Spin Doctor

By Ted Drozdowski, Boston Phoenix. Posted October 27, 2004.

Tom Waits has worn a lot of hats in his 31 years of recording. Well, mostly that rumply fedora – the one that looks as if he'd picked it out of a dumpster behind a Salvation Army mission. But he's borne the mantles of bar-room poet, beatnik troubadour, lo-fi champion, and stumblebum sonic visionary with equal comfort and increasing success. Now add to those "protest singer."

"Real Gone" (Anti), which came out Oct. 5, is full of the ruminations on love, death and sin that have become his stock. But even Waits, who seems to have created his own universe both in the realm of his art and in the way he conducts business, appears to have been affected by the undercurrents of fear, violence and greed that now ripple through America. "Sins of the Father," with its broad images of destruction and doom, the spoiled-dreams ballad "Trampled Rose," and "Day After Tomorrow," a letter from a soldier to his sweetheart at home, all are distinct products of the post-Sept. 11 Bush era.

Of course, Waits isn't going Phil Ochs on us, and elsewhere on this odd-as-usual-sounding album, he introduces us to the residents of a gypsy circus and assorted denizens of the urban demi-monde. He also seems more in thrall of the late bluesman Howlin' Wolf than ever. Certainly Wolf, like the barbed-wire-throated hipster poet Lord Buckley, has always had some sway over the growling vocal tone Waits uses, but the tight-knit rhythmic interplay of Wolf's classic Chess albums has direct bearing on new tunes like "Don't Go into That Barn." Guitarist Marc Ribot, an occasional Waits accompanist since the mid 1980s, liberally quotes and pays tribute to Wolf's six-string foil Hubert Sumlin throughout Real Gone. And in case you thought Waits had exhausted his timekeeping arsenal after years of banging on chests of drawers, trash-can lids, and amplifier reverb boxes, well, he's got another instrument up his sleeve and in his soiled jacket: Tom Waits, human beatbox.

When Waits began his career, in 1973, with the album "Closing Time," he was in essence a modern variation on the Tin Pan Alley tunesmith. Granted, his address on that songwriters' row was strewn with cigarette butts and empty bourbon bottles, but if you shuffled the trash aside, there was plenty of hope visible, especially in the beautiful "Ol' 55," which was later recorded by the Eagles. After a long spell that might be called his Bukowski period, Waits started really surprising his listeners in 1985 with "Rain Dogs" (Island), a sensitive, urban album full of sweet dreamers and sweet dreams along with bumpy little miracles of shuffling rhythm like "Clap Hands," an angular number about being shanghai'd that would make a good soundtrack to the pursuit sequences in "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."

There were brilliant albums in between, but perhaps the biggest surprise came in 1999 when his "Mule Variations" (Anti-/Epitaph) sold a million copies of its uneasy listening tales dipped in Delta mud and mania. Or maybe the shocker was seven years earlier, when "Bone Machine" (Island), which set its lyrics of lamplight burials and backwoods slayings to a near-industrial crunch that many Waits diehards pronounced unlistenable, won a Grammy.

The blend of beauty and evil in "Real Gone" makes it a logical successor to Waits's double-album blitz in 2002, when he released "Alice" and "Blood Money" (both on Anti-/Epitaph) simultaneously. Both of those discs were dark and tormented. In "Alice," Waits spun Lewis Carroll's obsession with Alice Liddell, the girl for whom he wrote "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass," into an often-affecting ode to unrequited love. No easy task, that, but soft-centered tearjerkers like "Fish & Bird" resonated with the same undisguised sentimentality as the Waits standard "Tom Traubert's Blues" from '76's "Small Change" (Island). "Blood Money" was another crimson-drenched matter, full of croaking odes to Mammon packed with lies, lust, and murder.

"Real Gone" embraces both ends of that thematic spectrum and wastes no time raking muck. "Hoist That Rag," the second tune, comes slithering in on upright bass played by Primus's Les Claypool, and it sounds like the tale of a couple of lowlife mobsters – until we learn that they have the power to "heave and turn the world around." "At night I pray and clean my gun," a thug sings, also offering a concise depiction of George W. Bush's contradictory ethos. As for the "rag," it's likely wearing stars and stripes.

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