Asylum Records, the label set up by mogul David Geffen and Neil Young’s manager Elliot Roberts, was a ‘70s haven for artists of a distinct West Coast sensibility, its roster including the likes of Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell. Another signing, Tom Waits, initially seemed cut from similar cloth, though each successive album pushed him further from the singer-songwriter mainstream.
Tom’s innate theatricality made its presence known on detours into a hybrid of jazz, beat poetry and counter-culture cabaret (“The Piano Has Been Drinking”, “Step Right Up”, “Diamonds On My Windshield”). He stayed with Asylum for seven albums, issued between 1973 and ‘80, but his creative itches were given their most seismic, most radical scratches when he jumped ship to join a UK-based label with a reputation as a home for mavericks.
Prior to landing at that new home, however, he accepted a commission to write and perform the music for director Francis Ford Coppola’s romantic drama One From The Heart. The result was a song suite on which he and country singer Crystal Gayle sparred as the off-screen inner monologues of the film’s leading man and lady, Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr.
It was a surprisingly “straight” collection of material, at least partially rooted in Hollywood musical traditions, with nary a hint of the wholesale experimentation to come. That was being stored up for his bow on Island Records, the company set up by British entrepreneur Chris Blackwell that focused on hard rock and folk artists, before diversifying into a stable of acts that defied pigeon holes – a launchpad for the likes of Roxy Music, Sparks, The B-52s and Grace Jones.
Released in ‘83,Swordfishtrombonesannounced the fully-fledged arrival of Waits as a more mannered (some might even argue contrived) persona, eschewing hitherto singer-songwriter norms for a voyage of discovery into determinedly percussive, cacophonous terrain. Front-and-centre as the self-styled junkyard master of ceremonies, he embraced instrumentation rarely called upon in the mainstream, fashioning a singular style along the way.
“I like to imagine how it feels for the object to become music,” he told press curious about his now more unconventional working methods. “Imagine you’re the lid to a 50-gallon oil drum; that’s your job, you work at that, that’s your whole life.
“Then one day I find you and I say ‘We’re gonna drill a hole in you, run a wire through you, hang you from the ceiling of the studio, bang on you with a mallet. Now you’re in show business, baby!’.”
A frequently evasive interviewee, Waits has been reluctant to analyse his own work too deeply, although he has spoken about feeling constrained during his time with Asylum, and thatSwordfishtrombonesrepresented a form of release, an opportunity to get creative with the discarded.
“There’s something very American about taking a piece of wire and some broken glass and an old T-shirt and some feathers, it’s just thrilling,” he toldNMEin 1985. “I furnished an entire appartment with things I found on the street.
“I wanted to do an record calledWreck Collections, ‘cause when you’re moving everything gets thrown into the same box. That’s always kind of interesting to me.”
The racket-like elements came to the fore, especially, on the askew opening track “Underground”, which serves as the curtain-raiser for a cast of first- and third-person characters that populated a fanciful American underbelly; misfits, vagabonds and ne’er-do-wells who stalked the darker sides of the streets. Waits uses improvised percussion, atonal guitar lines and awkward time signatures to flesh out the sense that these are the type of folk you don’t meet every day.
Here you’ll find the scowling gunslinger (“16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought Six”), the criminal trying to stay one step ahead of the law (“Trouble’s Braids”), relatives mourning loved ones (“Soldier’s Things”), ordinary Joes careering towards breaking point (“Frank’s Wild Years”) and paeans to failing, forgotten burgs (“Town With No Cheer”, “In The Neighbourhood”).
The protagonists in Tom’s tales are, at times, melancholy, morose, maniacal and menacing, none more so than the central figure of the title track who, Waits tells us,“came home from the war with a party in his head, and an idea for a firework display,”whose ultimate whereabouts become a mystery (“some say he’s doing the obituary mambo”).
Reviewing the album forMelody Maker, journalist Brian Case (a respected voice in jazz’s more envelope-pushing circles) applauded the artist for his mastery of both the scattergun and precise, his talent for painting vivid pictures in every song, some times over the course of less than two minutes of music –Swordfishtrombonesruns for 15 tracks.
“This is sketchbook Waits,” he wrote. “Maybe it’s the influence of writing music for movies, but there’s no doubt of a new concision about his work here. Where he used to stack image on image in every number, he can now feel confident about getting the emotion across in a single snapshot.”
It’s also tempting to listen toSwordfishtrombonesas a subliminal audition reel for the singer’s parallel career as an actor. In the five or so years following its release, Waits could be seen playing an extension of the characters he wrote about in cult films such asRumble Fish,Down By Law,IronweedandMystery Train, and later on in the likes of Robert Altman’sShort Cutsand the Coen Brothers’ portmanteauBallad Of Buster Scruggs.
The LP would go on to form part of a loose trilogy, its template both honed and expanded on 1985’sRain Dogs(votedNMEwriters’ album of the year, sharing joint first place with noisy upstarts The Jesus & Mary Chain’sPsychocandy) andFrank’s Wild Yearsin ‘87 – the latter inspired by the character Waits had first introduced onSwordfishtrombones.
None did much to improve its makers commercial prospects and Waits remained a stranger to the American Top 100 (although Rod Stewart’s cover ofRain Dogstrack “Downtown Train” was a smash hit single in both the UK and US). In terms of critical plaudits and influence, however, the triptych’s reach has been far and wide, benchmarks that have inspired subsequent generations of musicians to be more daring, to act upon the parties in their own heads.