More Gin - Soaked Gospel
Mule Variations
Tom Waits, Epitaph Records, 1999
Review by Paul Mitchell
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 64
Winter 1999

TOM WAITS IS THE 'Godfather' of popular music. Not so much Marlon Brando's famous character; Waits is more like the whole Godfather film trilogy. His musical persona takes audiences through generations of crime and low life and finally tumbles the dice toward a sawn-off limb kind of renewal.

Mule Variations, his first new release in six years, fits comfortably in the lineage of his '90s original albums, Bone Machine and Black Rider. Waits' characters, called into being with the help of his wife, Kathleen Brennan, escape cackling from unwritten novels, poems, films and vaudeville shows. They cat-call odes to darkness, slushing through rain-soaked and dim lit streets. They hear the click of high-heeled boots from around the corner, which may house a two-bit gangster with a .38 or a drunk, rural preacher in town for his version of recreation.

Ironically, there is little musical variation on this work in comparison to Waits' last two original recordings. The same Afro-urban percussion, echo-chamber piano, strangled guitar and paint peeling vocals dominate Waits' 'surrural' songs (surrural being a moniker coined by Waits, a cross between 'surreal' and 'rural'). And, stylistically, you could take Bone Machine's "Goin' Out West", "The Ocean Doesn't Want Me Today" and "A Little Rain", and you would find the template for Mule Variations' "Big in Japan", "What's He Building in There?" and the "House Where Nobody Lives".

Like the outstanding method actors of the modern age-Robert De Niro, Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken-Tom Waits, explosively creative as he is, has become type-cast. His songs are losing impact as a result. He has not been able to throw off this genre with Mule Variations in the way that Nick Cave was able to do with The Boatman's Call. Mule Variations is unlikely (the Springsteen-esque single, "Hold On", aside) to win Waits new fans. But old fans throughout the world will be twisting the cap from their whisky and leafing through crinkled pages of the Old Testament in celebration.

Gin-soaked gospel has become a regular motif on Waits's '90s recordings. On this album's predecessors it felt like an apocalypse ushered in by trapeze artists clanging rubbish bin lids ("World Died Screaming"; "In The Coliseum"), or Jesus driving Cadillacs and locomotives ("Jesus Gonna Be Here"; "Gospel Train"). On Mule Variations there are the same gospel and biblical references adding portentousness, the same elemental worshippers ("Chocolate Jesus"). But there are also two songs, "Take it With Me" and "Come On Up To The House", where Waits' characters express a more symbolic spiritual vision.

"Take It With Me" has as its foundation the classic gospel music refrain "you can't take it with you", referring to taking material possessions with us into death. Waits' ballad upends that idea and poetically describes the spiritual baggage that we can smuggle through the great customs gate in the sky:

No one knows where we are, it's a long time since I drank champagne, the ocean is blue, as blue as your eyes, I'm gonna take it with me when I go . . . in that woman there's a heart I love, I'm gonna take it with me when I go . . . it's got to be more than flesh and bone, I'm gonna take it with me when I go.

"Come On Up To The House" is Waits in howl down the moon mode, imploring a weather-beaten pilgrim to take refuge in "The House". It's clear from the music's juke-joint gospel feel and the Pale Rider preacher voice of the song's narrator that "The House" is not made from bricks and wood:

Come on down off the cross, we could use the wood, come on up to the house . . . Your singing lead soprano in a junkman's choir . . . You're high on top of your mountain of woe, come on up to the house . . . this world is not my home, I'm just a' passin' through . . .

This song officially (there are two Australia only bonus tracks that follow) closes Mule Variations. It's as if Waits gathers together in a storm-haunted valley all the album's characters, those with and without voices, in their raggedness and difficult beauty. He sets the aforementioned preacher narrator loose on them, his words nettle their skin and turn their cross-eyed gazes toward Waits's peculiar beatific vision. And we're standing among them, as they bang their hands and pots and pans together and set off for The House.

Paul Mitchell is Associate Editor of Zadok Perspectives and Editor of Shoot the Messenger on-line in which this article first appeared. E-mail mitch@fishcomnet.com.au..