In late 2000, I stood in Boston's Orpheum Theater, jostling up against countless guys in bowlers, tattoos and sideburns. It is rather hard to fathom that someone as un-pop as Tom Waits has groupies who look the part, but there they were, milling around like nervous soldiers in search of a Lucky Strike.
To say that I think highly of Waits is an understatement. For my money, he's one of the best performers alive. I've listened since the mid-'80s days of Swordfishtrombones, so by the time I stood in the Orpheum, I had little patience for the tender-eared embracers of the "good songwriter but he can't sing" school of critical judgment. I like Waits' voice(s); it's an integral part of his character-playing.
Still. When Waits took the stage and opened his maw for the first tune, I found myself plastered to the seat, shocked at the absolutely apocalyptic roar assaulting my ears. The most appropriate phrase might be one a critic first used to describe Bo Diddley's guitar sound: like "the devil moving furniture."
The show was the finest musical performance I've seen, but not just because I like Waits and his roar. He possesses a sense of music and performance that's like few other artists: every song feels like a piece of theater.
It's hard to figure why that sense of musical performance is so rare—combine music and a stage, and it seems natural to pay attention to spectacle and even acting. There is much to be said for music for its own sake, of course, musical performance uncluttered by distractions. Yet performers like Waits raise the bar, creating an experience, not a mere set of songs with a live band on stage. It's as if such performers are using more muscles than everyone else.
Part of the reason, of course, is that the bell curve of talent demands that most performers be mediocre. Something that raises the bar is, by its nature, rare. Yet examples do pop up, even right here in the Valley. The list remains short, though. There must be more, especially in a place where musical projects are always brewing away in basements awaiting their moment of glory, but when it comes to bands, the only example a colleague and I could light upon is the very fine and very odd band Fat Worm of Error. The Worm offers extremely noisy costumed fun that crosses well into spectacle. They and their cohorts in the local noise scene seem the most common appreciators of a transcendently spectacular brand of music.
A little farther from home, it bears noting, one finds the cabaret-tinged theatricality of Amanda Palmer (of The Dresden Dolls), who brings her Kurt Weill-esque piano music to Pearl Street this week. But most of the other Valley moments of music meeting spectacle seem to come from spectacle that veers toward music, rather than the other way around: Ashfield's Double Edge Theatre, for instance, puts instruments into the hands of its actors, providing strange strains of acoustic playing to accompany dream-like action. The formerly Northampton-based Missoula Oblongata troupe makes a habit of incorporating musicians in unusual fashion in its experimental, vaudeville-tinged work. (They even have a Myspace page featuring some of their musical performances.) When Northampton's Serious Play group produced Milosevic at the Hague in the A.P.E. performance space, local Dixieland madmen The Primate Fiasco were a part of the play (and guitarist John Sheldon provided offstage music).
Standard-issue musical performance has its glories, to be sure, but if the rarefied, high-theater approach is your cup of tea, obtaining the new Tom Waits album Glitter and Doom Live (available Nov. 24) should be on your to-do list. The bad news is that you'll only get the audio from a multifaceted performance that often features the likes of Waits kicking up dust, blowing glitter or donning a mirror-ball hat.
There is much to be happy about, though. The apocalyptic throat delivers the goods, and the band fires flawlessly through a host of unlikely rhythms and textures. And something that's not popped up much on Waits recordings is finally done justice: disc two is called "Tom Tales," and is a collection of some of the over-the-top tales (about impregnation through bullet wound, for instance) Waits always delivers when he sits down to play a few tunes on piano. Give that a spin and, even if it's just audio, you'll hear the difference between concert and experience.
