I Was Born In The Wrong Decade

I'm sure this would have been cheaper in the late 30s. Right now, I'd have to kill for it.

I'm thinking about it.

Tom Waits: Down In The Hole

The song that gave this blog its title.

Special Deal

Courtesy of Gizmodo.

Review: Tom Waits - Orphans

Once every few years, along comes an album that I rush out to buy, regardless of any current gambling or international-scale drug debts. I need to own the original packaging, hold the physical artwork in my hands, and if I'm lucky enough to have liner notes to read, I'll pore over them with a jeweler's eyepiece until I go blind in one eye.

This weekend, one of those albums came along.

At $AUD84.95, it's a hefty tug on the old purse strings, but it's worth every single cent. The deluxe edition of Tom Waits' Orphans comes in its own CD-sized hardcover book, with the pages consisting of lyrics on a ye-olde worlde background and a pseudo photo album. At the back are the three CDs. Yes, three.

They're called, in order, Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards. The Brawlers are junkhouse, roadhouse, bang-them-over-the-head-with-a-house raunchy blues and gospel numbers as only Tom Waits can do them. The Bawlers are yank on your heart strings ballads, and the Bastards are a psychotic menagerie of aural experiments and spoken word pieces whose parents were never fully legit.

Right off the bat, the first four songs on Brawlers are ones I've never heard before. They got me jumping up and standing on my chair, banging my head against the wall in glee. Tracks on this CD include a Ramones tribute, a song from the movie Dead Man Walking, and a new version of a track that Tom did with his old buddy, Chuck E. Weiss. Anyone remember the song Chuck E's In Love by Rickie Lee Jones?

When Tom does soppy, he can pull a tear from a gland-less eyeball with a single full-throated moan, and when he does it he'll call the song something like Little Drop Of Poison. Which came from the Shrek 2 soundtrack of all places. I vaguely remember a scene with a drunken horse on the piano in a bar. I'm guessing that was supposed to be Tom.

The last CD is Bastards, and this is where I've had a couple of disappointments. I know, someone's bound to hit me with a brick for saying that Tom is capable of wrong, but I'm not too happy about the overdubbed harmonica on a few of these, or the muffling of the banjo courtesy of Primus in On The Road, a song about Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. But the spoken word pieces over musical soundscapes are eery and effective, especially when mixed with older recordings of Tom, before he drank shoe polish strained through bread.

One last track I'll mention from Bastards is Dog Door, a wild, crunchy scratched-falsetto number that almost resembles the kind of R'n'B a zombified version of Tom would holler. I hesitate to use the words R'n'B and Tom in the same sentence, but the production values behind this track are firmly in the now. Sonically inspiring stuff.

Something that struck me about the album, and this is only after a full day of listening, is that Tom Waits won't be making music forever. I don't know if it was the lack of alcohol talking, but he ain't getting any younger, and this almost feels like a career retrospective.

But as Tom might say, there's nothing wrong with me that a hundred dollars won't fix.

For further illuminating reading, leg it on over to the Tom Waits Supplement, a very handy research tool for the history of all the tracks on Orphans.

Obscure Songs From The 80s

Unlike most people my age, I hate the 80s. Too much reverb, tacky synths, cheesy robotic weirdness. Being a guitar and harmonica player, I prefer the old, old blues of the 30s through to the 50s. Music that is a soul wailing, not a plastic pop contrivance.

That being said, like any decade, the 80s had plenty of damn good songs. It's easy to look at the charts now and feel that the quality has dropped, but chances are that when we listen again in the decades to come, we'll find a treasure trove of standouts amongst the garbage.

Why am I writing about all this?

In the last few weeks I've had strong musically nostalgic urges, so I've used that energy to track down a couple of fistfuls of tunes that tickled my nether regions back then, when they were very easily tickled.

1. Captain Sensible: Wot
   A one hit wonder, it's hard to believe this guy is actually in The Damned.
2. Belle Stars: Iko, Iko
   This one's on the Rain Man soundtrack, but back then it was all about the hats.
3. Monte Video and the Cassettes: Shoop Shoop Diddy Wop Cumma Cumma Wang Dang
   The 80s truly was the decade of the one hit wonder. This one made it to number one in New Zealand alone.
4. Queen: Princes Of The Universe
   Even with the over-the-top guitar, Queen made me believe there could be only one.
5. Oingo Boingo: Weird Science
   Proof that making your own robot woman is a recipe for Trouble.
6. Thomas Dolby: She Blinded Me With Science
   See? You can go blind if you do it too often.
7. Cyndi Lauper: What A Thrill
   The flipside of The Goonies single, this still rocks hard.
8. The Style Council: (When You) Call Me
   I can't help getting all misty eyed when I hear this, even though I don't know why.
9. Glenn Fry: The Heat Is On
   One of the most misheard lyrics in the universe, from when they knew how to do Axel F properly.
10. Taco: Puttin' On The Ritz
    Excellent for tap dancing, I used to listen to this on my huge, portable FM headphones.

Anyone else have some particular favourites that aren't on the standard 80s compilations?

Danny Hawaii Toons

Music has been on my mind lately.

I've had my first brush with fame with an artist I truly respect. And it got me thinking about my own music career. The one I decided to leave behind.

If you've read my previous blog, you may know that before I used Danny Hawaii as a character in my novel, I was doing music under the name. My idea was to combine blues and beats, in a future retro style.

I was getting somewhere, but I came to the realisation that I didn't think I was a good enough singer. And I wanted to be, because damn it if I was going to write music for someone else again.

So I left it all behind, replacing my music with writing. And the writing bug has hit me hard. I seem to get the same satisfaction out of it, without the downside. With writing, I don't have to carry around heavy amps and guitars, or worry about endless metres of cabling, sound levels, tuning, or the lack of dedication and ability of the other members in the band.

Because there is no band. It's just me.

In a fit of nostalgic goodness, I now present to you a link to four of the better tracks I did under the Danny Hawaii name.



Danny Hawaii Toons

Guilty, Guilty, Guilty

Diamanda Galas at the Sydney State Theatre, October 21st, 2005

GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY

The lights went down and Diamanda walked out, taking her seat in front of the piano under cover of darkness. I could see this because I was in the second row, almost dead centre.

Small sounds of her adjusting the seat and microphone, then the first low notes from the piano. Powerful and percussive, hidden somewhere inside them were the blues.

Then came the voice.

From the pits of her soul, she started as low as a woman can go. A single light faded in. She moved, she writhed, her feet worked at the pedals, her face was part of the song. Anger, sadness, frustration, pain. It all showed, and it all could be heard--in her voice, in her playing, in the stamping of her foot.

No banter, no patter, nothing to appease the audience or give us a reprieve from the intensity of her art. After every song, the light would fade and she would turn away to drink water. And Diamanda needed to. Her four octave vocal range was used to full effect, tearing from the furnace of her lungs, shifting to sweet, angelic tones, then back to a chattering, scratched soundscape.

Her voice startled me at times. She would lull us into security, then rip into a screeching, banshee wail. A strobe light came on to pierce the eyes as well as the ears. Just as quickly, back to a soft touch on the keys. Back to a single red light.

There was humour among the darkness. A song she wrote with John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin, entitled 'Baby's Insane', started off as a ragtime tune. With choruses of 'hide all the knives, cause baby's insane', there were a few chuckles from the audience, who otherwise were simply too scared to utter a word.

Themes of guilt, death, and isolation were constant. The old bluesman, Skip James, played piano in a similarly disjointed fashion. He would tell the audience that his music existed solely to inspire dread. It was not for dancing.

After her hour long set, there was begging, chanting, and whistling for two encores. I couldn't decide whether the audience's stamping of feet on the floor was something to be pleased or embarrassed about.

Encores over, Diamanda walked to the front of the stage and bowed slightly three times, centre, left, and right. We cheered and clapped, and then she smiled and walked off stage with music in her moves, waving good-bye.