Videos were the primary selling point for music then, and the images that paraded by were designed solely to catch the eye; any incidental meaning was usually accidental. So in the midst of all this color, noise, and flash, one day a sepia-toned main street came into view. A grizzled-looking man in a shabby drum major costume began a stately parade down the street accompanied by a small, somber marching band, his voice unpretty and croaking. It was Tom Waits, already over ten years into his musical career, singing “In the Neighborhood”.
This came so far out of left field, and was so unlike anything I had seen up to that point, that my brother and I made it the butt of jokes for years after seeing it only that one time. It was like a drunken uncle had stumbled onto the stage of a rock concert and taken over the mike for three minutes before being dragged off by security.
Of course, I eventually learned that there was more to music than the ten neatly-packaged singled doled out for me per hour of MTV, and I began to venture onto other avenues and side streets of music on my own. One day in 1993 I somehow remembered that strange time-warp of a video, and decided that I wanted to hear it again. Since my then-fiancée was the manager of a music store, I asked her to special order the cassette for me, and a week or so later I had my first true listen of Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones, which some herald as his finest, most ground-breaking work.
My second hearing of “In the Neighborhood”, this time without the visual, gave me a stunningly different experience. I could concentrate on the lyrics, which paints a portrait a run-down corner of town, which the singer clearly cares about, perhaps for its very shabbiness. He delivers a long list of one-off lines that tug at your heart, like “The kids can’t get ice cream ‘cause the market burned down”, “The window is busted and the landlord ain’t home”, and “the jackhammer’s digging up the sidewalks again”. No context is given. It’s more like a list of headlines from the most local newspaper you can imagine.
The rest of the album, while never having two songs that quite copy each other in musicality, continue the general theme of the average American town that used to be glorious, and now is only a shadow of itself. Although the lyrics can be vague, it sounds like the twin specters of “progress” and the aftermath of war are the cause of it all. War especially… songs like “Shore Leave”, “A Soldier’s Things”, “16 Shells from a Thirty-Aught-Six” and the title track (which includes lines like “He came home from the war with a party in his head… and a pair of legs that opened up like butterfly wings”) all come off as the rambling memories of a man who has traveled the world, with the stipulation that he watch as all the foreign places he visits get razed to the ground.
By the time the introspective jazz instrumental “Rainbirds” closed the album, I was hooked. I immediately starting catching up with everything I had missed from the first twenty years of his musical career, backtracking through the jazzbo early years, through the hobo-with-his-own-orchestra middle, and beyond the transformation of Swordfishtrombones into a series of avant-garde theater projects and ever-more bizarre studio albums. I’ve loved hearing his voice grow younger and older at the same time, every gravelly note hinting at a world of experience. Tom has explained as a way of describing his musical style, “I like beautiful music that tells me terrible things.” Count me in.
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