I’d heard about Tom Waits’ music for years before I picked up a copy of his Asylum anthology on vinyl. I was about 18 years old in my first year at Michigan State University. I’d read the book Written in My Soul: Conversations with Rock’s Great Songwriters by Bill Flanagan. The interview with Tom is a highlight of that amazing read and I grabbed that record and took it home and played it as soon as I got back to my room at my Mom and Dad’s place where I was staying for the summer before sophomore year back at State.

Here’s the thing: I mostly hated the record. I put it back in its sleeve and didn’t listen again. I was taken by surprise by some of producer Bones’ Howe’s love for jazz instrumentation and even lush string sections. The arrangements on Tom’s early records were particularly challenging for me as it would be a few more years before I discovered Thelonius Monk and took my lifelong deep dive into jazz. I also have to admit that when I heard Tom’s voice for the very first time I thought it was a joke. It was so extremely rough and ragged that it seemed almost like a theatrical affectation — and it actually is to an extent. I hated anything that even flirted with artifice back then so I wrote the whole thing off.

As I remember it took a full year before I came across that album back in my room at my Mom and Dad’s place and thought I’d go ahead and give it another spin. That time was different. I loved the whole thing and didn’t stop playing it, and Tom is definitely on my songwriting Mount Rushmore next to Dylan as one of our best and most unique lyricists.

Here’s a great BBC doc, Tom Waits: Tales from a Cracked Jukebox. Here’s Aquarium Drunkard on the film:

Tom Waits is an inherently American artist. Over the past four decades, Waits’ eccentric boho brew of junkyard scat, jazz, gutter blues, tin-pan alley excursions and avant-garde cabaret have howled into the ether and reverberated back again…transfigured into something wholly his own. One day we will interview the man, dipping into all of the above – but until then, this; the BBC’s 2017 documentary on Waits by filmmaker James Maycock…

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If you follow me on Facebook you might have seen my ornery post last week wherein I linked to an announcement about Leonard Cohen’s new album, and complained about my Nashville music peers constantly celebrating “great” songwriters who shouldn’t even be allowed to mutter Cohen’s name in their prayers. GREAT is a big word, and while I certainly stand by all my friends’ and peers’ rights to love what they love, there aren’t a lot of songwriters in this world that I would call GREAT.

Lyrics are almost always the weak spot for me when people mention less than GREAT songwriters that they love. Frankly, melodies are the easier part of the job, and my GREATS list all have great melodies too, but they’re not still toying around with silly story songs, and dumb near rhymes, and they actually manage to get some sense of rhythm into their words. Cohen is one songwriter on my list, and Tom Waits is another.

When I discovered this video on YouTube I thought it was just a fan tribute, but it turns out that No Visitors After Midnight is an actual DVD release that collects two live Tom Waits performances from BBC Studios, London, July 27, 1979 and PBS Soundstage, Chicago, 1975.

Here’s a GREAT songwriter…

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I love the Blank on Blank project’s animated takes on archived interviews. In this episode Tom Waits waxes on Stonehenge, Hawaii and everything in between. Here’s the lowdown…

Waits had just released the concert film, Big Time, when he was interviewed by Chris Roberts at a London recording studio; you can hear music playing softly in the background throughout the tape. So what’s the secret to interviewing Tom Waits?

He’s a natural raconteur. A great one. You just get out of the way and let him do his thing, perform. If you can nudge the jokes along, so much the better. – Chris Roberts

Here’s Tom…

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I was supposed to be doing a gallery talk with Daniel Holland at Red Arrow tonight, but the bad weather in Nashville found me on a text-go-round with the artist and the gallery last night, convincing ourselves that delaying the talk until 4:30 this Sunday afternoon was the best decision given the weather forecast. I’m writing this post on Wednesday night, watching the falling, freezing drizzle.

I’m preoccupied the talk because I’m really looking forward to sharing my recent correspondences and chats with Daniel, with the bigger audience we’ve been inviting to the event. Daniel and I have been in touch since last year — I highlighted his work in a review of a group show and spent the better part of a First Saturday evening chatting with him about his paintings at his solo show at Fort Houston. The exhibition at Red Arrow signals his biggest gallery exposure and it’s arguably his best show yet. We’ve been emailing each other cryptic notes, poems, questions and answers for weeks now.

Last Friday night we met-up in The Pharmacy’s beer garden where Daniel pays some bills as a bartender. Daniel is eloquent when he talks about craft beer, but he’s also that rare artist who can speak eloquently about his work and his creative career. As I mentioned in a recent Facebook post, during our 90ish minute chat Daniel and I discussed the Mayan empire, automotive paint, sweet porter pints, East Nashville, Julian Schnabel, secret journals, poetic messages, Tom Waits, cigarettes, Kansas, Nashville, Detroit, South Carolina, Robert Rauschenberg, the black void of death, the futility of nihilism, house paint primers, rental trucks, the utility of mops, and the love of work.

Julian Schnabel isn’t an artist I think of immediately when I look at Daniel’s paintings, but he’s an important influence and a timely one: After leading the pack in the New York art market explosion of the 1980′s, Schnabel’s fortunes have risen and fallen. During that time he’s become an outrageously successful filmmaker and recent retrospectives of his paintings find him getting the last laugh on critics who dismissed him in the last decades as a product of his own voluminous hype.

In lieu of my talk with Holland I offer this video that captures Julian Schnabel installing a recent retrospective in Italy, looking back on his career and his life with all of the hubris, humor, energy, criticism, ego, insight and insecurity one might expect from any artist playing the game decades into an iconic career…

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Pioneering animated filmmaker Ralph Bakshi had already produced landmark films like Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic and The Lord of the Rings when he approached John Lamb at Lyon Lamb Animation Systems about building a rotoscope set-up that worked with video instead of film. Rotoscoping involves drawing and painting over images projected from live footage — the finished product looks like a cartoon, but the gestures and expressions of the characters are more true to life than a purely animated film could ever be.

Bakshi’s interest in a video system was no doubt financial as shooting on video would have sufficiently lowered his overhead while not having much impact on the finished images. Evidently, the filmmaker got impatient and bought $250 thousand worth of 35mm equipment for his next project before finding out that Lamb’s experiments had worked.

Anxious to try out his new gear, Lamb invited Tom Waits to be a part of an experimental short film that features the singer in a street corner seduction scene with a flirtatious stripper — the whole performance is centered on Waits’ recitation of “The One that Got Away.”

Tom Waits For No One has its own, brand new website. Here is the filmmaker on the 35th anniversary of his almost-lost milestone…

It was nearly two years before MTV’s debut, and seven years before an animated rock video would appear on MTV, but we were inspired by a burgeoning market: rock n’ roll videos. All we needed was a subject… and then I recalled Waits at The Roxy. With his evocative body language and signature vocals, Tom Waits’ motion would translate beautifully into animation. Creative juices began flowing, a pitch was hatched, phone calls were returned, storyboards drawn, and after several meetings with Tom, sets were built and production began.

We scheduled a video shoot. Tom drove up in his ’66 Blue Valentine T-bird, stepped out wearing a pork pie Stetson, an old wrinkled suit and carrying a bag, asking where the dressing rooms were. We’re thinking “Whew, he’s going to change that suit!” Then he came out of the dressing room with the same hat and a different old wrinkled suit.

For the shoot, we utilized 5 video cameras, 2 high, 2 low and 1 handheld. We did 6 takes with 2 separate dancers. We edited down 13 hours of video into to a 5 1/2 minute film, which was then traced frame by frame and turned into “Tom Waits for No One”. Too early for MTV, the film premiered in 1979, lived one night with “Mike ‘n Spike’s Festival of Animation” and took first prize at a single Los Angeles film and video festival. Ralph Bakshi’s American Pop was released in February 1981. On August 1, 1981, MTV went live and changed the world of music and video forever. Our little production, predating both, disappeared into obscurity.

After 35 years, in a world where music, video, animation and digital technology and young talent create new product on a global scale by the hour, “Tom Waits for No One” reaches out from the 20th century with the seeming draw of a throwback to analog itself. The live action images were hand traced frame by frame, turned into a caricatured drawing, inked onto a cel, then hand painted, photographed and edited on the most technology-forward analog video tools, by young artists who would transition into the 21st century’s digital world to become leaders in their industries.

This video might not be safe for work if seeing a flash of cartoon boobs on your lunch break could get you in trouble with your boss. Also, you should find a new job.

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Tom Waits released his groundbreaking concert video Big Time 25 years ago. Not only did Big expand the contemporaneous notion of a short, promotional music video into a feature-length work of art, it also served as a moving picture showcase for the artist’s audacious mid-career trilogy: Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Frank’s Wild Years.

Of course, Big Time also delivers on the promise of all concert films, providing plenty of footage of Waits and his band stomping and growling and grimacing and roaring through ballads, rockers and the odd-ball tunes that define the trilogy — music influenced by Bertolt Brecht and the European avant garde as well as by American experimental composer Harry Partch and cult rocker Captain Beefheart. Still, the film has even more to offer. Here’s what Time Out had to say about it’s 1988 release.

This magnificent movie, filmed on a set consisting of a red-and-black checked floor and neon light boxes, cross-cut with scenes shot around the theatre, sees Waits adopt a variety of guises; the pencil-moustached ticket-seller who ‘dreams the film’, a sit-down comedian in stained white tuxedo and glitter-flecked face – sort of Victor Borge from Hell – and more or less straight troubadour. The music is from Frank’s Wild Years, Rain Dogs and Swordfishtrombones. Musical, visual and verbal puns abound; elements of vaudeville, burlesque and soulful balladry are orchestrated by what is evidently, for all the downbeat, offbeat imagery, a fantastically energetic imagination. A concert film unlike any other, owing something to the work of ’40s fashion photographer/jazz film-maker Djon (Jammin the Blues) Mili, and with no shots of an audience at all.

Watch Tom Waits’s Big Time below

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I first heard of Harry Partch while reading about Tom Waits. With 1980′s Heartattack and Vine, Waits hung up his fedora, turning his back on the piano-based, cabaret croaking of his early years for the strange territories of his breakthrough trilogy: Swordfishtrombones (1983), my favorite Waits’ album Rain Dogs (1985) and Frank’s Wild Years (1987). Some of the influences on this new music were plain to see: Waits Armstrong-esque crooning morphed into a Howlin’ Wolf-like growl and his increasingly abstract lyrics owed a big debt to the strange poetry of Captain Beefheart. Also, there was something else: The discordant tones on the record and the insistent presence of odd percussive rhythms might’ve seemed to have been Waits’ unique contributions, but he was actually standing on the shoulders of another American giant.

Harry Partch was born at the dawn on the 20th century in 1901. By the time he was 14 he was composing his own songs, but he dropped out of college after just six months of study, frustrated at the strictures of Western music, wanting to find a way to express himself in a manner that matched his restless, rebellious creativity.

In his mid-20′s Partch was trying to create a system of music that would adhere more closely to the sound of the human voice. He became inspired when he read On the Sensations of Tone by Hermann Helmholtz. The tome relates musical phenomena to physics and explains the physiology of hearing. With this bedrock understanding of how music actually behaved in the physical world, Partch had found his answers. He realized that the 12 note octave of Western music wasn’t a natural scale, but a constructed one and maybe even a repressive one.

“This thing began with truth and the truth does exist…truth always threatens the hierarchy or they think so,” said Partch.

Partch set about devising a system of pure tuning made up of microtones: small intervals between traditional notes that we aren’t used to hearing. In Partch’s music, a scale is made up of 43 notes. In order to play his compositions, Partch also became an instrument inventor; combining instrument parts or whipping new ones up from scratch.

This great documentary captures Parch’s cantankerous creativity while simultaneously filling-in the story of an outsider who seemed most comfortable at society’s fringes.

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