TOM WAITS
Rawwwrrr, rawwwrrr, rawwwrrrr.
Your beloved Tanya has come down with a bit of something, faithful readers.
Oh, you thought I was impersonating Tom Waits? No, heavens forbid. Sure, the man has a voice that sounds like the result of gargling with razor blades, but where is the fun in mocking that? The man himself will surely admit that he has an awful voice.
No, if one wants to put down ol’ Tommo, what they need to do is talk about how he’s a second-rate Hoagy Carmichael. What happens when, for the duration of your career, you’re classified as a “classic songwriter” but, thirty odd years into it, you’ve yet to write one classic song? Or at least one classic song that doesn’t “appropriate” “Waltzing Matilda. Well, then you’d be Tom Waits now, wouldn’t you?
For the first half of the career, he played the lovable drunk that nobody loved; a man who could’ve spared the world a lot of misery if he had just written books or, hey, even DIED IN A GUTTER. Actually, that’s not even the bad part of it: In the second half of his career, he was “reborn” as a guy who banged pots and attached trumpets to toaster ovens…and people called him a genius! As if the singer-songwriter stuff wasn’t atrocious enough, when he started utilizing pump organs and wang-dang-doodles, he lost the ability to even put TWO NOTES TOGETHER!
Wait’s last album had a song which went “What’s he building in there?”. The sharp-eyed observer, and frankly the dim-eyed observer too or indeed the eyeless fucking hunchback dwarf could have guessed what Tom was building: yet another amusical contraption which like Tom himself would have been better suited to crowscaring. Since he alighted on this Bukowski-meets-the-one-man-band schtick, his every album has been the same. Even his fans were forced to admit that Mule Variations wasn’t exactly moving Tom’s art forward, but when you’re a genius that sort of thing apparently doesn’t matter.
Okay, okay, here’s my Waits impression:
“Rawwwrrr-rawrrrrrr-drunk. (ping)
Rawwwwrrr-rawwrrrrr-midgets. (honk)
Rawwwwrrr-rawwwrrrr-broken-heart. (boom-chicka-boom)”
(Repeat ad nauseam and play in 17/12 time.)
Tom Waits. I know right where he can stick that swordfishtrombone. Up his arse? Fuck no, down his THROAT, so we never have to hear him again!