Tom Waits - Small Change (Elektra)

“He’s a poser, and it makes me uncomfortable,” one man said from behind the record store counter. “I think he found a market, cornered it and has fostered this image very well, kind of like blackface, or parody at least.”

“Nah,” the other man said, “I think he’s who he is when he wakes up in the morning, same as who he is going to bed at night.”

I fall somewhere in the middle where Tom Waits is concerned. Sure it’s humorous, but I can’t help feeling an overarching love of humanity, or a deep understanding of why he doesn’t love humanity, or both. Small Change took Waits from the comedy routines of Nighthawks at the Diner to someplace else, a dark space populated with the rogues and bums that would become such an integral part of his later work. I mean for God’s sake, he even made the dwarves’ worksong into a trudgingly bleak proletarian anthem! Small Change is part surreal, anticipating later characterizations like “Tabletop Joe” in imagery while keeping to earthiness in its jazz combo instrumentation. “The Piano Has Been Drinking” is as over the top as he ever gets, but “Pasties and a G-string” is already walking bar, transcending the hoots and yells of burlesque watchers to whatever interior monologue is left after however many beers and shots. These intimations, bursts of transformed and publicized inwardness, would lead to the hauntingly strange landscapes of Rain Dogs; but then, there are the heartbreakers, the portraits of lonely down-and-outers that still bring tears to my eyes—“Invitation to the Blues” or “Tom Traubert’s Blues”, where the absurdity of Matilda killing “Bout a hundred” is subservient only to the “Battered old suitcase, and a hotel someplace, and a wound that will never heal.” Yes, the delivery’s part Louis Armstrong and part Broadway, but there’s plenty of every-man hipster guru in there as well. It’s a record so full of fused opposites, where bad livers and broken hearts meet for nothing more portentous than getting to the bottom of the bottle, that I simply can’t trust either man behind that record store counter. How wonderful to be so right and so wrong, but given the scope of Waits’ subsequent vision, “What the hell do you expect?”

~ Marc Medwin