It's hard to think of gruff Tom Waits getting his start as an earnest, albeit eccentric singer-songwriter in the 1970s. Almost immediately after releasing his debut, Closing Time, in 1973, Waits began shaking up his act and developing the oddball facets of his current persona: the hipster Beat delivery, the fascination with prowlers of back alleys and underbellies, the appreciation for jazz and blues and other American idioms, and the unmistakable voice that has grown stranger and more thunderous with each album. By the 1980s, the transformation was complete, although albums like swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs were gambits, alienating as many fans as they attracted. In the 2000s and likely in the 2010s, few of his peers have proven so durable, so unique, so successful.
His music no longer begins and ends with an acoustic guitar and a piano, but his foundational commitment to these instruments has kept his musical excursions anchored to a songcraft that favors strict structures and bold melodies. Critically speaking, Waits-- aided and abetted by wife and musical partner, Kathleen Brennan-- is a tinkerer, assembling musical contraptions out of various styles and traditions and synthesizing blues, rock, jazz, schmaltz balladry, and even hip-hop into a truly idiosyncratic art. But I seriously doubt anyone bought tickets for his Glitter and Doom Tour last year because of his relationship to American blues. Instead, they went to see Waits the showman's showman, who regales them with tall tales of hopeless city dwellers and heartbroken hucksters with a campfire intimacy that makes these otherworldly denizens feel very real. He comes across as a scourge of the past, an affront to the modern world of blogs, bailouts, and reality TV.
His reluctance to tour regularly made Glitter and Doom one of the most coveted tickets of 2008. For those (of us) who missed it, we have Glitter and Doom Live, an album that reconstructs a typical evening with Waits (even though the tracks were recorded at different stops along the tour). While his nightly set lists generally covered every phase of his career, going back as far as "Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis" from 1978's Blue Valentine, this live album culls primarily from his 90s and 00s output, including several tracks rescued on 2006's Orphans. There are few nods to the 1970s and 80s, as if he's trying to avoid any overlap with his previous live album, 1988's Big Time. Glitter and Doom Live is not simply a souvenir of a tour most fans didn't attend but a de facto greatest hits of Waits' fourth decade of music, during which his gnarly adventurousness didn't wane but only intensified.
Waits leads a small but versatile band that makes these songs swing, playing up the tension without overwhelming his melodies. Omar Torrez's guitar snakes around Waits' vocals sinisterly, punctuating "Goin' Out West" with spiky notes. Horns flare in the crosswinds of "Metropolitan Glide", as if alluding to all the early 20th century artists, poets, and musicians who tried to capture the hectic rhythms of the cities with equally hectic jabs of paint, word, and noise. The percussion is crucial here, whether Waits is breathing beats into the mic or his son Casey is pounding out railroad rhythms on "Get Behind the Mule". Opener "Lucinda/Ain't Goin' Down" sounds better here than it did on Orphans, losing its beatbox backing track for a lurching ranginess that suits Waits' delivery. Likewise, "Such a Scream" and "Goin' Out West" possess a new aggression as Waits unleashes a series of dime-novel machismo boasts: "I don't lose my composure in a high-speed chase," he grunts. "My friends say I'm ugly, but I got a masculine face."
Waits flirts with self-parody on "Circus" and "I'll Shoot the Moon", but he's been doing that for years. "Circus", from 2004's Real Gone, is a rambling tale of carnival characters, and "Moon" is a loose, loungey crooner with minimal accompaniment-- two sides of the same Waits. On the latter, he commandeers the bridge to hit on a barfly, rattling off a fake phone number: Is it unintentional schtick or simply part of the character Waits is playing in the song? He can get sentimental and even maudlin on "Fannin Street" and "The Part You Throw Away", but he's never sappy. Closer "Lucky Day" (like "Moon", from 1993's The Black Rider) ends the albums on a note that's both dreamily optimistic and earthbound by the vagaries of his voice. That's the essential contradiction of late-career Waits: He is both an incorrigible dreamer and an inveterate realist.
He's also a darn good storyteller. Right before launching into "Lucky Day", he holds forth on the subject of eBay, namely bidding on the dying breath of Henry Ford. It's a typical Waits yarn, drawn out with unbelievable details dug up from America's weird past, and the audience reacts with guffaws and applause. What's atypical about this story, however, is that it's the only one included on Glitter and Doom Live. The rest have been compiled on a companion disc titled "Tom Tales", which consists of one 35-minute track of Waits expounding on a variety of subjects (Nazi alphabet soup, uncharitable shrimp) at a variety of venues. He's funny, of course, rattling off arcane factoids and admonishing a rowdy audience to get organized with their requests. While it's better to have these stories than not, their inclusion feels like an afterthought, a tacit admission that they might have been better mixed in among the songs to give a better sense of what an evening with Waits is really like. That's only a minor complaint, as their presence here-- even excised from their original context-- nicely supplements a particularly lively live album that is also a persuasive retrospective of Waits' last 20 years.
