Telephone Call from Istanbul—Tom Waits

#365Songs: June 23

Much has been written about Tom Waits over the decades. A great deal of it wrong, and most of it absurdly over-adulatory.

That said, he is indeed one of our greatest modern songwriters.

But I think it must be said that he is less troubadour or poet than he is a playwright or scriptwriter who acts in his own works.

There has always been a deeply self-conscious theatricality to his music, and the personas he takes on to bring his tales to life are as much a part of his art as are the songs themselves.

I think there are three stages of Tom Waits fandom.

In stage one, you fall for it all, and you are smitten by the beleagured hobo poet with the golden pen, broken piano, and shattered throat. You feel the pathos, the heartbreak, the seedy nobility. You see life from the bottom up, gather the characters in your arms, and raise endlessly hopeless toasts to the good guy winning in the end, even as you know he won’t. You parachute into the rickety noir stories with an elbow-patched jacket for a chute, and land either in a diner or a field, the first populated with crows, the latter with the sad sack still trying to scare them.

In stage two, the scales fall from your eyes, and you see the actor behind the act. You first feel cheated and duped, then eventually, scornful and derisive. The hobo poet is no more wise than the hobo clown is funny. Your suspicions feel increasingly founded as broke mythology collides with enriched truth. Waits released his debut album in 1973. In 1974, the Eagles covered his song “Ol’ 55” on their album On the Border, which sold 2 million copies. That broken old bum of a skid row songwriter likely put hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank. Less than two decades later, in 1992, Waits won $2.5 million from Fritos for ostensibly stealing his voice for an ad campaign. A voice, it must be noted, which owes a very great deal to Captain Beefheart—who did not similarly profit from Fritos.

In stage three, you make your peace, and find comfort in recognizing and acknowledging that the character, authenticity, and trajectory of the man behind the songs doesn’t really in the end matter—the songs stand alone, and so incredibly many of them are utter and complete masterpieces. Whether they are masterworks in a musical penned by a wizard behind the screen or the fully lived-in ragamuffin Han-Shain-isms of a modern-day zen lunatic doesn’t matter—the songs are the songs, and the writer is the writer, and the songs are brilliant, and thus too, it must be conceded, is the writer. In this stage, you realize that Tom Waits is less Bob Dylan than he is Tennessee Williams.

Perhaps the best and most appropriate modern example might actually be Billy Bob Thornton and Sling Blade. Karl Childers of Sling Blade isn’t Billy Bob anymore than Frank O’Brien of the Frank’s Wild Years is Tom. And that’s ok.

The Sling Blade analogy can help us with another aspect of the career of Tom Waits.

Just as a movie is often made or broken by its choice of cast, the music of Tom Waits depends in no small part on the eclectic brilliance of the musicians he “casts” to perform in his songs.

This especially becomes the case as Tom sheds the beatnik shtick and blossoms into the full measure of his genius with the masterfully madcap masterpiece that is his 80s trilogy, comprising Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Frank’s Wild Years.

While a range of musicians can be experienced across these three studio albums, I think the best way to hear the creators of the core sound is on the “live” album Big Time. These primary sonic architects include Greg Cohen on bass, Ralph Carney on horns and reeds, Willy Schwarz on accordion and organ, Michael Blair on drums and percussion, and Marc Ribot on guitar.

It is Marc Ribot that I want to spotlight here, for his work with Tom Waits truly achieves the level of genius. His playing is so evocative, so strange, so downtown, so angular, so inventive, it simply defines categorization, and is accordingly perfect for the strangely weathered universe Waits creates.

If you had to pick one song from Waits’ studio output to best reflect what Ribot contributed to the overall sound, the titular “Rain Dogs” is as good a choice as any. Ribot’s single-note percolations sharpen the careening list of the song’s pathos, and his note choice is blisteringly sophisticated in its decadent grace. Tonally, his guitar is clean to the point of being punctuated, and the notes manage to sound both plectrum’d and plucked with equal force.

But as noted above, there’s something about Big Time that feels especially magical, and the short solo break Ribot takes on “Telephone Call from Istanbul” is a masterclass in idiosyncratic angularity. In just 16 short bars, he manages to somehow connect everything from Django’s gypsy jazz and Richard Hell’s Blank Generation to Charlie Christian’s early bop and Hubert Sumlin’s surrealist Chicago blues. He plays with major and minor modalities, trips in and out of chromaticism, nods to old rockabilly and western swing, and rounds it all out with a flurry of Weillian melodicism. It’s absolutely brilliant.

Duke Ellington was famous for having composed his greatest works with his musicians already in mind, and one wonders the extent to which Waits may have done the same. Ribot first collaborated with Waits on 1985’s Rain Dogs, and subsequently returned for 4 songs on Frank’s Wild Years. I like to believe those songs—all standouts on the album (Hang on St. Christopher, Temptation, Way Down in the Hole, and Telephone Call from Istanbul)—were very much written with the intention of featuring Ribot’s singular sound.

Because, why wouldn’t you?

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