Tom Waits night at the Rio has come and gone. The Wednesday morning before the show Blackbox got an excited phone call from his mother about the Planks' newspaper appearance and he had to raise his eyebrows and scratch his chin, then (as those are both inaudible) profess his bafflement verbally. It seems that though there were several higher-profile and bigger-drawing acts on the bill that night, none of them had as sufficiently Tom Waits-ian photos in their
press kit, as with this
proven winner Robin Hunt
took of us at the Steamer Tea party back in '09.
We knew the show had good buzz on Facebook, but you always know when you appear in the paper because someone's parent will catch it. We never had an inkling! Conventional media: it hasn't quite gone away entirely, yet!
We got in early on in the show to make our mark and then make way for broader strokes. Time and again over our musical voyage people have suggested we lift up Tom's substantial mantle and promenade around beneath its considerable shade. But in tone and intention we are already similar enough to Mr. Waits' work that engaging him leaves us essentially imitators parading around in bad Tom Waits drag -- since you can't out-Tom-Waits Tom Waits and we have so far to travel to escape his iconic renditions in order to hash out a truly novel presentation. You can't just strap on the Cookie Monster voice and expect it to work. (We have a bit about the Tom Waits voice: that it's the wet sound remaining of the bark of the enraged dog after hours of baying, after the bark is gone but the evil intent remains. In human terms it's simpler, vocal chords reduced to two sticks of beef jerky slapping crudely against each other.) It had been several years since we participated, in any form, at a Tom Waits night -- Blackbox and Pavel making Misery Is The River Of The World substantially different by backing up Katie Go-Go on lead vocals, the very opposite (impatients?) of Waits.
But here we had an opportunity to indulge our penchant for the impish and perverse: as with the surreally-presented works of Al Mader, the lyrics to the ominous monologue "
What's He Building" revealed a quite-conventional metered and stanza'd song structure lurking just beneath the surface, obfuscated beneath a smoky, noisy layer of free jazz. Here we could scratch that goofy Spike Jones Western Swing itch and give up the arrangement of this song that it was originally written for before going down the path less traveled. Instead of making an arrangement by distressing and tormenting the original tune, we could overcome expectations and buck the trend by cleaning it up and sending it out in its Sunday best! Detourne the creepy by making it banal!
Tom has spoken of his inspiration from the song mills of Tin Pan Alley; if not 100% achieving that evocation, we like to believe that here we at least managed to bring listeners for a foray down Aluminum Pot Lane. With, yes, a couple of obligatory nods to the standard version. For lack of an actual innocuous "thing he was building in there" (a cuckoo clock?) to produce at the end of the song, we contemplated performing with this
curious construction footage rolling behind us on-screen, but ultimately we went full-bore for the musical presentation on its own:
And with that we took our bows (well, Wyoming Johnny took his) and departed the stage before the sold-out crowd, exciting many and baffling a few (with a lucky handful achieving both states simultaneously.) So let us leave Mr. Waits behind (though you may be fortunate enough to catch us revisiting this arrangement!) and we'll just note that we're currently on-track to next be performing in public
back at Trout Lake (sorry, John Hendry Park) starting at 6:30 pm on August 7th. But you'll hear more about that as it approaches. Cheers, and vive la différence!
