Glitter and Doom Live

Tom Waits: Glitter and Doom Live (Anti). If you listen to the 1973 album Closing Time then switch the needle to the grooves of 2007’s LP Orphans,
your ears would probably convince you that there’s no way the two
musicians at the forefront could have ever been in the same place at
the same time. But they have been. . . just 34 years apart. Those
respective albums were Tom Waits’ first and most recent studio outputs,
and if you put your ear up to the gap between everything he’s produced
since, the evolution of the artist who has refused to rest on his
laurels will give you the feeling of deja vu, as if you’ve heard it all
before for the first time.

Glitter and Doom Live, the
double-live album compiled from a series of concerts Waits performed
across Europe in 2008, is like meeting someone you swore you’ve never
met, but they insist you have. These performances are an extension of
Waits’ latter-day work, which resembles something along the lines of a
graveyard Walt Disney score sung by Louis Armstrong with a hangover.

While Waits seems to have no interest in
revisiting his early-day, beatnik-inspired dive-bar lounge act, he has
not abandoned his penchant for masterful storytelling. Waits seems to
be able to step inside the minds of the gin-soaked, broken-hearted and
deadbeat down-and-outers that inhabit the most atmospheric film noirs.
“Lucinda” relates the tale of man falling into torment and being sucked
into a whirlpool of sin after being tormented by the unrequited love of
a former companion with lyrics stating that, “Now her hair was as black
as a bucket of tar and her skin was as white as a cuttlefish bone/ I
left Texas to follow Lucinda, now I’ll never see heaven or home.”

“Get Behind the Mule,” from his 1999 Grammy Award-winning album Mule Variations,
feels almost like it could have been written by a passenger in Tom
Joad’s Model-T observing Dust Bowl hardship, and features a sparse
guitar over an almost train-on-the-tracks rhythm. “Fannin Street” is
probably the closest to classic Waits, as he performs a piano solo
while warbling a ballad about going to a place where “You’ll be lost
and never found, and can never turn around.” “Goin Out West” sounds
like a noir-ish surf rocker that seems tailor-made for a Jim Jarmusch
movie. (Waits has acted in Jarmusch’s Down by Law and Mystery Train; his next movie role is playing the devil in Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus,
also Heath Ledger’s final film.) “I’ll Shoot the Moon” feels like it
could have been heard at a Harlem nightclub in the 1940s, and his
gravelly “Satchmo” growl sounds somewhat soothing in this context.

Other standout tracks include the ballads “Falling Down”
and “Green Grass,” and a raucous version of “Singapore” from probably
his best-known album, 1985’s Rain Dogs, the oldest song on this
box set. “Story” is a spoken-word tale of his quagmire regarding a
situation with eBay and having money in his pocket, which led to his
being told he made a big mistake on an instinctive purchase of “the
last dying breath of Henry Ford” which was trapped in a coke bottle
with a cork in it. He “probably paid more than he should of,” but as he
explains, “it’s a first edition, and there’s only one of ‘em.” Since
the 1970s, Waits has always told similar stories of the “strange, but possibly true,” and disc two of this set, dubbed “Tom Tales,” is 40-plus minutes of these little nuggets. 

For many, Waits is an acquired taste,
and there are some who only swing to his tunes from one side of his
chronological pendulum. In a live setting, Waits seems to be able to
stop time right in the middle and this is one that people who like his
early and late stuff will both find equally enjoyable. And with all of
the little good-humored stories included from the live setting, even
those who have only scratched the surface of the world of Waits will be
able to find time to love this one.