Tom Waits
Mule Variations
[Epitaph]
Rating: 9.5
I once took a poetry workshop taught by a guy called Ed Dorn. You may have
heard of Ed Dorn. He's a fairly famous guy, as poets go, and he's written
his fair share of well- known poems. The first day of Dorn's poetry
workshop consisted of him delivering a sometimes scathing and mostly
nonsensical monologue that veered from Roman aqueducts to the Russian poet
Akhmatova to indigenous North African peoples. The main thrust was one
simple point: nobody has written a truly great poem over the course of the
last fifty years, and if anyone is going to write the one great poem of the
last quarter of the twentieth century, it was not going to be one of us
sophomore- year poetry scrubs. Sorry, it just wasn't.
I'd like to take this opportunity to extend Ed Dorn's admonition to the bulk
of Pitchfork's readership, and to amend it thusly: neither will any of you
write a song as good as Tom Waits' very worst song. Sorry, you just won't.
And to reach the levels of one of his very best songs, you'd have to spend
the next twenty years training with ninjas in a high mountain monastery,
travel from there to Haiti to have bizarre Voudun rites performed over your
writing hand, and then sell your soul to Satan for good measure. Better get
started.
So far, reviews of Mule Variations have been mixed, ranging from
shameless hero worship (yeah, yeah, like this one), to jaded critics
claiming that Waits hit his songwriting peak with 1985's Rain Dogs.
Some guy recently told a friend of mine that he didn't like Mule
Variations because "I saw Waits play in San Francisco in the late '80s,
and I just wasn't that into it, cuz I liked Waits better when he was a
ballad singer." What does that mean? I have one theory about those
dissing Mule Variations: they know in their hearts what Ed Dorn and
I have just told you, and crying out "He's slipping!" is a backhanded way of
claiming equality with one of the world's greatest living performers.
Don't listen to the bastards and their sour grapes. Mule Variations
is a great album, and that's all there is to it. Sonically, it picks up
where Bone Machine left off , but drops some of that album's
artifice: the clattering, trebly out- back- of- the- shed sound is still
here and the inexplicable presence of Primus persists, but many of these
songs find Waits relaxing his krazy karnival barker persona. The songs most
people are keying on-- "Big in Japan," "Filipino Box Spring Hog" and
"Eyeball Kid" have been getting a lot of airtime lately on my local college
station-- are standard later- era Waits jams, complete with weird rattling
percussion and menacing images of hellhounds and mutant children.
But the really good stuff here, as with any Tom Waits record, is the slower
stuff. "Hold On" has a classic "Jersey Girl" vibe, and while there may be a
little lyrical cheez involved, it's exciting to hear a return to that sound.
"Pony," "House Where Nobody Lives" and "Picture In a Frame" are ballads that
can stand with Waits' best, from earlier tunes like "Burma Shave" or
"Martha" straight through to "A Little Rain." The album- closing
bittersweet mid- tempo rocker tradition has never seen a better entry than
"Come On Up to the House," and the strange, out- of- phase falsetto backing
vocals on "Black Market Baby" are alone worth the price of admission.
It's true that this is not Rain Dogs, Swordfishtrombones or
even Frank's Wild Years. But is it Tom Waits' fault that people are
so hung up on those particular albums? Look, you've got two options here:
you can continue to bolster your own nonexistent street cred by dissing new
Tom Waits in favor of old Tom Waits, or you can give it up, admit that it's
all great and increase your own personal enjoyment. The choice seems like a
no- brainer to me.
-Zach Hooker