Crazy Horse’s Americana tour is now underway, and rather than focusing on the album, Neil, Poncho, Billy and Ralph seem to be following the usual pattern of testing out a lot of as-yet-unheard material. One song will be of particular interest to Canadians. For the moment, simply entitled “Ontario,” it’s an ode to Young’s home province, possibly inspired by his experience making his latest cinematic collaboration with Jonathan Demme, Neil Young Journeys.
Although not quite in the same league as some of Young’s great autobiographical numbers such as “Helpless” or “Don’t Be Denied,” ”Ontario” could also possibly stem from Young’s reflections while working on his book, Waging Heavy Peace, due out later this year. If there’s a soundtrack to it, this song would be track 1.
Here is evidently the first recording of “Ontario,” from Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, CO, Aug. 5. Thanks to the anonymous taper.
“I can never half-ass anything I do,” Jack White says. “I can never do things for image sake, that don’t have meaning underneath them.” He didn’t need to tell me this; I knew it even as I prepared to see him in his Third Man Records office, the door for which evidently once belonged to a John A. White III, D.D.S. Elsewhere in the waiting room, White’s passion for taxidermy was on full display, the main piece being a water buffalo-like creature with white stripes across its back, naturally.
The chat came a day after White fully unveiled the two (yes, two) new five-piece bands, one all-female and one all-male, that will be touring with him in support of his first solo album, Blunderbuss. The meaning behind that move? Presenting himself as a solo artist is virgin territory for White, and as he has consistently demonstrated throughout his career with the White Stripes, the Raconteurs, the Dead Weather, as well as notable collaborations with the likes of Loretta Lynn, Wanda Jackson and Tom Jones, doing things in his own inimitable way is what has gotten him this far.
“What it feels like is I’ve taken a deep breath and I’m saying, ‘OK, here’s me playing by the show biz rules right now,’” White says. “When you’re in a big band and that’s over, you’re supposed to make a solo album. I resisted that for a long time, but now it’s like I’ve finally let myself do this. A solo career was never an option before because I thought it was the easy way out.”
There is no doubt that Blunderbuss sounds like a Jack White solo record should, at least to anyone who has followed his career to this point. There are the bluesy, fuzzed-out riffs, but also deft displays of the musical evolution he has undergone since relocating to Nashville from Detroit five years ago. Fiddle, pedal steel and a range of vintage keyboards are now standard in his group(s), and audiences should be prepared to hear many of their past favourites given thorough makeovers.
There is also the question of whether the reason Jack is finally stepping out on his own with Blunderbuss is a reflection of his marriage to model/singer Karen Elson ending last year, soon after the White Stripes were officially put to rest. There is nothing to indicate he’s suffering though. To the contrary, those showing their support at the Third Man showcase included not only Elson, but also Raconteurs and Dead Weather band mates, and even White’s mother. It is more accurate to say that there is 20 years of experience packed into Blunderbuss.
“Sometimes it’s easy for people to think that new songs are about what you’re going through that week, but that’s not necessarily true,” White says. “Most of the time these feelings really have to fester before they get a chance to come out of you. It’s your job as an artist to figure out a way to nurture how to have it all come out when you want it to come out. That takes years, and you sort of have to train your body and your mind to do it.”
I guess it seemed inevitable that you would make a solo record, but has it taken this long because you’ve felt secure being part of a band?
I wouldn’t say that. This album naturally happened pretty much like everything else I’ve done. The Raconteurs just happened, the Dead Weather just happened. If you would have asked me a month before, ‘Are you going to be starting a new band,’ I would have said, ‘Are you crazy? I have no time to do that.’ It was the same thing with the Dead Weather, I had newborn kids, why would I start another band? It was hard enough to do what I wanted to do with the White Stripes, but the thing is, once something starts happening naturally, I don’t get in the way of it, I let it happen. I wouldn’t say that I choose to do it, like actually tried to make myself fit into a particular situation. Even with the White Stripes, it just happened.
You’re from a large family, and seeing you last night surrounded by so many band mates and all the other people who are part of Third Man suggested to me that you’ve wanted to have your music career be like a family too. Is that fair to say?
That would be my armchair psychiatrist opinion about myself, yes. I think when you’re raised in a house where there’s 20 people running around like crazy all the time, it’s not that much of a stretch to assume that’s how I want my environment to be. I like when things are happening and when everyone has a reason to be involved. It is a real familial type thing and as you saw last night, [the Dead Weather’s] Alison Mosshart and the Raconteurs guys were here and we all went out and saw the Greenhornes afterward. This is our family of musicians, and it was like that up in Detroit too when we had that whole garage rock scene.
Would that community mindset have been influenced by your Catholic upbringing as well?
I don’t know. I think that kind of stuff gets in the back of your brain when you’re raised in a religious household, or whatever your family is into. You carry that with you for the rest of your life. It’s like your heritage, if your family members are immigrants from Europe. You carry some of those pieces with you, and sometimes you don’t even realize it. I was saying the other day at breakfast, while putting salt on my oatmeal, that that comes from the Scottish side of my family in Nova Scotia. I actually read an article about it, and I never realized it until then. I’ve never known anybody else that puts salt on their oatmeal.
I don’t like to draw direct comparisons between artists, but the more I’ve seen of this latest project and what you’re able to do here at Third Man in terms of fulfilling your artistic desires, it’s reminded me of Prince in a lot ways. I hope you don’t take that the wrong way.
No, not at all. I think Prince is brilliant. You can go as deep as you want into those kinds of comparisons and it doesn’t bother me. Some people have walked in here and said it’s like the Beatles’s Apple Records and some people have said it’s like Chess Records. Paisley Park is certainly another one of those institutions where artists wanted to have a specific location in order to facilitate their ideas, and that’s what Third Man really is, a place to facilitate ideas.
Many people will probably call Blunderbussa break-up record, just based on what we know you’ve been through in your personal life in the past year. But to me it sounds more like you’re getting to an age where you’re pondering larger questions.
Well, for starters, it’s not a break-up record. If it were, it would be really weird to have Karen singing on three songs. To me, that disproves that idea. But people are always going to take things however they want to. If I come within 10 feet of a female on stage, people are going to make something out of that, even though I’m more likely to kiss Loretta Lynn than Alison Mosshart.
But the way you write about love on this record made me wonder if your art is fed by a need for the complications that stem from intense relationships?
We all have struggles we go through every day, no matter how “nice” we think we have it. As a songwriter/creator/producer, when I don’t have a struggle on a particular day, I will make one up. I will force a struggle to occur, and that could manifest itself through deciding to record a song with all female musicians and then getting another group of all male musicians to record the same thing just to see what happens. That suddenly raises all kinds of questions for me as a producer: how will they react to me, and what will I do differently? Will it make any difference at all? I want the musicians I play with to experience that kind of provocation, and I want the audience, both at a live show and listening to a record at home, to experience that as well.
The anger on a lot of these new songs reminded me of the great version of Dylan’s “Love Sick” that you and Meg used to do. The tension the two of you created always seemed to stem from something left unresolved in your relationship, even though that’s a huge assumption.
I see what you’re getting at. Some people might have an experience in love that might hurt their feelings for a second, but they let it roll off their back and they move on. A lot of artists, we don’t let things roll off our backs that easy. It absorbs into us and stays there forever. Sometimes when you put yourself inside a song, like when we recorded the U2 song “Love Is Blindness” during these sessions, I try to pull out anything from it that I can relate to that would make any sense for that song, just like with “Love Sick.” Lucky for me that I do hold onto these things. It’s sometimes a feeling that happened 12 years ago.
Were there moments of catharsis for you making this record?
Always, always. I feel fortunate whenever that happens, because like I’m saying, it’s not as if hitting a button just does it. I think I’ve gotten better over the years at realizing the difference between singing soulfully, and actually having it come from your soul. I also think that audiences can smell the difference.
From a purely sonic standpoint, Blunderbuss makes sense as a solo album simply because it draws from nearly every project in which you’ve been involved. Especially the last song, “Take Me With You When You Go,” seems to encapsulate a lot of it.
Yeah, there was no place else to put that song than at the end.
Have you been soaking up more sounds the longer you’ve lived in Nashville?
I would say it’s more a result of all the 45s and other records I’ve produced for Third Man. That really influenced the production style I used on this album, especially thinking about the Wanda Jackson record and having to orchestrate a 12-piece band. Had I not started Third Man and done all of those 45s, I don’t think this album would have been possible, certainly not in the way it turned out. Good or bad, it wouldn’t have sounded like this.
“I’m Shakin’” [originally done by Little Willie John] definitely sounds like it could have been on Wanda’s record.
That was the first track we did for Blunderbuss, actually. I like to start projects doing someone else’s song like that whenever I’m working with musicians who are new to me, just so everyone can a feel for what’s going on. We did with the Dead Weather too, recording [Dylan’s] “New Pony” first. Sometimes it turns out so well that it goes on the record.
Both of your current bands are fantastic, but I think people are really going to be blown away by the female band. You’ve obviously made it priority to include women in your music, and for me that’s always underscored how rock and roll always suffers when there isn’t that feminine balance. Do you agree?
Yeah, I mean, to compare the Raconteurs with the Dead Weather, just having that single female presence of Alison completely changes the whole dynamic. And obviously, the White Stripes wouldn’t have sounded like we did if there was a guy on drums. What Meg brought to the band is what made it what it is. I’ve never had any prejudice toward anybody, and I’ve probably worked with more women than guys. What I’ve noticed working with women is that a lot of bullshit goes out the window, and the focus is on accomplishing the task and getting down to something. Guys can often walk in the room with a lot of other agendas going on—egos, hang-ups—especially 20-something white hipsters. They can bring so much bullshit to the table that you have to sift through, and then they might turn around and sabotage you a week later because of all those hang-ups. I haven’t really experienced that working with females. That being said, it’s your job when you’re working with someone to bring out the best of what both of you can do together, so all of those are challenges to me. And like I said, I like the idea of shaking things up for myself, and that’s really what was behind this idea of two bands. We did rehearsals for this tour in two different locations across town and would drive back and forth between them every couple of hours. We’d rehearse the same songs with totally different rhythms, speeds, intros and outros, and it was my responsibility to remember all of it. On top of that, each band knew that there was this other band rehearsing the same songs. It wasn’t until the show here last night that they’d heard each other. I was even tempted to tell them that they weren’t allowed to watch, just to see what that would do. But that was the time when it made sense for them to finally see each other, while we were in this environment with everyone here for support. I felt it would really open things up before we go on tour. I think it was really inspiring for both bands, because it wasn’t one-sided in any way. Everyone who came out had something to say, and it was totally balanced. Half the people I talked to talked about a certain female musician and half talked about a certain male musician, whoever it was. I’m so pleased, because up until yesterday there was this lingering feeling that this might not work. Everybody could have said, well, we like the girl band but we don’t like the guy band, or so-and-so was better than so-and-so. But it was completely balanced, and I consider that a total blessing because it could have been a disaster.
So there weren’t any particular songs that you felt were better suited to a particular band?
I had to think about last night’s set a little bit because we were doing 10 songs apiece, and also, nobody knew that we were going to do White Stripes, Raconteurs and Dead Weather songs. What I knew was that coming out of the gate with a White Stripes song would change the pace of whatever expectations there were for hearing all of this new material and sort of say that this is how things are going to be. But I’m sticking with my no set list rule, which is something that none of these musicians have experience with. It’s high energy with everyone all the time.
Was it important for you and Meg to make that announcement last year that the White Stripes were officially over?
Very much so, because as much as I’d like to think that everyone is open-minded these days and less cynical, I don’t think a lot of people would know the difference between a Jack White solo record and a White Stripes record. I think a lot of people are just too close-minded in terms of believing that Meg didn’t bring a unique component to that band. I don’t even want to battle those people’s dumb misconceptions in any way. So that was one of the reasons why I wouldn’t have done a solo album while the White Stripes existed. I’m not saying that in an insulting way, but when you’re out there you realize that there’s this show biz stuff going on where people perceive things in a certain way and you can’t shake them out of it no matter how hard you try. People can say that they wish Meg was a part of it too—that’s actually flattering—just as long as they don’t say that this is the same thing as what the White Stripes were. That says to me that they think I’m mixed up for not knowing the difference.
Is it a full-time job being Jack White?
I think you have a choice to make when you call yourself an artist. To some people that means, I’m not going to have a day job, I can do whatever I want, I’m going to paint paintings and sleep in until noon. To some people that’s what the term rock star means, partying like some heavy metal guy. The other choice is to really become an artist by sacrificing yourself. Whatever your name was before, and whoever you were before, you don’t get to be that person ever again. I can only imagine that it’s like going to war and coming back a completely different person. That is what I think true artists have to do, to make that very dangerous choice to give yourself over and never go back. That means you never get to go home again, which is a scary thing to admit out loud, but I made peace with that a long time ago. I made that choice that this was not a 9-to-5 job for me, this was 24-hours a day, and that’s all it can ever be for me. I can never exploit myself for celebrity or money or anything. All I can do is create, because I have an incessant need to create. And it’s even scarier from a child’s perspective, being raised by someone who’s completely given themselves away to something they can’t come back from. I understand it, and one day they’ll understand it to.
An edited version of this piece also appeared in the May 2012 issue of The Word.
With their 2010 album, Brothers, the Black Keys did everything right in ambitiously expanding their sound without sacrificing any soul. It was a career-defining work, and the Akron, OH duo of singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney were rightly rewarded for it in the marketplace.
But while some artists might use such a milestone as an opportunity for further artistic reassessment, the Black Keys have stormed back in what seems a scant 18 months with El Camino, a crisp 11-track collection that displays a band that have constructed a grand home upon a simple foundation, but for now are content to rearrange the furniture. This is most evident in Carney’s drumming; for the first time, he no longer sounds self-taught and El Camino‘s tightness is its biggest surprise.
But after the opening salvo of “Lonely Boy,” “Dead and Gone” and “Gold on the Ceiling,” all of which could have been 1960s AM radio hits, Auerbach throws a curve with riff-fest “Little Black Submarines,” although it’s a rare concession to the band’s new arena audience. The rest of El Camino shifts gears effortlessly from the Hound Dog Taylor-esque boogie of “Run Right Back” to the vintage R&B of “Stop Stop.”
The latter bears the sonic stamp of producer Danger Mouse and his return to the fold after a minimal contribution to Brothers is another indication of Auerbach and Carney’s current desire for familiarity. Like the battered mini-van on the album cover, El Camino won’t attract the same gawkers that its souped-up predecessor did, but it’s reliable enough to get long-time fans where they want to go.
I understand that this record was made earlier this year and it’s been done for some time. True?
Yeah, but that’s how it generally goes for us. We’ll finish a record and it’ll take something like four months for it to come out.
Were you guys still itching to do something after finishing the tour for Brothers?
We actually hadn’t finished touring when we started this record. It took 40 days to make, but it was off-and-on because we had to leave for shows, come back and leave for shows again.
Did you have a plan in place with Danger Mouse?
We really love hanging out with Brian and respect him as a record maker and I think he feels the same about us, so there really wasn’t much to talk about. We agreed to do it, set up some dates and started working. That’s pretty much it; we didn’t talk much about what we were going to do ahead of time and we didn’t do any demos. There were no rehearsals; we had nothing when we went into the studio. We started from scratch every day.
You hadn’t written any songs?
No. No lyrics, nothing.
That makes sense, since my first impression of the record was just how tight and punchy it is. All of your records are raw to various degrees, but was your intention to do something really spontaneous?
Well, like I said, we didn’t really talk about it; we had no goal. But we were certainly listening to a lot of three-minute songs on 45s, old rockabilly records ― the Johnny Burnette Trio, the Sweet, the Cramps, the Clash, the Cars. We were just listening to stuff that was sort of compact. I guess subconsciously we got told what to do.
What stood out for me most was Pat’s drumming, which sounds so much different than how he’s played before. Tight is really the only word to describe it.
Yeah, there are parts that are super-tight. I think he was trying more stuff on this one than he has on any of our other albums, which is really cool.
As you said, you made the record while you were still on tour, so is it fair to say that all of the time you’d spent on the road played a role in how it turned out?
I definitely think it did. We’d become so used to playing the more up-tempo songs from Brothers; we didn’t really play the quiet ones. I wouldn’t say that our set is aggro, but it’s pretty rockin’, so that was our general mindset in the studio each day. Along with all of that music we were listening to that I already mentioned, it all just sort of happened without too much discussion. One thing I can say is that after we finished the fifth or sixth song we realized that we were getting into this real up-tempo groove, so we just let it be and didn’t really worry about it too much. Some of our records have had a lot of variation on them, in terms of tempos and a mix of loud and quiet songs, but we just let this one be what it was going to be.
It is notable that there aren’t any ballads.
Yeah, I guess the closest thing is the beginning of “Little Black Submarines,” but that goes away pretty quickly. I mean, we didn’t feel like we had to do a ballad. I think people know by now that we can play quietly if we want to, judging by our other records.
Since you mention “Little Black Submarines,” that really is the song that stands out from the rest. You must have had a good time doing that one, with the big riff and the guitar solo.
Yeah, that was my jock-rock moment. We actually did that song in two versions, an acoustic one and an electric one and spliced them together. I think that the electric half of that song is the closest representation of our live show than anything we’ve done before, and that’s more of the way Pat drums.
I also appreciated how you stuck to your R&B roots in songs like “Run Right Back.” I guess that will never leave you guys?
I don’t think so; it’s kind of ingrained in our brains. That’s what originally got us together: a mutual love of Stax Records, and hip-hop that was sampling Stax Records. That’s our foundation and I’m not sure we could shake that even if we tried.
I picked up on possibly a few Phil Spector-ish things too, or was that more Brian’s input?
I wasn’t listening to any Phil Spector, but I can say that I was listening to Duane Eddy and other kinds of ’50s stuff with that heavy reverb, which I guess is kind of Spector-ish.
The first single, “Lonely Boy,” is already all over radio in Canada, and I think that speaks to how much people here embraced you with Brothers.
Yeah, Canada was where it first really blew up.
It led to the extensive cross-country tour you did here earlier this year. What was that like for you?
A lot of miles and a lot of poutine. Seriously, it was amazing. The crowds were so much fun. A lot of times you’ll play in a big city and people will just stand around. That always seems to be the thing. You’ll go to L.A. or NYC and people will just stand there. You have to go to, like, Middle America to find people who want to go crazy. But it seemed it was like that in every place we played in Canada. There was such a great energy in every audience and that makes it so much more fun for us. It was basically show after show of that feeling.
From the first time I heard Brothers, there was something special about it, and I was really happy that it became as popular as it did. Did you have any sense while you were making it that that was the case?
I think it was a surprise; we didn’t go into it trying to make a commercial success. It didn’t necessarily sound like anything on the radio. It just sort of connected with people and there was no way we could have predicted that, to be honest. But I have to say that it is a beautiful thing to have had the success we’ve had and still be in complete control of every artistic step of the process. Ever since day one, we’ve made every call, not just musically, but with the artwork and the videos, everything. So whether it turned out to be a win or a loss, it was always on our shoulders.
I suppose that explains why El Camino is coming out in what seems like such a short time after the biggest record you’ve had so far. Most bands or labels nowadays would want to take at least two or three years to follow up an album like that.
Yeah, we don’t get that. We’ve been doing things our own way for ten years now, to the point where, honestly, we don’t relate to other bands. We didn’t start using a producer until our fifth record, or even record in a proper studio. We’re completely self-taught ― our whole idea of what it means to be a band is different from everybody else’s. I think being from the Midwest, we knew that we really had to work for it if we wanted it, you know? We didn’t even have a club to play when we started; we had to drive an hour north to Cleveland to play shows. I’d say it’s the work ethic we have, combined with good luck and timing that’s made it happen for us.
You expanded the band with Brothers without tampering with that foundation of you and Patrick. Are you planning on going further with that when you hit the road for El Camino?
Definitely. The new songs are, for the most part, based around a quartet concept ― guitar, bass, drums and keyboard ― and I don’t think I’d feel right playing them without having those parts there from the record.
I had the pleasure of speaking to Tom Waits over the phone just prior to the release of his latest album, Bad As Me. It was an enjoyable half-hour conversation (hopefully for him as well), and he was generous with his answers. Here is the piece that came out of it, the cover story for Exclaim‘s November, 2011 issue.
“The amount of time that you spend on anything should not, and will never, directly correspond to how important or interesting it is,” Tom Waits says. “A moment of inspiration will far surpass spending six years on something.”
Most fans of Waits would surely concur with that view, and in large part prefer it that way, knowing that catching up with the fortunes of the barstool philosophers, apocalyptic street preachers, and other characters that most often appear in his songs is a reward for patience that few other artists can offer nowadays.
Waits’s new album, Bad As Me, is indeed his first collection of new music since 2004’s Real Gone, on which experiments with turntables and beatboxing accentuated a more-caustic-than-usual frame of mind. In contrast, Bad As Me finds Waits returning to his patented balance of dirt floor stomps and heart-wrenching ballads—“brawlers and bawlers” to paraphrase the title of his essential 2006 rarities collection.
Even for fans accustomed to Waits’s open challenges, Real Gone required some heavy lifting, although that was tempered by Waits eventually following it up with a live album recorded on his six-week Glitter & Doom tour in the summer of 2008. Once donning his on-stage persona, Waits offered his most recent material in a less cluttered manner, and that approach has carried over into Bad As Me.
Recorded at the start of 2011, the album is again co-produced by Waits’s chief collaborator, his wife Kathleen Brennan, and features many of his core studio players such as guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist Larry Taylor, and son Casey on drums. But with guest appearances from Keith Richards, Flea, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, Sir Douglas Quintet organist Augie Meyers, and harmonica legend Charlie Musselwhite, Bad As Me follows in the relatively accessible tradition of Waits’s most commercially successful albums, 1985’s Rain Dogs and 1999’s Mule Variations. In an eerie way, it almost seemed time for the next installment of this ongoing drama to appear, although Waits cannot say if he ever feels he’s on a timetable.
“On one hand [these records] all happen very quickly, and on the other hand they take forever,” he admits. “With every song, if you know how to crack them open, you can find hundreds of other songs within them. The first couple of songs are always the hardest and serve as icebreakers. Once the ice is broken, you go into the freezing water and float downstream. Then when you’re out of breath, you realize you’re half a mile from the hole you went in, and you drown in front of a class of elementary school kids.”
Speaking in such shocking metaphors has become a Waits trademark in this current phase of his career. His gift for crafting modern fables now attracts admirers from all musical genres, and coupled with his frequent film roles playing a wide range of shady characters—including Satan himself in Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus—Waits has emerged as a unique presence within the global arts scene, someone unafraid to shine a light on the world’s dark corners, albeit with enough wit and style to make it romantic.
When asked about playing out the roles he writes for himself in his songs, Waits in some ways speaks like an actor, distancing himself from the process. “The ingredients of songs can easily include a stain on your bedroom wall, or the flavour of a soda they’ve stopped making—a variety of recollections over one chord. And the title is a girl’s name that you made up. So songs have humble and peculiar origins, and by the time they become songs they conceal most of what really happened. They usually send you off in a direction that’s completely incorrect. It doesn’t mean they’re not interesting, it just means that the truth is overrated.”
That may be so, but many Waits fans can attest to discovering his music at the onset of adulthood, the moment when life’s artifice is exposed for the first time. Like Catcher In The Rye and On The Road, Waits’s albums in the wake of his 1983 tour de force Swordfishtrombones can offer the sorts of lessons that those leaving home for the first time will never learn in school, i.e. the grim reality that one day we’ll all be (as a track from 1992’s Bone Machine plainly states) “Dirt In The Ground,” or in the case of “Get Behind The Mule,” that the best we can do is an honest day’s work, although it still won’t be enough to get what we really want.
Tying in these sorts of ideas with an artist’s personal life is always dangerous, but in Waits’s case it’s virtually irrelevant. His appeal, in large part, seems to lie in listeners living vicariously through his image, one developed from the pre-rock musical and literary touchstones that for the first decade of his career made him an oddity among popular “confessional” singer/songwriters like Neil Young and James Taylor. That view of Waits has changed drastically, however, as recent unlikely interpreters as Robert Plant and Scarlett Johansson have proven that anyone can extract their own meaning from his songs if they are willing to get their fingernails a little dirty in order to uncover what’s buried just below the surface.
It’s not as if Waits hasn’t earned the right to hold the keys to America’s cobwebbed cultural attic. While at the outset of his career in the early 1970s, the California native was just one of countless troubadours hustling their songbooks around L.A., by the middle of the decade Waits chose to fully immerse himself in a fading world of aging Beat poets, after-hours jazz clubs and seedy motels; a world about as far removed from the general perception of California at the time as one could get.
It was a bold decision, especially with the first stirrings of punk rock underway, and peers like Bruce Springsteen embracing the stadium rock aesthetic. But Waits’s commitment to his bohemian muse—along with a knack for hiring the ideal backing musicians to realize his vision—brought him a devoted following through albums such as 1976’s Small Change, and 1980’s Heartattack And Vine.
Right after that, director Francis Ford Coppola hired Waits to score the film One From The Heart, and everything changed. Kathleen Brennan was working as a script consultant for Coppola, and she and Waits married not long after the film was completed. Although she had never sought the spotlight, Brennan’s fertile creative mind had an immediate impact on Waits. She also knew the reclusive Captain Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet, who passed away late in 2010. It was his dada-ist approach to blues that soon became an integral component of Waits’s musical evolution.
“[Don] was angry when Swordfishtrombones came out,” Waits says while reminiscing about Beefheart. “He thought I’d appropriated elements of it from him, particularly the image of a fish, which he’d used on [his 1969 masterpiece] Trout Mask Replica. For me it was more of a tribute in a way. Somebody said that Trout Mask is the only pop/rock record that can be considered a work of art by the standards imposed by other disciplines, like painting. [Don] was a comet; he was not like anything else, and that’s about all you can say.”
A similar notion of Waits’s own work breaking free of artistic conventions took hold by the mid-‘80s. He and Brennan produced the play Frank’s Wild Years, based on many of the first songs they wrote together. It was followed up with an equally theatrical tour, captured for posterity on the 1988 live album and concert film Big Time. Since then, Waits and Brennan have written songs for playwright Robert Wilson’s productions The Black Rider, Blood Money and Alice, the last two featuring Canadian avant garde saxophonist Colin Stetson as a member of the band.
But while there are clear distinctions among all of these phases and facets of Waits’s career to date, the fact that he treats them all as a single body of work has made it nearly impossible for critics to pin him down. Not surprisingly, he views his career arc in much simpler terms today. “Songs with wisdom in them or cautionary tales, or songs that pretend to teach, are not new and never will be new,” Waits says. “They’re as old music itself. At some point someone figured out that the best way to remember something was to sing it, just like if you want to remember a poem, you write it down, or if you’re rehearsing a play, you walk through it while saying the lines—when I get to the chair, I know I’m supposed to say, ‘kill Dad.’”
For many casual listeners, though, it’s Waits as the gravelly-voiced hobo bluesman that they want, and Bad As Me will not disappoint them. From the churning opening track, “Chicago,” which explores with modern clarity the great migration of African-Americans from southern plantations to northern industrial cities, the album is another stage in the great blues reinvention project that Waits in large part instigated, with his early experiments at adapting raw sounds from long-forgotten performers of the 1920s and ‘30s now having led to Black Keys songs being used in TV commercials.
Someone who can testify to Waits’s importance in that regard is the Ontario-born spoken word/beatbox artist and harmonica player C.R. Avery whom Waits encountered in Berlin during the 2004 Real Gone tour and invited on stage for two of the concerts in that city. “Tom’s a living, breathing example of that mystical world of troubadours, so it was great to experience that firsthand,” Avery says. “It actually did confirm for me that that mystical world does indeed exist and I should keep striving to become a part of it. Even though I grew up loving hip-hop, and still do, the appeal of the blues will never be denied.”
Waits explains further that he often writes with a specific artist in mind, as evidenced by how some of his most affecting songs have been for others, such as Johnny Cash’s “Down There By The Train,” and Solomon Burke’s “Diamond In Your Mind.” On Bad As Me he says the song “Raised Right Men” was an attempt at a song for Aretha Franklin, a la “Respect,” but some of the album’s other lyrics were spurred by a fascination with reading west coast newspapers from the dawn of the 20th century. “Sometimes you’d turn the page and it would disintegrate, like it was made out of butterfly wings,” Waits says. “But what you realize immediately is that nothing is new under the sun, to quote Ecclesiastes, and at the same time there are fascinating insights into life before cell phones.”
That can also be said of the album’s closer, “New Year’s Eve,” which reads like the outline of a lost Charles Bukowski manuscript, as the plights of the song’s characters are illuminated in the harsh light of what is supposedly our most celebratory communal holiday. Yet, it’s a prime example of why Waits can never be accused of being a sentimentalist; an unceasing desire to keep living in the face of life’s misery is what matters, not looking back with regret.
“One of the first songs I remember was ‘Abilene’ [by George Hamilton IV],” Waits says before breaking into an impromptu rendition. “The line in that song that always stuck with me was about the guy sitting alone, wherever he was, watching the freight trains go by, wishing to God one of them could take him back to Abilene. It’s about missing your home after leaving behind things that you know, and trading them in on something you’ve never seen before. It’s a simple song, but profound at the same time.”
Nowhere is that idea better expressed on Bad As Me than “Last Leaf,” a duet between Waits and Keith Richards that finds them toasting their shared resilience with a noticeable glint in their eyes. If there’s any song that men will want played at their funerals from now on, it’s this one.
Yet, at 61, Waits still has a lot to accomplish. Earlier this year he contributed a series of poems to photographer Michael O’Brien’s book of portraits of homeless people, which raised close to $100,000 for a California food bank. There is also said to be a new musical with Robert Wilson in the work. What Waits says he won’t be spending his time doing is writing an autobiography as Richards did to great acclaim, even though a Waits book has to be one of the Holy Grails in publishing today.
However, just as his characters must continually look ahead with hope in order to find a reason to go on, so too does Tom Waits. “It takes a certain kind of hubris to do [an autobiography], and a big advance,” he says. “I see it as you’ve put your pack down and you’re sitting on a stump, looking back instead of forward, which is really not the best angle. Maybe I’ll be able to do it when I’m senile. That will make it more interesting.”
The great acoustic folk/blues guitarist Bert Jansch died from cancer on Oct. 5. I had the pleasure to interview him in 2006 upon the release of his excellent album The Black Swan. He was soft-spoken and humble, very much grateful that a new generation was discovering his music.
Here is the piece as it was published in the Nov/06 issue of Exclaim!:
Bert Jansch Is A Folk Star Reborn
As a cult hero for over 40 years, Bert Jansch can count among his many admirers Jimmy Page and Neil Young. But it is the new generation of psych-folk artists that has brought the British acoustic guitar god back with The Black Swan, arguably his best work since his days with Pentangle. Co-produced by Noah Georgeson, the man behind Joanna Newsom’s exquisite Milk-Eyed Mender, and featuring guest appearances by Devendra Banhart, Beth Orton, and Mazzy Star’s David Roback, the album recaptures the ancient mystique that made Jansch’s early albums, like 1966’s landmark Jack Orion, endlessly entrancing.
“Noah was recommended to me to help with the production, and I met him for the first time after seeing him play with Devendra in London,” the soft-spoken Jansch says. “Everyone in the band offered to help out on the record right away, which was great. It took me a while to get used to how Noah works, but once we got going, it was a fantastic experience.”
The revisiting of classic sounds only adds to The Black Swan’s top-notch performances, from the heartbreaking Irish prison ballad “The Old Triangle,” to the haunting title track, an original composition that Jansch says he’s had with him for several years. “I had a chance to play a lot of these songs live for a long time, which made a huge difference before recording.” The Black Swan’spedigree has already set it apart within Jansch’s vast catalogue, and should prove to be his best received album in recent memory. But aside from that, it is a timely and fitting tribute from the latest group to fall under the spell of his groundbreaking style. “I’ve been listening to Devendra a lot lately, and it is surprising to hear my stuff in his music,” he says. “It was strange at first, but then that made me think of how strange I probably sounded when I started.”
I first became aware of the Sheepdogs when a copy of their self-released version of Learn & Burn arrived at Exclaim! Magazine in the spring of 2010. For starters, I wasn’t impressed by the package–the garish yellow cover was amateurish, and the inside contained the sort of slapdash photo montage that a million other weekend warriors have employed on homemade CDs.
Of course, none of that should matter, but when you receive a few dozen CDs a week, judging by the cover soon becomes second nature. When I did listen to the album, my first impression was that this had to be a reissue of something originally released in 1974. I honestly couldn’t believe that these guys were serious, and I couldn’t even be bothered to review it. It was as if they were from a world where punk rock never existed.
This seems to be a good thing, judging by the media reaction to the Sheepdogs recently winning the contest to be the first unsigned band to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone. It’s raised a lot of questions for me though, the biggest one being why is this happening now?
A clue is in one of the initial reviews of Learn & Burn, posted on Chartattack, formerly Chart Magazine, the Canadian publication geared toward mainstream pop and rock listeners. The “4/5″ review compared the band to Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and Pink Floyd. The Sheepdogs’s own bio cited the Allman Brothers and Moby Grape as influences.
I encountered a similar enthusiastic reaction at a recent story meeting at Exclaim, when a 20-something contributor, well-schooled in modern rock, raved about a Sheepdogs’s set he saw at a summer festival. I was dumbfounded.
I cannot fault the young music journalists of today for dropping names that must have the same iconic ring to them as Robert Johnson’s name had for me as a teenager, but in my view, the Sheepdogs sound like Led Zeppelin about as much as LZ sounded like Elvis Presley.
What the Sheepdogs do sound exactly like is the Guess Who, and band who–as a kid growing up in Canada in the 1970s–was ubiquitous and the antithesis of cool. Yes, “American Woman” encapsulated the feelings of a large segment of society in 1970 and it made the group Canada’s first true international rock and roll success story.
Yet, the force-feeding of their catalogue as a result of Canada’s horribly antiquated Can/Con broadcasting regulations has made me even more hostile toward all things Bachman and Cummings. These guys have gotten a free ride for the past 40 years, as many other Canadian musicians of that generation continue to receive, and I’m tired of it.
So now we have the Sheepdogs carrying on that tradition, and songs from Learn & Burn will no doubt be heard on Canadian radio for decades to come, even if the band never puts out another album. The difference is, this is comfort food for an increasingly conservative culture; a soundtrack to enable baby boomers to bond with their grandchildren.
To be clear, I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that September marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Rock and roll, circa 1991:
The Rolling Stone thing is a whole other issue. It’s as if Jann Wenner saw the opportunity to play out the premise of Almost Famous in real life–and don’t think that that thought didn’t cross his mind. He’s a guy who still goes out of his way to give his old pal Boz Scaggs’ albums 4-star reviews.
Speaking of Scaggs, I found it coincidental that the writer of the Sheepdogs’ RS cover story bore that last name. Another coincidence? The band’s TV showcases have been on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon–Fallon had a role in Almost Famous. All of that is aside from the overriding question of how an unknown band from Saskatoon gets in that position in the first place, with the entire music industry falling at their feet. If there’s any lesson at all in Almost Famous–as Fallon’s character illustrated–it’s that that sort of thing just doesn’t happen without the highest levels signing off on it.
The article itself has raised the ire of Canadians for other reasons, mostly for several unnecessary–and offensive–swipes at Saskatchewan and its residents. Scaggs also takes a poke at The Tragically Hip, calling them “awful yet extremely popular.” Why he couldn’t have said the same thing about Nickelback is not clear. I have admittedly been disappointed at times with The Hip over the years, yet their music is not awful, and never will be. The fact that they have never attained enough currency to warrant the cover of RS seems the only criteria for the magazine to feel the need to dismiss their entire catalogue.
The music industry as Jann Wenner knew it is on its deathbed, and its so-called legends are looking more pathetic by the day. Attempting to recapture those days of stadium tours and double live albums is a natural, but highly misguided, way to recoup staggering financial losses. But in the not too distant future, it will all be gone; a process that will speed up if derivative bands like the Sheepdogs are all that’s out there.
I’m prepared to receive your ire, but please keep in mind that this isn’t a personal thing. I haven’t met anyone in the band, and I’m sure they’re good guys. All Canadian musicians are good guys (that’s what everyone always says), but that doesn’t mean they all make good music.
This piece also appears in the September, 2011 issue of Exclaim!
It’s been 15 years now since Hank 3 took up the mantle of country music royalty first passed down from the grandfather he never knew, Hank Williams, to the father he barely knew, Hank Williams Jr.
Shelton Hank Williams had no intention to follow in their footsteps—he was playing drums in Nashville punk bands until a one-night stand suddenly came back to haunt him in the form of $24,000 in back child support.
Thus, at 23, estranged from his family, he began singing country music in the style of Hank Sr. (to whom he bore a striking resemblance) in order to dig himself out of that hole, and hired a manager to fully exploit his legacy through a long-term deal with Nashville’s Curb Records, whose roster at the time also included Tim McGraw and LeAnne Rimes.
It was a decision Hank 3, as he became formally known, soon regretted since he could never play by Nashville’s rules. Although his five albums for Curb came to display great skill at balancing traditional country with his punk and metal influences, the constant fights with the label over his creative vision left him feeling shackled, and ultimately more respected within the hard music world, where he was also known for his Assjack side project and as a member of Superjoint Ritual and Arson Anthem, both featuring Pantera vocalist Phil Anselmo.
The Curb deal finally expired on Jan. 2, 2011, and on that day Hank 3 founded his own label and started recording at his home studio, the Haunted Ranch. And he kept on recording. In one of the boldest statements any musician has made in recent memory, Hank 3 is releasing all of that material at once in the form of the 41-track countrified double set Ghost To A Ghost/Guttertown, the doom rock collection Attention Deficit Domination, and for good measure, Cattle Callin’, the brain-melting one hour-plus mash-up of auctioneers and thrash metal.
“It was starting all over from scratch,” Hank says. “Every day for five months, from the time I woke up to the time I fell asleep, I was writing, laying down tracks and mixing. I started with the country stuff on Ghost To A Ghost, and then started having fun with the b-sides on Guttertown. When I got sick of playing country, I’d play some doom, and when I got sick of that, I started getting the auctioneers together. It was just constant.”
Although Hank was diagnosed with ADD as a teenager, he maintains that the new releases are designed more to show how much Curb was holding him back. “Name me one person who’s ever released that much on the first day, and on top of that, tackled three different genres in the process,” he says. “That’s been my vision all along, and that’s how I feel I’ve carved out my own niche.”
Having now attained his long-sought-after freedom, it’s likely to translate into wider acceptance from the industry. Getting Tom Waits to guest on the Guttertown track “Fadin’ Moon” is a definite feather in Hank’s cap—their friendship began when Waits interviewed Hank for Mojo last year—yet, like Waits, remaining a musical iconoclast is the path for which Hank 3 feels he’ll always be best suited.
“I still play three-hour shows with everything included in the set,” he says. “Some nights we’ll start out with a thousand people and by the end half the audience has either gotten tired and left or is passing out drunk. I’ll keep doing what I do regardless, and to me that’s the Hank Williams bloodline of hard work and telling the stories of working people.”
Creator
Jason Schneider is an author and music journalist based in Waterloo, Ontario. He has published four books and is also the roots music editor for Canada's national music monthly, Exclaim! Magazine.
heartbreaktrail at gmail.com
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