Asylum Years - Tom Waits > Reviews > Tom Waits For Every Man

Author's product rating:   

Originality	Groundbreaking
Lyrics	Sublime
Quality and consistency of tracks	Flawless
How does it compare to the artist's other releases	Outstanding
Value for Money

Advantages:	Compilation of all of Waits greatest early work
Disadvantages:	Doesn't include The Piano Has Been Drinking, Not Me

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I first discovered Tom Waits a month ago. It was a cold, dark Friday night, late as the dawn. The bar we were in was striped and strobed in blue neon; gun-metal blue in the shadows. We didn’t meet, as such, there were no introductions. This strange looking, lived-in, suitcase of a man lay his hat down beside me at the bar; took my arm, and then my ear, and began to whisper stories as old as the world.

I’ve been back to that bar every night since. He tells me the same stories, but I always learn something new from them.

You may know the name, Tom Waits, you may even know some of his songs. He’s been around since his debut, “Closing Time”, released in 1973, and been covered by such artists as Bruce Springsteen (“Jersey Girl”), Rod Stewart (“Tom Traubert’s Blues”), even Meat Loaf (“Martha”, on Welcome to The Neighbourhood). He is the man in the shadows, the man of constant sorrow. The Godfather of Growl.

Asylum Years is a compilation of some of Waits’ finest early works, and, as such, represents THE place to start discovering the majestic lyricism and raw vocal intensity of one of music’s best-kept secrets.

Waits’ voice can move between soaring musicality and earth-moving violence - very often in the same song. His influences are worn on his worn sleeve: jazz, blues, beatnik discourses, the work of Kerouac, alcohol and cigarettes. Along with an acute perspective on the world, and the humour not to let it drive him insane, Waits offers something truly different, and rewarding for anyone willing to sit down with him and let him recount a couple of tales.

Part of my attraction to these songs is the intense lyrical power of the man. His catalogue sits in my CD case alongside such maestros as Bob Dylan and Neil Young – and when he is at his best, he can run rings around the pair of them (no disrespect intended!).

These fourteen tracks are a powerful testament to this unique man, and deserve to blow the whistle on this lamming agent of love-making, heart-breaking and counter-culture. The collection provides a broad schema of Waits’ range and ideologies. Taking select items from each of the Asylum Records albums (although the live album Nighthawks At The Diner is unplundered).

From Closing Time we have: Martha and Grapefruit Moon, two haunting ballads from a time before the whiskey and cancer-sticks turned Waits’ vocals to liquid rust.

The Heart of Saturday Night provides three titles: the opener, Diamonds on My Windshield, is a spoken-word piece set to an arpeggiating bass-line. The story of a night on the road …”the radio’s gone off the air, gives you time to think…” and Waits catalogues all he sees. This moves nicely into the second track (Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night, where Waits brings in the guitars and a quite beautiful vocal line. One of the most haunting and hummable tracks on the album. Finally, we leave our rainy Saturday night behind with the track The Ghosts of Saturday Night, a piano-led ballad of pure melancholy …”Cab combs the snake, trying to rake in that last nights fare… and a solitary sailor who spends the facts of his life like small change on strangers”…

Small Change offers up: Tom Traubert’s Blues (probably the greatest Waits moment, I defy anyone not to feel the hair on the back of their neck stand up as our world-wearied hero coughs out his woes. It was the first line of this song, and its amazing delivery that cemented my love for the artist); followed by the spoken word (with subtle jazz-scat embellishment) Small Change (the Chandler-esque telling of a small time hood who meets his end on the wrong end of his own pistol). These are always the first two tracks I play to my friends to introduce them to this melancholy, predatory world. The only crime here is the exclusion of The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me), but Small Change will probably be the next album you’ll want to pick up, and, anyway, you can’t have all your presents in one go.

Representing Foreign Affairs is the lyrically brilliant Burma Shave and wickedly good-humoured I Never Talk to Strangers (with Bette Midler, whose vocal presents an ethereal contrast to the rest of Waits diatribe, making the track a little unsettling on first listen). The third track from this album is the big-band sound of Potter’s Field, which moves from sweeping noir instrumentation to a staggering wide-eyed fury from Waits… “Hell, I’d double-cross my mother if it was whiskey that they paid” … “Learnin’ what you have to pay to be a hero anyhow”…

Blue Valentines (an album which found Waits experimenting with the electric guitar) lends the collection its title track and Kentucky Avenue – a storming observation of the American underbelly and its bizarre characters – delivered with one of the strongest and most compelling vocals of the whole album; lyrics delivered like steel spiders crawling up from his throat to scatter themselves about you.

Heartattack and Vine offers up its final track to the mix, Ruby’s Arms, and it sits at the end of this album too – Asylum Years is roughly chronological. A ballad, introduced by a horn section, which gives way into a moving string orchestration, and adds to the rawness of Waits bucolic reckoning. Truly spine-tingling. Heartattack… is also the source of Waits cover of Somewhere (from West Side Story), which he deconstructs and resurrects so it merely extends his unique ability with song.

Asylum Years is, by turns, compelling, demanding, rewarding and frightening. It is tempting to say “if you only buy one Tom Waits album, buy this one”, but the truth is, you will not be able to stop at just one. With Alice and Blood Money being released together this year, it should be hoped a spotlight of interest will find its way to Waits’ world. Genius, after all, deserves better robes than shadows.