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(Oct 29, 2004)
Rating - ***
The Tom Waits page
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Real Gone is the latest effort by Tom Waits, "a crustacean from
the Paleolithic era", to quote Chef from South Park. My earliest memory of
Waits is a song called "Pasties and G-String," with the refrain:
"Gonna give ya somethin' that you can't get at home." To give you an
idea of the time span we're talking here, Led Zeppelin hadn't yet
put out its last studio album when "Pasties" was written. Active volcanoes
still dotted the landscape of much of what is now Kansas and western Iowa.
He's one of those artists that seems to have been around forever, part of the
very infrastructure of the rock movement, and the fact that he is still recording,
writing new songs, and finding new areas of fusion is strongly to his credit. OK,
so he's old but not dead yet - we get the point!
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Marc Ribot, a jazz guitarist with a long and accomplished, if not sensationally
successful, recording career in his own right, joins Waits on most of the tracks,
playing a cigar box banjo on "Trampled Rose." To call Ribot a jazz guitarist is to
damn him with faint praise - witness his "Cubanos Postizos" project, a marvelous
tribute to Cuban jazz great Arsenio Rodriguez, or the song "Yo! I Killed Your God" -
he has style, humor, panache, and creativity coming out of his ears - one of America's
largely undiscovered treasures. His smooth and unmistakable sound is the perfect
foil to Waits' gravelly voice. In fact, I enjoy Real Gone more when I
pretend it's a Marc Ribot CD that his agent didn't do a good job of negotiating the credits for.
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There are several really fine songs on Real Gone, the best being "Don't Go
Into That Barn," which has a breath of its own, like a demonic fetus torn too
soon from the womb, cursing and hissing in its death throes on the ground, crackling
with flames and bubbling bile, with lesser demons accompanying it from the shadows. By
itself it's worth the price of the album. On the next rung down from "Barn" are "Hoist That
Rag," "Top of the Hil," and "Metropolitan Glide." Unfortunately, the rest of the
CD goes from slow, to slower, to slowest, until Chopin's Funeral March would
seem like a brisk romp in the meadow by comparison. To make matters worse, Waits'
voice, considered by many his most endearing quality, is just plain no good. To be
honest, if he didn't have a name for himself and submitted his singing on a demo
to the record labels, he'd be lucky to get signed. You could say the same for
Bob Dylan I suppose, but Waits is even worse. Despite the glacial pace of
many of the songs, and the incomparably grating voice of Waits, the songwriting is
so superb that the whole effort averages out to three stars.
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