The Nomadic Tom Waits Fan: A Concert Study

By: Tim Sheridan

Sunday August 20, 2006

Named as one of VH1's Most Influential Artists of All Time, Tom Waits brings a very special evening to those lucky enough to get a ticket.
Photo By Anton Corbijn

Forget isolated tribes on uncharted Pacific islands, the lobby of a concert venue is fertile ground for a social anthropologist. It has it all: role-playing, ritual dress, carefully codified behavior. On this particular night the crowd filling Chicago's Auditorium Theater lobby appears unremarkable at first glance. But on closer inspection a couple of distinct species of fan reveal themselves. First there is the ersatz jazz boho with his de rigueur hipster hat -- here seen in a sensible summer straw -- and cultivated soul patch, with rumpled thrift store suit coat optional. Then there is the raven-haired goth, tattooed and pierced and meeting your gaze with a "what-the-fuck-are-you-looking-at" air. Such a commingling of fan taxonomy could only mean you are at a Tom Waits concert.

Waits himself sowed the seeds of this micro-civilization over 30 years ago. While his recording debut, Closing Time, cast him in the '70s singer-songwriter mold (so much so that the Eagles soon covered one of its tracks), it wasn't long before he fully invested himself in an approach that played like Chaplin's tramp on a bender in the streets of New Orleans with Jack Kerouac in tow. But by the mid-80s the shtick seemed creatively spent, and many thought him relegated to B-list cult status. It was then he pulled one of the great hat tricks in show business, switching labels and refocusing his sound to a more eclectic and adventurous mélange of junkyard instrumentation and Brechtian sideshow theatrics. Winning a new breed of edgier fan, he retained the old, lifting himself to the aerie of living legend.

While his stock rose, the frequency of his tours dropped, and Waits hit the U.S. circuit only a handful of times in the last two decades. Instead he focused his efforts on theater collaborations with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, and director Robert Wilson. As such, his current tour is a rare chance for his fans to get an audience with their demi-god in the flesh. But considering there is no album to support (his studio output also dropped off drastically, with only three discs since 1999), the evening took on the feeling of a retrospective, not so much in material as in flavor and band personnel.

Taking the stage in the form of foreboding shadows thrown against a white curtain, Waits and his band launched into the clubfooted blues of "Make It Rain," and followed up with a lumbering take on the previously raucous "Hoist That Rag." While he only dipped into his '70s material once (for a melancholic rendition of "Tom Traubert's Blues"), he recast newer songs in a style that harkened back to his early period, such as his loving croon on "Shore Leave" and a supremely bluesy "Murder in the Red Barn." Supporting this retro-vibe was workman New Orleans guitarist Duke Robillard, whose traditional blues style stood in contrast to Waits' longtime sideman Marc Ribot, and steeped the music in the coloratura of the Crescent City.

On the other end of the career sat son Casey Waits on percussion, who keenly represented the latter half of Waits' oeuvre, not only as his grown progeny, but also in the human beat box work he supplied on "Eyeball Kid." With no new material on the set list, the spoken paranoid screed, "What's He Building In There?" took on new meaning. It was a question that was likely on the minds of fans as they filed out, making their way past sidewalk vendors hawking Abba Zabba candy bars (at a hefty mark-up), and tossing empty Mickey's Big Mouths bottles they had secreted past security into the trash. What's fermenting in Waits' head? Until that is revealed, the fate of this culture stands in limbo.