“What? … You have no elected officials. It’s like the early days of America, just yelling shit out. … All right, I’m going to have to take over.” – Tom Waits, straining to hear his audience.
I started looking for alternatives in high school.
I’m not sure if I was truly uninterested in the forms of entertainment that were made available to me as a 14-year-old, or if I purposely chose to reject the teenage culture that seemed to be rejecting me. Regardless, my foothold into the world of the peripheral was 88.1 WESU, Wesleyan University Radio.
I found the station in 1993, while scanning the left side of the dial, listening for anything that wasn’t Aerosmith. One evening the DJ informed me that she would be playing Tom Waits for the duration of the set. I put in a tape and started recording.
A few weeks earlier I read a Tom Waits feature in Spin, and I had been meaning to get some of his music since. He seemed like such an oddball; it made sense.
That night, I heard the crazy sounds of weird drums and carnival calliope behind a gruff, intimidating voice spouting bizarre lyrics, and I wasn’t so sure. But a couple of days later, I gambled $13.99 on Blue Valentine. I thought the combination of the front and back covers was one of the most bad-ass things that I had ever seen.
“There’s a place for us…” That magnificent opening line of “Somewhere” pulled me in. The carnival barker was gone, replaced by a fully emotive jazz/blues/lounge lizard. I listened to the album in awe.
And then I listened over and over again. Later, I developed a deep appreciation for the later-period Vaudevillian sounds emanating from the WESU tape, but Blue Valentine remains my first and favorite Tom Waits album.
His vision of America is the one I want to live in. His brand of Americana is the one I want to buy.
It’s a perfect document in 10 songs. By a twist of fate, Roshni and I had the chance to see the man live in Mobile, Alabama last summer. I knew that it could be the best shot I ever get, so we flew in on an expensive plane and checked into a cheap motel.
We arrived at the vintage Saenger Theater in style, and got to our seats as Waits sauntered onto the stage. Dressed in an old three-piece, a green collared shirt, heavy work boots, and a bowler, he went right into Orphans‘ “Lucinda,” grabbing the mic stand, waving his fingers in every direction, stomping up dust, and howling.
The 60-year-old was a sight for sore eyes, but what hit me like a train was the voice. He’s the Sandy Koufax of vocal power and command, barking fire, stopping on a dime, switching to an eerie falsetto and back again. Perfect. He went into “Falling Down,” and tears came. I could barely take how beautiful he was.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve come to honestly love the man. He is a distinctively skilled craftsman and an imaginative visionary, two qualities that rarely come together.
The stories of his songs will remain with me until I die, like a parallel world, more sketchy and hopeful and ugly and beautiful than the one I’ve dealt with. His version of America is the one I want to live in. His brand of Americana is the one I want to buy.
He is the ideal ambassador for a different reality. There’s a battle going on right now. It’s a battle against chain stores and strip malls, against bland food and bland fashion, against marketing calculations and cultural formulas, against mindless consumption and thoughtless disposal…against homogeny.
When I traveled from New York City to Mobile, everything looked the same. I couldn’t really tell the difference, and there’s something awful about that. It makes me want to fight, and I’m not the only one.
There’s a battle going on, and this man is in the thick of it. He’s a balladeer general with an indomitable spirit. He fights for beauty; he fights for meaning; he fights for a real life that has fallen by the wayside; he fights for America.
Fifteen years ago, I saw the world as an ugly place, and I looked for something different. I would listen to those old songs, and embrace a fantasy of a time that passed, a time that seemed too beautiful to have ever been real.
It’s taken me all this time, but now I understand. I saw that man, how he acts and how he sings. That world exists, and it’s there for us. Sure, every once in a while I’ll have to buy coffee from a multinational corporation; maybe I’ll have to get a mass-produced light fixture from a big-box home-improvement store.
I may even catch a few episodes of a show designed to manufacture artificial celebrity out of dull Americans. But as long as I remember that’s the fantasy, I’ll be okay. The real world is the one that’s beautiful, the one I can feel.
Andrew Williams lives in Brooklyn and battles entropy in Manhattan. He enjoys epic sagas and bicycling.