Tom Waits – Glitter and Doom Live

Wanna know the difference between a Tom Waits appreciator and a Tom Waits aficionado? For those merely impressed by Waits’ gifts —those who, perhaps, even admit to enjoying his music, in limited doses — it all starts with the songs. “You know, once you get past the voice, he’s actually a great songwriter!” And indeed he is, but ah, The Voice! For the true connoisseur, it begins and ends with the voice, the one that barks, sputters, coughs, growls, takes a Howlin’ Wolf imitation straight through the gutter and sometimes all the way down to Hell.

But where to start with Glitter and Doom? If anyone ever doubted Waits’ capacity to write songs of bold, melodic beauty and lyrical elegance, this fine set would leave them without a leg to stand on; presented live and without the smoke and mirrors of the recording studio, the songs assembled here are amplified not only in their sheer loveliness, but also in how composerly they are structured, and how richly they reflect an increasingly diverse milieu of musical traditions. And The Voice? It’s pushed to the fore and strained to the max: The Tom Waits who softly rasps at the piano is mostly eschewed in favor of Tom Waits, the carnival barker.

Glitter and Doom is a live album, pieced together from songs recorded over the length of his tour of the same name. If you don’t know how big of a deal a Tom Waits tour is, consider that when I saw his Nashville show, I sat between a man who had driven from the other side of Texas just to see the show (a man who claimed to own a bar called Tom’s, where the jukebox played only Waits tunes) and a couple who had flown in from Germany, for one night only, just for that Voice. This is Waits’ third live album but his first since signing to ANTI, and the selections favor those latter recordings, with several tracks from both Orphans and Real Gone, and one from each Blood Money and Mule Variations. There is only one song from the seminal Rain Dogs, but, curiously, three from Bone Machine.

None of the songs are reinvented in a particularly radical way, and yet the arrangements here are both surprising and illuminating. More than any other Waits recording — save, perhaps, for Orphans, which categorized his songs in terms of blues-based rockers versus piano ballads — Glitter and Doom locates Waits’ music squarely on the map of American song, playing up the bluesy groove of “Get Behind the Mule,” the jazzy crawl of “Dirt in the Ground,” the R&B foundations of “Falling Down.” Of all his songs, “Make it Rain” has always reminded me the most of Howlin’ Wolf, and here it’s plaint to hear that waits and Bob Dylan have both been drinking plenty from that same well.

Though the songs are all familiar to any fan, the way this set plays out like a regular Tom Waits album is mesmerizing, and allows the songs to be heard as if for the first time. It’s a rough, grizzled album that starts with the coughed-up gallows humor of “Lucinda,” and mostly keeps things wild and wooly, but Waits is ever seduced by his sentimental crooning side, and he’s more than ready to take strange detours through the surrealist jazz strut of “Singapore.” The Bone Machine suite of “Dirt in the Ground” and “Such a Scream” is recreated here, but it ratchets up the violence in the latter song even as it makes the former more approachable: Waits songs are resilient enough to feel like living creatures, always growing and changing in unexpected ways.

But this isn’t Tom Waits lite. This is a Tom Waits album designed to thrill fans, and as such it’s about so much more than the songs; it’s about the man himself, and about the myth and the outsized persona he’s built up around himself. This means that the set’s most delightful surprise is hearing him bark the lyrics to “Singapore” in a totally new cadence, full of crags and crevasses to get lost in. This means that he indulges his most outlandish bit of self-parody in the “Circus” monologue, relishing its kitsch, and then playing it straight on “I’ll Shoot the Moon,” seemingly without irony. And this means that Waits the singer and songwriter shares the stage with Waits the all-around entertainer and peerless showman; an entire second disc of stage banter, stories, and stand-up comedy, simply called Tom Tales, clocks in at a whopping 36 minutes — a dream come true for diehard, and believe me, it’s both as weird and as delightful as you’d think. And it’s very much a part of what makes this the rare live album that is not only essential, but revelatory, and, in its own way, as great a gift to fans as Orphans was three years ago.

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