Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones

A look back at the album which saw Tom Waits ran away from the bar to join the circus.

Love, invariably, has an effect on an artist’s music. Whether it’s the pursuit of it, or the resultant joy or pain from acquiring it, many artists have been changed by the experience of love. And there’s none that exhibit this more profoundly than Tom Waits. Swordfishtrombones, for all its strangeness, is an album that pays tribute to the power of being in love, because it’s the first "proper" Waits album to have appeared following the songwriter's tenure as a soundtrack-writer for Francis Ford Coppola, for a film called One From The Heart. The film's important, as it was during his time working on it that Waits met his future wife, Kathleen Brennan. Brennan's been credited with the role of muse and musical head-fucker; and since that time has had joint writing credits with him on his albums, and is often lauded by the artist as being crucial in the creative process.

So what is it that makes this disc so important, so necessary? It's because it's where the old is snapped back and allowed to pervert itself; it's the place where the singer's career changed irrevocably, and it still – its insistence on exploring odd tones and wilfully weird lyricism – informs his work now. With Swordfishtrombones, Tom Waits shrugged off the increasingly tired boozehound, barfly persona that was threatening to drown him, and became the crotchety-yet-lovable, avuncular artist that he's known as today. This is a crossroads album that still, years later, holds a heady thrill – there's the sense of an artist searching for expression through a number of new forms, and it's intriguing to see just how far on a limb a singer-songwriter can go. It’s a total reinvention; the sort that few artists have the balls to attempt, and that even fewer have the strength of vision to pull off. Swordfishtrombones was, all things considered, a brave outing for the guy who could’ve taken the easy option and continued as a Billy Joel analogue. Instead, he leapt into the abyss, jumped ship from his former record company Asylum Records for the sunnier climes of Island Records, and unveiled himself as a much more dramatic performer than his previous outings had revealed him to be.

This was, from the outset, Waits' baby. He produced the album, arranged (for what’s often described as a "junkyard orchestra", featuring players he'd return to in the future) the music and handled the design and cover art of the disc. The bum, such as he'd existed in Waits' career thus far, was well and truly gone, and replaced with something much feistier.

Album opener Underground begins with a blockheadedly-thumped percussion line (and more than a hint of marching-band horn atop a chicken-pecked guitar), giving the first hint that the troubadour of old had departed. Singing about a world beneath our own, a combination of marching tempos and chest-beating declamation heralded the new Waits like a punch to the gut.

A short, sharp introduction, Underground is followed by a more subtle character-sketch, a world – literally – away from the skid-row losers that'd previously been the singer’s stock-in-trade. This song, Shore Leave, is one of the finest tunes ever to feature accompaniment from a chair. Moving into shadier territories, Waits relates the tale of a dislocated seaman on leave from his ship, seeking simple pleasures while missing his girl. Muted horns growl like passing traffic over stories of floorshows and new decks of cards, and billiards-playing midgets. It's a tense piece, but during the loverman chorus, marimbas – soon to become a Waits staple – add a slinky-hipped sort of sway to the horny sailor-boy tale.

Some of the most fabulous guitarwork to be married to Waits' imagery exists in this song, too - spidery guitar lines that burst into fullness, with a texture reminiscent of a blade drawn across the skin of a peach; juicy, fulsome, splitting. The solo offers the clarity of a shiv, spiked into one's eye – in a background of aunglongs and what sounds a lot like banjos. By the end of the song, the frustration's become too much: an almost incapacitated Waits wails the words "Shore leave!" over and over again, a sort of idiot mantra, as the marimbas slink away in the background. It's an air of open-ended uncertainty, framed by strange reedwork, that's created. It's immersive in a way that none of the singer’s songs had, thus far, managed to be.

Of course, the old Waits hadn't entirely been eschewed. Both Johnsburg Illinois and Soldier's Things hark back to his earlier work – perhaps so as not to spook the long-time fans? – though have enough dissonant aspects to unsettle. There’s a nakedness to the tunes – about love and about the reduction of a life to a box of useless ephemera – that makes them compelling, though strangely-placed, given the avant-garde nature of some of the other works on the album. In other quieter moments, Australia gets a mention with Town With No Cheer, a tune that talks of the reduction of rail services that bring a small outback town to its knees, wrapped (after bagpipes skirl and what sounds like a blowing sign clanks through the intro) in nettles that shroud the hills in "a blanket of Patterson’s curse". With reference made to both Slim Dusty (see A Pub With No Beer) and the sort of thumbnail portraits of tragedy espoused by Paul Kelly, with this song, he creates one of the most heart-rending portraits of fucked-over rural existences laid to tape.

It seems, however, that Waits hadn't entirely come to the disc with the intention of being inventive for the sake of it, nor with the idea of repeating his past too much. Tunes like Down, Down, Down see experimentalism given the shunt for some stop-on-a-second soul-groove playing that swings amazingly. 16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought Six – featuring a percussion line played on a brake-drum and thumped doghouse bass – rocks its way through, and marks the start, perhaps, of the singer's grandstanding blues part of his career: "I'm gonna whittle you into kindling!" he cries, between lines speaking of mule escapades and of tearing the seats out of cars. Elsewhere, Gin Soaked Boy knocks out some dirty blues, almost like a John Lee Hooker tune with the benefit of a three-week bender, akin to the sort of pissed lecture you'd receive from a favourite uncle who you’ve found on the back porch with the dregs of a bottle of bad bourbon, and no pants.

The bandleader aspects of the album are best encapsulated on In The Neighbourhood, where Salvation Army-styled instrumentation accompanies an ode to the urban life, like a heartfelt love-letter to the bastard aspects of everyday life as heard through a hangover; at once thankful and celebratory and sore headed. Portraits of guns by registers, noisy traffic, newspaper sleeping-bags and lapsed deliveries wrap around each other in the skein of memory.

Providing a link between the lengthy ad-libs of the singer's live shows (captured on numerous bootlegs, as well as the legit release Nighthawks At The Diner) and his new area of interest, is Frank's Wild Years, a spoken-word number that’s backed by a particularly funky set of keyboard stylings. The suburban dream, during its length, is burnt to a crisp, and it's a tune that would also provide the seed for an album – and stage-show – of the same name, to be explored in the ensuing years.

The album's title track is the platter's best example of Waits' perverse recollection of human peccadilloes. More marimba, talking drums and an almost-vocal bass combine with a tale of twisted locals, the effect of wars and mental illness to produce a uniquely backwoods, drink-sodden tale. Here, his imagery is at its strongest, with protagonists with a pair of legs that opened up like butterfly wings, and with the cryptic cultural reference of characters who Chesterfield moonbeams in a song. The track is also, perhaps, gives hints to Waits' reinvention. In particular, the lyrics

Now some say he's doing the obituary mambo
Some say that he’s hangin' on the wall
Some say this yarn's the only thing that holds this man together
Some say that he was never here at all
Some say they saw him down in Birmingham
Sleeping in a boxcar going by
And if you think that you can tell a bigger tale
I swear to God you'd have to tell a lie.

seem particularly apropos, given Waits' interview tricksterism and general playfulness with descriptions of himself. If there were ever an acknowledgement that Tom Waits was a made up bloke, then this is it.

The album's running-order is broken up, sporadically, by instrumentals that lend the album a sort of silent-movie feel: Dave The Butcher gives atmosphere that seems to be borrowed from Nosferatu, Just Another Sucker On The Vine comes across as a kind of ragtime disappointment, with a dash of Gallic charm, while album closer Rainbirds feels like curtain-music, like the signifier of the end of an evening. It's a brilliant, theatrical feeling that’s oddly fitting.

While it's the first in what many perceive as a trilogy of albums that woven from the same strange wool, Swordfishtrombones remains the work that still casts a shadow over what Waits does today. While Raindogs highlights more of the scope of Waits' musical peregrinations, and Frank's Wild Years is much more of a considered whole, Swordfishtrombones is the disc that saw him break free from his past and embrace the sort of roleplaying tendencies that would see him move more towards the theatre and film. A kaleidoscopic portrait of the weirdness of life, the album is still, more than twenty years on, like a radio-broadcast from another planet.

This article originally appeared on FasterLouder.com.au. I am no longer associated with that website and, as copyright owner, have moved it here for permanent record.