The one genre Tom Waits says all good music comes from: “Like a planet”
The music of Tom Waits is always going to be somewhat of an acquired taste in the world of rock and roll.
While there aren’t too many songs in his discography that were going to be able to compete with the pop starlets on the charts, it’s easy to see them as different musical vignettes half the time, each of them being another excuse for him to inhabit another character. That leaves a lot of wiggle room for him to play in, but there’s always the same common threads throughout every one of his classics.
First of all, Waits’s music has always been rough around the edges in the best way possible. Although he has a habit of making some of the most abrasive versions of his tunes, his resident barfly demeanour in the first era of his career at least showed him to be an earnest songwriter on par with people like Jackson Browne and Randy Newman. Then when Rain Dogs came out, it felt like everything turned a corner.
He had the same discipline in writing songs, but he seemed to adopt the same kind of grit that you’d hear out of the belters from days gone by. He certainly wasn’t a crooner like Elton John whenever he stepped behind the piano, but there was also a strange kind of intrigue that came out of listening to songs like ‘Big Black Mariah’ when they first came out.
Even when the tone got more than a little bit dark on tracks like ‘What’s He Building’, it was still about the importance of the song at the heart of everything. That particular track may as well be a sound design experiment half the time, but when listening to the basis of the track, a lot of it comes back to the same kind of rush that Waits got from listening to the blues for the first time when he was a kid.
Because aside from all his experiments with avant-garde music now and again, he knew that the blues was central to everything in popular music, saying, “The blues is like a planet. It’s an enormous topic. You can’t ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It’s a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don’t know where I would be. It’s indelible and indispensable.”
It’s easy to see that in someone that was friends with people like Keith Richards, but it’s hard to think of any major trend in music that didn’t have blues as its older sibling. Pop music may have gone through its ups and downs on the charts, but whether that’s listening to rock and roll, R&B, soul music, or even some of the later genre offshoots like grunge, there’s always those few guitar licks that trail back into the same holding pattern that Robert Johnson pioneered back in the day.
And judging by Waits’s vocal style, it’s not like he hasn’t done his fair share of paying respect to the greats, either. I mean, ‘The Earth Died Screaming’ is one of the most beautifully disturbing freakouts that he has ever laid down on record, but if you took out the modern production and released that kind of vocal performance decades before, it wouldn’t have felt all that out of place next to artists like Howlin’ Wolf.
So even if people get tired of the same three-chord formula that the blues can seem like at times, it’s always been about more than the simplicity. The music was the foundation of everything, but it’s the passion behind the people singing that is bound to resonate with people centuries after the greatest artists have sung their final notes.
