I stumbled across this great 2002 interview with Tom Waits from the The A.V. Club. As with most Tom Waits interviews, it’s full of great quips, stories, and factoids. This one jumped out to me:
You know what I really love? The CD players in a car. How when you put the CD right up by the slot, it actually takes it out of your hand, like it’s hungry. It pulls it in, and you feel like it wants more silver discs. “More silver discs. Please.” I enjoy that.
I’ve been on a major Waits kick lately while reading Barney Hoskyns’ fascinating biography, Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits.
Tom Waits: iTunes, Amazon, Insound, wiki
How’z that book? I was just recently thinkin’ of Mr. Waits myself… I came into possession of a bootleg DVD copy of the Big Time movie; it rocks.
The book is great. Unauthorized but well-sourced and researched. Lots of footnotes, which I appreciate.
I caught a bit of Big Time on either Sundance or IFC recently. The cinematic segues are goofy. I think I’ve still got it on VHS in storage, somewhere. Seems weird that’s never been issued on DVD.
I wrote to Chris Blackwell (he of Island Recs, now of Palm Pictures), and he told me that the rights to the film belong to Universal Pictures. Why they don’t reissue it, esp. since they also own that portion of his (audio) catalog is beyond me.
So I just finished the book, and I don’t like the way it ends. The author very clearly wants Waits to go back to writing pretty piano songs, and thinks that he’s been re-treading previous 80s/90s-era stuff over the past couple of albums. Sure, I love the 70s stuff too, but come on. I get the feeling that the bitterness over Waits’ refusal to cooperate with the biography eventually builds up to not being able to objectively assess the music. Or something…
But still…the chapters up to Mule Variations are totally awesome.
The overall idea is that Waits traded one persona (drunk Beat hobo) for another (eccentric avant-garde primitivist), and he’s been riding the latest one into the ground. Maybe that’s true, but I think Real Gone was a wild, interesting album, and some of the new songs on Orphans were cool too.
At the same time, I think it’s absolutely the right time for Waits to go out on a solo, acoustic tour. Just him and a guitar and a piano. Think about it. It could be amazing. I don’t think he has the guts to do it. Too vulnerable. But damn, it would be incredible. Just imagine how some of the newer stuff might sound re-arranged for a solo performer.