What He Built: Tom Waits’ Mule Variations Turns 25

For a singular iconoclast who makes capital-A albums, Tom Waits sure compiles batches that feel like collections.

Like Guided by Voices or They Might Be Giants, diehards can praise individual totems, but you can mix and match without losing much context. Does anything in particular truly separate, say, Bone Machine’s stark “Jesus Gonna Be Here” from 1999’s banjo-and-rooster-adorned “Chocolate Jesus,” or the vibraphone-laced “Black Market Baby” from Blood Money’s upside-down Disney ballad “All the World Is Green?”

Mule Variations is remembered as an unusually tender career high thanks to the surprisingly marketable ballad “Hold On,” the first release ever on Epitaph’s esteemed ANTI- offshoot, a shock Grammy darling, and traditional sales stopped some 60,000 shy of going Gold. But it’s still got the drawer-slamming “Filipino Box Spring Hog,” the Randy Newman-esque “Eyeball Kid,” and the Welles-style radio play “What’s He Building?” on hand, three of Waits’ freakiest oddities offsetting lovelies like “Picture in a Frame” and Delta gutbucket pantomime like “Cold Water,” which borders on minstrelsy even for him. In short, it’s more of the same, a same that could’ve never been conceived by anyone else, including his most obvious influence Captain Beefheart or the many bluesmen he steals from like a good genius. It’s one of his best albums, and the one I heard first, in which I’m probably not alone. Like most have concluded before me, I can probably get with it being Waits’ most accessible of the post-Asylum era. 

But what I wanted to point out, if there’s anything left to really say about the Tom Waits character and the cinematic junkyard world he pulls his listeners into — where all human characteristics are sliced and diced into savvy dialogue just like Tarantino films — it’s that his albums have more in common with rap structurally than anything else. A Waits tune is essentially a vamp; they don’t ascend or descend in volume or tempo. They don’t crest with dynamics into a blistering climax or evolve into multipart suites. His songs basically set a tone and the anticipation built is what he plans to do with it, what voice he plans to overlay or what story or concept is going to unfold while the established palette trudges onward toward its destiny. How it’s going to find its way to its title, which is almost always in the lyric and often the punchline we get to re-enjoy after meeting the setup. Essentially, 99% of the time, you’re hearing a beat that a wordsmith is about to utilize.

Take Mule opener “Big in Japan,” a James Brown takeoff sung by one of Waits’ favorite personas, the deluded masc caricature. It’s like a time-jump epilogue to the groaning loner who bellows the classic “Goin’ Out West,” except instead of “going out West where they appreciate me,” he’s managed to find success in the far East, despite having “the clothes, but not the face.” It’s a typical Waitsian bullseye, the loser who sings loud and proud like a winner. So he has fun juxtaposing Soul Coughing/Tchad Blake-style sample-murk beneath an easy funk-guitar figure and punches of horn, without a trace of rhythmic changeup or drum fills or anything that would elevate it from a grooving character sketch to a Performance. He’s been turning major musicians into living loops since Swordfishtrombones or so. As rappers know, once you set the stage, you get out of the words’ way. 

 

VIDEO: Tom Waits “What’s He Building?”

And because of Waits’ increasing reliance on non-traditional instruments, his sonics merit the hypnosis. The pulse of “Lowside of the Road” could be a cowbell filtered to dark gray in the audio mix, or the side of a shovel clanging on a wheelbarrow. Is that guitar buzzing in and out of it? Or field recordings from a hive of bees? What sort of contraption is making that low-clicking percussion in “Hold On,” an air conditioner that’s just starting to go? Knowing Waits, any of these things can be true. Every song changing colors and sonic trademarks from one to the next gives them distinctions even beyond the signature of collecting them for a particular album.

And because Waits can’t surprise us that much at this point, who’s to say you couldn’t switch the gorgeous gospel “Come on Up to the House” with Bone Machine masterpiece “Who Are You” at birth and make a ton of difference? Whether he’s assimilating sewing machines, turntable scratches, congas on “Get Behind the Mule” that sound like samples from a game of ping pong, or dozens of wrinkles on blues-guitar and crying-piano options, it’s all just varying and fortifying an established signature. The words do the same thing, always fortifying the tall tale of the Tom Waits Character, whether he’s stirring his brandy with a nail or happenstancing across a woman who’s a “diamond that wants to stay coal.”

 

 

If Springsteen is the control variable for this heartland-noir mode and Warren Zevon bent it towards Coen Brothers-style dark-comic irony, Waits’ surrealist take on chain-gang blues and club-under-the-club speakeasy jazz could’ve been a template for a pre-rap (hell, pre-rock) Atlanta, taking the devil-at-the-crossroads extremes of blues myth to its freakshow be-all end-all, literally when he’s detailing the exploits of “Eyeball Kid” (“so cry right here on the dotted line”) and semi-satirically when he pitches us a “Chocolate Jesus” like Father Guido Sarducci as a snake-oil salesman.

Like your favorite trap-rapper, Waits wants us to believe these different timelines and realities are all him, that he’s reporting from the underworld and won’t break kayfabe in his world-class interviews or anywhere else even though his home life with Kathleen Brennan’s gotta pretty smooth for her to be such a consistent frequent collaborator. It’s no surprise that he’s declined to provide us with any new dispatches since 2011’s surprisingly loud Bad as Me; the age of social media isn’t for him. There’s no need to peek behind the curtain when you can get behind the mule.