Profane Profundities of the Proletarian Preacher

"Swordfishtrombones" (1983), by Tom Waits

Lemme pull on your coat about something…

My old friend, Chris Bailey (it was always Chris Bailey) introduced me to Tom Waits on one of our late-night weekend drives around the city of Phoenix. We were the kind of guys who generally wanted to stay out of trouble, and our favorite pastime was probably digging through stacks of used records. We weren’t above poking into seedier parts of the city, doing some GoodWill shopping, grabbing iced coffee at that Mill Avenue place near ASU, and maybe taking some snacks and whatever tapes we bought from Zia Records out on the back roads that used to exist between Mesa and Buckeye.

Those aren’t empty farm roads anymore.

On these tours of the record stores, the Holy Grail for Chris was a copy of Waits’ then-recent concert film “Big Time.” He never played that album in my car, though. He knew my tastes better than I did back then, and he was cagey about doling out Waits just a little bit at a time. He hooked me with the “funny” bits - ribald tales and wordplay from the live Nighthawks at the Diner, or the saucy “Pasties and a G String” off Small Change.

And “Frank’s Wild Years.”

Our Classical music station abruptly went off the air one day after it had been acquired by some corporate suits. For the golden space of a few days the DJs were told to “play whatever you want” …and boy, did they! I usually put that station on when I was by myself in the car on my way home from school, so I was astounded to switch over and hear Michael Penn, followed by They Might Be Giants, followed by…. Frank’s Wild Years.

I was so floored, that I hurried to the phone as soon as I got home. A tired voice answered, “106.3 FM,” and I said, “Are you guys not a classical music station anymore?”

“No,” he said, “I’m so sorry.”

“What? Why? This is great! Are you going to play this stuff all the time?”

The DJ perked up, because he had been getting hammered with angry calls from old people all day, and I was the first happy person he’d talked to. Sadly (for me) they soon switched to an “alternative rock” format - 106.3 The Edge - and while I did get to hear a lot of great music from them over the next few years, they never played Tom Waits again.

The DJ told me they got in actual trouble for playing “Frank’s Wild Years” that day because it referred to drinking and driving. (Not for arson or wife and chihuahua murder - but for drunk driving. Priorities.)

The song “Frank’s Wild Years” comes from the 1983 album Swordfishtrombones, which was the first of a sort-of trilogy of albums. It was followed up by Rain Dogs in 1985 and the album Frank’s Wild Years in 1987. Big Time was released in 1988 and mainly consisted of songs from those three albums.

Swordfishtrombones was the first album where Waits permanently departed from his shabby but lovable beat poet persona and began to inhabit darker characters from the darker corners of the world he sang about. This album centers on stories that could be about the same guy, but probably aren’t. The strung-out sailor of “Shore Leave” couldn’t possibly be the son of the bereaved mother in “Soldier’s Things.” The sailor’s wife back in Illinois could be from “Johnsburg, Illinois,” and it’s possible she stepped out with some “Gin Soaked Boy” - but none of them could be the same old doughboy from “Swordfishtrombone.”

None of these people are in a good place. Few of them are good people. And Waits carries their pain, whether in his poisonous carnival barker persona or his brusque chain-gang boss voice. He screams, hoots, growls, and huffs through these snapshots, and still wrings moments of clean beauty out of the remains.

In all my years, I’ve never been at the bottom, the way the people in these songs have been. I don’t think Tom Waits has, either. But I recognize the settings; I’ve felt the bottom drop out and felt the sting of loss. This album plays like the soundtrack to a movie that you don’t want to see, but you know is playing on screens near you.

I see now what Chris was trying to protect me from, and I have questioned many times whether I was ever ready for it. We were privileged suburban kids poking through the remnants of other people’s cast-offs at the Goodwill… until later, that’s the only place I could afford Christmas presents for my kids. We cruised through some dark parts of town, looking for people stuck in the trap of their own bad choices, wondering which of our choices would take us there someday.

There is a problematic appeal to visiting those dark places. On one hand, it would be worse to pretend they weren’t there or that people didn’t live that way. On the other hand, if you aren’t helping in some way, you’re exploiting them, turning their suffering into entertainment. I don’t know the “right way” to wrap your head around this puzzle, but…

For my money, if you want to go “Down, Down, Down” without having the devil call you by name, this is your ticket.