#Bone Machine

[gummyartstradingcards]

[sowhatifiliveinfukuoka]

Tom Waits (1992)

© Derek Ridgers

[balleralbumcovers]

EPIC ALBUM COVER #125

Tom Waits - Bone Machine

Released: 1992 (Island, UMe)

Experimental rock, singer-songwriter

[hey-cj]

front: Tom Waits' "Bone Machine" album cover

back: trashcan lid with skeleton wings

bleach on blue shirt

[tilbageidanmark]

1985-1986?...

(All the other memes I made..)

[rastronomicals]

11:17 PM EST November 19, 2024:

Pixies - "Bone Machine" From the album Surfer Rosa (March 21, 1988)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

★★★★★

File under: Conversations re: Kissy Kiss

[nedison]

it's BONE MACHINE season

[bizarrobrain]

"Murder in the Red Barn" by Tom Waits - From "Bone Machine" (1992)

[bryanharryrombough]

Tom Waits - "Black Wings"

When the moon is a cold chiseled dagger and it’s sharp enough to draw blood from a stone He rides through your dreams on a coach and horses And the fence posts in the moonlight look like bones

[schismusic]

Tom Waits and the art of believing

Somewhere in Simon Critchley's book on David Bowie he has an anecdote about Bowie redoing a vocal part a billion times because it's not authentic enough and — hold up, let me get the book:

"If Bowie’s art is inauthentic, if it is F for Fake, as Orson Welles might have put it, then is it also F for Falsehood? I remember reading an interview many years ago with Robert Fripp where he talked about watching Bowie in the studio in the late 1970s. Bowie was listening to a track or a tape loop and was very carefully, repeatedly, quite deliberately, and for the longest time, trying to generate the right emotion in his voice. What could be more contrived and fake than that? Shouldn’t true music come straight out of the heart, up through the vocal cords, and into our waiting, shell-like ears? Yet, as others have observed, Bowie’s genius lies in the meticulous matching of mood with music through the medium of the voice." (Bowie, Simon Critchley, p. 37)

— so yeah, if you've ever listened to so much as a smidge of Tom Waits this should be a pretty obvious connection to make.

It gets even better when you realize that Waits's inauthenticity is actually kind of the point. It's really hard to pinpoint where Thomas Alan Waits ends and Tom Waits begins, or more accurately the other way around - which makes what Tom Waits says immensely compelling, in that you never know for sure whether it's the cookie-monster-demon-thing talking or the man behind the legend poking his nose into the words. So this necessarily makes for a number of different possible listening experiences. This one time I was playing D&D with my old party and as we were playing my DM needed to introduce the Skaven — it was a Warhammer 40K type thing, I have never played any Warhammer 40K, whatever, that's besides the point — and he was like "all of a sudden, from the underground, you hear that song from Robots" and everybody was like "ooh yeah I know that!" and I was like "holy shit you mean Tom Waits?".

This kind of threw many of the people around the table for a loop and the night ended with me lending my Bone Machine CD to the home owner. He promptly returned it a while later and I suspect he didn't get to the end of it. More Tom Waits for me I suppose. When I first got that exact copy of Bone Machine (spoken like someone who has more than one copy of Bone Machine, whereas this is very much not the case, it's still the same one, bought used in January 2020: I was dating a girl and it lasted for like thirty seconds flat but luckily our relations are still very much positive, we got to base one and then dipped, then we lost track and exchanged like holiday wishes or birthday wishes if we got lucky, then all of a sudden I meet her again downtown last November — what happened is she apparently takes dance classes in town and has to spend like two hours on the train everyday just to train, pun not necessarily unintended but also definitely not intended entirely — and we have this wonderful little chat and then we're both like "actually let's stay in touch I'd love to get coffee at one point" and then sometimes we have short conversations and honestly I might just actually ask her for this coffee thing, have a more relaxed conversation and all, she's a nice person you know, she has her own way of dealing with the cards she gets dealt, a slanted skewered sense of irony about herself and everyone else that's very Southern-Italy-expat-into-the-North most likely mutuated from her parents and perhaps even derived from a sense of inadequacy of sorts, there's a lot to unpack I think, meanwhile I at the time — January 2020, that is — was still trying to process the previous relationship, which I might or might not have mentioned in the Godflesh piece, which actually might have become the veritable centerpiece of most of the stuff I write on here, and damn this sentence is really long, you guys are enjoying the ride I hope, I mean you must, after all this is the name of the game on here, don't I usually just run around in circles until all of a sudden you look the other way or roll your eyes in immense frustration and/or inveterate anger and while you're not looking I get to the point and the story ends?), it was January 2020 and I was on lunch break from studying. I was getting ready for a Linear Algebra exam. Linear Algebra is pretty cool but it doesn't leave much room for emotion, necessarily — it has its reasons of which the heart knows nothing. So here I was, this girl I was dating on her first relationship, me with one relationship too many, as young as I was. And at one point it entered my mind that maybe, just maybe, to stop being a crybaby I probably just needed to get into different music. Potentially music that had mystified me in the past. And nothing had mystified me like this one 128kbps CD dump of Tom Waits's Rain Dogs had, uploaded on a USB drive for me by a friend's father. So obviously I picked up Bone Machine. And I pop it in the stereo that night and this shit hits me right on the temple.

Imagine my shock when I realize that all of a sudden you don't need to be Godspeed You! Black Emperor to sound like the end of the world. Even crazier to me that the apocalypse could sound so flawlessly and tastefully arranged and yet so tangible and even brutal, and that there was basically no divide between the two. Which obviously prompted me to ask "how does this even work?" and to keep listening. So maybe all I needed to do was approach this with a musician's mentality, which is what I still do and it genuinely helps me a lot when talking Tom Waits. At the same time I wouldn't argue Tom Waits is a musician's musician, so to speak. He's also a writer's musician, crucially. Bones Howe defined his work on Nighthawks at the Diner as "Allen Ginsberg with a really, really good band" (I'm linking it here in full so you can check it out on your own time, which I highly recommend you do), and while I feel like Waits's work on average is a bit more humorous, which is kind of why even among the Island era works Bone Machine is the only one that actually does that homicidal maniac thing where everything, and I mean everything spectacularly ties into that general sense of apocalyptic abandon. The more personal numbers relate excellently to that, better than they ever have — and this is from that same guy who wrote, I don't know, Time. This one time, right before the pandemic hit, I was invited to a birthday party and as many things did back at the time it spiralled into a lot of heavy feelings being spilled onto absolute strangers. I had this CD in the car and I felt like I had to put this track on, I just knew it, don't ask me why. So I did:

And then a while later I found myself toying around a lot with this other track, called I Don't Wanna Grow Up (music video courtesy of Jim Jarmusch, by the way). Obviously 2020 wasn't the best time for many people. I was trapped with five other people — two of which had COVID — in a house meant for four, I seemed unable to hold one person down for long enough to actually become friends and my academic career, if there even was one, was very clearly dead in the water. And let's be clear here: would you wanna grow up in that context? God knows I didn't. And I guess it makes it even funnier when it's a guy who has very much grown up already telling you that he doesn't wanna grow up — and that you find yourself believing him. Because ultimately Tom Waits, as opposed to Thomas Alan Waits, does not in fact grow up. He is born fully formed and trudges through life in eternal decay, he faces memories of his past haunting him and turning ever less beatnik and ever more hallucinatory and modernist and distorted. His blues become his decomposing greys/greens, they become toxic miasmas that end up deforming and corroding the songs. And even icons of religious salvation turn into broken contract killers — the sole ones capable of providing a truly beautiful death. "Some say he killed a man with a guitar string… some say under his coat there are wings." Fitting that the music should turn a slow country instrumental into a metaphysical number, chilling and perfectly inexplicable precisely in direct proportion to how close it is to the reach of sheer intuition.

But what originally got me into the record was Waits's balladry, as funny as it may seem. You don't usually listen to Tom Waits for the ballads, mostly because lately (that is, from 1983 onwards, at least) that's very much not what he's remembered for. And yet not many people can just as easily write Goin' Out West — a track that goes so hard it's been covered, basically unaltered, by Queens of the Stone Age — as he does Whistle Down the Wind — a track that's so touching it's been covered, with very different instrumentation and vocal interpretation, by Joan Baez — on the same record, no less. The one that got me at first was A Little Rain, a murder ballad so brutally honest it doesn't even have to say it out loud: a sixteen-year-old leaves her small hometown to see the world. "I love you mom, and a little rain never hurt no one" are the words she leaves her mother with. To the cost of sounding redundant, it probably wasn't the rain that hurt her. You are left with a profound sense of evil that, unsurprisingly, pops up in a track like Springsteen's Nebraska — "well, I guess there's just a meanness to this world".

But the one that speaks to me, fellow imposter syndrome having asshole, the most is Who Are You, more eloquently (perhaps a bit too eloquently) titled Who Are You This Time on some live albums of Waits's. It's very easy to construe yourself as a suicidal buttfuck-insane maudit rat bastard, but most other people see right through it when you're twenty. My obsession at the time was to be taken seriously, to be taken as a ticking time bomb, to be taken as a menace even. I don't think it was necessarily a form of posturing; it could more appropriately be interpreted as me trying to get people to notice how fucked I felt this shit to be. Unfortunately it gets old fast. I guess Tom Waits, or likely Thomas Alan Waits, kind of saw it too. It's reasonable to interpret this track as a song against itself, or rather a song against whoever is singing it, or rather a song about whoever is singing it pretends to be in front of an audience, which necessarily entails some interesting reflections on identity and artistic integrity and the understanding that who says the thing is just as important as the thing being said. I am making no sense because it's almost 2am. I don't give a fuck. Here's a song that makes me cry:

[misterparadigm]

Been listening to a LOT of Waits lately. I've been going album by album and curating a Spotify playlist of the best tunes, which I've titled "Derelict Gypsy Gospel." Even made a cover for it for Spotify. You can check it out at the link below, if you're a Waits fan.

[2othcentury]

Artist: Tom Waits  Song: Goin’ Out West  Album: Bone Machine  Released: 1991

[rastronomicals]

3:36 PM EDT August 9, 2024:

Pixies - “Bone Machine” From the album Surfer Rosa (March 21, 1988)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

★★★★★

File under: Conversations re: Kissy Kiss

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[manitat]

[musicmags]