SOUNDTRACK: TOM WAITS-Blue Valentine (1978).
Waits begins to morph into his later stage persona with this album, although you wouldn’t know it from the opener, “Somewhere,” yes from West Side Story. It’s a pretty straightforward Louis Armstrong-style cover, and I wonder what people thought of it. “Red Shoes by the Drugstore” on the other hand foreshadows some of his crazier songs from later on–it’s kind of a like his beatniky work, but it’s a bit scarier and has less of a jazz feel. Of course, he hasn’t completed eschewed melody and songwriting with the wonderful “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis”–a slow piano ballad.
There’s also the amazing “Romeo is Bleeding” (the inspiration for the title of the movie). There’s some more wild bluesy songs like “$29.00.” In fact, Waits seems a bit looser overall (if that’s possible)–his voice is less clipped and beatniky, he’s more wild and perhaps even off beat
“Wrong Side of the Road” merges into later territory although he’s got enough scat style vocals to keep it sounding cool instead of crazy. “Whistling Past the Graveyard” is one of his most uptempo bluesy songs; it’s fun and a little crazy.
And yet for all of these forays into the unusual, he still stays firmly footed in what you expect from 1970s Waits: “A Sweet Little Bullet from a Pretty Blue Gun” and “Blue Valentines” are jazzy, smoky, lounge songs, keeping us on solid Waits ground. He hasn’t stepped far enough away from his original style to alienate listeners yet, but he’s definitely pushing the boundaries of what might be comfortable.
[READ: September 25, 2011] “Starve a Rat”
This story is a sad and lonesome tale (not unlike Torres’ other story that was recently published in the New Yorker–it’s like these two magazines are linked by some kind of fictional umbilicus).
In this one, a 19-year-old boy hooks up with an older man. The man asks the boy to wear a diaper on their first encounter. The boy doesn’t but rather, he tries to satisfy him in other ways. This pickup becomes something more when the man, who initially asked the boy to leave, relents and talks with him through the night. The boy finds himself being more honest with the man than with anyone else ever.
The leads to some flashbacks about the boy’s history. Back when he had a girlfriend, what his girlfriend’s parents were like (her mother knew that he was gay) and how much he loved the girl, even though he always knew she was just a beard.
The strange thing about this story is that I couldn’t decide when it was set. It has a kind of dark tone that makes me think it is a 1970s story, although there is talk of clinics, so maybe it’s the 80s? He mentions something about albums being not so out of date that they’d be making a statement–so that could be early 90s? (more…)
I Just Read About That... 