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Tom Waits: Troubadour of the Imagination
Our Band Could Be Your Life is probably the only book of rock criticism/anthology that I've read. And that was three years ago; and because of the title. I thoroughly enjoyed it, however it was the first and the last. Unless you want to count Johnny Rotten's autobiography, which I read when it appeared in '99 or so. But due to my grown obsession with the records and persona of Tom Waits, and a gift certificate, I ended up with a copy of Innocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader. The book has a great format; it's basically a compilation of magazine clippings from the past 30 years, beginning with a press release that Waits himself wrote to introduce his second album, The Heart of Saturday Night. Some of the interviews are worthless; the editor (Mac Montandon, Brooklyn-based) has justified their inclusion on the line that they demonstrate the naivet� of the music press and their general inability to crack the dense and idiosyncratic genius that is Tom Waits. But actually printing the insipid reviews does little but bore the reader. Some critics and interviewers get it right--for example an intrepid though long-winded writer from Musician magazine, circa '87, and late-'70s profiles from the New Yorker, Newsweek, and others. A drawn-out transcription of an encounter between Waits and Elvis Costello is charming but exhausting. The book is worthwhile for dedicated fans, along with those who are intrigued but need illumination. And Frank Black's foreword is wonderful. But the most interesting thing to me was a contrast made in one of the profiles between Waits and Bruce Springsteen, another figure I've found myself unable not to listen to daily. To paraphrase the passage: If Springsteen wrote songs for the down and out, the working class, the drunk, the hopeless, lovesick and lonely, then Waits wrote songs from those perspectives--he embodied the characters. Tom Waits has one of the richest imaginations in recent American history. Perhaps Bruce Springsteen has one of the biggest souls. Aside from the disparate sizes of the two artists' audiences, they've really been two different audiences. Ignoring for a moment the fact that Springsteen has been largely misunderstood by the public, especially throughout the mid-'80s, and much of his audience consists of casual pop music fans, one might say (or at least imagine for now) that his audience, his real audience, truly consists of the characters represented in his songs--especially his first decade of records. His songs are about solace. Listen to "Downbound Train." More than a cautionary tale, it connects with anyone who's lost everything, including (most of all) direction. It's difficult to romanticize the plight of that song's narrator. Not so with the characters of Tom Waits, who drip with infatuating contagion. By the early '80s, after Waits had worked to shed his drunkard, down-and-out persona and had begun to experiment with new styles and means of recording, he was all about invention and reinvention. The press had latched onto his rough, whisky-soaked early-years stage act-- which is shown well in the book--and for a while his fans were stubborn to let go of it either. So in a sense, that early legacy is to blame for fans' infatuation with the characters he draws. But only the lazy or bitter listener could call his ballads contrived; his rich imagination, humor, and expert storytelling lure listeners who only dream about the inside of a boxcar or the end of a whisky bottle at nine am, the open road before dawn, or the harbors of Singapore, but have never and may never experience them outside of a Tom Waits album. -Dave
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