Tom Waits

by Jonathan Valania

Tom Waits
Blood Money
Alice
ANTI

You can tell a lot about person from what they think of Tom Waits. His career is something of a musical Rorschach test--some just see spilled ink, others see fantastic chimeras. He's one of those love 'em or hate 'em artists, and the great divide between us and them is invariably Waits' worn-out shoe of a voice. If you like your singers to sound like a shiny new sneaker, you've come to the wrong place. These two collections are no place for tourists (1985's Rain Dogs or 1999's Mule Variations are better starting points.) Distant cousins to 1993's The Black Rider, Blood Money and Alice are song cycles that Waits co-wrote with wife Kathleen Brennan for theatrical productions by avant-garde dramatist Robert Wilson. Alice is based on Paul Schmidt's play about Lewis Carroll's dangerous obsession with Alice Liddell, the real life inspiration for Alice in Wonderland. These songs hearken back to his work in the '70s--sad, wistful and prematurely old--when he pounded out jazzy character studies on the piano peopled with sentimental fools seeking shelter from the stormy weather inside a bottle of rum. Beautiful stuff. Blood Money is firmly rooted in Waits' dark side, summoning up visions of some Weimar Republic cabaret where dark, sodden characters perform dark and sodden acts. Originally titled Red Rum, Blood Money's soundscape is far more jarring and disorienting: pneumatic calliopes pumping out evil circus music; strange drum algebra; bare, ruined choirs of brass left out in the rain. Blood Money's thematic thread is drawn from the 1837 play Woyzeck about a German soldier whose tenure as guinea pig for army medical experiments drives him homicidally insane, and the music hugs the brutality and hopelessness of the story like a shadow. But you never lose touch of the humanity of it all. Blood Money A Alice A