It was roughly 1991. I was sitting in a Journalism class at Clarkston Senior High. Kris Nemesi, played music from time to time. I probably wouldn’t shut up about Skinny Puppy. Ms. Nemesi as she was known then, said, if you want to hear something far out, you should hear this. And she put on Frank’s Wild Years. The sound of Hang on St. Christopher coming through a tiny “boombox” speaker sounded like a demonically possessed Lee Armstrong spouting beat poetry over a jazzy industrial backing band. I was in from the closing of that track. All of us who were there that day bought everything Tom Waits ever wrote.
Tom’s music and persona are intertwined. He is effectively a myth that is a real person. He’s wise, he’s funny, he’s foolish and he’s a bit of the town drunk all in one. The music on this album seems like it always existed. It was the first thing I thought when I heard it, it must be a bunch of covers, because it sounds like a 78 rpm record for a Coppola film I somehow missed. But it’s not. It all just came out of his head. His music always thrives on the specificity of his lyrics. He anchors his music to things, like a car, or a town, a bus stop, a train station. You could move into a Tom Waits song, it’s got geography and dimensionality. And his voice lends gravity with an earthy affected growl, or a brittle, shard of glass, yawping falsetto. This entire album relies on tight instrumentation from long time collaborators, Larry Taylor, Ralph Carney and Michael Blair all help form a mad man’s orchestra with upright Bass, amazing drums, and great horns. This album like the two before it were a major move away from Tom’s lounge singer days of Heart Attack and Vine, or the Heart of a Saturday Night, which are also both great, but kind of limited musically.
This album was performed a couple of times at the Steppenwolf theatre in Chicago as a play. But it also featured prominently in Big Time, the concert documentary.
Innocent When You Dream can be played at my funeral. And I somehow sang Yesterday is Here, a cappella to a room full of drunks in Prague in 1994. Cold Cold Ground is a perpetual favorite of mine, as it has that sense of time and place.
Similar to my comment on Mind the Perpetual Intercourse, I don’t even know if this is his best album, but it is the one that I heard first, and it utterly blew me away. For that I have always loved it.
I was lucky to be able to take my Dad to see Tom Waits with me in Detroit on the Glitter and Doom tour. It was an amazing show that like seeing Johnny Cash, will go down as one of those unforgettable experiences.
Cold Cold Ground Lyrics
Never slept with a dream before he had to go away
There’s a bell in the tower Uncle Ray bought a round
Don’t worry about the army in the cold cold ground
Cold cold ground, cold cold ground, cold cold ground
There’s a bird in the chimney and a stone in my bed
When the road’s washed out they pass the bottle around
And wait in the arms of the cold cold ground
The cold cold ground, the cold cold ground, cold cold ground
And a briar patch of berries takin’ over the slope
The cat’ll sleep in the mailbox and we’ll never go to town
Til we bury every dream in the cold cold ground
In the cold cold ground, the cold cold ground
In the cold cold ground, in the cold cold ground
Blow the roof off the goat barn let it roll down the hill
The piano is firewood, times square is a dream
I find we’ll lay down together in the cold cold ground
In the cold cold ground, cold cold ground, in the cold cold ground
And a whole box of rebel and a bar of soap
Make a pile of trunk tires and burn ’em all down
Bring a dollar with you baby in the cold cold ground
In the cold cold ground, in the cold cold ground, in the cold cold ground
Stop talking to the neighbors til we all go dead
Beware of my temper and the dog that I’ve found
Break all the windows in the cold cold ground
In the cold cold ground, in the cold cold ground
In the cold cold ground, in the cold cold ground
In the cold cold ground, in the cold cold ground
In the cold cold ground, in the cold cold ground