Tom Waits

Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards

Anti-

originally published November 22, 2006

I first heard Tom Waits on a family vacation in the Smoky Mountains when, having exhausted all the other music in the car, my dad popped in his cassette of Rain Dogs. I had no idea what to make of the demented boneyard orchestra that issued from the Crown Victoria’s speakers, or of the obviously disturbed man who sang over it in his razor-throated bark. What I did know was that I’d rather listen to more Jimmy Buffett than that insanity.

Even as, over the next few years, Rain Dogs became one of my favorite albums, my initial assessment of Waits remained a central part of my admiration for his work: this isn’t what music is supposed to sound like. Rain Dogs was probably my first encounter with music so self-consciously strange, and that jolt of the new and unfamiliar, though not entirely pleasurable at first, is a major facet of the second phase of Waits’ career, a phase that has lasted more than 20 years now.

The danger, though, is that after 20 years, what was once shocking is now comfortable. “Waitsian” is now an adjective whose meaning is immediately graspable by nearly any music fan: it means junkyard percussion, demonic bellowing, Marc Ribot’s fractured Cuban guitar lines, saloon piano, musical saws and other unusual instruments, and vivid images of broken things and broken people. (“Waitsian” even extends to his image. Take a look at just about any magazine feature on Waits - you’re guaranteed to see him in some sort of dilapidated setting, probably surrounded by old musical instruments, maybe yelling into a megaphone.) Waits has updated the formula - on his last album, 2004’s Real Gone, he dropped the piano and added human beatboxing - but it is a formula, and Waits has worked it successfully since 1983. His gifts as a songwriter, performer and raconteur remain undiminished, but at this point you pretty much know what you’re going to get from a Tom Waits album. That’s hardly a bad thing, but it’s worth pondering.

And so Waits’ new rarities collection, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, fits the formula to a T. Its title even makes it explicit - each of its three discs covers one of the three main Tom Waits song styles: rockers (crank up the trashcan drums and Ribot guitars), late-night ballads (lots of piano and upright bass) and the weirdoes (time to break out the saw). The 54 songs (and two hidden bonus stories) in the collection are culled from soundtracks and compilations and who knows what else, though 30 of them are apparently new recordings (the accompanying 94-page booklet wasn’t included with the review copy, which is a shame, since scholarship is one of the main joys of an odds-and-ends collection like Orphans). There are covers of The Ramones (“The Return of Jackie and Judy,” returning the favor of “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”) and Daniel Johnston (“King Kong,” which sounds like a whiskey-drinking kid breathlessly recounting the entire plot of the film), more experiments with beatboxing, a political song (“Road to Peace”) even less subtle than Real Gone’s “The Day After Tomorrow,” and a cover of “Heigh Ho” from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves that strips the song of all its recognizable elements until it sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of the dwarves’ diamond mine.

Sprinkled throughout are songs that rank with his best: the handclapping gospel “Lord I’ve Been Changed,” the gunslinging acoustic blues “Books of Moses,” a cover of Sparklehorse’s “Dog Door” with a menacing groove that legitimately sounds like nothing else Tom Waits has ever done, and two great songs from the Dead Man Walking soundtrack. You could easily pick a handful of songs from each disc and create an album that could stand up next to Mule Variations, and the ones left over aren’t too bad either. For a Waits fan, Orphans is essential.

But as a listening experience, Orphans can be too much of a good thing; the tracks on the themed discs tend to run together into one big Waitsian goulash. A collection like this is perhaps better served small-plates style - load it all up on your iPod, hit shuffle, and let Waits jolt you with the strange again, song after song.