Tom Waits: The Island Years Remastered (1983-1993)

Twelve years have passed since Tom Waits’ last effort, the album Bad As Me (Anti-, 2011), was released. Never officially retired, the singer, songwriter, musical experimentator committed in these last years more with cinema than with music, appearing in such movies as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2022). While rumours affirm that he is back to work on writing new music, is time for an engagement with his most daring and interesting period in my opinion, which are his 1980s and 1990s, that will be reissued in almost its entirety this fall.

During that period, after marrying his wife Cathleen Brennan, collaborator and sound designer for Francis Ford Coppola with a respectable background in contemporary music, Tom Waits, who co-opted his spouse in order to write new intriguing material, changed shape and skin definitely passing from the bluesman and the jazz crooner of the 1970s to a more interesting experimental musician, collaborating on records and in live concerts with people as avant-garde guitarist Marc Ribot, just to name one, in order to deconstruct rock music and give life to a new world populated by unlikely and absurd “American dreamers” like Frank, the main character of his triology as we will speculate in the following lines. 

This trilogy begun with the 1983 output Swordfishtrombones, first to be released by Chris Blackwell’s Island Records. If the title, and the music, made hangry Captain Beefheart who felt someone has stolen his inspiration for the album Trout Mask Replica (Straight, 1969), we can praise it as one of the most interesting albums coming out of the NY – where Tom Waits relocated from Los Angeles with his family – experimental music scene of those days.

As every post modern music, Swordfishtrombones is composed by songs where melodies and structures are apparently mongrelized while at the opposite they are deconstructed and reconstructed in order to give the listener the feeling of being put into another, but yet familiar (thanks also to Ennio Morricone and Kurt Weill inspired melodies), world, as if the music itself would be an invitation to reconsider the place we’re living in with new eyes and, above all, ears. 

The purpose is to put Frank, the lead character of the songs of the trilogy composed also by the following Rain Dogs (Island, 1984) and the double Frank’s Wild Years (Island, 1985), under the light as an American dreamer who, thanks to his passiveness – he goes looking for a new life in a new land always by train – is destined to failure and to loose himself. And if the trilogy will culminate in a theatrical play put on the scene by the famous Steppenwolf company, the following albums by Tom Waits are nontheless interesting.

Bone Machine (Island, 1992) is Tom Waits’ album most dominated by strange and dangerous to play (in Waits’ own words, see Tom Waits On Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters, 2011, Chicago Review Press) percussions such as the self-built “conundrum” which dominates pieces like All Stripped Down and Such a Scream. The ghost of Harry Partch, an U.S. composer who built his own instruments (and the scales to play them over) dominates the album, possibly another gift from Waits’ wife Brennan who is clearly present as a co-writer through Ireland-influenced melodies like I Don’t Wanna Grow Up, a song covered subsequently by the punk band The Ramones.

And finally, last but not less interesting, The Black Rider (Island, 1993) is the album, co-written by Waits and Brennan with the Beat writer William S. Burroughs, which signs the beginning of the collaboration between the Pomona songwriter and the dramatist Robert Wilson. The story is similar to Carl Maria Von Weber’s (1786-1826) Der Freischutz and it narrates about a hunter who fall in love with a girl promised to a richer hunter. 

In order to gain her love, he will use on a competition some magic bullets given to him by the devil himself (“some of these bullets are for you and some are for me” the devil will proclamate) but one of the bullets will kill the young girl, and the hunter will get mad and lonely. Obviously influenced by the relationship Burroughs had with heroin and its being a double-face substance, The Black Rider was put on scene during the 1990s with a discreet success of public and critics, and it will be Waits’ last release with Blackwell’s label.

After almost a decade, Waits will sign with Anti-, a label created by Brett Gurewitz as a companion to Epitaph, more keen on experimental music than the latter devoted to punk rock, and his career will gain new peaks thanks to albums like Mule Variations (Anti-, 1999) and the collection of rarities Orphans (Anti-, 2006). But this is another story, and we will narrate it when new reissues will be released. 

Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years will be issued on September 1^st, 2023, on vynil and CD, while Bone Machine and The Black Rider on October 6, 2023.