The crowd was mostly standard for a big-ticket New York show. Middle-aged men coming in from New Jersey. A few genuine rockers still hanging on in that Deborah Harry way, saggy leather. College kids. But there were definitely pockets here and there, clusters of people who just seemed a little . . . out of place. Women with questionable hair cuts, men dressed like Matt Drudge. Many bespectacled hep-cats--maybe they weren't even playing dress-up, maybe they didn't ever come this far uptown for real. It's hard to know what to take at face value at a Tom Waits concert. Waits is an artist who has done so much to protect and propagate his own myth that questions of artifice are almost never brought up. His fans are just so glad to catch a glimpse that rarely is anything second guessed. And, of course, the whole affair is tongue-and-cheek, right? A non-Tom Waits fan will always ask, you don't actually think he sings well, do you?
When the band took the stage, they were visibly fucking with our heads. Tom Waits' touring band, readying an evening performance (two and a half hours long) in front of a capacity crowd (two and a half thousand strong), knew just how pumped the fans were. Mr. Waits hadn't performed here in twelve years. Waits' cult following had grown exponentially since the release of his 1992 landmark album "Bone Machine", arguably the most distinct record of the decade, and Waits' appearances in art films directed by, among others, Robert Altman, Jim Jarmusch and Hector Babenco. So this, September 23rd, 1999, was a big night, and the band was just onstage, grinning. They were at their posts, behind an upright bass, a banjo, a collection of modern and decrepit-looking keyboards, and a drumset that also included those bone-sounding xylophones, as well as a giant metal hoop, hanging from a 50-foot wire, which was only struck once, and with perfection, during "16 Shells form a 30-ought-6," to get that specific clank. And they were grinning at us, watching our heart rate increase as it dawned on us, somewhere in this building, the mad genius, the apocalyptic beatnik, the singer at the lounge at the end of the Universe, the near-inventor of post-modern popular song, the Werner Herzog of rock, Tom Waits, was preparing to take the stage. Then, a drumroll. Blackout. A spotlight to the back of the house, and, echoing the opening of his German folktale via William Burroughs operetta "The Black Rider" we hear, shouted through a megaphone:
Ladies and gentlemen!
Harry's Harbor Bazaar presents
Under the big top tonight
HUMAN ODDITIES!!!
And the place explodes in shrieks. Waits, in a sloppy dark suit with deep red shirt and derby hat, makes his way to the stage, announcing the Three-Headed Baby, Hitler's Brain, and Lea Graff the German midget who sat in J. P. Morgan's lap, all the while sprinkling colored cellophane around his head. It is a notable entrance. But it got me thinking, what is this? Is this anything other than avant-garde theater? Even more curious is seeing it in the Beacon Theater, home to however many Journey concerts. It is treated by the audience, the same one Waits later professed to love as individuals and as a group, like thunderous rock. Waits' music, and performance, is sly surrealism, so obviously not-rock, that it makes one even more willing to hoot like a frat boy when he approaches the mike.
After his barnstorming intro, Waits bounced straight into "Down Down Down" from "Swordfishtrombones" the first of the post-neo-Beat albums, where the beret was traded in for a World War One helmet. Waits was elevated on a small wooden platform covered in dirt, kind of a reverse-sandbox. The effect was rising dust with each step he took, including the occasional bull-like backward shuffle of his legs as he bent forward, grumbling his dark and humorous couplets on everything from horse farmers, Cuban card sharps, emotional acid rain, existential camping trips, and plenty of mules. Mules come up in many of Waits' songs (16 Shells, A Little Rain, Lucky Day Overture, Get Behind The Mule)--he even dedicated the night to all the Mule Warriors out there tonight . . . even if that mule was a sports utility vehicle, we still have to get behind it and plow.
He and his band rocked sufficiently. Smokey Hormel did better than can be expected in filling Marc Ribot's shoes, playing loud and frenzied on "In The Coliseum," bluesy and cool on "Chocolate Jesus." After nine or so songs, a stage hand rolled out a piano. Waits' "Big Time" persona came with it. With only Larry Taylor's bass and a few plunked-out keys, he brought out the 4 AM sleepy-and-soused "Invitation To The Blues", one of the tunes thought to have inspired Rowlf the Dog in Jim Henson. The jokes came too. Talk of homemade cologne made from tomato puree and soy sauce, and homemade sunglasses made from bottoms of Milk of Magnesia bottles. And that rats need to be constantly eating, or else their teeth will grow straight into their brains. Then the Wiemar-esque sing-along "Innocent When You Dream" comforting us with a make-believe childhood, a post-nuclear misinterpretation of pre-war bliss, floating as lazily as the Rhine, hiding its East River acidity.
There was humor, but if the last Waits you've heard is "Nighthawks at the Diner" it may not be just as you remember. The humor now is virtually without reference to a realistic America, only the mythical America Waits has concocted for his own songs. Where coffee is stirred with a rusty nail, carnival organs are more common than car horns, men weep openly under a bone-colored moon . . . frequently.
Waits donned a glittering, mirrored helmet and picked up another megaphone as he told the story of The Eyeball Kid, then held a solitary flashlight to his mouth as he asked What's he Building In There? The latter took on an inadvertent moment of zeitgeist when it was discovered that the neighbor (now known to be named Cunningham, though if he were a ham, he isn't very cunning) used to run a consulting firm in Indonesia. Breaking from the spoken-word cadence, Waits remarked, "I have no idea what that's all about." It was a nice touch.
The crowd ate everything and asked for seconds. Perhaps a little too excited. There was a whole lot of a-hootin' and a-hollerin' for what is, remember, an avant-garde theater exercise, not a rock concert. During ballads like "Pony", "Who Are You", or "I'll Shoot The Moon", it seemed a little unfair that the tender singing was interrupted by caterwauls from the crowd. But I didn't mind it. I would have minded it if people were shouting, "Yeah!" or "Tom!" or "Jersey Girl! Downtown Train! Ol' 55!" (which are Waits' only "hits" because they were covered by Bruce Springsteen, Rod Stewart and the Eagles respectively). But it wasn't like that. There was bellowing, moaning, non-verbal vocal expressions of adoration. It somehow seemed right, despite what the woman behind me thought.
If you're reading this and kicking yourself, it's too late. Waits is off to Europe and then, who knows, another twelve years?!? It was a night as original as the artist himself. Tom Waits rules, and whether or not "he's kidding" continues to remain un-asked. For even if he were, he does it so well, and is the only one doing it, that we need him doing what he's doing. No one can replicate it. No one should try.
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