Waits Breaks Loose

"I’m always looking for sounds that are pleasing at the time. The sound of a helicopter is really annoying until you’re drowning, and it’s there to rescue you. Then it sounds like music."
-Tom Waits, in Sasha Frere Jones' New Yorker review/feature

Like Randy Newman, Tom Waits already sounded like an old man on his first record, so it shouldn't be a surprise that both artists are still going great guns. And while Waits' new record Bad as Me sounds more or less like what you'd expect from him—the carnival-barker-bluesman-in-a-barn shtick—the record's penultimate track, "Hell Broke Luce," is a shattering breakthrough. On 12th listen, give or take, I'm prepared to say that this howl of PTSD rage ranks as one of the five or 10 best things he's ever done, and in a sense it's the work that his entire career has built up to.

What do I mean? While Waits has expressed anger and vitriol before, there's often been a comforting theatricality about it, a once-removed wink that lets us off the hook a little bit, puts a little literary distance between his howling and yowling and the realm of authentic pain and suffering. When he's barked "God's Away on Business" or "Misery Is the River of the World," he's done it with an emcee's leer; you can see the crumpled top hat and gold-toothed grin; even the harrowing "Murder in the Red Barn" has a camp Guignol affect about it. When Waits has poured real ache or outrage in his songs, it's been in quieter songs like "Georgia Lee" ("Why wasn't God watching? Why wasn't God listening? Why wasn't God there for Georgia Lee") or the uncharacteristically topical panorama "Road to Peace."

"Hell Broke Luce" is something else altogether: Its anger and confusion and nastiness is immersive and immediate. It's the first time, it seems to me, that Waits has used all that trademark clatter and atmosphere—the handclaps and stomps and echoes, and in this case, gunfire and what sound like ululuations—to put us viscerally into a scene rather than to powerfully suggest a mood ("Clap Hands," most of Swordfishtrombones) or, if he's telling a more conventional story ("Franks Wild Years," "What's He Building in There"), to put us in the presence of a narrator, a raconteur. There's no such distancing screen here, or if there is, it's fused to the narrator's own dissociative disorder. His name seems to be, or used to be, Geoff, an Iraq war veteran who's seem some fucked-up shit that's still rattling around his brainpan. And I do mean rattling—the phrasing and form of this song, though artfully controlled (check out the "Taps" moment at 1:52), is as disorienting as its noisescape. I swear here advisedly, too, just as Waits does in the song: The man's language, for all its pungency and ugliness, has very seldom been outright profane, so it's arresting to hear him simply declare within three lines, "That big fuckin' bomb made me deaf."

If you've ever glibly joked that Tom Waits sounds like a crazed homeless person screaming at you on the train, this song will straighten that grin right out; this doesn't sound like play-acting anymore. Just as he's spent the better part of his career honing his skills creating bang-on-a-can soundscapes, I think that Waits has had to go through a whole career of playing the addled and dispossessed, of trying on the hobo's clothes, to earn the right to be inside Geoff's skin. He's definitely crawled into it, and damned if this song won't crawl under yours, too.

Indeed, it's interesting that Frere-Jones' New Yorker piece pegs another song on the record, "Talking at the Same Time," as sounding like an outtake from Threepenny Opera, when it's "Hell Broke Luce" that is clearly a "Kanonen-Song" for the age of IEDs and scrap-metal Humvees. Waits practically quotes the Brecht/Weill tune's catalogue of casualties:

Kelly Presutto got his thumbs blown off
Sergio’s developing a real bad cough

"Real bad cough" might double as a description of Waits' voice. He's never used it with such lethal purpose before.

Better Lyrics for Brel

I perform with the band more or less weekly at Greenpoint Church, and about once a month I lead the music, meaning I pick the music. I'm always trying to come up with fresh stuff, and over the years I've brought in arrangements of Bob Marley tunes ("Thank You Lord"), the Psalm 23 theme from The Vicar of Dibley, and a bunch of tunes from Goodbye Babylon.

Last week, Pastor Jen told me she'd be preaching on the golden calf, idolatry, and placing our trust in what really matters, and I thought of "If We Only Have Love," the Jacques Brel tune, of which I've got a recording from the so-so Off-Broadway revival of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris 2006 (which I reviewed for Newsday). I accordingly found the lyrics online and picked out the tune on guitar. I ran the lyrics by Pastor Jen, and she was satisfied that they fit the theme.

I wasn't quite satisfied with them, though. There were false rhymes and odd images, as in the closing lines:

Then with nothing at all
But the little we are
We'll have conquered all time
All space, the sun, and the stars

Really? I thought that might sound a little strange in church, and even the lyric's references to Jerusalem and drinking fro the Grail felt a little odd to me. Then I remembered this passage from Sondheim on Music:

I fell in love with Jacques Brel's music long before that revue [Jacques Is Alive and Well]. In fact, I got all the French records. It was Judy Prince who introduced me to Brel's stuff, and I just bought every record I get...When I went to see Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, I loathed the lyrics, and that would turned me off, if anything. Even though I don't understand Flemish or French very well, I'm so glad that I heard it first with him singing his lyrics, and read a translation on the LP albums, or had Judy translate them for me. That had the real flavor. I don't think the English lyrics carry the flavor well at all.

Digging around on the web some more, I learned that Brel's widow much preferred the translations of Arnold Johnston, a professor at Western Michigan University, but these translations aren't findable online. I was, however, able to track down a literal translation of Brel's "Quand on n'a que l'amour" here. Though these weren't singable in English, they were so much simpler, clearer, and more forceful than the ones by Eric Blau and Mort Shuman. No mention of Jerusalem or the Grail, for the one thing, and two details struck me: Where Blau and Shuman's version had the hippie-dippie image, "If we only have love/We can melt all the guns," Brel's had the more poetic, "When we've nothing but love/To talk back to a gun." And the closing lines? Nothing about conquering the universe with love, but instead this beautiful statement:

So, while having nothing
But the force of loving
We will have in our hands, friends
The entire world

So I burned some midnight oil turning this literal translation into singable English lyrics, and I thought I'd share them with the Internet.

When We’ve Nothing But Love
By Jacques Brel

When we’ve nothing but love
As the gift that we bear
Then the path that we’re walking
Is the passion we share

When we’ve nothing but love
Between lovers and friends
Then each day is a voyage
And the trip never ends

When we’ve nothing but love
As the promise we give
And our treasure is faith
Every day that we live

When we’ve nothing but love
To enliven our days
And to brighten the dark
In this city of grays

When we’ve nothing but love
As our reason and mind
And the song that we sing
And the help that we find

When we’ve nothing but love
To serve food to the poor
To give clothes to the naked
When they knock at the door

When we’ve nothing but love
That we offer in prayer
To the evil that rages
In the world everywhere

When we’ve nothing but love
When we answer the call
Of the people who struggle
Just to go on at all

When we’ve nothing but love
As our compass and guide
To discern the best path
When beset on each side

When we’ve nothing but love
To talk back to a gun
And we’ve only got songs
To convince war is done

So we’ve nothing but love
What is all this love worth?
My friends, barely nothing
Just the whole blessed earth

Sometimes, Sometimes Completely Confused

One of my favorite so-bad-it's-good songs is Tom T. Hall's "I Love." Favorite non-rhyme: "And onions."

But recently, on a Stax collection, I stumbled across another oldie whose guileless, almost naked directness really blew me away: Calvin Scott Sr.'s "A Sadness for Things." It's not only closer to the bone, but it's a fascinating piece of music (that disorienting chord under "have" in "I have...a sadness for things"), the fadeout mid-lyric (a la the Heads' "Life During Wartime"). Indeed, my love for this tune is far less ironic than my devotion to Hall's:


A Sadness for Things

I couldn't decipher all the lyrics but the ones I can, I love:

I have a sadness for things
For houses with children
Where no one sings
For acres of wheat fields
When cupboards are bare
For love being spoken
And no one to care
For trains that are empty
And tables for one
For books seldom opened
And clocks that don't run
And songs soon forgotten
And paths never crossed
For wars that are fought
And all that is lost

I have a sadness for things
For every [indecipherable]
Whose phone never rings
For intelligent parents
That are sometimes, sometimes completely confused
For words in the Bible
Just said and never used
For [indecipherable]
And birds that can't fly
Stray dogs and lost kittens
Old people that cry
For the tired and the weary
With little to show
For those who don't listen
And for those who don't know

I have a sadness for things
For houses with children
And nobody there can never sing
For lonely girls
Whose phone never rings

Like Weill and Anderson's "Lost in the Stars," it's a great, melancholy gospel song for nonbelievers.

Not Since "The Crunge"

I've never been able to count along with Zeppelin's mind-bending funker "The Crunge," have you? I can't embed the tune here, but this might give you an idea why. Like some of the crazy Balkan stuff I've heard (Ivo Papasov and others), which people somehow actually dance to (and I've tried), "The Crunge" somehow creates an otherworldly groove out of its shifting meters, as opposed to, say, the prog-rock of Yes, in which the aggressive time-signature changes stand out jaggedly; they sound calculated, "classical" (not that there's anything wrong with that--I love me some Yes, if only for the junior-high nostalgia).

The Dirty Projectors' brilliant new record Bitte Orca has many pleasures, but the song that continues to blow out my mind's speakers is "Temecula Sunrise." I love the way it builds from a sweet, folky acoustic guitar riff into rafter-shaking art-rock; I love the alternately off-putting and welcoming lyrics; I love the incredible surge of feeling it conveys; I love the Projectors' signature "hocketing." But above all, I've come to love that I just cannot count along with it at all. The harder-to-get this tease of a song plays, the greater my ardor:

Listen how the burst of "aaah...Temecula sunrise" (at 1:16, 1:25, etc.) seems to flood in early, between the beats of the meter that precedes it. My awe only increases when I watch Dave Longstreth in this mellow acoustic version: I can see him grooving to his own internal drummer, and Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian totally keep up, but I'm just as lost without a drummer (probably moreso). You can hear someone clicking and clapping along here, apparently to help keep time, and it's as endearing (and clearly intentional) as those two audible drumstick clicks you can hear in the studio version:

It turns out that Amber and Angel (along with drummer Brian McOmber) are even better than that. They play the bass and guitar parts along with their hocketing. I swear, the collective brain power of this band could power all five boroughs:

Somehow, an anonymous drummer was able to more or less take the song's pieces apart. Just try counting along with him:

I remain in abject awe. While this song may remain too prickly and sprawling too groove quite like "The Crunge" or like Ivo Papasov, it flows as naturally as Debussy, and just as sweetly. This is straight-up composing with rock instrumentation, and to my ears it points the way to bright and glistening musical future--not unlike a Temecula sunrise, I'd say.

Without a Love of My Own

I've always loved it, and I remember it being used very effectively in a scene in John Patrick Shanley's underrated film Joe Versus the Volcano, but I'd never paid close attention to Elvis Presley's gorgeous rendition of "Blue Moon," from his seminal Sun Records sessions, until I was singing along with it recently (it's on a playlist of songs called "Oliver Lullaby" to help my baby son go to sleep). Can you tell what's missing from this rendition?

Blue Moon - Presley, Elvis

It's gorgeous--that ticking guitar, the reverb, Elvis' falsetto vocalise...but there's no bridge. To remind you, I'm talking about this part:

And then there suddenly appeared before me
The only one my arms will ever hold
I heard somebody whisper, "Please adore me"
And when I looked, the moon had turned to gold

The moon never turns gold in Elvis' sad, slowly ticking, 1-6-4-5 rendition. This turns the song's title meaning on its head; if Larry Hart's lyrics use "blue moon" to signify a rare and magical evening ("once in a blue moon") in which our singer meets the love of his dreams, Elvis makes "blue moon" mean simply "sad moon." The "you" in "you saw me standing alone" is more clearly than ever the moon itself; there's no other character here, no grand entrance and no happy ending (he doesn't sing the "now I'm no longer alone" lyric, of course).

This illustrates a truism about rock or pop music vs. showtunes: that the former is often best at crystallizing a mood, a single state of mind, and the latter is a more narrative form, with a beginning, middle, and end.

Strangely enough, a show like the current Broadway hit Fela!, in which Afrobeat jams grind along one chord figure for as long as a dozen minutes at a time, illustrates a similar point about how music functions in the theater: A song can build, develop, change, even accompany story, but it's better at conveying or intensifying a feeling, an impression, than bearing a text or having to carry the narrative (in the BMI Lehman Engel workshop, it's called "singing the book"). Lest I seem to be diminishing this incantatory power, the feeling such music conveys is huge, bigger and deeper than words, an end in itself. That much should be clear from Elvis' "Blue Moon," which stands out from other renditions precisely because of the strength and clarity of feeling he gets across. That he's undistracted by the cross-purposes of a story arc seems to make all the difference (compare it, say, to the urban kitsch of his preachy "In the Ghetto").

Superfly on Drugs

It should go without saying that Curtis Mayfield's achievement amounts to more than being sampled by Beyonce and writing "People Get Ready." In addition to his early work with the Impressions, he also recorded one of the best film soundtracks ever, 1972's Superfly, the sales of which outgrossed the film it was created for, and in the process forged a much-parodied and taken-for-granted genre, what might be called crime funk, duly parroted by every cop show in the '70s. But the original is a tight-knit work of genius, an entirely free-standing work. Back when I used to listen to albums all the way through, this was a favorite spin.

And I happened to notice something back then about two of the album's signature songs, and ostensibly its two main narrative guideposts (as far as I know--I've never seen the film): the insinuating, repetitive pitch of the "Pusherman," and the inevitable, chilling result of his ministrations, "Freddie's Dead." The sound clips may speak for themselves:

Pusherman


Freddie's Dead


Did you catch the identical three-note figure? It's an unmistakeable internal reference. Written in C, the figure would read like this:


The figure is phrased differently in each: In "Pusherman" it's manic, obsessive, unrelenting, shambling forward to land on either side of the beat.



While in the magisterial "Freddie" it slams down assertively on the downbeat (and yes, Mayfield's vocal adds another note on top):



The effectiveness of repurposing a musical motif this way should be self-evident, thematically and narratively: It links these two songs in our heads, and even points a finger of blame for Freddie's untimely end back to its source.

What I was curious to see, then, is whether or not Mayfield used this figure throughout the Superfly record. Well, that I discovered several examples is hardly slam-dunk evidence that Mayfield did this with any kind of intention, because that figure is a staple of blues, R&B, rock and roll--indeed, it's such an unremarkable series of notes, just a doodle on the pentatonic scale, that you can find it all over all kinds of music from nearly any time or place. Still, I wanted to see how it turned up--and I'm relatively persuaded that its frequent recurrence on the songs of Superfly represents the use of a leitmotif, either conscious or (more likely) unconscious. As most film scores are written in a compressed amount of time between the completion of shooting and the theatrical release date, it's likely that Mayfield simply found himself falling into a musical shorthand that happened to rotate, in part, around this three-note "drug motif."

In fact, it shows up in every song except the film's one love song, "Give Me Your Love," and it only just barely flares by in the guitar part of the bridge of the film's title song, "Superfly":



I would argue that one reason these songs don't use the "drug motif" is that they are the least germane to that subject. Though "Superfly" is a fine movie theme, I don't really feel Mayfield's heart is in this outright celebration of ghetto gangsta-dom; the love song is also fine but somewhat generic.

But it's in a series of moralizing songs about inner-city pressures and lives gone wrong that the three-note "drug motif" so prominent in "Pusherman" and "Freddie's Dead" turns up with a frequency that's hard to ignore.

Consider "Little Child (Runnin' Wild)." The bass line starts with a climbing elaboration of the figure:



And then the chorus hits the figure head-on:




Considerably sunnier is "No Thing On Me (Cocaine Song)," in which Mayfield uses the figure specifically to repudiate drugs, indeed with the words "the man can't put no thing on me":



And here, by using the Pusherman's motif, he makes it clear exactly which "man" he's talking about:



More troubled and hortatory is "Eddie, You Shoulda Known Better." As this is a more subjunctive, less assertive argument than "Freddie's Dead," the three-note figure is accordingly embedded a little more subtly. But it's still evident, and it accents some key lyrics:





The instrumental "Junkie Chase," strangely enough, doesn't seem to include the drug motif. But then there's "Think," arguably the still, quiet heart of Superfly--a mildly anguished yet sun-kissed instrumental ballad with a spindly, fluttery guitar figure that recalls "Little Wing." This, of course, is the piece the aforementioned Ms. Knowles so memorably collaborated with on her "Resentment," a song very far away in intent and tone from the blaxploitation-scape of Superfly--but then, a great instrumental piece is a house with multiple entrances. In its original context, "Think" swims along meditatively, soberly, transcending the struggles of the rest of the record.

As such, it wouldn't be surprising if the three-note drug motif was missing. But in fact, though it's subtle, it's definitely there, and as a penultimate cadence, like the comma before an amen:



You can find clusters of notes in common among infinite numbers of songs if you look and listen, and it usually doesn't mean a thing (if it ain't got that swing). But it's clear to me that the three-note drug motif, this resilient strand of the blues scale, went viral in the bloodstream of Superfly, and it's at least one reason the album is a natural high.

Fractured "Jawbone"

"What do you think of the beginning of 'Jawbone'"? a friend wrote me after seeing this blog. I have to confess I'd never really taken note of the song, a track on the The Band's seminal self-titled 1970 album (record company must have loved taking that to market). Now that I have digested the motley moritat that is "Jawbone," my initial response would be: Beginning? What about the rest of it? It's nuts, and I mean that in a good way.

I've probably taken The Band for granted. When I saw The Last Waltz years ago, I was checking it out for all the guests--Dylan, Joni, Emmylou, Muddy Waters--more than for the furry Canucks who were the ostensible subject of the concert film. On the advice of several musician friends, I've schooled myself a little in the group's essentials ("The Weight," "The Shape I'm In," the problematic "Night They Drove Old Dixie Down"), and even discovered an unlikely favorite, the disturbing childhood reverie "Moon Struck One."

But one reason it's easy to under-rate The Band is that their songs, like many of Hoagy Carmichael's or John Fogerty's, just sound like they've always been around, or as Ralph Gleason said of "Dixie," "the rhythmic structure, the voice of Levon and the bass line with the drum accents and then the heavy close harmony of Levon, Richard and Rick in the theme, make it seem impossible that this isn't some traditional material handed down from father to son straight from that winter of 1865 to today. It has that ring of truth and the whole aura of authenticity." Their songs' terrain feels familiar, even well-worn; you feel like you know exactly where you are all the time, and where you're going.

But from the first notes of "Jawbone," with the piano meandering and eerie harmony vocals slipping and sliding in weightless free time on the words "Old jawbone/Where did you first go wrong?", you have no idea where you are, what's happening, what's going to happen next. And when the beat kicks in (at :25), you start knowing even less. For a song that's resolutely major-key, and not even particularly bluesy, it remains deeply disorienting pretty much throughout.



I'm not sure I know how to count 3/2, but the three-beat bars of the verse here ("Three-time loser/You'll never learn") certainly don't feel like 3/4 or 6/8. There are eight of these, plus an extra beat, and then comes the song's catchiest hook, its reason for being--and strikingly, its only switch of perspective, as the narrator who spends most of the song ragging Jawbone for his unlawful ways hands the mike to the subject, who wails unapologetically, "I'm a thief, and I dig it" (:42) over a four-beat bar, followed by an inspired jig of 6 beats, as if Jawbone is kicking up his heels in defiance. There are three of these, and then we slide into a gently chastened 6/8-feel boogie version of the "Old jawbone" chorus (1:02) for eight bars.

After another verse (with the priceless lyric about Jawbone lamenting the small print of his post-office wanted poster) and another "I'm a thief" jig break, the 6/8 chorus returns, but with a discombobulated waltz feel (2:00) this time, and an odd five-then-four-bar shape. Another verse and jig break, only this time the third 6-beat jig is lopped off at four beats--you can almost hear the band rearing up in resistance (2:46) to the fancy meter and ready to rock on straight 4. Which they do for a generous solo section, followed by another verse and jig break.

I'm not sure how often I'll be spinning this odd track in future, but I doubt I'll ever dismiss The Band as derivative roots-rockers again. Clearly all that musty Americana artfully disguises their true art-rock ambitions.