1987: Frank’s Wild Years

Never could stand that dog

Strange how potent cheap music can be. It can preserve a moment, trapped in vinyl, and it can last a lifetime, accompanying, inspiring, supporting. Year by year, these are the songs that have soundtracked our lives.

Tom Waits’ 1987 album Frank’s Wild Years, track by track.

Hang on St. Christopher

Despite being tone deaf, having no sense of rhythm and being far too cack handed to play an instrument effectively, I always wanted to be a musician. Around the age of eighteen I had a very clear idea of the kind of music I would make if I was. It would be rhythmically lumbering, musically peculiar, unexpected, delirious, the sort of music a monster in a Universal movie might make. Like nothing anyone else had ever done before.

Then, one day, I walked into a friend’s bedroom and discovered someone else had done it. Someone had made the music I was hearing in my head. Music no one else had made before. A whole new direction. Hang on to your St. Christophers, because it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Straight to the Top (Rhumba)

How do you describe the music Tom Waits was making in this period to someone who has never heard it before? The Rhumba version of ‘Straight to the Top’ is a decent enough place to start, possibly. Several hairy percussion sections have got together to rumble out a rhumba beat, while the horns from a Turkish big band are playing odd little snippets of melodies, with an angry old street preacher yelling a parody Frank Sinatra song over the top.

None of it sounds like it should work on its own and certainly not all happening together, and yet it all coalesces into an extraordinary sound that is simultaneously new and full of its influences. This meld of obscure folk instruments, blues song structures and beat lyrics created the soundtrack of a parallel world, of back streets and cellar bars and attic roosts, a music unlike any other.

Blow Wind Blow

The friend had been given the Tom Waits record by an Aunt, which was just as well because we were unlikely to have found it by ourselves.

Starting in the late ‘70s Radio One DJ and universal hipster uncle John Peel would compile his Festive Fifty, a list of the best records of the year, voted for by his listeners. The Festive Fifty for 1987 included a lot of bands I loved, like The Wedding Present, The Jesus And Mary Chain, Big Black and Sonic Youth, but no Tom Waits. Twelve different Smiths tracks. Twelve. A whole thirteen too many. But no Tom Waits. Even for the indie kids, who scorned Top of the Pops and used the Top 40 merely as a guide as to what not to listen to, Tom Waits was too weird.

This was an alternative to the alternative.

Temptation

Which was very appealing, of course. Particularly because I hated The Smiths. But listening to Frank’s Wild Years you got the impression that Tom Waits may have had no opinion of them, may never have heard of them or any of the ‘80s cultural world in which we were saturated. He was from somewhere else.

Halfway up Parkway in Camden, London, there was then a greasy spoon cafe. This cafe had its name painted on its windows, just above shallow gingham curtains that ran along a brass rail across the vertical centre of the glass, so that, from the outside, you only saw the heads of occupants, nursing their vile instant coffee in the steamy yellow light.

In other words, it looked to us like the closest we could get to the cover of Waits’ 1975 album Nighthawks at the Diner, and so, ignoring the temptations of Camden Market, the goths and the bootlegs and oily noodles, we would sit there, nursing our horrible coffee, trying to force ourselves into his world.

Innocent When You Dream (Barroom)

The thing is, Frank’s Wild Years was not just different to other records, it was different to other Tom Waits records. Waits had started out as a cocktail bar pianist, a down-at-heel crooner, mumbling out comedy songs like ‘Better off without a wife’ and bleary anthems like ‘Ol’ 55’ to tipsy audiences. At one point his knack for a tune and a poetic lyric had critics bracketing him with Bruce Springsteen as the great hope for the American Songbook. You can hear that talent for classic song writing in ‘Innocent When You Dream’, a delicate melody floating over the wheezing organ and jangling piano.

And then, starting with the album Swordfishtrombones things started to get strange. There had been signs of it, of course, on earlier records, the wandering beat jazz of ‘Diamonds on my Windshield’, the odd shiver and hiss of ‘Red Shoes by the Drugstore’. But Swordfishtrombones opens with a Frankenstein percussion and a skeletal marimba and, as the first song’s chorus says: ‘There’s a world going on underground’.

I’ll Be Gone

The old Tom Waits had been transformed. And the transformer was Kathleen Brennan. Waits met Brennan on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s One From The Heart, for which Waits was working on the soundtrack. They were engaged within a week. It was Brennan who introduced Waits to far more obscure musical inspirations like Captain Beefheart (an obvious influence with his fractured arrangements) and Harry Partch, the experimental musician who made his own strange instruments. Waits and Brennan have been married collaborators ever since. As Waits says: ‘I'm just the figurehead. She's the one who's steering the ship’.

Yesterday is Here

Part of what makes Frank’s Wild Years so persistently timeless is how out of time so many of those influences are. Brennan’s experimental taste mixed with Waits’ own influences of jazz and blues makes for an indefinable combination, especially where those traditions meet, in artists like Kurt Weill. Weill was born in Germany in 1900, studied as a classical composer and co-wrote The Threepenny Opera with Berthold Brecht, including the now jazz standard ‘Mack the Knife’. You can hear Weill’s twitchy, Berlin cabaret sound all the way through Frank’s Wild Years; Mittel European, dark, theatrical.

Please Wake Me Up

It’s appropriate, that theatricality, the promise of becoming someone else of reinvention and transformation. The first time listener has their idea of popular music transformed for a start. But in Waits’ growth as a musician there is also the promise of artistic renaissance. You don’t have to be Mick and Keith, grinding out the same turgid twelve-bar chug for fifty years. You can transform, be someone new.

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Frank’s Theme

That theatricality is also appropriate since the album started out as a play. Described by Waits as ‘ cross between Eraserhead and It's A Wonderful Life’, it tells the story of a failed accordion player, Frank O’Brien, who is freezing to death on a East St. Louis park bench and dreams of his life story.

The play was put on by the renown Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago in 1985. Waits and Brennan wrote the libretto, with Waits writing all of the music, and Waits played Frank O’Brien. It was directed by Gary Sinise, of all people, and included Steppenwolf ensemble member Gary Cole in the cast.

Incidentally, Waits’ father was called Frank, but as Waits has pointed out, his actual first name was Jesse and ‘no, Dad, it's not about you.’

More Than Rain

But then, Waits was no stranger to acting a part. So much of his performance was performance. He seemed to have spent his youth pretending to be a fifty-something bar-fly, singing songs that were full of characters and their stories: the desperate pregnant writer of ‘Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis’, the tired and emotional romantic of ‘I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You’. Playing a character called Tom Waits, essentially. And now playing, on this record, multiple voices from the life of Frank O’Brien, a character played on stage by Tom Waits. It’s a carnival hall of distorting mirrors, but nothing new for Waits. It's a short step from being the carnival barker of ‘Step Right Up’ on the album Small Change, to being the hell-fire preacher of ‘Way Down In A Hole’ on Frank’s Wild Years.

Way Down In A Hole

If you’ve never heard Frank’s Wild Years, you’ve almost certainly heard at least some version of ‘Way Down In A Hole’ because it was used as the theme music for one of the most significant TV series of the early twenty-first century: The Wire. Different seasons used different covers, with Waits’ version only appearing in season two. For all that it's hard to think of anyone working in Waits’ style, the classical song writing skills that underlie his music mean that he is endlessly covered, often by unexpected artists like Rod Stewart or Paul Young. Scarlett Johanssen has done a whole album of mostly Tom Waits covers.

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Straight To The Top (Vegas)

The influence goes the other way, of course. ‘Straight To The Top (Vegas)’ is a parody of the kind of self-aggrandizing, boosterish cabaret song about success in show business, though here sung by someone who is very much headed to the bottom. But like all parody, it's also an introduction to the material it’s parodying, it might just prompt you to listen to more Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett to try and find out where Tom Waits is coming from.

I'll Take New York

Or where he’s going to. Like the record as a whole, the wonky, downward slide of ‘I’ll Take New York’, the sound of a dream dying in a back alley, is an introduction to another world. ‘Some day they’re going to name a street after me’ wails (presumably) Frank, but it won’t be Broadway. It’ll be some grimy little backstreet leading only to a seedy dive bar full of failed stars and men who only remember what they could have been when they’re drunk.

The cartoonist Tom Gauld did a cartoon called ‘The street Tom Waits grew up on’, which includes an ‘abandoned clown-show factory’, ‘Saint Frank’s hobo orphanage’ and the ‘accordion players’ graveyard’. This is the street we’re being led down.

Telephone Call From Istanbul

My friend (and friend of The Metropolitan) Simon, used to run a student bop when we were at University together. Early on in the evening, before the place was busy, he would always play me a Tom Waits track, so I could heave and shoulder around the dance floor, ticking and jumping like a broken clockwork scarecrow. ‘Telephone Call From Istanbul’ is surprisingly danceable.

It’s not a lonely street, that Tom Waits street. A lot of people live there, or at least wander down, now and then, to see the sights and meet the weirdos who live there. Like so many iconic artists and outré albums it serves as a cheat code, a quick way of establishing a shared world view and tastes, a friendship accelerator.

Cold Cold Ground

Most of all though, it remains an incredible record. As the first full realisation of the newly transformed Tom Waits, it is still, musically, unlike anything else, of its time or since, even among Tom Waits records. Most of all, though, underpinning all the experimental theatre and mutant instrumentation, there is a solid foundation of plain old good song writing.

Train Song

Part of that solidity is that under all the playacting there is a deep honesty. Waits may be playing characters and telling stories, but he is telling those stories to a purpose and they can be full of real emotion. Especially in 1987, when the top selling singles in the UK were ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’, ‘Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now’ and - wait for it - ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ (you’ve only got yourself to blame if you click that link). None of which are half so achingly beautiful or heart-felt as ‘Train Song’.

Innocent When You Dream (78)

My favourite track on the record, this. And I always used to say that Frank’s Wild Years was my favourite album. According to my Spotify Wrapped my top artist for 2024 was Tom Waits, so I suppose it still is.

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Waits has, of course, appeared in The Metropolitan before, by appearing in Jim Jarmusch’s fim Mystery Train