May 6, 1999
In certain circles, particularly those traveled by musicians, Tom Waits' return to recording after a 6-year absence has been awaited with a fervor that rivals that of The Phantom Menace. The man does not disappoint. Mule Variations is a summing-up of everything Waits has done in his 25 year career, from the tender piano ballads of his early years to the growling, clanging carnival stomps of his brilliantly experimental 80's work to the distorted cacophony of Bone Machine, his 1991 masterpiece.
Self-described as surrural (surreal + rural), much of Mule Variations sounds as if Alan Lomax had stumbled onto a drunken hobo carrying a tattered copy of a Charles Bukowski anthology and asked for a field recording. Gritty, greasy blues played on barbed wire and rusty harmonica, croaked out in a voice scratched by rooster claws and choked with graveyard dirt are only one style of which Waits is master. "Cold Water" is the finest example, an infectious childlike singalong about being broke, hostile cops, being 24 but looking 47, and the visceral joy of riding the rails. His instrumentation is as ramshackle as his singing, with megaphones, chumbus, turntables, optigon, chains, bells, dobro, chamberlin, bassoon, sax, metal stools scraping concrete and something he calls a conundrum contributing to a fundamentally bluesy racket that can be strangely beautiful, funny, frightening or just flat-out rocking.
Waits' Beat-derived persona is malleable but his snare-drum tight songwriting focuses on the losers and the freaks - you'll meet the Eyeball kid, a Filipino box spring hog, a prostitute with charcoal eyes, a diamond girl who wants to stay coal and a Chocolate Jesus. He's also remarkably touching, with a vision of passion that was born "as soon as I put your picture in a frame," and in the heart-wrenching "Take it With Me" argues that love might be as immortal as the poets say.
But even after chronicling the spirit-crushing pain that people can visit on each other in "Georgia Lee", Mule Variations ends on a defiantly optimistic note, a raucous, open-armed call to "Come On Up To The House" as Waits calls all the downtrodden to shelter in that roaring, weathered voice. As contradictory as life itself and just as fascinating, Waits' work is an experience you can't afford to miss.
- Jared O'Connor
Surrural blues from
The Man