Swordfishtrombones is an underground carnival tent packed with gin
soaked sailors playing shotguns for musical instruments. Tom Waits is
center stage, on stilts with a megaphone, hollering out the dance steps,
and his wife and co-composer, Kathleen Brennan, is keeping them all in
tune.
This album is the advent of the falsetto howling Tom Waits. The mule
one with plows for feet. We'd grown to love the boozy bluesman Waits,
surrounded by his compatriots, the lowdown and the bitter. We'd made
friends with the oddballs, freaks, and disenfranchised, but on this
record, they actually come home with us.
Songs like the stomping, smog-caked, "Underground" were nowhere to be
found amidst the barlight ballads on Small Change or One From the Heart,
but here the song is Waits' toothless concierge, the opening track
inviting you "down, down, down" the rabbit hole. "16 Shells from a
Thirty-ought-six" is best served, as 33 1/3 writer David Smay says, as a
karaoke tune when you're home alone shouting along and pointing at
nothing in particular.
Swordfishtrombones is not Waits' best -- I'd reserve that for his next
album, Rain Dogs -- as I think the three instrumentals detract from his
most compelling artistic aspects: his voice and lyrics. But it is a
great first step in a new and more dynamic reshaping of his music,
vision, and persona.
Monday, June 20, 2011. Royal Oak Music Theater. Elvis Costello and the Imposters.
What I want from an Elvis Costello show: most of my favorite songs from his best albums (Model - Bedroom); great sound, especially on the vocals(1), keys(2), and drums(3); energy from the band; witty, engaging banter from between songs; and the man himself leading the show at center stage. This show hit every bit of these criteria save one, which probably wasn't EC's fault. Nieve could've been way up in the mix. He deserves better.
Stage right is a bird cage with beaded strings for bars, lit up to showcase the scantily clad women dancers. This doubles as space for the hot audience members to dance in after they are called up to the stage to spin the song wheel (more on that later). Just to the side of the cage is Steve Nieve and his massive keys setup. Drums to the left of him at center stage and elevated. Bassist next to drums, almost behind the spinning wheel. And the man himself front and center, playing guitar on all songs and master of ceremonies when the spinning wheel got some action.
Taking a page out of the Tom Waits stage setup, there were barstools and assorted kitsch on tables, with a 14" old TV tuned to static. The male audience members who got called up on stage sat in the barstools sipping martinis as though they, and vicariously all of us in the crowd, were invited down to Costello's basement bar for a personal performance. The entire back wall was covered in those color bars that used to appear when UHF stations went off the air at 2am and woke you up on the couch in a haze to realize you should've gone to bed hours ago.
From a Chicago show in May
Costello and company took the stage and broke immediately into "I Hope You're Happy Now", which I've seen him playing on a lot of youtube videos from events over the last five years, and with good reason. The Imposters rip it. They played another four songs in succession without stopping even for applause. This was the mission statement for the evening. We're good. Very good. And these songs are as much a part of us as our fingerprints, but we're still going to kill 'em just for you.
At this point it's becoming apparent that they're going to bring out all the goodies. The wheel is lined with many hits, like Chelsea, Watching the Detectives, Allison, and a few deeper cuts. Costello puts on his best master of ceremonies affect and welcomes us to the show, introducing the concept of the wheel with some self-deprecating humor which goes over well. He invites his first hottie on stage to spin the wheel, and then she moves over to the dancing cage for the rest of the song.
This process of finding willing participants, introducing them briefly, then playing every song like they'd just been practicing it the hour before, went on to the tune of a dozen more songs, sometimes breaking it up by playing whatever the hell they wanted for a few songs. My personal favorites were Chelsea and Lipstick Vogue, not only because they're high on my list of all time favorites, but they came down the sharpest and liveliest.
Two encores and 30+ songs, spanning just under 3 hours, later, EC and the Imposters retired for the night, earning every cent of the dollars I can only hope are lining their pockets this tour. The songs I remember them playing are below.
I'll start things off here by reviewing one of my favorite albums from Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska (1982).
Nebraska as an album distills down to a trio of essential elements: sin, guilt, and consequence. Or maybe that's just my 10+ years of Catholic indoctrination muckying up my interpretation. Most songs here are narratives about how we live with the "debts that no honest man can pay," a line that circles back through several songs.
There is an undercurrent of determinism in many of the stories where the central character seems bound to commit an act of sin, whether accidentally, like hitting a dog on the highway in "Reason to Believe," or because "there's just a meanness in this world" in the album opener, "Nebraska," or because of a hard fact, "Franky ain't no good" in "Highway Patrolman," or due to a confluence of circumstances, "The bank was holdin' my mortgage and they were gonna take my house away," as Johnny 99 pleads. Like so many of Springsteen's previous songs, the characters feel trapped in their condition and see only one course of action left available.
We've heard from people desperate to escape, to drive away and leave their town and not "get caught on the wrong side of that line" before. "Hungry Heart", "Born to Run", "Thunder Road", maybe an entire side of singles from Bruce's last three records. But Nebraska is a departure from Springsteen's previous work because the songs are about criminals, rather than desperate though well-intentioned working class people. This gives the album an even darker tone than Darkness or River where the characters merely make intimations of committing crimes, and even then the crimes are drug deals or shady business deals. On Nebraska, the desperate become the killers.
Yet Springsteen fills these character sketches with such rich, believable voices and details their desperate circumstances so convincingly that it's hard not to pull for their redemption, even when their transgressions are unforgivable. He sets the standard high with "Nebraska," a song that slowly unfolds the true chronicle of Charles Starkweather, who, with his teenage girlfriend, went on a killing spree in '58 at the height of Eisenhower-era America. The killings were the basis for the brilliant 1973 film, Badlands, with Warren Beatty in the lead role.
Like Capote's attempt to know killer Perry Smith in such profound detail in order to be able to write about him for In Cold Blood, Springsteen sounds like he's spent a lot of time with his characters. What's powerful is his ability to allow the details of these characters and their situations to create an experience universal to listeners.
Ultimately, his characters are archetypes, embodiments in their song context of a question of the human condition. The "mythology" that critics praise him for creating is really bringing to flesh and song some of the deepest questions we face in life, such as 'what is honor'? 'what is belief'? In interviews, when Springsteen is in storyteller mode, he explains how a song asks these questions, but he doesn't answer them. He's smart enough to know that he doesn't have the answers, and humble enough not to try.
When you strip away the huge E Street Band sound, as Springsteen does on Nebraska, you get songs as stark as the midwest landscape. Out there, with no big drums to drive the songs, no screaming guitar solos to pound your heel to, and no sax or keys for atmosphere, the songs are left out in the sun to either thrive as a creature that is ready to adapt (as few others can), or wilt and be thrown to the vultures. It's a dangerous experiment for a whole album, though we've heard songs sound like these on the previous record, The River, with the title track as a great example. Largely, Nebraska is a creature that survives not in spite of the harsh recording setup but because of it.
I like the intimacy of Nebraska, the stifling closeness of his voice, and the position in which he's placed himself, one that he presages on "Darkness on the Edge of Town," with "Tonight I'll be on that hill 'cause I can't stop / I'll be on that hill with everything I got." That's the songwriter, his guitar and harmonica, and a few other instruments, and this is his High Noon. Nebraska is probably as close as Bruce will come to aligning himself directly with Dylan and Young.
As a songwriter who believes that the first and last songs on each side are crucial components of an album, Nebraska's last track, "Reason to Believe," is important to the whole album. "Reason" gives us a narrative of five scenarios wherein, against all odds, a person has a reason to trust that good things will happen. The narrator comments on each of these scenes "strikes [him] kinda funny," but nobody here is laughing.
In the first scenario, a man kills a dog on the highway, stops his car, gets out, and pokes the dog with a stick. There's a sense of guilt in this one. I see a guy who wants so badly to undo what he did accidentally in a presumably unavoidable situation. He was doing what he does -- driving down the highway like he's done a million times. But sin here is unavoidable. I don't get a necessarily Christian original sin reading here, but a basic truth that sometimes in life you do things that harm someone or something. You don't mean to do it, but there it is. And no amount of wishing or believing is going to undue it. You have to live with it.
In the next verses, we're presented with people who believe that by trying hard enough, things will work out right. Springsteen's voice is earnest in the telling, yet incredulous in his phrasing. Despite the somber topic, the song is no dirge. Instead, the song is an uptempo, acoustic gospel melody absent of gospel's typical themes of redemption, resolution, or real comfort. People here may find a reason to believe, but why they do is as much a mystery to the narrator as it is to us as listeners. All the way back on the second track, Atlantic City, there's the grave, "maybe everything that dies, someday comes back," which is sung with a desperate, almost tearful earnestness. In Reason to Believe, the same sentiment is practically laughed off the page.
I keep coming back to Nebraska, trying to find answers to its mysteries. Being so stripped down, I expect Bruce to be sitting down with me, telling me some truths about life. It's a personal sounding record, but he's actually more absent as a real person here than ever before. Instead, we get 10 stories, each full of characters brilliantly fleshed out, each exploring some question of how to live with sin, each totally missing Springsteen speaking from the "I", which is as troubling as the question he silently asks: how do we live with ourselves this long life?
I went to my first concert in 1989. Bon Jovi was touring their latest, New Jersey, at the since-demolished Silver Stadium in Rochester, NY, and Skid Row opened for them. I was in 2nd grade. The only thing I remember from the show is sitting next to my best friend in the bleacher seats with cotton balls in my ears feeling like a dork (my mom made me wear them!), yet overcome by this conviction that I wanted to experience as much music as I possibly could until forever. Even when I got old.
Turning back to 1989, with the end of the Reagan administration, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and the Berlin Wall falling that year, it follows that musicians were reaching as far into the future as the world around them. There are several albums from that year that to this day I keep thinking came out after Cobain died. They didn't. They just sound like they did.
That year, keg-party rappers, Beastie Boys, studied breakthrough sampling techniques and laid them over aggressive beats that would shape the sound of hip-hop's post Golden Age artists with their release, Paul's Boutique. Check out the Annotated Lyrics to this album for a dip into the goody bag of samples these guys used. It's enough to make Girl Talk giggle.
Meanwhile, nearly ten years after New Order's flux-capacitor rise to power out of the ashes of Joy Division, the best live dance band on the planet unleashed Technique, bringing the sun-drenched clubs of Ibiza to the dank CBGBs of the states. The rave club DJs of the following decade owe every last glow stick to this record.
If the front half of the '90s were driven by the often opposing forces of grunge and Brit-pop, then the road back home leads to Pixies' Doolittle and The Stone Roses' self titled record, respectively. Doolittle's fuzzed out guitar riffs and scream along lyrics are balanced by some of the catchiest rock hooks not written by Kiss. For me, Pixies prove that the beautiful and the profane share the same bungalow. The Stone Roses drew from Ray Davies' ear for phrasing and his love for all things UK, washing it in a dreamy haze that continues to float out of my car's windows on the sunniest of summer days.
Other visionary rock albums from 1989 include The Cure's Disintegration, Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine, and Faith No More's The Real Thing. All of which share far more in common with the decade that followed their release than the one that led up to it. Hmmm, somehow neither Bon Jovi nor Skid Row made the cut? But both of them led me to music, so they'll always have a place in my heart, if no longer in my ear.
