Record Review - Tom Waits

Tom Waits
Small Change

Recorded directly to a 2-track stereo tape in the summer of 1976, Small Change is by far my favorite Tom Waits record. The record opens with Tom Traubert's Blues, a gutter-rasping, heart breaking tune that drifts from verse to verse with soaring pain, loneliness and longing..."Wasted and wounded, 'taint what the moon did...got what I paid for now...." Throughout the album Wait's scratchy, straining voice floats over booze-soaked, church-hymn piano ballads and catchy and impossibly bouncy, bass-heavy jazz riffs. The lyrics are dark but hopeful, Charles Bukowski inspired poetry. The final track is I Can't Wait to Get Off Work To See my Baby which comes across as a Bukowski short-story set to music.
Invitation to the Blues is a wrenching ballad of vivid portraiture, chronicling the story of a small corner of American life set in a diner in No Place USA. The classic lonely, waitress and new-in-town guy yarn chocked full of Wait's genius metaphors..."Well she's up against the register with an apron and a spatula, yesterday's deliveries, tickets for the bachelors, she's a moving violation from her conk down to her shoes...well, it's just an invitation to the blues."
1975s, Nighthawks at the Diner was closer to stand-up comedy at times but Small Change's The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) is the funniest he has penned to date. Gems such as "the jukebox needs to take a leak and the carpet needs a haircut (shag carpet 1976.) Think about the year...Boston, Fleetwood Mac, Disco is heating up...blindly ignoring the bell-bottom, feathered hair scene around him Waits leans loose behind the giant wheel of his old '55 writing and tickling the ivories as if the dim days of the Great Depression never ended.
Two of the songs feature an infective crazy, bubbling bass line...Step Right Up satirizes cheap advertising's bull shit seductions with skillful glee and Pasties & a G String sing the praises of strip clubs 20 years before their mass acceptance..."crawling on her belly, shaking like jelly and I'm getting harder than Chinese Algebra...take that Abba!
Small Change (Got Rained On) is a film noir story set in a bone chilling air. A lone, aggressive saxophone shadows the singer's voice as he takes the listener through the grim tail of a small-time crook who gets...rained on by his own .38. If you enjoy sax this one has some really sweet rips.
As his career moves on, Waits has gotten really crazy and experimental (in a good way) but for me this one hit the bulls-eye dead on. I consider it an American treasure (as corny as that sounds.) I finally got to see old Tom live a couple of months back here in Dallas. Sadly his vocal cords are now so shredded it's hard to imagine him even sounding as 'smooth' as he did back in '76...when I was a clueless 11 year old Fonzie fan, listening to The Bay City Rollers and dreaming of Charlie's Angels. This is a record all music fans should own. Buy it.
-Richard Mullins