TOM WAITS/Mule Variations
(Epitaph)

© Michael Koster, June 1999

Imagine a communion wafer in the form of a chocolate bar, perfectly shaped to resemble our savior. Religion that literally melts in your mouth. Or a hog cooked up in a dug-out alley on a set of bedsprings, and basted with a sweeping broom. Or a diamond of a woman, who just wants to stay coal. Tom Waits goes beyond mere imagination by bringing his strange odyssey of oddball characters and surreal images to life in music—and it's all just weird enough, and delivered with the proper pomp and gravel, to be thoroughly captivating.

"Pin your ear to the wisdom post/Pin your eye to the line," Waits sings in "Get Behind The Mule," a rambling blues number that serves as Mule Variations' philosophic cornerstone. Guitarist Smokey Hormel lays a kind of cool, groove-laden net over Waits' seductive non sequiturs, all of which revolve around the refrain: "Got to get behind the mule/In the morning and plow." Waits has probably never seen a plow, much less worked one. But his falling upon this image as nothing less than a metaphor for living one's life gets to the crux of our man as both consummate entertainer and serious artist. Waits is not a bum; he doesn't ride the rails or sleep on the side of the road "with the snakes and the bugs," and he doesn't nurture himself with a strict diet of cheap red wine (I bet he drinks the good stuff) and Bohemian poetry. Yet his beat stories and metaphors are rendered with such sheer and loving belief that they remain thoroughly convincing. Waits clearly believes, and by extension we also believe.

It helps, too, that blues heavyweights Charlie Musselwhite and John Hammond pitch in with mouth harp chores, lending even more seeming authenticity to Waits' earthy poetics. Waits, in fact, has never been this bluesy. It's a direction that suits him well. It is therefore ironic that he's taking flak for his first new recording in six years, and so far the best album of 1999. Critics have come to expect so much of the "Skidrow Kid" (a 50-something artist who takes down $75 thousand a gig) that if a new release isn't entirely original, he's immediately guilty of some sort of artistic sin to which everyone else is immune. His supposed transgression on Mule Variations is that he already covered this material on the 1976 lounge classic Small Change,1985's eccentric masterpiece Rain Dogs, and to a lesser extent 1992's aberrant and percussive Bone Machine. Perhaps. But Variations is is every bit as good as those milestone albums. In some ways, maybe even better. One could argue that Waits' roadside fantasy images and dimestore novel characters are as wonderfully warped as ever, but that's no surprise for an artist who has been consistently delivering the goods for the better part of a quarter century. Or that you're 10 songs in before Variations gets even remotely less than compelling, but that's par for Waits' course as well. Or that the heartfelt sleepers that have come to grace even his most eccentric albums—in this case the sentimental "Picture In A Frame, the lump-in-the-throat "House Where Nobody Lives," and the pained yet gorgeous "Georgia Lee"—are as quiet and powerful as ever. But his newfound blues are what set Variations apart and put it over the top as a bona-fide classic.

I could go on for pages, and someday someone probably will. Some American studies grad student in full dissertation mode, smitten with Waits' very peculiar and very real genius, will fall upon this stunning body of work and attempt to dissect its weird pathways and loaded symbology. Said academic will fail, of course, because Waits is all about dirt and intuition, not intellect. It's like his wayfaring vagabond says in "Cold Water": "Some men are searchin' for the holy grail/But there ain't nothin' sweeter than ridin' the rails." Amen.