Tom Waits left the asylum and went to join the circus. At least that is what implied on the front cover of Swordfishtrombones – the first of his loosely connected Frank trilogy of albums – which harkens back to movies like Todd Browning’s Freaks, and with rides a similar line between the exploited and exhibitionist. Swordfishtrombones is the character of Tom Waits last Asylum years left to go mad, and here we see him in a variety of carnival exhibits, freewheeling from one attraction to other, so much so that it achieves unity by sheer audacity.
The late seventies to the early eighties seem to be a great time for the area of what I will catch-all call “weird music.” Strange experiments were occurring in the post-punk/new wave eras, An early MTV would screen many a Residents video, and in this same year of 1983 a man called Daniel Johnston would record a tape called Hi, How are You? that ten years later ended up on Kurt Cobain’s T-shirt. But even then there was very little precedent for Swordfishtrombones in a mainstream capacity, and we have two other people to thank for that. The first was Kathleen Brennan, seeming love of Tom Waits life who freed him of any need for sticking to expectations, and the second would be the musician that she introduced him to. That would be Captain Beefheart, whose Trout Mask Replica is probably the closest to Swordfishtrombones intent both in clashing instrumentation and in both singers voices, close to an insane Howling Wolf.
Any contemporary listener expecting the traditional blues/jazz/folk combination would get a wakeup call from the first marimba notes and horns of “Underground” clashing bizarrely and wonderfully with this short guitar rift. Much of Swordfishtrombones is an exercise in economics, and here in two minutes we get a sense of the world we’re about to inhabit, the “big dark town” that the narrator found. But we move quickly from underground to the coast with “Shore Leave,” which has a definite jazzier sound, but in turn is accompanied by many strange sounds such as banjos and chairs being scraped across floors. The word atmosphere is a common one in music, but here it’s almost tangible. Thematically though, it is not entirely dissimilar to things on Small Change. He hadn’t fully left the bar crawler world, he was just holding himself hostage. After the instrumental “Dave the Butcher,” whose organs and whatever-Bass-Boo-Bams-are the most overtly carnival-istic on the whole album, we then move immediately to the that sounds most like it could belong on an Asylum record. “Johnsburg, Illnois” is a short and twice-the-sweet ballad ironically about the women who inspired this sonic change; it is familiar, but never at any point an affectation.
The next sequence of three is my favourite of the entire album, starting with the crazy trumpeting blues of “16 Shells From a Thirty-Ought Six,” which takes the rabble of criminal from Blue Valentine and has them perform more sinister crimes. The rhythm is thrilling, and threats of whittling a person down into kindling are punctuated by a continuous industrial hit of metal. Then we have the evocatively titled “Town with No Cheer,” which at first seems to be implying a sense of place with some good ol’ Scottish bagpipes (Hey, Scotland has a reputation for being miserable, but it doesn’t have No Cheer!) before moving so abruptly into another tune that it sounds like the transition my iPod makes between shuffled songs. It’s remarkably effective though, as we get a bluesier routine whose most distinguishing feature is the synthesiser, playing quick notes as the other instruments ring out long, and Tom sings of a town seemingly from the location of a train stations with wonderful images like “it’s boilin’ in a miserable March 21st/wrapped the hills in a blanket of Patterson’s curse”. Finally, to end side one we have what is my favourite on the album. “In the Neighbourhood” is a song that you could probably most pinpoint as the transitional point between older and newer Waits, a march that sounds like it has lasted for centuries with some lines that are both beautifully descriptive (“Well the eggs chase the bacon/ round the fryin’ pan/ and the whinin’ dog pidgeons/ by the steeple bell rope”) to the darkly funny (“the kids can’t get ice cream/’cause the market burned down”).
After Side Two opens with the almost cinematic “Just Another Suck on the Vine,” another instrumental that sounds like it could open some movie about a deliberately non-specific French town, we move into what is probably the funniest moment of the record in “Frank’s Wild Years.” A Nordian spoken word piece backed by a swinging bass and organ, it is so nonchalant in its descriptions of brutality and misery, such as Frank driving a nail through his wife’s forehead, a poorly dog and then torching everything he owns that it makes this black heart cackle, something that is rare for a piece of music to do to me. Boy, when you write it down it makes me sound like a sociopath.
Anyway, on to the title track “Swordfishtrombones,” which in its music uses neither a trombone nor, I presume, a swordfish. Instead we get more marimbas and bizarre percussion as Waits softy – for Waits! – tells another criminal tail that has some Kerouac influence with wonderfully strange descriptions of the road like “flyswatter banjos” and the “obituary mambo.” By contrast “Down, Down, Down’s” story of the devil is almost more recognisable, especially with the heightened version of the blues rock we found on Heartattack and Vine, and how this music so compliments Tom’s own devilish tones.
We return to something more – heartbreakingly – recognisable in “Soldier’s Things.” What’s remarkable about this being so affecting is that it really is just a description of a “solider’s things,” but it’s the little details like “this one is for bravery,” and the sparse instrumentation, that makes it work. But before we can use to sentiment we are snapped back into a deprived world in “Gin Soaked Boy” (In fact, these last four songs all very quickly run into each other), which has a fantastic blues riff by Fred Tackett to complement what appears to be a story of an unfaithful, or at least mistrusting, couple. Tom’s final spoken word on Swordfishtrombones are even more ambiguous, with the classical modernism percussion creating a such a feeling of anxiety that it makes one feel like they on this chase that explains why Tom speaks quietly to us. But so we don’t this leave this album in a state of tension there is the final instrumental “Rainbirds.” Another seeming classical piece, but this time in a different sense, it begins with the brightness of the glass harmonica before moving back into a smooth piano piece (with a strong and loud bass) that all helps to bring us back to a sense of reality. Or at the very least like we’ve been running in the rain.
Swordfishtrombones is a man charting new territory with the smallest of tethers to his past. Full of non-sequiturs, bizarre descriptions, yet still a description of something sickeningly and noticeably human. Tom Waits had brought us along with him to his new home. The next step would be to cut some of that tether and run some more in the rain.
What did you think of the album, though?
Tom Waits Album Rankings
- Swordfishtrombones
- Heartattack and Vine
- Small Change
- Blue Valentine
- Closing Time
- Nighthawks at the Diner
- The Heart of Saturday Night
- Foreign Affair