Tom Waits came into my life very gradually. I read about him before I heard him, and I tried liking him before I liked him. My first real encounter was when Frode Lauareid mad a mixtape for me. Frode was a very good guy that I encountered in my work for DNTU, which I have talked about before. His musical taste was very eclectic as well, and the tape had a lot of very interesting music on it, including the song 16 Shells From A Thirty Ought Six by Tom Waits, which was the first song I heard and really liked of his. I had seen his albums Rain Dogs and Swordfishtrombones (which is where the song was from) figuring highly on music critics' lists of best albums of the 80s, but I didn't quite get him. That is until I listened to the mixtape and things started to make sense to me.
Following his career is very interesting as well. He started out in a jazzy piano sense, with a gravelly voice that still had a lot of good and round tone to it and wrote great songs, like Old 55, The Heart of Saturday Night, and I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You, but a dramatic change started with the album Heartattack and Vine from 1980. The gravel in his voice was cultivated into little rocks, and he sounded more and more like a town crier. This in turn was augmented by a change in instrumentation from a very heavy reliance on piano to harder percussive instruments, such as marimbas - and with more of a percussive use of the piano as well. His band in the 80s also included Marc Ribot, who has a guitar tone that fit his music perfectly.
The thing with Tom Waits is that even when his voice sounds like a barking sea lion, it really fits the overall musical picture he is painting. He is a true artist with a very clear vision, and that vision started crystallizing with Heartattack and Vine, a song that was covered by Screaming Jay Hawkins and used in a Levi's commercial - yet nothing surpasses the original.
One of the clever lines in the lyrics of Heartattack and Vine is "Don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just God when He's drunk." In my late teens and early twenties, I was a lot more militant about my lack of religious belief, and liking this quote, I decided that it would make a nice signature line for my email. That was all fine and dandy, but I also was trying to do some fundraising for the teetotaler children's organization at that point - and I made the mistake of using my personal email. Needless to say, my signature line backfired. I got a response from someone who first politely informed me that they didn't have any funds available - then made an equally polite note of my signature line and informing me that even if they had money available, the quote was so offensive that they wouldn't have let us have any grant money regardless. To me, that was a very humbling moment - and it has become one that I do use to stress the importance of professionalism.
But enough talk (although I had to make up for yesterday) - here is Heartattack and Vine.
The thing with Tom Waits is that even when his voice sounds like a barking sea lion, it really fits the overall musical picture he is painting. He is a true artist with a very clear vision, and that vision started crystallizing with Heartattack and Vine, a song that was covered by Screaming Jay Hawkins and used in a Levi's commercial - yet nothing surpasses the original.
One of the clever lines in the lyrics of Heartattack and Vine is "Don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just God when He's drunk." In my late teens and early twenties, I was a lot more militant about my lack of religious belief, and liking this quote, I decided that it would make a nice signature line for my email. That was all fine and dandy, but I also was trying to do some fundraising for the teetotaler children's organization at that point - and I made the mistake of using my personal email. Needless to say, my signature line backfired. I got a response from someone who first politely informed me that they didn't have any funds available - then made an equally polite note of my signature line and informing me that even if they had money available, the quote was so offensive that they wouldn't have let us have any grant money regardless. To me, that was a very humbling moment - and it has become one that I do use to stress the importance of professionalism.
But enough talk (although I had to make up for yesterday) - here is Heartattack and Vine.
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