Pawn Shop Marimbas, A Bottle Full of Rain, It’s Memories That I’m Stealing: When Tom Waits Decided To See What It Would Sound Like If Captain Beefheart Had Sung The Threepenny Opera

Friday is music. Playlists! Today there's a heap. Three of Tom Waits' best albums are back on vinyl and CD too. And I'm back listening to music I loved a little too much!

I wrote about music every day for nearly a decade on a major national news site – and even on the days when I was scratching my head to come up with content, I don’t think I ever wrote (much) about Tom Waits. I certainly never wrote the definitive essay I carried in my head for far too long. And now it’s gone. (It just wasn’t time….Time….Time…).

Blue Valentine changed my world. And Small Change came tumbling after. The Heart of Saturday Night and Closing Time hold special places in my heart. A song like Martha chokes me up every goddamned time. When 1999’s Mule Variations was released it was the first Tom Waits album to come out since I had been a confirmed, card-carrying fan. I even got to write about that one for a publication. (I would type up reviews and save them to a disc, driving them up the road to the Capital Times for them to copy and paste into their format). I wrote about Alice and Blood Money for a bigger paper. And by then, I could email my reviews. (Fancy).

There hasn’t been an album of new material by Tom Waits since 2011. I didn’t like that last album at all when it was released. I’d probably love it a whole lot more right now.

From time to time, I still go on a bit of a Tom Waits kick. But I did write here, earlier this year about how I nearly blamed him for some of the shenanigans in my life. That’s the closest I’ve ever got to writing properly about Tom Waits. And it wasn’t even really about his music (and maybe it wasn’t even really about him either).

In the 1990s, the music of Tom Waits blew my mind. I was, almost overnight, his biggest fan. At least I thought so. Until I met other fans. And took more recommendations. First, it was the compilation, Beautiful Maladies (the best of The Island Years). I still think this album totally slaps; one of the few compilations that is both a wonderful survey and feels like a special album as it plays through. It’s the highlights, but it feels correctly themed, so well chosen and placed.

The albums that Beautiful Maladies represents are all being reissued. They’ll arrive on coloured vinyl and the regular kind. They’re also being released (again) on CD. They are on the streaming services already of course, and the new, improved versions are there (apparently).

Today sees the release of Waits’ golden trilogy of reinvention. Next month we’ll get The Black Rider and Bone Machine.

But today it’s Swordfishtrombones (1983), Rain Dogs (1985) and Frank’s Wild Years (1987).

I love a good trilogy within an artist’s catalogue. And this mid-80s run is one of the best. Waits had done his drunk-at-the-piano shtick to death (very nearly his own actually). He’d gone back to the guitar just slightly, but was still tinkling the ivories for songwriting inspiration even as the gravel in his voice further thickened. What was the next move?

His relationship with Kathleen Brennan saved his life. And then his career. They were married in 1980. They are still together. Brennan lives away from the cameras and the internet. She is the person that introduced Waits to Beefheart. She became Waits’ most important and longest lasting musical collaborator, penning many of the lyrics to his songs from the mid-80s onwards, working as a co-producer and co-arranger. She is the reason he went west.

And he did so spectacularly on Swordfishtrombones. And then again, and a bit more refined with Rain Dogs. Finally, his Swordfish song Frank’s Wild Years (a hilarious spoken word delivered over nighthawk jazz) was to later be turned into a play, which necessitated the album also called Frank’s Wild Years. These three albums are worlds within themselves. They also present new idioms for and from Tom Waits. So, there’s repetition of sounds (the scrap-heap percussion that drives many of the songs, his accompanying junkyard dog wail) and themes (mercurial worlds of nostalgia).

Accordions will set up beautiful ballads, but there’s also jagged guitar riffs (and sometimes on the same song as the haunting accordion) and the piano is still there, it’s just been turned on its ear. A new tune drains from the side.

Waits was able to make road-movies inside of three minutes (16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought-Six, Jockey Full of Bourbon, Hang on St. Christopher). Some of his biggest and best revenue-collectors (that also happen to be incredible songs) are on these three albums. Downtown Train, which Rod Stewart turned into a mega-seller, Time, which Tori Amos memorably sang after 9/11, Way Down In The Hole which soundtracked every season of The Wire, a range of versions, one for each new set of adventures. Nick Cave, one of modern music’s great magpies might have even used Way Down In The Hole as the (good) seed to create one of his own staples, Red Right Hand.

Waits was on fire on these three albums. Backed by brilliant musicians – many of them leaving their indelible markings. Marc Ribot for one. His guitar so crucial to this sound. But the drummer Stephen Hodges was just as valuable. And Waits himself was stretching out beyond just piano and guitar. He’s behind many of the percussive sounds and all sorts of keyboards, banjo, bells, and various different yells.

I owned nearly every Tom Waits album on vinyl at one point. Now I don’t have any. I’m tempted to change that (again). I was inspired to check out Swordfishtrombones, because one of my favourite record store people told me it was the one. He knew I only knew the compilations at that point, and one or two of the earlier records. He was right and Swordfish was the one for me. Until I heard Rain Dogs, which has a handful of exquisite songs and sometimes feels like one of the very best albums by anyone ever. Frank’s Wild Years never quite held a candle to the first two albums in the trilogy, but it’s still packed with incredible highlights. Hang On St. Christopher, Temptation, Innocent When You Dream, Way Down In The Hole and Cold Cold Ground are all to be found on this album. Those are the reasons to own it right there. Anything else is a bonus.

I did my time listening to Tom Waits. So much so that it became its own parody. I would walk to the bar with my own copy of Heart of Saturday Night or Foreign Affairs to play across the pub’s sound system; my social smoking became anti-social as a direct result of my belief in the character that made these albums, and therefore the kind of character one needed to be to listen (properly, truly) to these albums.

I did my time listening to Tom Waits. And then did your time too.

And I had to have a little break because if a little went a long way, then the whole lot of his discography seemed to last forever.

But I still have my favourites. And I still have days when I like to play an album or two. Or a selection of the great songs from many of these fine moments.

Mule Variations is my favourite album. Unless I’m also listening to Blue Valentine again. Which is absolutely the one. Until of course I hear Nighthawks At The Diner, or Heartattack and Vine. There’s a lot of gold in the hills of 2004’s Real Gone too. And there are a couple of live albums, a couple of soundtracks, many compilations (most of them terrific in one way or another) and then, in 2006, he released a triple-album of rarities and large chunks of it sounded as good or better than most of what had been officially released in place of these wondrous songs.

But some days it’s all too much. The music. And the memories of the madness I attached to it.

Still, today, I’m going to be listening to Swordfishtrombones. And I reckon you should too.

Then I’ll play Rain Dogs. And you might like to as well.

I’ll top it off with Frank’s Wild Years. Which you might want to check in on too.

But if that feels like too much for you, I made a playlist of my absolute highlights from across all three albums, I jumbled them up to show how the songs speak to one another and link arms and run wild over hills and towards strange dreams. I called my playlist Tom’s Wild Swordfish Dogs. So you can have at that for a sampler.

And of course, being Friday, I have another playlist for you. A Tom Waits-free zone. Just 20 songs I thought might hang well together. It’s Vol. 132 of A Little Something For The Weekend…Sounds Good!

And you might like that as well. Or instead.

So. There you go. Not quite the Tom Waits essay I planned. But that’s gone for now. The music is still here. And today I’m especially grateful for that.