Coda
Take It with Me When I Go
“My deal is, usually [writers] know too much
about you, or they don’t know nothing about
you. The nothing is usually fine with me.”
(Tom Waits to Tom Lanham, Paste, December 2004)
I left London in a heatwave, pulling out of King’s Cross on a packed lunchtime train. Ten hours later I’m standing in the midnight mist of Edinburgh, waiting for Tom Waits at the rear of the city’s venerable old Playhouse theatre.
He’s just concluded a two-and-a-half-hour show, the second of two nights in bonnie Scotland, and a surprisingly small clutch of admirers hovers beside a pair of tour buses that idle near the theatre’s stage door. I am one of their number, feeling more than a little self-conscious as I come to the end of the long Tom Waits journey that is this book. Is this the moment when I finally do turn into Nick Broomfield—or A. J. Weberman, perhaps? Will I hail Waits out of the misty darkness with the words, “Hey Tom, it’s me, the guy who’s been rummaging in your (metaphorical) garbage for the last two years”?
Hot ticket, 28 July 2008.
It’s been a while since I did the stage-door-Johnny thing. Waiting here takes me all the way back to the adolescent desperation of shivering outside Morton’s in Berkeley Square, fingers crossed that my then-hero Todd Rundgren might appear for two minutes and deign to sign the cream sleeve of Faithful. Surely I’m too old to stand in the spitting Scottish rain at midnight, overhearing the mutterings of young fans brandishing posters for the Glitter and Doom tour that winds up in Dublin at the end of the week.
Has Waits already come out? Gone back to his hotel? Is he still in there, and is Kathleen with him? Who’s that coming out now? Oh, it’s Patrick Warren, the keyboard player introduced by Waits tonight as hailing from this very city. And there’s Omar Torrez, the Seattle-based guitarist whose flamenco guitar flourishes were such a highlight of the set. Surely it’s only a matter of time before I clap eyes on Waits himself—and even, for the first time, on Kathleen …
Earlier that evening I stand at the entrance to the Playhouse with a swarming throng of fans whose age range—from eighteen to sixty-five, I’d hazard—speaks volumes for Waits’ wide appeal. Few have paid less than £100 for the privilege of being here. Stringent anti-touting measures make the queuing a nightmare but have to be applauded.
The man himself, bowler-hatted and tossing up a small cloud of gold dust, gazes down from the Glitter and Doom banner over the foyer. It’s an image I first saw back in May, when the first leg of a US tour—starting in Phoenix and winding up in Atlanta— was announced in the form of a press conference staged by Waits himself without a single journalist present.
Glitter and doom: outside the Playhouse. (Art Sperl)
Glitter and doom: a typically Waitsian conjunction of showbiz and apocalypse, sparkly artifice and biblical gravitas. “Leona Helmsley’s dog made $12 million last year,” he noted in an interview he conducted with himself for Anti.com on 20 May. “Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio, made $30,000. It’s just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains. We are monkeys with money and guns.” Waits’ disgust at America’s values shows no signs of abating. He will not be going gently into that good night.
Waits had begun his last UK tour at this venue back in November 1987. He’d also played the Playhouse in 1981 and 1985. But before these two dates he hadn’t performed north of the border for twenty-one years. By 8:30 the mood in the old Victorian theatre—all crimson velvet and vermilion brocade—is growing restless. Mirroring the red interior of the auditorium, the stage setup resembles a dusty antique shop. An ancient marching bass drum sits to the left, while a rack of Waits’ beloved bullhorns stands behind a central platform.
It takes a slow handclap to bring the lights down and coax the band on to the stage. Barring Casey Waits, now firmly ensconced in “the family business,” the personnel is brand new. Linchpin Larry Taylor has made way for bassist Seth Ford-Young, Marc Ribot for Omar Torrez. Horn man Vincent Henry occasionally doubles as a guitarist. All are adroit, supple players who bring something more intricate and sophisticated to Waits’ music than we’ve heard in recent years. Later in the set, fifteen-year-old Sullivan Waits will supplement the ensemble with a turn on congas and a spot as “assistant” saxophonist/clarinettist.
As it has done every night since Phoenix, the show opens with a medley of “Lucinda” and “Ain’t Goin’ down to the Well,” the two songs sequenced as they are on the first Orphans CD. Waits couldn’t have begun with a more overt statement of intent: this is not going to be an easy ride through his sentimental back pages. Dredged from deep within, the gargled Waits bark sounds almost monstrous as its owner howls the plaint of William the Pleaser and stamps a booted foot on the riser that supports him, each time bringing up a little cloud of talcum powder. Wearing his bowler hat and accompanying his vocals with pantomime hand gestures that utilize his freakishly long fingers, he could be a demonic Charlie Chaplin. Satanic reds and purples alternate with cooler greens and blues as backdrops to the spectacle.
The set takes a while to ignite. “Rain Dogs” lacks the polka pep of its studio original, and “Falling Down”—with Waits’ hoarse bellow masking a lack of genuine tone—fails to convince as the faux-stadium ballad it is. Things gradually improve with Night on Earth’s “On the Other Side of the World,” aired more than a few times on the European leg of Glitter and Doom that started in San Sebastian on 12 July. By the time Waits is through with a crooned “I’ll Shoot the Moon”—complete with a kabuki clinch, his giant hands caressing his own back—he has every last man and woman eating out of his palms.
When Omar Torrez brings in the next number, the high-stepping Yiddish rhythm could be any one of a dozen songs from his post-Asylum years. “Christ, which one is it?!” Waits barks as though reading our minds. It’s an endearing instant of self-deprecation, followed by “They’re all good, you know!” The song turns out to be Blood Money’s “God’s Away on Business,” with Casey on kettledrum sticks and his dad railing against the world like a mad tramp. On its stomping heels, “The Part You Throw Away” is bare and minimal, all plucked pizzicato phrasing and Tom himself on miniature acoustic guitar.
The radical rework of “Eyeball Kid” is the set’s glitzy centrepiece, Waits’ showbiz parable delivered in a disco-ball bowler hat with the song’s blues-funk Mule Variations arrangement replaced by an eerie ambient soundtrack akin to Orphans’ “Army Ants.” As a spotlight hits the hat, beams of light stream out to every corner of the theatre, Waits rotating on his riser with an idiot grin plastered across his face. It’s pure Robert Wilson, of course. Another mutant-Yiddish classic, “Singapore,” picks up from the groove of “God’s Away.”
Up to this point Waits has barely uttered a word. He only begins to address the audience when he gets behind a piano, as though the very familiarity—the muscle memory—of that perch makes it safe to revert to his comedic self. “We been on the road for a while and it’s been fascinating,” he remarks before listing examples of entirely fictional local laws he’s encountered along the way. (It’s schtick he’s been doing since the US leg of the tour.) The sight of Waits at the keyboard prompts the more seasoned fans in the Playhouse to beg for older songs. Waits indulges them for a moment before making his boundaries crystal clear. “Okay, those are all requests,” he says, “but they’re your requests.”
But then comes the small miracle so many of us are pining for: a “Tom Traubert’s Blues” with Waits backed only by Seth Ford-Young, the song raw and ravaged but still, after all these years, delivered with such care, so perfect it is hard to believe it’s happening. As it ends a raucous Scots voice screams “Och, ya beauty!!” and we all grin in agreement. A flood of further requests echoes around the auditorium. “You still workin’ at the airport?” Waits responds to one particularly persistent disciple, using a line first deployed in the seventies. We don’t get “Invitation to the Blues” or “On the Nickel,” nor does he play “I Can’t Wait to Get off Work” or “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis”—all of the above performed at times on the Glitter and Doom tour. But we do get “The Briar and the Rose” and then— for the very first time on the tour—“Take It with Me,” dedicated to his longtime UK publicist Rob Partridge and sung with such artless tenderness it makes me weep.
The ballad portion of the show concludes with a mass singalong on “Innocent when You Dream” before the mutant Dixiebilly of “Lie to Me” restarts Waits’ uptempo motor, the line “I have no use for the truth!” insistently repeated as Casey thuds out the beat on his tom-toms. Little brother Sullivan, all of fifteen, then joins the troupe for a rousingly ragged version of “Hoist that Rag,” smacking the congas as his father howls the splenetic lyric. Superb solos follow from Messrs. Warren, Henry, and Torrez.
Waits is back on guitar for “Bottom of the World,” its bellowy Celtic feel underscored by Torrez’s mandolin, and for “Cold Cold Ground” and “Green Grass.” “Way down in the Hole,” played on almost every Glitter and Doom date, is funkier than I’ve ever heard it, with electric piano fills straight out of Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say.” Sullivan plays clarinet alongside Vincent Henry’s baritone sax on an aptly funereal “Dirt in the Ground,” staying put for “Metropolitan Glide” and the closing “Make It Rain,” the latter augmented by a shower of glitter falling over Waits Sr.’s head. The old stage devices are still the best.
“Jesus Gonna Be Here” is the first of three encores, Vincent Henry blowing two saxes simultaneously à la Roland Kirk/Ralph Carney. When Waits introduces the second as “a little story,” somebody shouts “‘Step Right Up’!” “Not that one,” Waits snaps straight back. It turns out to be a “9th and Hennepin” that’s virtually stripped of musical flesh, delivered as spoken-word beneath a flickering naked lightbulb lowered from the rig over Waits’ head. “This is about 9th and Hennepin in the old days,” he informs us. “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” a frequent Glitter and Doom encore, rounds things off but only leaves the Edinburgh crowd clamouring for more.
As with every show on the two legs of the tour, the Playhouse performance will receive ecstatic reviews and blog posts, numerous voices proclaiming it the greatest gig ever. A five-star Guardian review greets me in my hotel the next morning. Apparently I am alone in the world with my churlish misgivings about the set list—and the ultimate worth of songs such as “Lucinda” and “Metropolitan Glide.”* But I’ll take the memory of “Tom Traubert” and “Take It with Me” to the grave.
The drizzle continues as we wait next to the black tour buses. Hang on a minute, isn’t that young puppy Sullivan Waits? And that’s definitely big brother Casey, a towel draped round his shoulders as he disappears into the snug recess of the bus closest to us. What would happen if I sidled up to them and asked for a quote about their papa? Bad things, methinks.
Beat the street: desperate fan Natalina Forbovsky peers into the Waits tour bus. (Art Sperl)
The dampened fans around me whisper furtively among themselves. He’s still in there; he must have gone; he was never here at all. “It’s not like there’s a lot of us,” sighs one disgruntled youth. “You’d think he could just sign a few posters.” Yeah, I can really see that happening.
Across the street, by the other bus, a dreadlocked boy cranes his neck in a flash of recognition. It’s clear that he’s just spotted our hero on board: seems Waits has been in there all along, yards away from me, coming down from the adrenalizing euphoria of the show. Before I can quite register what’s happened, the doors suck shut and the bus pulls away into the damp Edinburgh night.
Set list, Quiet Knight, Chicago, December 1975. (Courtesy of Charlie Thorne)