‘Silent Night’: Revisiting Tom Waits’ unlikely cover of a Christmas carol
Whether it’s because of the creaking and clanking percussion that undercuts so much of his work from Swordfishtrombones onwards or that harrowing, guttural voice of his which has been a staple of his entire career, if there’s any one particular holiday in the year that you’d associate Tom Waits’ music with, it’s more likely to be Halloween than it would be Christmas or Valentine’s Day.
One night in early December 1978, two days before his 29th birthday and twenty days before Christmas, though, he brought all three of those holidays together over the course of six glorious, spellbinding and magical minutes.
Waits was filming a spot for the iconic Austin City Limits, running through a set packed with early gems like ‘I Wish I Was In New Orleans’ and ‘On The Nickel’. He also dipped into a few tracks from his then-new album Blue Valentine, including ‘A Sweet Little Bullet From A Pretty Blue Gun’ and ‘Romeo is Bleeding’. But the real standout came when he launched into what’s arguably the best cut from the whole record.
Every move that Tom Waits makes is an unexpected one. His career is full of unpredictability and surprises, experimentation and outlandish (in the best possible way) performances, but surely even the bravest betting man in the audience of The Moody Theater that night didn’t expect to hear Waits working any Christmas music into his setlist.
It’s no surprise then to hear a slight ripple of shocked laughter make its way through the audience when he begins to raspingly, yet tenderly, play and sing the Joseph Mohr-penned ‘Silent Night’ towards the end of the show.
After drawling and drifting through a verse of the Christmas lullaby, Waits segues straight into his own ‘Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis’ from Blue Valentine, an equal parts gorgeous, hilarious and heartbreaking ballad which captures just as much or more of all the life and living as the very best Jack Kerouac prose could hope to do.
The audience, so bemused at the start of ‘Silent Night’, by now are now enraptured as Waits dreams his way through the song, and they follow him through the American histories and neighbourhoods that are so vividly invoked and depicted in the story of the song. They laugh again when he wants them to, and their hearts break all around him on his command, too. Backing himself on a gently rising and falling piano, Waits sings with the voice of every beaten down nobody who wished they could have been somebody in the whole entire world over the course of the performance.
After the final twist of the song, the central conceit that none of it was true, none of it was real, perhaps it was all just a dream, Waits drifts away again into the lullaby of ‘Silent Night’. If there was to be any silence that night, it would have been because the audience had been so stunned. As it was, they roared their delight at his audacious, mercurial and gorgeous showing.
Tom Waits might more often invoke the spirit of Halloween, but with his December birthday and in performances such as this one, he’s really more of a Christmas miracle.
