A conversation about Tom Waits last weekend directed me to this track by Akira The Don, a track with a borrowed vocal, Tom Waits reading Charles Bukowski's The Laughing Heart, a poem about existence, fulfillment and finding light among the darkness- 'Your life is your life/ Don't let it be clubbed into dank submission/ Be on the watch/ There are ways out/ There is light somewhere...'
I read Bukowski's Ham On Rye in the summer, a semi- autobiographical novel based partly on his own teenage and young adulthood in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 40s- it's a grim read in many ways, the young Henry Chinaski not fitting in at school or the private college his father sends him to, and he pulls no punches in his first person description of school brutality, domestic violence, masturbation, alcohol, terrible acne and indifferent doctors and the growing misanthropy of Chinaski (a thinly veiled Bukowski). That Bukowski wrote an existential poem that concludes there is light somewhere is remarkable given how dark much of his writing is.
Akira The Don adds piano, a jazz club feel and some very lazy hip hop drums, all very sympathetic to Mr. Waits. I then remembered that 100 Poems used the Waits vocal for Song For Claire (Your Life Is Your Life) on their 2024 album Balearic As A System Of Belief.
It got me looking through my collection for more Tom Waits. I've posted this before but it's always worth a re- post, Tom Waits' Closing Time spliced with Allen Ginsberg reading his poem America, a Ginsberg peak, the young Allen looking around at the nation and his life- 'America/ I've given you all and now I'm nothing'.
America features the use of a racial slur which was part of Ginsberg's America and very much not acceptable now.
Tom Waits is in a way one of the last links to the Beats, an artist in the Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs tradition. His bohemian life and scenes from the underworld/ underbelly of American society street poetry seems very 20th century now, a dying art form in some ways. I can't think of many artists existing in the same milieu- those that do, Jim Jarmusch say or Bob Dylan (also a Beat inspired writer), won't be around forever. David Lynch departed earlier this year- his music fitted into a Waitsian world.
I don't have a huge amount of Tom Waits, I never committed to going the full hog. I used to have Swordfishtrombones on cassette but I didn't replace it after my cassette collection got slimmed down in the 90s, probably something I should rectify. I had a copy of Mule Variations too but can't find it now. Mule Variations came out in 1999- I was amazed it's that long ago. I always loved this piece of weirdness and neighbourly paranoia, What's He Building?
I do have Rain Dogs, Tom's 1985 album, often lauded as one of his best. It's got the full Waits range of carnival music, Weimar oompah, jazz, experimental rock and blues, New Orleans funeral marches, various styles of outsider music stitched into a whole. Rain Dogs was written by Waits in a basement room in Lower Manhattan in a two month period in the mid- 80s. He wandered round the city with a tape recorder taping sounds and noises which he then layered guitars, marimba, trombone, piano, accordion and banjo on top of and made drumbeats out of banging pieces of furniture, drawers from cupboards and cabinets. Sometimes the album's madness, variation and cacophony is too much- I have to be in the mood for it. But peppered among the underbelly pieces and bursts of chaotic noise are some of his best loved songs too- Time, Hang Down Your Head, Downtown Train.
Clap Hands is the second song on Rain Dogs, with uneven pots and pans percussion and Tom narrating the lives of New York's dispossessed.
Hang Down Your Head was released as a single, a song with a proper structure that nodded to his earlier work, Waits at his most direct and songwriterly, that gravel voice accompanied by electric guitar.
9th And Hennepin finds itself in the gutter with broken umbrellas and dead birds, a girl with a tattooed tear and the train going by, an NYC Beat Generation blues poem.
Downtown Train is one of his most famous songs, covered by Bob Seger, Rod Stewart and Everything But The Girl. Tom's song has Robert Quine playing a wonderful electric guitar part (Quine turned up at Bagging Area last week playing guitar on Lou Reed's The Blue Mask). Downtown Train has become a classic and for good reason.