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    Innocent When You Dream: Narrative in Tom Waits' Songs - the middle years
    Innocent When You Dream: Narrative in Tom Waits' Songs - the middle years
    Innocent When You Dream: Narrative in Tom Waits' Songs - the middle years
    Ebook266 pages4 hours

    Innocent When You Dream: Narrative in Tom Waits' Songs - the middle years

    By Barry Pomeroy

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    About this ebook

    This second volume of my Narrative in Tom Waits’ Songs series follows the shifts in his music as Reagan’s eighties tumbled into the nineties. The narrative voice shifts with his music as the stories drift outside the personal to examine the world around him just as much as it does his reactions to it.
    Tom Waits’ middle period is much more experimental than his early work. The piano-playing hard-drinking and smoking Waits of The Heart of Saturday Night and Nighthawks at the Diner settled down into the much stranger magician and carnival roustabout of the eighties. Drawing upon three-penny opera, vaudeville, classic blues and industrial music, Waits began to experiment with non-traditional instruments, bagpipes, marimba, pump organs, and odd percussive “instruments” such as brake drums, a damaged Chamberlin, and a Stroh violin.
    His lyrics shifted with his music, and the characters of his ballads from Closing Time were less recognizable as he shifted Swordfishtrombones to Island Records in 1983. Then his music became more experimental than the songs of his earlier albums. Rain Dogs continued that experimentation two years later, and he began to tell the stories of people trapped on the outside of society. In another two years, he followed the story of Frank, a kind of alter ego if Waits had lived a different life, as if Frank from “Frank’s Wild Years” hadn’t doused the house in kerosene and driven away. It was about this time that Asylum released some older versions of some of the early work, capitalizing on Waits’ growing popularity and taking advantage of their contract with him. This proved to be a kind of unconscious elegy to Waits’ early work as he went even further afield, and showed the shift to the experimentation in Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs and how that became extended into Bone Machine.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBarry Pomeroy
    Release dateNov 10, 2018
    ISBN9781987922646
    Innocent When You Dream: Narrative in Tom Waits' Songs - the middle years
    Author

    Barry Pomeroy

    Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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      Book preview

      Innocent When You Dream - Barry Pomeroy

      Innocent When You Dream

      Narrative in Tom Waits’ Songs

      the middle years

      by

      Barry Pomeroy

      © 2018 by Barry Pomeroy

      All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author, although people generally do what they please.

      For more information about my books, go to barrypomeroy.com

      ISBN 13: 978-1987922646

      ISBN 10: 1987922646

      This second volume of my Narrative in Tom Waits’ Songs series follows the shifts in his music as Reagan’s eighties tumbled into the nineties. The narrative voice shifts with his music as the stories drift outside the personal to examine the world around him just as much as it does his reactions to it.

      Tom Waits’ middle period is much more experimental than his early work. The piano-playing hard-drinking and smoking Waits of The Heart of Saturday Night and Nighthawks at the Diner settled down into the much stranger magician and carnival roustabout of the eighties. Drawing upon three-penny opera, vaudeville, classic blues and industrial music, Waits began to experiment with non-traditional instruments, bagpipes, marimba, pump organs, and odd percussive instruments such as brake drums, a damaged Chamberlin, and a Stroh violin.

      His lyrics shifted with his music, and the characters of his ballads from Closing Time were less recognizable as he shifted Swordfishtrombones to Island Records in 1983. Then his music became more experimental than the songs of his earlier albums. Rain Dogs continued that experimentation two years later, and he began to tell the stories of people trapped on the outside of society. In another two years, he followed the story of Frank, a kind of alter ego if Waits had lived a different life, as if Frank from Frank’s Wild Years hadn’t doused the house in kerosene and driven away. It was about this time that Asylum released some older versions of some of the early work, capitalizing on Waits’ growing popularity and taking advantage of their contract with him. This proved to be a kind of unconscious elegy to Waits’ early work as he went even further afield, and showed the shift to the experimentation in Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs and how that became extended into Bone Machine.

      And it's such a sad old feeling

      All of the fields are soft and green

      And it's memories that I'm stealing

      But you're innocent when you dream

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      Swordfishtrombones

      Rain Dogs

      Franks Wild Years

      The Early Years Vol. 1

      The Early Years Vol. 2

      Introduction

      As I explained in the first volume of this series, I first encountered Tom Waits’ music listening to late night radio in the 70s. As a child growing up in a house without music of any type, I came to my appreciation of Waits later than most. My foster parents had a piano I wasn’t allowed to touch because I would damage it, so it hulked in the corner of the living room growing year by year more out of tune, and only very occasionally people they trusted more would try to coax a tune from the forbidding box. I recall a man playing a guitar in the kitchen, and someone rattling spoons at the table, but other than those rare moments, for my knowledge of harmony I had to rely on the arbitrary and repetitive calls of crickets and birds.

      My early experience with radio was equally limited. My foster parents had one of the early solid state radios that ran on several D-cell batteries. Declaiming waste with every breath, they only used it to access the news and weather. On the local station the reports were divided by a segment on sports which they endured and ignored; we knew as children that the radio would be turned on at dinner time, and we would listen to the local station outline crime and politics until that segment of the news was overtaken by sports goals and games.

      Once my foster parents heard the weather report, their first inclination was to switch the radio off in order to save batteries. As children, because our only access to music was those rare moments after the weather report, we often fought the decision. My foster father would say, just as we showed interest at the opening bars of a popular song, Turn that noise off, and we would sigh and complain that we never heard the rest of the song. The car radio was equally inert and silent, likely at least as much from a fear of distraction as a parsimonious concern about the use of extra gasoline for frivolity, so we grew up almost entirely without music. For us, the radio was an occasional glimpse into a world beyond the countryside, although that glimpse was rare enough that if we believed the outside world didn’t exist, few would have been surprised.

      Once I was older I bought a cheap solid-state radio of my own, tethered to the wall by an AC electrical cord that meant I wasn’t wasting batteries, and drank my fill of fuzzy stations from far away and commercial radio closer at home. I didn’t have the money to buy the music I was starting to become interested in so I kept the cassette deck always queued to record. I listened carefully to the opening bars of a song to see if it was worth the flying leap for the deck, and two of my fingers were always poised for the record and play buttons.

      I recorded part of a novel the same way from a radio show which read popular stories for their listeners. In subsequent years I listened to the excerpt many times on my strange mixed tape, and because of that I can still quote from it. Many years later I was reading for my PhD and had the uncanny feeling that I knew the novel although I was certain I had never read it before. Once Ramsay was introduced as a character, I recognized where I had met him before. The rather unspectacular novel had a few poetic passages and my recorder happened to capture one of them.

      It occurs to me, telling this story now, to do a quick internet search based on my memory of the quote. In less than ten seconds I found the name of the novel and the quote’s context, although many years ago this was not an option:

      "I have not forgotten your crazy saint. I think you are a fool to fret that she was knocked on the head because of an act of yours. Perhaps that was what she was for, Ramsay. She saved you on the battlefield, you say. But did she not also save you when she took the blow that was meant for you?

      "I do not suggest that you should fail in your duty toward her; if she has no friend but you, care for her by all means. But stop trying to be God, making it up to her that you are sane and she is mad. Turn your mind to the real problem; who is she? Oh, I don’t mean her police identification or what her name was before she was married. I mean, who is she in your personal world? What figure is she in your personal mythology? If she appeared to save you on the battlefield, as you say, it has just as much to do with you as it has with her—much more probably. Lots of men have visions of their mothers in time of danger. Why not you? Why was it this woman?

      "Who is she? That is what you must discover, Ramsay, and you must find your answer in psychological truth, not in objective truth. You will not find out quickly, I am sure. (Robertson Davies - Fifth Business, 165)

      This method of capturing audio meant that my music collection was both eclectic and truncated. I often missed the opening bars of a song, and if the DJs were overly keen to set up their next tune, I would lose that as well when I cut the banter from the recording. Perhaps because much of what I recorded was butchered in this fashion, I often had no idea who was responsible for what I heard. Such information was of low priority, for I was not able to buy their music anyway, so, like a peasant in a medieval town agape before a passing minstrel, I would listen without troubling myself about its origin. Because of this, I often did not hear the entire song for many years.

      A further restriction on the music which influenced me was the availability of radio stations. There were many top-forty stations, and sometimes I would listen to the top one-hundred countdown, and my receiver could also pick up some talk radio drifting across the American border. Other than those more commercial alternatives, I had two real options. I could listen to the esoteric material sent out by the campus radio, but it was over thirty kilometres away and had such a poor signal that even when I ran a wire up the wall for an antenna it was filled with static. Usually it was only clear enough for good listening late at night, and even then, if a storm was in the offing, the signal would quickly degrade.

      The other option was Canada’s broadcasting corporation, or CBC. The mandate of the national radio meant stations were located in more remote areas, and played some Canadian content and local material, although that varied considerably late at night when older people were asleep and few younger listeners would complain. As well, the station carried a show called Brave New Waves, which started in 1984 and was meant to explore the changes happening in music around the country and internationally.

      Late at night CBC radio would let their hair down and play music like I’d never heard. I recorded famous classical orchestral movements alongside instrumental pieces that sounded like noise combined with instruments and dripping water. Perhaps this habit of collecting esoteric material meant that I was more open to Tom Waits when I first heard him, so my penury and the lack of music in my childhood might have been a blessing.

      On the night that my radio was invaded by Tom Waits’ spoken word piece Frank’s Wild Years I missed the beginning of the song / story. As well, I hadn’t heard the introduction which would tell me who was responsible for the song, even if the broadcasters had bothered. Therefore, I didn’t know I had just met Tom Waits, but the song stayed with me, and was added to the archive I was compiling on cheap blank cassettes.

      Years later, when I volunteered at the campus radio station at university, my friends and I would while away our time in the record library by listening to albums on the turntable kept there for the purpose. The gold mine on the shelves, old albums and recent EPs, were a source of evocative cover art and artist names we didn’t know and hadn’t before heard.

      I discovered Van Morrison, Leadbelly, Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, and many others by pulling a record off the shelf and looking at the cover art, the lineup of instruments, and the date of its production before placing it on the record player. That’s how I found Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones. Later, by the time I discovered Rain Dogs, I was hooked. When I heard those albums, and then his earlier work, I realized I’d been listening to Tom Waits for a while.

      I discovered an interview with him speaking about Rain Dogs and heard a subtext in his answers that opened a vista I didn’t expect to see. The obsequious interviewer was a California personality, glossy and slightly rattled by Waits’ answers, or non-answers to his questions. His discomfort pointed to the innovation the album represented and encouraged me, unschooled in music as I was, to realize that I was listening to someone who was not a representative of the pop music of the time.

      I heard years later in a documentary on Waits that Swordfishtrombones was the most experimental album to perhaps ever be released, and although I was musically naïve, I couldn’t understand how it didn’t represent the way music is thought of and produced. As each album came out I approached them with no expectations of similarity, and I wasn’t disappointed.

      In terms of Waits’ lyrics, since I am not a musician and know as much about music as a cat does astrophysics, I recognized the stories that Waits told. I had met the people he spoke of, heard their cracked voices, learned about their broken lives, and gave them a space in my life that otherwise I might not have allowed.

      My last project using Tom Waits’ songs as an inspiration was Going to Ground, a novel where I imagined him—or more correctly a character based on his songs—traveling across the Canadian landscape in search of a home. He has inherited his father’s 71 Impala rag top, which had been bought when Tom was born. He works as a grafter, splicing unlikely combinations of fruit twigs onto orchard trees but staying unattached himself. The novel opens during a dry season in the orchards, and the trees he’d nursed to health have turned to witches brooms, gone wild on slopes where there had been apples and pears. Once he hears that his mother left a trunk for him before she died, he sets out on one last trip. The novel tells the story of a drifter yearning to come in from the cold, someone who left home too early and fear it’s too late to return.

      This latest Tom Waits-inspired project is more directly based on his songs. I am writing a short story about each of his songs in the order that they were produced. My stories are not meant to reiterate the song, or even expand on it. Rather I am trying to capture a parallel story, one glimpsed in the peripheral vision, just out of sight of the song’s narrative. These volumes use the songs to riff on a larger story I see as struggling to free itself from the shorter and possibly more limited form. This project is meant to push the envelope wider, strain the meaning of a few lines, and stretch the place the song occupies so that the abandoned faces on the street can find a mirror, and those tunes stretched on the rack of Tom Waits’ talent uncover a hidden America.

      This second volume of my Narrative in Tom Waits’ Songs series follows the shifts in his music as Reagan’s eighties tumbled into the nineties. The narrative voice shifts with his music as the stories drift outside the personal to examine the world around him just as much as it does his reactions to it.

      Tom Waits’ middle period is much more experimental than his early work. The piano-playing hard-drinking and smoking Waits of The Heart of Saturday Night and Nighthawks at the Diner settled down into the much stranger magician and carnival roustabout of the eighties. Drawing upon three-penny opera, vaudeville, classic blues and industrial music, Waits began to experiment with non-traditional instruments, bagpipes, marimba, pump organs, and odd percussive instruments such as brake drums, a damaged Chamberlin, and a Stroh violin.

      His lyrics shifted with his music, and the characters of his ballads from Closing Time were less recognizable as he shifted Swordfishtrombones to Island Records in 1983. Then his music became more experimental than the songs of his earlier albums. Rain Dogs continued that experimentation two years later, and he began to tell the stories of people trapped on the outside of society. In another two years, he followed the story of Frank, a kind of alter ego if Waits had lived a different life, as if Frank from his Frank’s Wild Years hadn’t doused the house in kerosene and driven away. It was about this time that Asylum released some older versions of some of the early work, capitalizing on Waits’ growing popularity and taking advantage of their contract with him. This proved to be a kind of unconscious elegy to Waits’ early work as he went even further afield, and showed the shift to the experimentation in Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs and how that became extended into Bone Machine.

      Swordfishtrombones

      Underground

      The less money he had the closer he was to the ground. When he was rolling, when his wad would choke a horse, he could get a room on the top floor, and call for room service any time of the day or night. After his money ran low, he was downgraded to three-floor walk-ups, his plastic grocery bags rattling on the wooden banisters like bags of bones. He’d worked restaurant and bar, but when he was down on his luck he was on the street hawking wares for a shop he’d never entered, and as hunger began to claw he took to pushing a mop between the tables and chairs in any one of a dozen drinking establishments.

      He’d heard some of the new hobos, the kids hopping trains and digging through dumpsters, liked to sleep on roofs, their middle-class background betraying itself when they shinnied a conduit carrying cables in order to keep as safe as possible on the street. They were firecracker smart, but when it came to the half-moons of dirt beneath their nails they made it look as though they’d been gardening rather than grubbing it rough in alleys and underneath bridges.

      He wasn’t exactly athletic, but he’d eyed more than one roof like a kid looks at the moon, too far away to be possible, and with the knowledge that the arrival might prove to be different than imagination would make it. The long apartment with multiple doors off the hallway was more his speed, and when the walk-up proved to be too hard on the wallet, he let himself out the window on the first floor rather than run the gauntlet of the sharp-eyed hallway to the street.

      When pushing suds back and forth fell apart, he would lever metal from where it had been clattered into an alley. Lifting scrap into a truck taught him exactly how high his arms could reach when a few dollars pushed them to greater heights.

      Under walkways and bridges on rainy nights were options he’d never thought much about from the one-floor house near the railway tracks where he’d been born. A person is a tracking sine wave on a machine, their lows and highs meaningful for the observer, at least those with a speciality in failure and drift, but when your unsteady boat was the one that was tossed by the waves it was hard to see the rise and fall with the same positive light.

      He’d heard that some people had the job of crawling through the tunnels which carried the murky street overflow to the sea, where along the way it mixed with a generous amount of sewage. Beneath the city there still existed the old pneumatic railway as well, a dozen truncated subway lines and half-finished catacombs, places where rats scrabbled in the dark and the imagination populated the eternal gloom with lurching deformities, limbs screwed on wrong and eyes peering from something that wasn’t quite a face.

      One Sunday he watched a man about his age, his ears bulbous with headphones and his back hunched over a metal detector. His senses heightened, he searched the ground for the debris from a former time, lost keys and change, an old pocket watch and locket with the sprig of hair still tightly wound and tied with a piece of thread. Tom let his eyes follow the man and when he thrust his arms forward, Tom was almost tempted to take part in his enjoyment.

      He saw his arms shake with the digging, as he lifted out clods of dirt and roots, pushing the spade out of sight and almost up to the handle. When he was down a yard or so, he began to pile dirt back into the hole, as if he’d uncovered the jewelry that he’d been looking for his whole life and now that he saw it, gleaming from the dank earth, he realized that the excitement had been in the chase more than the teeth in the neck.

      Tom had drifted through the Pennsylvania coal country a few times, but the black-faced miners from documentaries in school hadn’t prepared him for what he saw. Instead he saw cows reaching over the page-wire fencing with long tongues in the grass, and heard gunshots echoing in the sudden hills.

      Some of the wealthy people sought for the ground as well, as they holed up in cold-war bunkers or bought missile silos and outfitted them will pool tables and Jacuzzis, all the while grass waved far over their heads.

      Sometimes he felt as though he were cresting on a wave, as if he’d swum out too far while a riptide was flowing, and he’d been caught in the backsplash of the white water, his head just above the foam, tearing a breath of air from the salt. He felt as though he’d gone down more than three times, and his arms, tired from the thrashing, were jolted by the fear of death enough to break and surface and make for shore.

      He remembered the advice, that the swimmer should run parallel to the beach until the rip had exhausted itself, and then aim for the sand. He knew enough about the world that it could not be approached straight on, that he needed to take it at an angle, slant his way in toward the centre like he was riding a whirlpool, but he wondered if it would ever become easier.

      He began to think about the different lives he could have tried, what roles his shoulders could have slipped into like a gown, and what voices might erupt from his throat if he were to let down his guard and howl like a chained-up dog. He might have been a sailor, might have been a thief, could have spent his muscles giving his life to the boss of a nine-to-five. Each shirt was made in a different pattern, but all of them were made for people like him.

      Shore Leave

      He imagined a garish purple silk with a horse pattern beaten into the fibres. Wearing that shirt, he’d have to be somewhere off, somewhere in an Asian port town, Singapore, Medan, Shanghai, Hong Kong. He imagined this other self, hopelessly cut off, his hands bunched into fists in his trousers, his shoulders hunched against all the language and signs and culture he didn’t understand. With long hours of silence, against the scream of the sky and the traffic and the clatter, his Adam’s

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