| Chris Ryba-Tures |
Big Time plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, November 14th, through Sunday, November 16th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Y’all. After, like, 25 years of waiting, hoping, dreaming, I finally get to see Tom Waits in concert! Some of you have probably been waiting even longer. Don’t worry, you can come too. Get your ticket to see the mysterious junkyard troubadour, the skid-row Cyrano, the doomfully dour beatnik saint of drunks, losers, carnies, and tramps do his wildest and weirdest under the bright lights. Just days from now, the psycho-bluesman with the rasp and the rattle, the man himself, will croon and spit and spray his mad poetry out into the dark of the Trylon Cinema, his maw underlit by a caged construction bulb. A storm of cheap confetti is brewing on the horizon. Horns will honk, guitars will squonk, nightmares will mambo ‘til they’re sore.
It’s gonna be wild.
I know, I know. How is this possible? It shouldn’t be. Dude doesn’t tour. Dude doesn’t even really play shows, like, at all anymore. Waits’ most recent live outing of note, The Glitter and Doom Tour, was in 2008—17 years ago, man. Last time he was in Minnesota was, get this, for the Get Behind the Mule Tour on August 29, 1999, at the State Theater in Minneapolis. Last album was 2009’s pretty terrific Bad as Me, but I can only imagine it’s nowhere near as bad (in the good way) as watching the man responsible for all that beautiful noise just mere rows away, threatening to take a bite out of the mic like a granny smith with such conviction that we think, “Holy smokes, he just might.”
I’m ready. I’ve been ready, even if I’m not listening to him in my mild years as regularly as I did during my wild ones. These days, a Waits binge usually piggybacks on a rewatch of The Wire (IYKYK). Sometimes I’ll go real hard on the psycho blues of Heart Attack and Vine (1980) for a month or so, maybe shed a tear to “Rosie.” But in these revivals, I’ll most consistently return to his raw-boned, apocalyptic albums that hooked me back in high school: Mule Variations (1999), Bone Machine (1992), and Beautiful Maladies: The Island Years (1998).
It seems the Tom Waits we first met is the Tom Waits we return to, the one we love the most. I have the feeling many of us have someone to thank for our introductions to Tom Waits. I have Mr. Powers, my high school English teacher, to thank for mine. Mr. Powers was the English teacher I needed at my tight-assed Catholic high school. He wasn’t the most popular (Mr. Main). He wasn’t the most fun (Mrs. Fabel). He wasn’t a young hipster doofus (Mr. Taschney). But, much like Tom Waits, to those who “got” him, Mr. Powers was all of those things and more. He was a teacher who twisted the basic curriculum just enough to make everything more interesting. He was the teacher who could drop exciting books into your 15-year-old hands that changed your whole literary trajectory, e.g., Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior, Neil Gaiman’s Death: The High Cost of Living, and Richard Wright’s Native Son.
Everything he shared with us felt substantive, real, and just alien enough to drum up real excitement, no matter how tired we were after lunch. The details of his personal life were scant but intriguing. He lived, actually LIVED, in a rough part of town, was divorced, lived hard for a while, and frequently visited some place called The Electric Fetus. It wasn’t uncommon to walk into his class to find photocopies of a CD booklet from his most recent purchase out on our desks and a CD queued up to play from front to back while we read along with the lyrics. I’m sure this bored the shit out of some of the students, but not me. I was in heaven getting to spend an entire period with The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash; The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and, most profoundly, Tom Waits’s Beautiful Maladies: The Island Years.
Bent over a bizarre poetry about German dwarfs, sailors on shore leave in Singapore, and big black mariahs, I fell under the spell of Tom Waits. He was this otherworldly force, this conjuror capable of spinning wild images out of a grimy miasma with barks, growls, howls, croons, stories, and one helluva falsetto. His band seemed to make music with instruments that were not proper instruments, and abuse proper instruments until they made improper sounds. From bubbling horns and the taxi dispatcher vocals of “Hang on St. Christopher” to the graveyard marimba and ghoulish chorus of “The Earth Died Screaming” to the lilting final lines of “Time,” each was a temptation I couldn’t resist. After school, I hopped over to Best Buy and nabbed a copy of Beautiful Maladies for myself, plus a copy of his brand new album, Mule Variations.
For much of my senior year, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, and PJ Harvey were my holy trinity. You’d think I would have jumped at the chance to get tickets to see Waits at the State Theater that same year. I didn’t. I had something going on. Some dumb high school shit. I actually remember saying, “I’ll catch him next time.” Teenagers are fucking idiots.
There was no next time.
Not ‘til now.
Over the following decades, I watched for tour announcements and collected his seventeen studio albums, three live albums, a handful of compilations and soundtracks, and his 3-disc set Bawlers, Brawlers, and Bastards one by one. I have to admit it’s been nice to see him in the movies at least, with his hits (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), his misses (The Dead Don’t Die), and his maybe-I’ll-get-around-to-its (Licorice Pizza). It makes sense for him to be onscreen as much as behind a mic. Waits has been an actor longer than he’s been a crooner. His first movie appearance in Sylvester Stallone’s Paradise Alley may have come five years after the release of his first album, Closing Time (1973), but he’s been in over a dozen movies since his most recent album dropped. And if you’ve seen him in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Down by Law, Short Cuts, and even Mystery Men, you don’t need me to tell you, the dude is a natural.
Yowler, actor, poet, singer, performance artist, storyteller—even casual fans will agree that the lines defining Tom Waits are blurry. He’s always been a persona-forward artist. Nearly every one of his interviews on late-night shows and in music rags is a slippery performance art piece; a cooly detached thumb-in-the-eye to the media machine, laced with insanely clever turns of phrase (“I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy”) and bizarre, but poetically plausible, anecdotes (“My mother was a tree and his father was an exhaust manifold”).
Which brings me to this Tom Waits show that I, that we, get to finally see.
This show does come with caveats as contradictory and elusive as the man himself. It’s not exactly a concert tour that’s coming to Minneapolis, though it is a tour of sorts. And while it is a concert, it’s also kinda an off-off-off-broadway theater thing and a flip through post-modern cable access television. And, while Waits will be performing live, we’re not exactly going to be in the same room with him. He’s actually going to be performing from another time (1988) and places (Los Angeles and San Francisco).
But, it IS a tour. It IS live. And it IS Tom Waits. And that’s a reason to fucking celebrate. What’s coming to Minneapolis is a super-rare 35mm print of Tom Waits’s 1988 theater/concert film “Big Time,” all the way from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
The only 35mm print in existence.
Three nights only.
Run, don’t walk, to get your ticket now.
It may be your only chance.
Don’t be like teenage Chris. Don’t count on a “next time.”
For those of us who came of age during Waits’s Island Years, this show sounds like it’s RIGHT on the money. From what I hear, it draws heavily from the first three albums of wall-to-wall clangers and bangers—Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Frank’s Wild Years—from Waits’s post-post-beatnik phase and post-psycho blues eras. It boasts it will be more than a concert, featuring strange props, costumes, and sets, all dedicated to Waits’s alter ego Frank O’Brien. And in case you haven’t met Frank yet, this is a great chance to get acquainted:
Frank settled down in the Valley
And he hung his wild years
On a nail that he drove through
His wife’s forehead
He sold used office furniture
Out there on San Fernando Road
And assumed a $30,000 loan
On a little two-bedroom place
His wife was a spent piece of used jet trash
Made good bloody marys
Kept her mouth shut most of the time
Had a little Chihuahua named Carlos
That had some kind of skin disease
And was totally blind
Frank first came onto the scene in 1983 on a spoken-word track on Swordfishtrombones. Two albums later, he’d become the conceptual heart of the album Frank’s Wild Years, a tale of failed dreams and the small town boy chasing them to, you guessed it, the Big Time. Seeing Tom Waits in concert as Frank, at the height of his Island Years reinvention, will no doubt be unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. But even so, with all the characters he’s created and all the characters he’s been to that point, what could we possibly expect?
I expect that through Frank, with his pencil-thin moustache flapping like an emaciated bat over his sleazy Southern California smile, we’ll be getting a very specific, hard-to-pin-down flavor of Tom Waits for most of the show, if not all of it.
I expect a little extra madness shot through with disarming moments of tenderness.
I expect a little extra silliness from everyone on stage.
I expect a little extra camp and creativity and chaos.
I expect anything other than the album versions. I expect the songs I know to be unhinged and unwound, reinterrupted and renovated.
Above all, I expect my expectations to be turned inside out and used to wipe down the chassis of an old pickup truck.
This time, I’m not going to wait ‘til next time. Neither should you. There’s a real good chance there won’t be one.
Step right up, friends, to the Big Time.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon