Tom Waits

good show

She is great.

Eight million Tom Waits threads, I know, but I might as well use this one for this info:

For his Atlanta stop, recorded at the city's historic Fox Theater on July 5, Waits delivered a stunning and epic two-and-a-half-hour performance, including songs he says he's never attempted outside of the studio before. Backing Waits is a five-piece group featuring Seth Ford-Young (upright bass), Patrick Warren (keyboards), Omar Torrez (guitars), Vincent Henry (woodwinds) and Casey Waits (drums and percussion). "They play with racecar precision and they are all true conjurers," Waits says. "They are all multi-instrumentalists and they polka like real men."

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Setlist:

"Lucinda / Ain't Going Down to the Well"

"Down in the Hole"

"Falling Down"

"Chocolate Jesus"

"All the World Is Green"

"Cemetery Polka"

"Cause of It All"

"Till the Money Runs Out"

"Such a Scream"

"November"

"Hold On"

"Black Market Baby"

"9th and Hennepin"

"Lie to Me"

"Lucky Day"

"On the Nickel"

"Lost in the Harbor"

"Innocent When You Dream"

"Hoist That Rag"

"Make It Rain"

"Dirt in the Ground"

"Get Behind the Mule"

"Hang Down Your Head"

"Jesus Gonna Be Here"

"Singapore"

ENCORE

"Eyeball Kid"

"Anywhere I Lay My Head"

Link near the top of the page to listen.

thanks Ned, listening now. this set is pretty similar to what i saw him play in Houston, plus a few songs i didn't hear -- Chocolate Jesus, Such a Scream, 9th and Hennepin, On the Nickel, Singapore (maybe a couple others) -- but overall very similar. Recording quality is excellent too!, this is really really good.

Live double CD at the end of November 2009:

Trailer: http://vimeo.com/6985723

8 free tracks: http://www.tomwaits.com/news/article/60/Free_Glitter_and_Doom_Live_Album_Preview/

Preorder: http://kingsroadmerch.com/tom-waits/

http://i37.tinypic.com/10pye5k.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTi8mATzSTI&NR=1

whoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

So I don't want to start yet another TW thread, but there's hardly been any discussion of Glitter & Doom yet. What did people think?

I get a guilty conscience every time I see it in my record collection, as I've hardly played it since I bought it several months ago. I was put off a little by the boomy-ness of the sound at first. But I clearly owe it to him to listen more.

i listened to it a ton when it came out, and then i haven't played it since. it's good! i should dig it out again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH_EwRjrldc

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_li342nNZnS1qdf09mo1_500.jpg
old guys play some sort of event

(ribot in the back there!)

Ribot good enough that he gets to sit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVVDrPEQZt4&feature=player_embedded

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiJ2E0xGOv8

http://www.tomwaits.com/news/article/146/Peek_At_A_Lyric_From_New_Tom_Waits8217_Album/

never seen this before
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCNDZY4vXPs&feature=player_embedded

also finally getting around to the brawlers box set thing. some amazing stuff! kind of frustrating that the info about when the tracks were recorded / who played on them is so vague, but oh well.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kunmz1iWzo1qz6gpyo1_500.jpg

I'm not a huge fan but I really enjoyed the Boxers set, especially the third disc with the spoken word stuff. The poem about the boy waiting at a diner during a bus ride stopover is particularly great.

aw that's nirvana by bukowski. but yeah what a beaut. what a beaut.
there's some real gold on this that used to live on bootlegs, i think a long series called tales from the dimestore?, vols one to nine or something. almost wonder if they might theoretically hold a little more info about what's what. i like never let go, & lie to me a bunch.

Thanks to Chuck Tatum for:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5X4N2exOsU&feature=player_embedded#!

HAW!

http://www.somekindofawesome.com/journal/2011/8/22/listen-tom-waits-bad-as-me.html

I like it

was that actually taken down within the last 9 minutes?

Woah! Yes, I guess it was!

It sounded much like Tom Waits FWIW. Brash, honking, stompjng Tom Waits rather than sad Tom Waits. U know the drill

anti ppl be lurking ilm

I'm anti-ppl

You guys are right about Nirvana upthread. It's been on every Christmas compilation I've made since I first heard it.

The poem about the boy waiting at a diner during a bus ride stopover is particularly great.
yeah! almost wish there was a whole album of this sort of thing. he has an amazing speaking voice, even when he's not hamming it up.

I made a compilation of many of his best spoken word pieces, stuff like "What's he building in there". A bit disjointed in feel but it captures that incredible side of his work. I wish I flat-out loved his singing but I just don't.

U know the drill

yeah it's funny how much this is exactly what you expect a new tom waits song is going to sound like, but, you know, nice also. spoken bits are v wolf.

am i totally reactionary if i prefer his pre-swordfishtrombones stuff?

nope, otm.

it's like loving the complex human sprawl of a man but remembering the innocence of the child he was

thanks, i feel validated!

you're all wrong.

Nah, I'm kidding - you can like what you like, you don't have to ask me!

There is something quite devastating and melancholy and genuine about a lot of early Waits. Albums like Small Change are gut-wrenchingly desperate while Heart Of Saturday Night is so wistful and starry-eyed. I have a lot of time for this era. He had a tendency to go from genuinely affecting to full-on hammy, but by reinventing himself in the early '80s he managed to hit a happy medium through pure theatre.

I love that cartoon "The Street Tom Waits Grew Up On" upthread. Who did that?

So, the new album is out. Ilxors?

All female covers album out Nov. 22

https://www.spin.com/2019/08/tom-waits-covers-album-phoebe-bridgers-aimee-mann/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oncg1WJP8uU

Man, they really fucked up "Hoist That Rag" on the remaster
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orxPuV06jgM

WTF? Are all the tracks remixed/rerecorded like that?

One of the best guitar performances of Marc Ribot's career, sure, why not turn it way down until its barely audible. What a baffling decision.

Nothing else is that egregious but the original mix/master sounds better all the way around

i pulled up hoist that rag on spotify a couple of weeks ago because i was in the mood and i honestly thought it was a cover for a minute. so weird.

whoo, that is a serious downgrade.

Ah, better times for the Real Gone songs (but with Judah Bauer instead of Ribot)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR5SHuJDlUQ

^^I love that version so much, incredible performance.

Been thinking about Waits again lately. I have that Real Gone remaster on vinyl and it's quite jarring.

I put together an extensive career-spanning 'Best of' playlist here https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4FbY20jZVLSCXvfI4W1rvr?si=lMeXBmuATlWtgaNsbFfNww

This is a timely revive for me. Honestly cant remember the last time I put any of the records on, its surely been over 10 years. But just in the last couple weeks he's randomly been on my mind again (apocalypse? nostalgia?) and I've been thinking its time to revisit

it is kind of weird. Someone I know posted an interview with him a couple of days ago, and I got so excited I almost posted the same interview here, until I noticed it was maybe 20 years old. When this thread popped up again I for some reason figured it was someone else posting the same interview, like it had just been unearthed or something, but no, just a bunch of unrelated folks just thinking about Tom Waits.

^^^^ this.

A "press conference" from 10 or 15 years ago kept appearing on my Twitter feed this week.

This is the one I saw:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojX3ef2Gfgc

LOL Josh I totally watched that within the last week as well! Looks like it was just uploaded in June, it must be making the rounds of peoples YouTube recommendations. Its a neat interview, its fun to see him in such a good mood.

He should name his next album "Algorithm."

I've suddenly found myself enjoying his 21st century records much more than when they came out. A major correction after Mule Variations, which felt like the Swordfishtrombone persona was tapped out.

I went back to Bad As Me yesterday and it was better than I remember. I did enjoy it at the time but it didn't seem to have its own 'character' like most of his other albums, more a distillation of previous work. Still, it's a real solid hoot anyway

I'm sure he's fine, personally and financially, but I file Tom Waits near the top of the list of artists who right now probably wished they toured a bit more.

I've heard that the early alcohol consumption and later theatrical distancing were there because of serious stage anxiety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psk3rmjonQA

That's what i saw a few days ago ^^

I will absent-mindedly find myself singing "God's Away On Business" while doing a mindless chore, it's like having a song stuck in my head for the last ~17 years.

Xxxpost: it’s been a while since I heard “hoist that rag” and that remaster is so alien to me. Where those horns added in? I don’t remember them being there before unless they were way back in the mix. I like how those horn sound but without the guitar it’s missing something primal about it. It was the heart of the song.

Is this more of a remix then? Are all Waits recent remasters like this where it’s more of a second version than a real remaster?

I think it's just Real Gone that sounds significantly different.

From Waits' Bandcamp page:

Grammy nominated and featuring an entirely new mix that better fulfills the dynamic musical soundscape Waits/Brennan envisioned from the beginning. To accomplish this they returned to the multitrack session tapes and enhanced certain instruments or a vocal arrangement to create a sound that better represents the full bodied more sonically vibrant and jagged edges that Waits and Brennan were originally going for but lost.

It's the Iggy Raw Power mix of Waits releases

damn

it sounds like a lot of elements in the mix are

real gone

The horns are definitely new.

Tom Waits: "Ima fix Hoist That Rag"

Ribot's playing on that reminds me of his Cuban band, he must have really been in that mode at the time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0IPcqI3NH8

listening to the Real Gone remaster again, tbh if you didn't know what the OG "Hoist That Rag"sounded like there would be no issues. the album sounds great.

I have the original mix (which I hated at the time FTR) on a hard drive and I'm comparing it to the new version (on Bandcamp). The horns are entirely new on "Hoist That Rag" (or excised from the mix at the time and restored later) and I think the increased Cuban-ness of it makes the new version a little better. I remember reading an interview at the time where Waits said he wanted to make the album really noisy and harsh to suit both his and the national mood, and he succeeded - it's the St. Anger of his catalog IMO, and I've never liked it. I'm gonna buy this updated version.

I could totally see them having recorded the horns at the time and then stripping it down to make it super minimal and raw, and years later thinking 'hey those horns sound pretty sweet'.

TW is sounding great to me today. Also reminding me that his records are where I really fell for Ribot.

Couldn’t they have kept that different version of Hoist That Rag as a bonus track or something at least? It’s fine, but I’d take the more minimal, gnarled up original version any day. Weird to completely replace it.

One of my favorite TW tracks tbh, annoyed he’s George Lucas-ing it.

Yeah same, his best track of the 2000s imho, really caught lightning in a bottle with it

Insane to not at least leave the old mix up somehow. I've got it on my old iTunes archive drive but I never use that anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aw3mFXOwRgw

I remember when Orphans came out, a bunch of those tracks i had already been familiar with for years due to filesharing & owning the various comps and sdtks, and the orphans versions of many of them had overdubs and new parts punched in, most of which didnt help the songs imo. Obviously some of it was just due to familiarity with the previous versions, but it was still weird to hear these songs, many of which had really fantastic spare arrangements and carefully-mixed soundworlds, all of a sudeen filled with a bunch of drums and banjos and harmonica, which sounded like they were all recorded in the same session. I remember being particularly annoyed at a bunch of Charlie Musselwhite blues harp soloing all over "Heigh Ho".

I would never change a single thing about the OG Hoist That Rag and I wish he would put out an entire album that sounds like that.

Always like the demo of Alice better than released version too

Random thoughts after going back to a lot of TW:

-Both versions of Hoist That Rag are very good

-Bad As Me is also good, not bad

-I love his ballads more than I used to (although I always loved 'Green Grass' and 'Alice')

-Bone Machine is still sounds great, I love that high rasp voice he uses on say 'Jesus Gonna Be Here', wish he used that more

he has approximately 50 amazing ballads

Johnstown, Illinois is my favourite.

Good Old World, Waltz

Also fun to hear him write a song over the 'Do Whatcha Wanna' bassline ('Get Lost' on Bad As Me)

I wrote about Alice and Blood Money, and the experience of interviewing Waits (the story that got me in the door at The Wire), for Stereogum.

thanks i enjoyed that

good piece