As anyone who ever listened to him knows, Tom Waits is two men.
The first showed up in 1974 with The Heart of Saturday Night, a brilliant slate of tracks that, while not his debut album, announced the presence of an American songwriter who would not go unnoticed.
The second arrived nine years later with Swordfisthtrombones, a record that declared a sharp, eccentric break from everything he had done before.
The first era (6 albums, not counting his debut or the One From the Heart soundtrack) was defined by an elegant ability to chronicle the down-and-out. To give voice to the drunken, striving, troubled lives of people in touch, maybe too much so, with the ragged underbelly. He did pretty well with it, too. The Eagles covered him, among others, and he worked his way into a collaboration with Francis Ford Coppola (the aforementioned soundtrack), to name just two of the highlights.
The second featured a different kind of storytelling. More baroque, more theatrical, more willfully weird. He eschewed the piano ballads that had become his signature and replaced them with a unique but less accessible voice.
Any number of theories explain the shift. He stopped the hard partying. He got married. He stopped living in hotels, cafés, and bars. He tired of his own reputation and sought to expand his capabilities. All of these are probably true, to some degree, and are variously supported by the historical record.
But I have a different theory: Waits stopped being Waits because he couldn’t be Billy Joel.
In an October, 2004 review of Real Gone, Pitchfork.com writer Amanda Petrusich says: Sometime in the early 1980s, Waits stumbled past a mirror, caught a quick glimpse of his knobby mug, and was slapped with a cosmic, knee-wobbling epiphany: Tom Waits saw Billy Joel.
In Petrusich’s eyes this is clearly a very bad thing. Waits, after all, is a counterculture icon. He has the kind of credibility a guy like Billy Joel could only dream of. And yet for a time they both worked the same fertile ground: piano players and songwriters writing pop music with a nod to the disaffected.
From an artistic perspective Waits was always better at it. Nothing Billy Joel has ever done can stack up against Tom Waits at his best. The thing is, though, that there’s enough evidence in the albums leading up to Swordfishtrombones to suggest that Waits wanted to write a Piano Man of his own. He was no stranger to schmaltz (see Kentucky Avenue) and most of his early work has solid pop underpinnings (see the Eagles’ cover of ‘Ol 55). I don’t think he was willfully avoiding mainstream success, I think he was dancing right up to it and seeing if he could give it a go.
It just never clicked. Not really. So, Waits resigned his post.
That’s a shame because, despite the reputation, later Tom Waits isn’t as consistently good. There’s a Hang Down Your Head here or a Picture In a Frame there, sure, but for the most part you have to work to enjoy Waits, Version Two. He may be capable of more, but it amounts to less.
I wonder what could have been. What would have happened if he really did look in that mirror, really did see Billy Joel, and decided to ride it for all it’s worth. It’s a damn shame we’ll never know.
