‘Tom Traubert’s Blues’: the song that defines Tom Waits
Most people would kill to come up with a single line as evocative as the opening lyric from Tom Waits’ tragic ballad ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)’—“wasted and wounded, it ain’t what the moon did. I got what I paid for now,”—but one of the most impressive things about the song is that Waits tosses equally brilliant lines with regularity for its almost seven meandering minutes of runtime.
Knowing where to approach Tom Waits’ catalogue for the first time is an impossible challenge. His songs can seem inaccessible to the unsuspecting, and without proper preparation, you would be forgiven for coming away from a track like ‘The Earth Died Screaming’, wondering why anyone would want to listen to a song like that in the first place.
But just as much as Waits’ trademark wolf-man voice, skeleton army band, junkyard soundscape, and nightmare-alley imagery may put off a less-than-ready listener, the issue of quantity is a much harder obstacle to overcome than quality.
As his band vamped into a teasing, creeping, horror-fuelled version of ‘God’s Away on Business’ during the 2008 Glitter & Doom tour, Waits looked around, listened to the music and then joked, “Which one is it!? Christ! It could be…700 of them! But they’re all good!”
And he’s right. Tom Waits—unbelievably for a career that has lasted over 50 years—hasn’t released a bad song yet. His career can be chopped into a few distinct parts, each with its defining songs; in his early years, he was a singer/songwriter with as tender sensibilities as the best of them, as evidenced in songs like ‘I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You’ and ‘Martha’. He then morphed into his most famous character, the down-on-his-luck everyman ‘Jazzbo’: a smooth-talking, rough-moving lounge lizard who sang songs like ‘The Piano Has Been Drinking’ and ‘Eggs and Sausage (In a Cadillac with Susan Michelson)’, and said things like, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy”.
His biggest reinvention came in the early 1980s, when, thanks to the help of his wife and long-time creative partner Kathleen Brennan, he became the carnival-harking, howling junk-yard pyromaniac and alchemist that he was always born to be. And the list of definitive songs from this era is as long as the list of songs from this era.
But when it comes to taking his career as a whole, some songs and performances stand out more than others. Some lyrics define all his characters at once, as well as his themes, schemes and dreams. A line like “Don’t you know there ain’t no Devil, there’s just God when he’s drunk” is quintessential Waits, and it gets right to the heart of so much of what makes his art great. Other lyrics, such as the already mentioned “God’s away on business”, “I’d tell you all my secrets, but I lie about my past”, and “Come down off the cross, we could use the wood”, are also seminal examples.
But in the end, perhaps ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)’ from the 1976 album Small Change most succinctly defines this undefinable artist. A tender, aching, and yearning ballad built on sumptuous orchestral strings and Waits’ walking piano countermelody, the song hears a scratch in the singer’s voice that catches your own if you try to sing along. The story within the song is a lament on hardship, on losing your place in the world and yourself inside the bottle, and on living a life alone in the wilderness that comes from such a perilous existence.
It’s an everyman anthem full of howling, broken wisdom, and it’s an instruction manual on how to steer clear from such a life of suffering. But, conversely, it’s also about freedom and chasing down a dream. Just as looking at Tom Waits is like looking in a carnival house of mirrors, where everything is not as it seems, and everything is constantly shifting, disorienting and wrong-footing you, this song is equally hard to pin under just one theme and idea. “That’s a song that is about a lot of things,” Waits told NPR in 2007, “but mostly I think the idea that a Matilda is a backpack, so it’s about going on the loose, being on the road, chasing your dream.”
More recently, he expanded on this idea. Although rumours persist that Waits is currently working on music again, he hasn’t released a new album since 2011. However, earlier this year, he appeared in the Italian documentary series Il Fattore Umano.
During the season finale, Ultima Fermata, which explored the devastating problems of homelessness in the American South, Waits introduced one of his songs by saying that “in Australia, a Matilda is a knapsack or backpack, and when you’re on the road and when you’re on the run, when you’re out on the loose, and you’re walking with a backpack, they say you’re ‘waltzing Matilda’. You’re moving with all your belongings on your back”. He then delivered the most iconic version of the song which defines his whole career, ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues’.
