FEATURE:
Frank's Wild Years
Tom Waits’s Extraordinary and Iconic Swordfishtrombones at Forty
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EVEN if the album…
IN THIS PHOTO: Tom Waits in NYC in 1983/PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith
charted low and was not raved about by all critics at the time, Tom Waits eighth studio album, Swordfishtrombones, is now considered a classic. Released on on 1st September, 1983 (though some sites say it was later in September), It was a move away from the more piano-driven albums. Embracing something altogether unconventional, abstract and weird, it was a brilliant blend that makes this album one that everyone needs to hear. I shall celebrate its upcoming fortieth anniversary with some features and reviews. Before that, The Guardian wrote a feature that highlighted the fact Swordfishtrombones was the beginning of a wonderful trilogy for the U.S. legend – Frank’s wild years, as it was (a song on Swordfishtrombones, it was the title of his tenth studio album – albeit with the apostrophe in ‘Frank’s’ removed). His most recent album, Bad As Me, came out in 2011. We all hope there is more work from the singular genius that is Tom Waits. I have selected some parts of The Guardian’s feature, as it highlights how Swordfishtrombones started this wonderful mid-career trilogy that continued with Wild Dogs (1985) and Franks Wild Years (1987):
“On Tom Waits’s 1983 album, Swordfishtrombones, there is, in among a lot of fabulously unhinged musical experimentation (Tony Bennett described the record as “a guy in an ashcan sending messages”), a 90-second ballad of such tender beauty that it explains all the rest. The song was written for Waits’s wife, Kathleen Brennan – “She’s my only true love/ She’s all that I think of, look here/In my wallet/That’s her” – and named after the town, Johnsburg, Illinois, in which Brennan grew up. The pair had got together on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1981 film One from the Heart, for which Waits was writing the music and Brennan editing the script, and had married a couple of months later at 1am at the 24-hour Always Forever Yours Wedding Chapel in Los Angeles.
The union liberated Waits from what may have appeared his inevitable fate: of the ultimate bar-room balladeer who descends into dissolution and obscurity. The singer had spent the first decade or so of his career toying with that possibility, living partly in the Tropicana motel on Sunset Boulevard, or in his car, a 1955 Buick, writing and singing about dereliction and doomed love, and playing up to a reputation for “wasted and wounded” chaos. For the first time, having met Brennan, he said: “I now believe in happy endings.” The experimentation of Swordfishtrombones was the first expression of that faith. “My life was getting more settled,” Waits recalled. “I was staying out of bars. But my work was becoming more scary.”
It was Brennan who gave Waits the courage to retire some of the seductive “piano has been drinking” myths of his own creation and to follow his restless musical intelligence, wherever it might take him. That album came out not long before the arrival of their first child. Two more albums (and two more children) followed in quick succession in the mid-1980s, Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years. These are records of startling originality and playfulness, of cacophonous discord and sudden heartbreaking melody, in which it seemed the artist was trying to incorporate the whole history of American song into his loose-limbed poetic storytelling. To mark the 40th anniversary of Swordfishtrombones, that trilogy of albums has been remastered and will be rereleased next month.
Over the past week or so I’ve been talking to a few of the people who played on those remarkable records, and a few of the many listeners on whom they had an astonishing effect first time around (what Radiohead’s Thom Yorke calls that sense of having “an entire universe revealed to me for a few minutes only to drop me at the other end of the block [with] no idea how I’d got there”). To find the sounds he was looking for, the singer assembled around him a fearless collection of virtuoso musicians – the guitarists alone included Keith Richards and Marc Ribot. As Waits once told me in an interview, his band were required to do more than just keep up. “It’s like Charlemagne or one of those old guys said,” he noted. “You want soldiers who, when they get to a river after a long march, don’t start rooting for their canteen in their pack, but just dive right in.”
For the second album of his trilogy, Rain Dogs, Waits and Brennan had moved from the west coast to New York, into a loft apartment in Little Spain, not far from Union Square, which Waits furnished with stuff he found on the streets. He was, he said at the time, completely overwhelmed with the immersive noise and talk of the city. “For the most part it’s like an aquarium,” he told one interviewer. “Words are everywhere. You look out of the window and there’s a thousand words.” That clamour of found poetry made its way into his songs, just as the skip-reclaimed furniture found its way into the apartment. He had a sense, he told David Letterman at the time, that living in lower Manhattan was like “being aboard a sinking ship. And the ocean is on fire.” That feeling ran through Rain Dogs (the name is a reference to the city’s rough sleepers, “people who sleep in doorways… who don’t have credit cards… who fly in this whole plane by the seat of their pants”).
Marc Ribot recalled last week the first day of recording. “We were in the old RCA Studios, which harkens back to a time when the labels owned studios,” he said. “This was a historic place, high ceilings, wood panels, a huge room, which could record an orchestra; we set up in a clump in the middle. There was a lot of amazing old equipment and amplifiers from something called the guitar society and a lot of unusual instruments”.
Ian Rankin
Novelist
I already knew Tom Waits’s music, those soulful communications from the louche underbelly of the American dream, but nothing had prepared me for Swordfishtrombones. I first heard it on a friend’s stereo system, the pair of us transfixed by what was happening in front of our ears. It felt to me as if a vaudeville show was taking place in a scrapyard, the music whirling and clanging, Waits presiding over it all like a bruised but keen-eyed master of ceremonies. Rain Dogs added extra textures and refinements, laying its (marked) cards on the table with its opening track, Singapore, a novel contained within two and a half minutes of controlled musical mayhem. By the time of its release I had left university and was trying to shape myself into a writer. I admired Waits’s lyrical vision and concision – the man was a born storyteller, stopping travellers who had wandered into the wrong part of town and compelling them with his words.
Jim Jarmusch
Film director
I met Tom in 1984 just after Swordfishtrombones came along and everything opened up. He was invigorated by New York, and obviously his wife Kathleen was a big part of that change. When I cast him in Down By Law, there was no trepidation. Some musicians are just very good at translating into character and Tom is one of the best of those.
He knows about a lot of different things in the world, but songs are his religion. On those records he is a blender and bender of genres: R&B and blues and ballads and spoken word and Stockhausen and jazz, Kurt Weill, Louis Armstrong, Serge Gainsbourg and death metal. He has a very experimental side. He showed me this instrument that he made that runs tape loops using bicycle chains. He subscribes to a newsletter of people who make their own one-off instruments and corresponds under one pseudonym or another. I heard him doing his voice exercises once, which was kind of hilarious. I have always seen Kathleen as a reliable kind of navigator, but she is always taking the ship further out into space. What they have is not going to get broken, not in this lifetime at least”.
IN THIS PHOTO: Jim Jarmusch with Waits/PHOTO CREDIT: Deborah Feingold/Corbis/Getty Images
I am taking 1st September as the anniversary, even though a lot of sites simply say ‘September 1983’ as the release date. It seems a bit of a mystery as to when the album was definitely released! If I am a little early in celebration, then you will have to forgive me! You should go and grab this album on vinyl, as it is a definite release and one of the all-time best. Released in September 1983 (we know for sure the month and year at least!), people have examined Swordfishtrombones years later. At the time, Swordfishtrombones was seen as an odd diversion or new direction for Waits. Looking back all these years later, we can see it as the start of a golden trilogy. For The Quietus, Tristan Bath shared her thoughts in 2013 (for the thirtieth anniversary):
“Swordfishtrombones is not an influential album in the strictest sense. It did little to expand the aural palettes of popular music, it triggered no major movement to speak of, and if anything lost Tom Waits a sizeable chunk of his own dedicated (if rather dull) following. However, it’s also a near perfect masterpiece; a 40-minute magical realist portrait of the human condition, and a missive from a sonically parallel universe. Its most lasting impact has most certainly been on Waits himself, for whom it represents both the high point and fulcrum of his entire career. The songs, instrumentals and monologues that lie therein paint a Brueghelian picture of an underground world of misfits and freaks, massively darker and more compelling than the jazz cafes of his previous work. If Small Change sounded like Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, then Swordfishtrombones is Tod Browning’s Freaks (which also, and far more literally, inspired the album’s iconic mutant cover art by Michael A. Russ).
The first two tracks both open with brief descending figures, dimly bugling the album’s overarching theme of descent into the opening track’s titular ‘Underground’, which - as an opening statement - summarises the album perfectly.
Swordfishtrombones is essentially composed of fifteen differing and yet related vignettes, detailing fifteen disparate tales from the real world. Servicemen’s tales crop up most often, whether it’s a letter home from the dank streets of Hong Kong (‘Shore Leave’), a veteran’s descent into madness upon the unwelcome return to reality (‘Swordfishtrombone’) or an itinerary from the treasure chest of an old war hero (‘Soldier’s Things’).
Elsewhere Waits’ weary eyes fall on banality of small town life, highlighting a murky Australian ‘Town With No Cheer’, and the previously unsung images from life in the suburbia of Frank Capra’s America (‘In the Neighbourhood’).
Most telling is perhaps the mighty ’16 Shells From A 30.6’, a tale of a bounty hunt in turn of the century America, which unsubtly mentions making “a ladder from a pawn shop marimba”, aggressively parodying Waits’ own victorious battle with either his own inability to deliver as an artist, or more literally a fight with labels and producers.
Musically, the album hops timbres and styles as often as it does character or setting. ‘Underground’ is a sick reimagining of a Slavic march, while ‘Down, Down, Down’ and ‘Gin Soaked Boy’ are both the work of some only slightly twisted version of a dime-a-dozen blues band. ‘Shore Leave’ is perhaps the most Partchian offering. Listen to CRI’s release of several homemade Partch recordings dating from the tale end of the 1940s. Partch’s near-atonal bass marimba setting for spoken lyrics extracted from African-American novelist, Willard Motley’s Knock On Any Door (aptly entitled ‘The Street’) almost sounds like some childish demo tape for Waits’ ‘Shore Leave’”.
Before getting to a review from Rolling Stone, David Smay wrote for Salon in 2018. They are exerts from his 33 1/3 book on the album. There are some fascinating observations and comments regarding the sound influences and mixes that go into the heady brew of Swordfishtrombones - and Waits’s essential work after that:
“In an otherwise favorable review, Robert Christgau accused Tom’s post-"Swordfishtrombones" songwriting of an overrated “American grotesquerie.” This charge is easily refuted since Tom’s freak show has an international flair as often as it features two-headed snakes bobbing in a murky jar in a Kansas sideshow. Despite [his wife] Kathleen’s complaint that he compulsively subtracts body parts from his characters, Tom doesn’t exploit the grotesque so much as inhabit it.
Anybody who’s had to endure a creative writing class knows the tedium of workshopping somebody’s exercise in Southern Gothic Lite. Without something like Flannery O’Connor’s mordant wit or moral clarity, trotting out a parade of dwarves, cripples and the occasional holy idiot just substitutes easy color and sensation for plot and character.
I’m going to take a bold critical stance here and argue that fiction and songs are discrete cultural expressions with distinct formal elements. (Though it is a common enough mistake, which can be disastrous when Motörhead fans show up at an Alice Munro reading. Frankly, I blame Lemmy and his New Yorker subscription; “Ace of Spades” is laced with allusions to Munro’s "Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.") Let me posit it this way. Fiction enters the eye and takes a circuitous route through the brain, which only gets to the heart after sustaining an almost dreamlike immersion. Whereas songs enter the ear and start jerking around with your heart or hips immediately, only rarely bothering to engage the brain. A poorly written story will just bore you, but a bad song inspires real ire and resentment that something so stupid is affecting you. It’s not so strange that cheap music is potent; that’s what cheap music does.
I emphasize this point because I think Tom’s grotesques work differently in song than they would in fiction. Certainly the outré imagery helps conjure some bizarre and freaky landscapes, but they don’t inflate the music the way they can in fiction. What they allow him, though, is another layer of metaphor, a point of personal insertion into the songs that isn’t dependent on confessional lyrics or reportage. There’s a reason why the Eyeball Kid has Tom’s birthday. The carnival air, the foreign backdrops, the dwarven and the misshapen have less to do with how he sees the world than how he sees himself.
In “Shore Leave” Tom stretches just beyond the lyrical territory that he’d established with his Asylum albums, but musically, vocally, even emotionally, this song marks a change. There’s a beautiful turn in the lyric after he’s set the scene when he says, “And I sat down and wrote a letter to my wife.”
I like to think I got more angry with "Swordfish" . . . More fractured. I sorta reached an impasse, y’know. Lookin’ back I can see I had governors on a lotta the things in my head. Had to shake ’em off. Uh, be a little more honest with myself. I sorta provided a commentary on things in my old songs now I kinda escape into the song more. More extreme I guess.
That’s it exactly. He enters the song in a way he didn’t before. And on the coda, when he shifts into a previously unimaginable falsetto to howl “Shore leave! Shore leave!” like a wounded animal, you know you’re hearing a new Tom Waits.
When Tom wants to conjure a mood that’s when he reaches for his boo bams. When they began to work on "Swordfishtrombones" Victor Feldman took Tom to meet Emil Richards, a veteran session percussionist who had worked on innumerable tiki music albums of the fifties and sixties, as well as Hollywood soundtracks. They wandered through Emil’s huge collection of instruments from around the world, selecting African talking drums, and aunglongs and bell plates. Tom had already had a chance to see and hear a junkyard orchestra in the “Used Carlotta” section of "One from the Heart" and he wanted to go further. He wanted each song to sound like a little soundtrack—not just the score but the sound effects too”.
I am going to finish off with a Rolling Stone review from 1983. The reaction and reception to Swordfishtrombones has been incredible. It is an album that so many people were seduced by. It still sounds like nothing else, forty years later! I hope on its anniversary – whatever day next month that falls! -, people play it fresh and all the way through. It is an album that demands full attention and focus I think:
“TOM WAITS’ NEW album is so weird that Asylum Records decided not to release it, but it’s so good that Island was smart enough to pick it up. Half of the fifteen cuts — the dirty blues, poetry recitals and odd instrumentals — would not sound out of place on a Captain Beefheart album. The rest of the record consists of gorgeous Waitsian melodies, which haven’t been collected in such quantity since his ten-year-old debut album.
It’s easy to forget that Tom Waits is one of the great American pop songwriters. His voice is so ravaged that his albums have often been cluttered and overproduced in order to compensate. On the self-produced Swordfish trombones, Waits wisely sticks to spare accompaniment, which allows his rough-hewn voice to achieve a real tenderness. As for the songs, many of them feature men who are caught up, broken down or separated from loved ones by war. In “Soldier’s Things,” the saddest song on the album and Waits’ most stunning composition in years, a mother is having a yard sale: “A tinker, a tailor/A soldier’s things/His rifle, his boots full of rocks/And this one is for bravery, and this one is for me/Everything’s a dollar in this box.”
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Tom Waits album without the rhymes (“He got twenty years for lovin’ her/From some Oklahoma governor”) and deadbeat humor. “Frank’s Wild Years” contains a hilarious monologue about a guy cutting out on his wife, “a spent piece of used jet trash [with] a little Chihuahua named Carlos/That had some kind of skin disease/And was totally blind.” The combination of weirdness, heartfelt lyrics and haunting instrumentals adds up to a superior LP and an opportunity to rediscover Tom Waits”.
Next month will be forty years since Swordfishtrombones was released into the world. Pitchfork ranked Swordfishtrombones at number eleven in its 2002 list of the best albums of the 1980s. Slant Magazine listed it as the decade's twenty-sixth-best best album. It is an undeniable classic that will reach a new generation of fans. As to the questions as to whether Tom Waits will follow 2011’s Bad As Me. It seems only…
TIME will tell.