CONCERT REVIEW: Tom Waits at the Orpheum Theatre, Boston
- Michelle Aguilar
A friend of mine recently said that Tom Waits has spent his entire career playing the role of an old man; which is funny, because at this point, time is catching up with Waits' persona. While most performers who have been around as long as him are aging, pathetic shells of their former selves, these days Waits appears to finally be settling into his proper age.
And if his packed three nights at Boston's Orpheum Theatre September 19, 20 and 21 were any indication, he's in his prime. The ol' Tomcat may be clean and sober. Frank's Wild Years may be behind him. And yes, Mule Variations may not have turned out to be the mind-blowingly innovative album many of his fans were hoping for, but this trio of shows proved that Waits' live performances are still a ticket to be envied.
On a fairly bare bones stage filled only with Waits' usual pile of ethnic instruments and oddball keyboards, supplemented with carefully-placed lighting here and there, Waits kept his audience's rapt attention as he growled, shouted and stomped his black boots on the floorboards with gusto for two-and-a-half hours. Waits made the most of the fairly intimate opera house atmosphere, carrying on brief conversations with audience members, telling his usual anecdotes and generally walking back into Boston's collective embrace after a 12-year absence, providing a killer performance along the way.
Waits is in at least one respect like Bob Dylan, who at this point in his career has the luxury of an enormous back catalogue to choose from. For the Boston shows, Waits culled together a set that had the attentive fan in mind, which bore little resemblance to "Big Time," or even his much bootlegged 1996 San Francisco benefit show at Oakland's Paramount Theatre for his friend Don Hyde's legal defense fund. Fans looking for old favorites got a list that went back as far as Closing Time. Based on Internet reports, this set, and even Waits' patter, wasn't all that different from shows he's been doing around the country, but he still has the charisma to make his audience feel like he's choosing the songs off the cuff, especially for them. The fact that Waits' backing band always had a close eye on Waits for cues that they sometimes couldn't help missing, and that they occasionally got flubbed up when he would sing counterintuitive, syncopated vocal lines, enhanced this conceit. (The band's mistakes were actually kind of charming in this way.) The penultimate example of Waits' charisma that night was probably when he coaxed the audience into a sing-along of "Innocent When You Dream," in which he pretended to end the song four times, only to raise yet another chorus, provoking so much laughter the audience could barely sing their part. By the last reprise, even the band was fooled.
Many of Waits' old "hits" were seriously reworked, some to the point where they were hard to recognize until halfway through the first verse. Old chestnuts like "16 Shells From a Thirty-Ought-Six" and "Jockey Full of Bourbon" lurched and rambled or sped along so differently from their album versions or from other live performances that they practically became new songs. Newer songs like "The Earth Died Screaming" and "The Ocean Doesn't Want Me Today" seemed even more chilling than their album versions. "Screaming" was set loose in overdrive, as Waits turned his head up to rafters, rasping out both the verses and the choruses unrelentingly at top volume, so that the song became one long, anguished lament.
Despite providing these favorites, Waits demanded a lot of his audience, peppering the set liberally with songs from Mule Variations including a soulful version of "Hold On" and the "Rain Dogs"-style "Get Behind the Mule." But Waits doesn't tend to attract the casual fan, and the crowd cheered just as hard and with as much recognition at new songs as they did the old ones, even when in the middle of his set Waits sat at the piano and asked the audience, "Do you want to hear a new one or an old one?" and then joked, "Go to hell!" when they responded overwhelmingly in the latter.
But then again, that might be because "The Eyeball Kid," (off Mule Variations) was the song that people were mentioning on their way out the theatre, the unquestioned highlight of the night. Throwing his trademark reflective confetti around himself like a wino having a one-man party, Waits' rasping, gravelly ravings -- combined with a simple but eerie light show and truly weird, indistinguishable ear candy from the backing band - breathed new and surprising life into "Eyeball." The same goes for "Filipino Box Spring Hog," a song which had a stunning public debut with Charlie Musselwhite on harmonica at the 1996 benefit show but seems robbed of life on the new album.
Waits' Orpheum show at proved that no matter what you might think of his latest album, there's no denying that when it comes to a live show, the old man's still got it.
