Waits previewed the album, like he had several times before, by releasing one of the songs on a charity album. However, this was the only way that it was business as usual for Waits. As a singer, he had always been stubbornly silent about his politics, undoubtedly thinking that the political views of a singer/songwriter should only be of interest to himself. All of this had changed in the America of George W. Bush. Like so many others, he saw so many of the basic rights promised in the Constitution being trampled. So, while he did not seem to go out of his way to bring up politics, he would not back down in interviews when asked to discuss the 2004 Presidential Elections and what he thought of candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry. And most everyone was asking. “Well I’d say this is probably one of the most important elections that we’ve had in a long time,” Waits said on The Dave Fanning Show . “Not that they aren’t all important, but I join the voices of a lot of Americans and hope that he’s voted out of office… I can’t say that Kerry is a logical and the most effective alternative, I think maybe we’re kinda one party with two heads… I like what Bill Hicks said. I think when you are elected president in the United States they [should] take you into a small room. And they run a film clip of the Kennedy assassination from an angle no one has ever seen before. And then they turn to you and say: ‘ Are there any questions? ’”31
He took it even further in an interview with Barney Hoskyns for the British magazine Rock’s Back Pages, in which he stated, “This is an enormous global cartel. We’re going 90 miles an hour down a dead-end street. Bush has probably set us back about 75 years.”32 It was really quite astonishing, in interviews leading up to the release of Real Gone (and the elections) Waits discussed George W. Bush almost as much as he discussed his own music. In the Toronto Star he bemoaned the “you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us” idea that had sprouted in the Bush administration, the suggestion that if you were against Bush or against the Iraq War that you were anti-American. Waits charged that Bush wanted to go to war with Iraq from day one, comparing him to a doctor who smashed your foot and then tried to cast it.33 When a British newsman suggested that polls seemed to indicate that Bush would probably win, Waits reacted with horror, begging him not to say that.34
More importantly, he put his money where his mouth was. One of the cornerstones of the upcoming Real Gone was the song “Day After Tomorrow,” a touching protest of the Iraq war told from the point of view of a soldier writing home. Weeks before the new album was released, Waits contributed the tune to a charity album called Future Soundtrack for America. The collection also included songs by R.E.M., Blink-182, David Byrne, Bright Eyes, Death Cab for Cutie, The Flaming Lips, Fountains of Wayne, Jimmy Eats World, They Might Be Giants, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. All proceeds for the album went to MoveOn.org, a political group that was dedicated to the ouster of George W. Bush. Waits was also long-rumored to play a part in the Vote For Change Tour, a group of concerts played throughout the U.S. in the months leading up to the election, with all of the benefits going towards John Kerry’s election. Artists who did participate in the tour included Bruce Springsteen, R.E.M., John Fogerty, Pearl Jam, Bonnie Raitt, The Dixie Chicks, James Taylor, Neil Young, Bright Eyes, The Dave Matthews Band, John Mellencamp, and Death Cab for Cutie. The whispers that Waits would participate in the tour never came to be, though.
As had become his habit over the last few albums, Waits allowed the new work to be premiered on the Internet. All of the songs for Real Gone were released to the music-download site iTunes.com on September 24, almost two weeks before the album would be available in stores. This may have contributed to the fact that the album debuted at #28 on the Billboard albums chart on October 13, making it his highest charting record ever, beating Mule Variations debut and peak at #30.
Waits had called up many of his favorite collaborators to work on the album. Missing in action on Alice and Blood Money, guitarist Marc Ribot was shanghaied back into the studio. Other familiar faces included Larry Taylor and Les Claypool (who undoubtedly had more time on his hands with his band Primus on “indefinite hiatus” since 2001). The two handled all the duty on bass (Taylor played some guitar, too) replacing the conspicuously absent Greg Cohen, who was now awol from a third straight Waits disk after being a lynchpin of his group since Heartattack and Vine in 1980. At the time of the Real Gone recordings, Cohen was working with jazz innovator Ornette Coleman’s latest quartet.
On drums was Claypool’s former bandmate in Primus Brian “Brain” Mantia, who had left the band right before the breakup to join the current line-up of celebrated metal band Guns N’ Roses, helping lead singer Axl Rose record the legendarily slow-to-birth album Chinese Democracy. At this writing, that album is still essentially an urban legend; the perfectionist (and more than somewhat unstable) Rose has been threatening to release the album on-and-off since breaking up the classic lineup of his band in the mid-nineties, with no end in sight. Harry Cody, formerly of the band Shotgun Messiah, also contributed some guitar and banjo work to Real Gone .
After getting his feet wet with the Ramones cover, Waits’s son Casey, now nineteen years old, wanted to take the plunge and play percussion and work the turntables on the old man’s album. (This further proved Kathleen Brennan’s long-ago point that the boy should not be named Senator, although it does bring up the question of whether he should have been called Drummer.) Musically, Casey Xavier Waits has vastly different influences from his father — as is the way with parents and children everywhere. Casey would rather listen to Ol’ Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan or Rage Against the Machine than Mose Allison or Harry Partch. Still, it was Casey’s first chance to work on an album, and he went into the musical mix with a determination that his father referred to as “somewhere between euphoria and embarrassment.”35 However, as Waits pointed out, Casey had gotten what he most needed from the opportunity — the experience of working on a record — and more importantly, he got a paycheck for it.
His son’s presence also seemed to influence the musical direction of the album. Though Waits had been experimenting with it for a few years, Real Gone has much more of an urban, street vibe than any of his previous works. Waits experimented with vocal tricks of being “a human beatbox” and Casey worked the “wheels of steel” on a couple of tracks. Not to suggest that Tom Waits has recorded a rap album — that would be nearly impossible and totally impractical to pull off with any panache. However, much like his earlier experiments with Tin-Pan Alley jazz, funk, rock, bebop, and the blues, Waits used another musical style to spice up and inform his work, not necessarily to drive it. “Hip-hop is filled with the noise and the rebellion and the anger and the energy of today,” Waits told the San Diego Union Tribune. “Most people, because it’s young people’s music — unless you have kids — don’t stay in touch with what’s going on right now. There’s no reason to, you just listen to your old records, just like your mom and dad did. With kids you say, ‘Shut that thing off!’ Then you think, ‘Maybe I better listen to it.’”36
While he was listening to hip-hop, he was avoiding other sounds and types of music that had been his regulars. As had become something of a habit in his later albums, Waits decided to test himself by banishing one of his basic musical building blocks from the recording of Real Gone. In previous albums, the instruments that got the shaft were the saxophone (Swordfishtrombones) and the electric guitar (Alice and Blood Money) . For the new CD, Waits thought it would be interesting to do an entire album without using one of the earliest staples of his sound and his first instrument, the piano. Not that he banished the keyboards from the studio; in fact he says that just the opposite was true. “My theory is that if you don’t bring it, you’ll definitely need it,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “So I tell them to bring everything. Then I don’t use it. I brought a piano and never even sat down on it. It just didn’t seem to fit.”37 He was more forceful in his explanation to the BBC, saying all piano players eventually hit the point when they just want to drop the thing off a high
roof.38
Waits always searches for different places to record his music. Most of the work on the album was recorded in an abandoned schoolhouse. However, Waits acknowledged that a lot of the vocals were laid down in a much more private setting — his bathroom. He explained that the sound he was searching for just wasn’t coming at the studio. He had to find an alternate spot to get the acoustics perfect, and somehow it ended up being in the loo. Still, he acknowledged he wasn’t sure what exactly it was about the cramped space which made it so conducive to the sounds that he was stalking. “I don’t know. It was just kind of a mystical place.”39
Waits starts the album at the “Top of the Hill.” He shows his hand from the beginning: this is going to be a new variation on his sound. The song has Waits rapping over a jittery bass and guitar line with a jumble of sounds skittering around in the background; Casey’s turntable work, strangely flat percussion by Brain, and Waits’s own distracted vocal booms accenting the whole thing. Waits’s label suggested the song was reminiscent of seventies jug band Mungo Jerry (best known for the classic single “In the Summertime”). Musically, it is vaguely evocative of some tracks from Bone Machine, and yet at the same time it’s like nothing he’s done before. This ain’t your father’s Tom Waits.
The odd Waits take on R&B continues with “Hoist That Rag.” On this song, Ribot’s sproingy guitar licks and old school scatting percussion by Casey Waits and Brain make the song something of an oddity — a Tom Waits song which is so effortlessly funky that it could undoubtedly be covered by George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic fame. The third song on the album is in many ways the centerpiece of the collection. “Sins of the Father” is a lament on the state of the world that runs for an astonishingly long (at least for Waits) ten-and-a-half minutes. In some ways, it seems like a more traditional Waits lament, all pained vocals and deep simmering regret with just a vague hint of reggae. Yet the lyrics reflect the newly political Waits worldview, taking a cynical look at how governments can become fat and lazy and not recognize that they are putting their own survival ahead of their citizens and how the younger generations must pay for what has come before them. When asked by Jonathan Valania of Magnet if it was specifically about Bush, Waits replied, “I’m talking about my father, I’m talking about your father, I’m talking about his father. The sins of the father will be visited upon the son. Everybody knows that.”40
The song also included what was undoubtedly a tip of the hat to one of Waits’s esteemed peers. Canadian Leonard Cohen is another cult artist well known and respected for his songwriting talent. In fact, Cohen started his career as a novelist and poet — penning several books including Beautiful Losers, Parasites of Heaven, and Book of Mercy. In the sixties, Cohen became fascinated with folk music — writing such standards of the form as “Suzanne,” “Hallelujah,” and “Bird on a Wire.” As his career extended over the years, Cohen’s artistic scope continued to expand, creating such acclaimed albums as New Skin For the Old Ceremony (1973), Death of a Ladies’ Man (1977), I’m Your Man (1988), and The Future (1992).
The “Sins of the Father” line “Everybody knows that the game was rigged” seems to be a tribute to Cohen’s apocalyptic love song “Everybody Knows” from I’m Your Man. That song features the extremely similar line, “Everybody knows the fight was fixed: the poor stay poor, the rich get rich.” Months after Real Gone was released, the Observer asked Waits to list his twenty favorite albums, and I’m Your Man was there, ranked ninth. “Important songs, meditative, authoritative,” Waits wrote about Cohen’s album, “and Leonard is a poet, an extra large one.”41
The deceptively simply titled “Shake It” features the album’s most guttural vocal over a siren of a guitar line by Larry Taylor. It is one of the more experimental tunes on the album, a dissonant, clanging swirl of sound and motion — and a song that is more impressive as an exercise than it is an enjoyable listen. Critic Michael Toland suggests that Waits was channeling “Howlin’ Wolf as interpreted by an impressionist painter,”42 which explains the song’s odd mixture of allure and disorientation as well as anything. Put more simply, it is one of the experiments that Waits has always slipped onto recent albums to push the envelope of musicality and artistic scope (see also: “Filipino Box Spring Hog” from Mule Variations, “ Kommien-ezuspadt” from Alice, or “Such a Scream” from Bone Machine).
Musically more interesting is the gothic mystery of “Don’t Go Into the Barn.” It is a melding of several styles in one track. In the midst of a disturbing tale of rural death and mayhem, there is an offbeat interlude reminiscent of enduring basic training in the military. As he has often done before, Waits’s rant has an evangelical fervor of a man just barely avoiding damnation — a man who feels the hell hounds nipping at his heels. The lyrics are vaguely insane and the whole thing has the feel of a darkly surreal opiate-fever dream.
If he is screeching for salvation in that song, in “How’s It Gonna End?” Waits uses his sometimes underappreciated soft-spoken vocal style — he damn near croons in this quietly mournful dissection of a man’s almost eternal bad luck streak. The song has a subtle polka melody — the mixture of Harry Cody’s banjo, Waits’s guitar, and Larry Taylor’s bass sounds amazingly like an accordion. The subtle instrumentation and unadorned vocals show off Waits’s evocative lyrics and imagery in a way reminiscent of his early work. “How’s It Gonna End?” got additional exposure being widely released as a free download on the Internet through services like Amazon.com and AOL.
“Instructional dance songs are a rarity these days. When I was a kid, it seemed that every single that came out was an instructional dance song,” he told the Toronto Star, name checking such long ago dance crazes as “The Locomotion,” “The Jerk,” “The Peppermint Twist,” “The Grind,” and “The Mess Around.”43 Therefore, Waits stepped into the void and came out with the “Metropolitan Glide.” Of course, “Metropolitan Glide” is a Waits dance song — which means that you will never hear it at a club and it ends with Waits wheezing over the beats like he has tuberculosis. However there are some concessions to rhythm and blues; a rubbery bass line and the faux–James Brown screams of “Are you ready?” in the background. That screech is very similar to a dance floor sample from John Kongas’ seventies single “He’s Gonna Step on You Again,” which was long a hip-hop staple. It had been used on Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock’s eighties rap hit “It Takes Two,” Happy Mondays’ cover of the Kongas’s song (renamed “Step On ’91”), and at least two Janet Jackson songs, amongst many, many others. Oddly enough, this little dance number earned Waits yet another one of his strange Grammy nominations, for Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance, in 2005.
Not too surprising on an album so steeped in mortality and suffering, the most beautiful and traditionally structured song is an ode to a corpse. The mournful murder ballad “Dead and Lovely” asks the question “What’s more romantic than dying in the moonlight?” It tells the quietly affecting story of a girl who trusts the wrong man and pays for it with her life. Like “How’s It Gonna End?” before it, the song has the sepia glow of an old photograph. The song feels like it is from another time, particularly the jazzy noir guitar lines and the subtle percussion which sounds an awful lot like quiet snaps of the fingers.
“Circus” channels the word jazz that Waits has taken to heart, most successfully in “What’s He Building?” and “Frank’s Wild Years.” The music is just barely there, a music-box melody with nearly inaudible snares. The vocals have a tinny disembodied sound, like they were recorded over an intercom. “It was a song first, that I did with some hip-hop I looped from the radio,” Waits told The Globe and Mail . “But it felt too cheerful, too bouncy. I wanted it more pathetic and tawdry. So I spoke it, and got my son to play drums on it, and it worked out better.”44
There is more lovely desperation in “Trampled Rose.” The album preview on the website for his label Anti described it evocatively as “West Africa joined with Appalachia and a furtive tarantella.”45 That unlike
ly description actually captures the vibe of the song quite well, with Waits’s tortured and drawn-out vocals dripping with desperate longing. This middle section of the album contains more examples of Waits’s great skill as an old-timed balladeer. The next song “Green Grass” paints a vivid portrait with some of the most evocative lyrics on the album. Then he returns to the raw throbbing avant-blues of “Baby Gonna Leave Me,” the industrial thud of “Clang Boom Steam” and then the calliope-salvation of “Make It Rain.”
Then comes the hushed acoustic song which he previewed the album with on the charity CD, “Day After Tomorrow,” Waits’s quiet and heartfelt protest of the Iraq War. However, it was more than just Iraq that inspired him, he admitted to the Australian radio show The Deep End. “It’s a letter home. From a soldier … I’ve got kids that are draft age. And it’s a troubling time we are all living through. You know, it was written to try and be a song about the Civil War or Vietnam War. Just war, you know … a war song.”46 The narrative may not have been specifically about the Iraq War as he claimed; however the timing was not just a coincidence. Waits was very much concerned with Iraq. “All you really can do is put a human face on the war. These are my feelings. I just tried to imagine a soldier writing home from anywhere. This is your war. You have lost, both sides have lost,” Waits said on a radio interview with the BBC. “We’re killing off our children. They’re sending our children to war. They’re sending their children to war. It’s a mess, man. Anybody knows that.”47
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