Tag: tom waits

Hard-to-find

Shortest Day/Longest Day

Craig McAllister

The past few days have been full of positive results. Thanks to match abandonment on Saturday due to pea-souping fog, my team managed to avoid defeat for the first time in a few weeks. Result! Then, out of the blue, we sacked the manager! Result! He/we never saw that coming. (Fog joke there). And the boy has done well in his prelims. Result!

Yesterday was Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, when daylight hours sharpen to a pinpoint before slowly widening again, the time of year when local wags think it amusing to say “the nights are fair stretchin’” every other sentence.

Not that I noticed. I’ve had Covid since testing positive on Sunday. The one positive result no-one wants. Any festive oomph I may have had has since evaporated, drained from my body like the juice in a Duracell battery come Boxing Day. My muscles feel as if they’ve been put through some sort of gym session when, obviously, they haven’t, and my head thumps harder than the hangover after Mark and Amanda’s wedding in 1994. I’m drifting in and out of sleep continually. I’ve had to rewind and rewatch the last couple of episodes of Succession as I missed half of them. Squid Game came and went in a slo-mo ‘what was all that about?‘ fug. The days have been both short – is it 4 o’clock already?! – and long – is it still only Tuesday?! etc. I was most disappointed to find that Marc Riley wouldn’t be doing his usual evening show on 6 Music. The one time I’d get complete, uninterrupted time with him and he’s off. Seems he has Covid too. His replacement, Ezra Furman, has been pretty good, mind you.

I’m blaming my place of work. Covid was rampant in the week leading up to last weekend. Classes were being sent home as both learners and teachers tested positive. One class. Three classes, An entire year group. My job is not wholly classroom-based, but there was a certain inevitability that it would find me and at some point – Thursday, most likely – I caught it.

Not that I knew. I coughed a bit on Friday, but nothing more than normal for an asthmatic who uses his inhaler less than he really should. Despite the fog, I was going to the football on Saturday, so as is usual before going to a game, I took a LFT. Negative result confirmed, I duly went and very likely infected those around me. Or perhaps they infected me. Who knows?

By Saturday night I was shivery and I was beginning to think that I *might* want to get tested in the morning, just to be safe. We woke up on Sunday morning and stuck on the telly, to be met with Professor Jason Leitch, the most straight-talking expert on the box, explaining that the new variant presented itself with aching limbs, runny nose and sore head. Shit. That was me. The test was booked and taken. Driving there and back was a bit of a chore, if I was to be honest with myself, but still, surely not? I took another LFT that afternoon, ‘just to check’, and promptly forgot about it until an hour or so later when I happened to glance at the wee white plastic tray. Two lines. Two lines. It was heart-sinking and inevitable. The confirmatory results were back by 7 the next morning, Positive.

Normally at this time of year, I’ll cede to the times and offer up a bit of music with a loose connection to Christmas. Being imprisoned away from my music collection for the next week or so means that frustratingly, I can’t upload any music, so I’ve poked around the dustier corners of YouTube to find this diamond in the rough.

Tom Waits finds everlasting beauty in the bums, broads and bourbon bars of backstreet, smallville USA. His songs – Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis perhaps the nadir of it all – are film noir set to song, the dirty fingernailed and whiskey-soaked flipside of the American Dream. But you knew that already.

Waits bookends his own tale of loss, regret and loneliness with a Christmas song (carol?) as old as time itself and the whole performance, filmed for the Paul Hogan Show would you believe, in 1979 is as unpretentious, honest and artful as you could wish for at this time of year. Waits, eyes closed and lost in song, his long eyelashes and clear skin the envy of everyone, his lupine features, all chiselled chin and high cheekbones, topped of with a sculpted mess of greased curls, is on splendid form.

All Waitsisms are present and correct. His voice, rising from a phlegmy whisper via bluesy rasp to gutteral growl, is sensational. He half talks, half sings, dragging on a blue-curling Marlboro, slipping into full-on ess oh yoo ell blue-eyed soul singer when he namechecks Little Anthony and The Imperials. The story is simple; a hooker is pregnant, hitched to a good man who promises to look after them all ‘even though it’s not his bay-bugh‘. She’s in a good place and she wants ‘Charlie’ to know. As the song continues its scuffed and scrappy barroom blues, you start to pick up on the idea that the hooker really misses Charlie, to the point that by the song’s surprising twist at the end, you might find yourself misty eyed, sentimental and nostalgic. It gets me every time, It’s that time of year after all. From one incarcerated outcast to another…

 

 

 

Get This!, Live!

Tom Tom Club

Craig McAllister

I was teaching a class last year when the word ‘struttin’‘ came up. Not strutting with a ‘g‘ at the end, but the more street-smart struttin’. What did the word mean, someone asked. Their grandfather had had to put strutting on his shed to strengthen the roof, but given the context of the sentence, struttin’ made no sense. Immediately, instantly, at once, I thought of John Travolta in the opening scene of Saturday Night Fever. “Let me show you,” I replied, and rather than replicate the Travolta strut in front of a group of 10 and 11 year-olds (that would’ve been all sorts of wrong) I rattled across the keyboard impatiently until I had the Saturday Night Fever opening scene cued up on YouTube. With a thumb hovering over the space bar should I need to pause proceedings – what swearies and/or nudity might be lurking around the next frame? – I turned up the volume, turned off the lights and by the metaphorical seat of my pants, pressed play.

As the Bee Gees’ slick guitar line and steady disco beat filled the classroom, 30 or so wee heads bobbed in unison – ah-ha-ha-ha – to Stayin’ Alive while it played behind Travolta’s character as he strutted – strutted! –  along the busy Brooklyn thoroughfare, (“Hey! To-neeey!”) all dimples and demi-quiff, the cock of the walk in his tight leather jerkin and Cuban heels. “Ah!” said the class in unison. So that was struttin’. The class understood. We moved on. “What did you do at school today?” would be asked later on at home. “We watched Saturday Night Fever,” would come the reply, to the bafflement and/or concern to some and/or all of the parents.

Over the years in the classroom I’ve managed to crowbar in such disparate references as the Stax Records snapping fingers logo, the choreography of The Ramones in concert, The Beatles’ ‘…Mr Kite‘ when doing a piece of writing on circuses and a gazillion records from the ’60s when we studied the decade.

“This, boys and girls,” I said triumphantly as I placed my old Dansette Major Deluxe on a table at the front of the classroom one day, “is a 1960s mp3 player.”

This led to the formation of the Friday Afternoon Record Club, when pupils brought all manner of 7″ singles from home and we’d listen to and discuss them. The first rule of Friday Afternoon Record Club though, is to never mention it, so we’ll leave it at that. The head teacher would’ve had a fit if they’d known we’d been listening to David Essex and Status Quo and Kelly Marie (b-boo, b-boo!) instead of something less culturally-relevant instead.

Had the learners in front of me recently been that wee bit older when we’d been discussing the meaning of struttin’, I might’ve extended the concept of the word through Tom Waits‘ Nighthawk Postcards.

‘Let me put the cut back in your strut,’ he says sings scats, sounding like Louis Armstrong chewing on sandpaper. ‘And the glide back in your stride.‘

Nighthawk Postcards is a sprawling, eleven-minute jazz-inflected monologue, Waits rasping and riffing and painting highly visual pictures with well-written words, the aural equivalent of the suggested stories in the paintings of Edward Hopper. Not for nothing does the song and its parent album take nomencular inspiration from one of Hopper’s most-celebrated works.

An inebriational travellogue as it’s introduced, the bass player wanders in straight off the grooves of a Charles Mingus 78 and continues to walk all over the yellow-lit, yellow-stained ambience with hep jazzcat grooviness. There’s a low-key, full-blown jazz drummer, a saxophone player who can’t wait to be let off the invisible leash that tends him to the background and a brilliantly loose-knuckled, laid-back piano player – on this recording not Waits, surely – there’s no way he can riff and scat and rap his way across those notes and spaces while playing at the same time, is there? Is there?

Tom Waits – Nighthawk Postcards

The words leap off the record, instantly visual and scene-setting. Waits loves wordplay; busses that groan and wheeze, eyelids propped open at half-mast, a sucker born every minute and you just happened to be comin’ along at the right time. And he loves colours; neon swizzle sticks, a yellow biscuit of a buttery cueball moon, obsidian skies, harlequin sailors, piss yellow gypsy cabs… one line in and he’s got you hooked forever.

Stop whatever you’re doing and step into Tom’s low-rent, sawdust floored world. He’s funny, he’s soulful, he’s part bluesman, part jazzateer and part down-on-his-luck crooner – he breaks into Sinatra’s That’s Life at one point, making Frank’s version sound like the eternally happy collected works of PWL by comparison. The audience – they’re actually not at Raphael’s Silver Cloud Lounge as Waits might have you believe at the start, but live in the studio (L.A.’s Record Plant) – a bold move in 1975 – whoop and holler and guffaw and groan at all the right moments. The song… the whole Nighthawks album… is a masterclass in performance.

The band aren’t exempt from the odd show-offy moment either. When Waits sings of the L Train sounding like the ghost of Gene Krupa, the drummer clatters a perfectly brushed onomatopoeiac rail-rattlin’ Krupa beat in response. Rehearsed? You bet it is, but it’s a great moment. At the mention of P.T. Barnum, the sax player eases into a fluttering take on Julius Fucik’s ‘Entrance of the Gladiators‘ (you know it – look it up) before fading back into the shadows. It’s Waits though who’s the real star of the show. He’s one of the greats, and on this record his writing and delivery and all-round uniqueness is second to none. But I suspect you knew that already.

What’s the scoop, Betty Boop? Whadayamean you’ve never heard Nighthawks At The Diner?!? Do yourself a favour and add it to your collection. Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back, as I’m sure Tom must have growled across a tune of his at some point or other.

 

 

 

Get This!

I’ll Tell You One Thing, He’s Not Building A Playhouse For The Children

Craig McAllister

Tom Waits was 70 at the end of last week. On the one hand this was quite surprising. Tom Waits?! 70?! No way! On the other though, Waits has looked at least 103 since the first time I set eyes and ears on him, round about the time they played a clip of In The Neighbourhood or some suchlike off of Swordfishtrombones on Whistle Test, or perhaps even the Oxford Road Show. This was back in the mid 80s when pop was shiny and bright with clean hair and cleaner teeth and here was Waits, crumpled and tramp-like with an electric shock of hair that even Keith Richards might’ve taken a comb to, his rough hewn chin and sharp cheekbones giving him the look of a werewolf on the verge of an asthma attack, attacking, not playing his upright piano. Cool as the proverbial fuck.

 

Waits really perfected that beatnik bum look, looking like the hobo in a Rockwell painting that had managed to peel himself free from the canvas and flop onto the nearest flat surface. It was in place for Closing Time, his first album, and he sort of grew into it with each subsequent release.

Delivered with a voice that’s equal parts gravel and gasoline, Waits sings bourbon-soaked mini operas of loving and losing, of romance and heart-break – Grapefruit Moon, for example, or Martha, or the astonishingly brilliant and Desolation Row-like Kentucky Avenue, yet he can be laugh-out-loud-funny when the mood needs lifting. Seek out All My Friends Are Married on Nighthawks At The Diner for a prime slice of all-bases-covered Waits’ melancholic pathos. In fact, listen to the whole album, it might just change your life. That’s an instruction, by the way, not a recommendation.

Tom Waits – Martha

As his back catalogue grew to be as wild and varied as the bottle selection behind a Bowery bar, so too did his approach to music. Waits’ anything goes attitude meant that accordions played polkas while bits of metal clanged rudimentary rhythms, skewed blues flipped and flopped underneath funereal Salvation Army band dirges, spoken word sections fought for your attention with ambient jazz….fantastically unpigeonholeable, that’s yer Waits.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Regardless of the style, the substance is always there. Taken as music-free words on a page, a Tom Waits’ lyric is a work of art in its own right, as essential a read as Bukowski or Kerouac, wonderful beat-influenced poetry that will be subjected to wonky actual beats once inside a recording studio. On 1999’s Mule Variations – 20 years ago – jeez! – you’ll find two of Waits’ most incredible tracks.

Tom Waits – What’s He Building?

On What’s He Building?, Waits snarls a fantastic spoken word account of a mysteriously sinister neighbour who’s piqued the irk of the singer. Static squelches its way across the band waves. Heavy tools clank. Bandsaws whine and whir. The menace creeps as Waits lays out his problems with his neighbour. Or should that be neighbor?

What’s he building in there?
What the hell is he building in there?
He has subscriptions to those magazines
He never waves when he goes by
And he’s hiding something from the rest of us
He’s all to himself, I think I know why
He took down the tire-swing from the pepper tree
He has no children of his own, you see
He has no dog, he has no friends
And his lawn is dying
And what about those packages he sends?
What’s he building in there?
With that hook light on the stairs
What’s he building in there?
I’ll tell you one thing, he’s not building a playhouse for the children
What’s he building in there?
Now what’s that sound from underneath the door?
He’s pounding nails into a hardwood floor
And I swear to God I heard someone moaning low
And I keep seeing the blue light of a TV show
He has a router and a table saw
And you won’t believe what Mr. Sticha saw
There’s poison underneath the sink, of course
There’s also enough formaldehyde to choke a horse
What’s he building in there?
What the hell is he building in there?
I heard he has an ex-wife in some place called Mayor’s Income, Tennessee
And he used to have a consulting business in Indonesia
But what’s he building in there?
He has no friends but he gets a lot of mail
I bet he spent a little time in jail
I heard he was up on the roof last night, signalling with a flashlight
And what’s that tune he’s always whistling?
What’s he building in there?
What’s he building in there?
We have a right to know

It’s the perfect soundtrack to a still-to-be-written Stephen King short story, a modern-day gothic horror tale of untold holy terrors behind suburban curtains. I wonder if Stephen King has heard it?

Rubbing uncomfortable shoulders with the creeping menace of What’s He Building? is the plaintive Take It With Me, a song so small and sad you wouldn’t believe it was the same artist who’d done both.

Tom Waits – Take It With Me

It’s a sweeping-up song, end of the night barroom jazz, a long look back on a love lost. We’ve all been there but, as usual, Waits puts it best.

“Oceans as blue as your eyes,” “We lived in Coney Is-land,” “It felt just like the old days….”

The memories linger, like the tendrils of tobacco and whiskey curling around the mouth of the piano player, playing to no-one but you in the corner of the bar.

In a land there’s a town, and in that town there’s a house
And in that house there’s a woman
And in that woman there’s a heart I love
I’m gonna take it with me when I go

This isn’t one of Tom Waits’ best-known songs, but it should be. Listen. Repeat. Share. Thanks.

Hard-to-find

Easter Everywhere

Craig McAllister

This is beautiful. Halfway between a Lynchian take on Disney melancholy and a string-soaked Salvation Army-sponsored wake, it’s the sound of hope over despair, of light at the end of a long, lonely tunnel, of redemption and resignation, reflection and retreat.

Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet – Gavin Bryars featuring Tom Waits

It’s an extraordinary recording, originally put to tape in 1971, and although at that point Tom Waits wasn’t involved, serendipity certainly was. The track was created to soundtrack a documentary being made about the homeless people who lived around Waterloo Station and it’s built around the melody of a homeless man, captured Alan Lomax-style singing the titular line over and over again.

As fate would have it, when Bryars played it back in the studio he noticed that the unknown man’s voice was pitch perfect with his piano. Not only that, but his entire vocal lasted 13 bars, Bryar’s preferred length for his planned piece of music. 

The first version lasted 25 minutes, the entire side of an LP. With the popularity of cassette tape, later versions grew to 60 minutes. The granddaddy of them all though is the 74 minute version from 1993, the version that includes Tom Waits’ sympathetic and entirely perfect co-vocal, the go-to guy if you’re looking for a wine-soaked hobo to enhance your recording. The first version of the track I heard, the recording won Bryars a Mercury nomination and a new fan in me.

It’s astonishing. The sighing strings and elongated brass lines leave just enough space for the empty sadness to seep through, church organs weaving in and out of the wholly holy swill. Uplifting melancholy in excelsis, Jesus’ blood is of course both religious and metaphorical.

You wouldn’t need to travel far from wherever you’re sitting just now to find a homeless person, an embarrassing and shocking state of affairs in a world where multi millions have been pledged to save the roof of some old church or other in Paris. A quick drop of Jesus’ blood won’t fix things in this day and age, despite what the big man upstairs might have you believe.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten, Live!, Most downloaded tracks

2018 (Slight Return)

Craig McAllister

As is the way at this time of year, lists, polls and Best Of countdowns prevail. Happily stuck in the past, the truth of it is I’m not a listener of much in the way of new music. Idles seem to dominate many of the lists I’ve seen, and I want to like them, but I can’t get past the singer’s ‘angry ranting man in a bus shelter’ voice. I’ve liked much of the new stuff I’ve heard via 6 Music and some of the more switched-on blogs I visit, but not so much that I’ve gone out to buy the album on the back of it.

If you held a knife to my throat though, I might admit to a liking for albums by Parquet Courts and Arctic Monkeys, both acts who are neither new nor up and coming. I  listened a lot to the Gwenno album when it was released and I should’ve taken a chance on the Gulp album when I saw it at half price last week, but as far as new music goes, I think that’s about it. Under his Radiophonic Tuckshop moniker, Glasgow’s Joe Kane made a brilliant psyche-infused album from the spare room in his Dennistoun flat – released on the excellent Last Night From Glasgow label – so if I were to suggest anything you might like, it’d be Joe’s lo-fi McCartney by way of Asda-priced synth pop that I’d direct you to. Contentiously, it’s currently a tenner on Amazon which, should you buy it via them, is surely another nail in the HMV coffin.

2018 saw the readership of Plain Or Pan continue to grow slowly but steadily in a niche market kinda style, so if I may, I’d like to point you and any new readers to the most-read posts of the year. You may have read these at the time or you may have missed them. Either way, here they are again;

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

  • An article on the wonder of The Specials‘ b-sides.
  • Songs about snow and inclement weather.
  • Some words on the punk Beatles. Pete Shelley was very much still alive at the time of writing and retweeted the article.
  • A look at how the best reggae musicians steal the best soul tunes and make them their own.
  • Lush’s Miki Berenyi talks us through some of her favourite music. The most-read thing wot I wrote this year.
  • Stephen Sondheim , Leonard Bernstein, Tom Waits and Pet Shop Boys. Here.
  • First thoughts on Arctic Monkeys‘ Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino.
  • Why Eno‘s Here Come The Warm Jets should be in everyone’s record collection. Here.
  • Skids’ Richard Jobson waxes lyrical about Bowie. Here.
  • Some words on the quiet majesty of Radiohead‘s How To Disappear Completely.
  • Brendan O’Hare, loon drummer and all-round public entertainer in Teenage Fanclub chooses his favourite Teenage Fanclub tracks. Here.
  • The punk poetry and free scatting jazz of Patti Smith. Here.
  • A first-timer’s guide to Rome.
  • Johnny Marr live at the Barrowlands.

Feel free to re-read, Retweet, share etc.

 

See you next year.

Hard-to-find

Peace And Quiet And Open Air

Craig McAllister

Somewhere was written by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim and soundtracks arguably the most famous sections of West Side Story. Bernstein based parts of the music on Beethoven’s ‘Emperor‘ Piano Concerto*. Sondheim constructed a lyric that offered hope out of despair. In the musical, the song appears twice, first as a celebration of Tony and Maria’s against-the-odds love for one another and secondly towards the end when Maria sings it – spoiler alert! – as she holds her shot and dying boyfriend in her arms. I’m not a musicals kinda guy, although Grease is indeed the word, but it isn’t hard to appreciate the soaring melancholy of Somewhere. I’ve no idea how the rest of West Side Story is soundtracked, but I suspect it’s not for me. Somewhere though will always be in my ever-changing and expanding list of favourite songs.

Tom Waits takes the song and makes it crawl in slow motion like a couple of Bowery bums from the grubby and well-thumbed pages of a charity shop Bukowski novel. He’s gargled a gallon of gravel and phlegm, downed a litre of brown paper-wrapped liquor and turned Somewhere into a tear and piss-soaked anthem of hope for down on their luck drinkers everywhere.

Tom Waits – Somewhere

The original’s vision of hope over despair is magnified tenfold in Waits’ version, two drinkers looking for a way out of their sorry existence. Strings swirl with Disney-like flourishes. Waits’ vocal is fantastic, his phrasing and intonation bang on. Is he in character or is it for real? Who knows? There’s no doubt though that he’s singing from the heart. This is soul music, just not as you know it. “We’ll find a new way of living,” he croaks. “We’ll find a way of forgiving.”  It’s depressingly sad and sky-scrapingly brilliant all at the same time.

Waits’ version was recorded initially for his Blue Valentine album, an album you really should investigate if it’s unfamiliar to you. He’s a bit of a genius is our Tom, although I suspect you knew that already.

In sharp contrast, Pet Shop Boys reclaim Somewhere as a day-glo gay anthem to rival that of their own take on Go West. If it’s near-11 minute dance remixes y’r after, look no further than the full-length treatment afforded to it.

Pet Shop Boys – Somewhere (full length 10.54 version)

A bit of random Chris Lowe chatter, a sprinkling of West Side Story’s I Feel Pretty and a date-defining trip hop shuffle eventually give way to the thump, thump, thump!!! as Pet Shop Boys’ disco machine shifts slickly through the gears towards the track’s conclusion. Fairlights crash and synthetic strings sweep in trademark PSB fashion. The Smiths you can dance to, as they famously quipped.

“We’ll find a new way of living,” announces Neil Tennant in that slightly smug, slightly knowing way of his. “We’ll find a way of forgiving.” By the end, doubts have been cast aside, bags have been packed and we’re all in line, “Hold my hand and I’ll take you there,” following Tennant and Lowe, marching to the beat of their 808 to a wondrous new place.

 

*As I typed this article I listened to all 43 minutes of Beethoven’s Concerto No5: Emperor (complete) and I must be honest, to these philistine rockist ears, I failed to spot where Bernstein borrowed the music. Maybe your ears are more refined. It’s here if y’fancy it.

Hard-to-find

That’s why I’m queasy like Sunday morning

Craig McAllister

And Sunday afternoon. And probably most of Monday too. Hangovers. Phhhhhhh. Not had one for a while. This one’s a cracker. I had it all planned that I would put up a couple of rip-roaring posts today, but that’s just not happening.  Got that constant sicky feeling and my head feels like, eh…..eh…..I dunno. Tch. You know what it feels like. Well. You think you do, but this one’s 10 times worse. This hangover is a killer.

hangover

I’d love to be under the covers with Tom Waits or Nick Drake on in the background. But with Plain Or Pan juniors 1 and 2 and a Mum who expects the Best Mother’s Day Ever, this idea is an absolute non-starter. Instead, the next best thing – Here‘s Tom Waits doing ‘Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet’, his collaboration with Gavin Bryars from 1993. It starts with a sample of a tramp singing the title over and over and ends with Tom Waits growling the same line on top of the saddest string section imaginable. If they were brave enough, Disney could score a film using this track. It’s melancholic, soulful and the perfect soundtrack to the hell that is my heid right now. Like it? Try this version from a Denver radio station broadcast in October 1999. Just Waits and a piano. Taken from a bootleg called ‘You’ll Like This One’. Aptly named.

tom-waits

Just in case you’re in danger of slashing your wrists and ending it all forever after putting yourself through those 2 tracks of downbeat maudlin melancholia, here‘s a raucous wee track to put you out your misery.

johnny-shane

The Grand Poobah, the King of the Hangover himself, Shane MacGowan‘s limited release from 1994, ‘That Woman’s Got Me Drinking’, featuring none other than Captain Jack Sparrow himself on guitar. Johnny Depp, in case you were wondering. Sounds like The Pogues doing Motorhead. Now there’s an excellent concept.

Business as normal from tomorrow folks. Stay with me!

tennents-lager-lovelies

That woman’s got me drinking