March 24, 1999
POP REVIEW; Tom Waits’s Night on Earth
By NEIL STRAUSS
”I must sound like George Burns!” Tom Waits commented midway through his performance on Saturday night as part of the South by Southwest festival at the Paramount Theater here. He could have been talking about his gravelly, nicotine-stained voice or the steady stream of jokes he kept making between songs. It was Mr. Waits’s first concert in nine years (not counting benefit performances), and by the end of the two-hour, 19-song show, it was hard not to wonder why he doesn’t perform more often.
Onstage, he was a natural showman, much more accessible a performer than the way he comes across in his choppy concert documentary, ”Big Time,” and his eclectic ”Mule Variations,” his first album of new music since the score from his 1994 collaboration with Robert Wilson, ”The Black Rider.” (”Mule Variations” is due April 27 from Epitaph, an independent label known for its punk-rock releases.)
For some 30 years, Mr. Waits has been creating a body of work, from beautiful ballads to clattering avant-jazz-rock, in which each new song delves into the mind of a different character battered and almost beaten in a neighborhood of Waits’s own making. It is a dangerous night town filled with hard liquor, pawn shops, old-time religion, murderous derelicts, yellowing bed sheets and sailors on shore leave. At the Paramount, Mr. Waits rolled out nearly all his best-known characters: the besotted penitent waiting to die in ”Jesus Gonna Be Here Soon,” the reminiscing heartbreaker of ”Innocent When You Dream,” the itinerant musician of ”Sixteen Shells From a Thirty-Ought Six,” the belligerent drunk of ”Goin’ Out West” and the lovelorn loner of ”Downtown Train.”
Except for Larry Taylor on acoustic bass, Mr. Waits’s four-piece band was all new to his music. The musicians had rehearsed 30 songs before the show, and went on stage with no idea which of those numbers Mr. Waits still remembered the lyrics to. As a result, songs began tentatively as he tinkered with the set. In new pieces like ”Filipino Box Spring Hog,” Mr. Waits was forced to conduct the band as he sang, cueing guitar solos, crescendos and silence.
Stephen Hodges worked with his percussion like a foley artist, making sound effects more than rhythms; Danny McGough played organ and keyboards quietly and intermittently, like an Expressionist painter composing a landscape out of disconnected splashes of color. And Smokey Hormel, a much stiffer guitarist than Marc Ribot who played on Mr. Waits’s last tour in 1988, nonetheless slipped easily into his role as versatile accompanist and stage sidekick. At its worst the band’s playing seemed learned instead of felt, but that will no doubt fade as Mr. Waits begins a small, rare American tour later this spring.
Throughout the show Mr. Waits either sat at the piano or hunched over the microphone (purposely positioned well below his mouth), with his hands clapping, knees buckling and face twisted in a knowing smirk. Each song came across like a theater piece without a set, only Mr. Waits’s expressive Howlin’ Wolf voice, intense stage persona and lyrics that jumped from Brecht to beatnik to Beefheart to blues.
Between pieces there was a lot of stand-up comedy. ”I haven’t been here in about 20 years,” he wryly assured the worshipful audience. ”But let me just say that there hasn’t been a day that’s gone by that I haven’t thought of you, collectively as well as individually.”
from the info file:
William Ruhlmann@allmusic
Tom Waits brings an appropriately international flavor to his mostly instrumental score for Jim Jarmusch’s globetrotting taxicab movie. As in all his music of the time, Waits’ chief influence is Kurt Weill, and using horns and accordion among other instruments, he re-creates Weill’s creepy, catchy style in 16 short tracks running almost 53 minutes. He and Kathleen Brennan contribute three songs with lyrics, which Waits performs in a calmer, more melodic way than those on some of his recent albums. Still, this soundtrack is very much in the style of Waits’ Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Franks Wild Years albums.
Paul Brenner@allmovie
Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan comedy-of-the-night is a collection of five vignettes taking place in the enclosed space of a cab ride, each occurring simultaneously in five different cities and five different time zones — Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki. The Los Angeles episode takes place at dusk, as high-powered casting agent Victoria (Gena Rowlands) gets a ride from L.A. International Airport with tomboy driver Corky (Winona Ryder), who would rather go on driving her cab than take up Victoria’s offer to make her a superstar. In New York City, novice East German cabbie Helmut Grokenberger (Armin Mueller-Stahl) has difficulty working the foot pedals to his hack, and his passenger, YoYo (Giancarlo Esposito), ends up driving himself to Brooklyn, picking up the shrill-voiced Angela (Rosie Perez) along the way. In Paris, an African cab driver (Isaach De Bankol˘) ejects a collection of drunken African diplomats from his cab and picks up a beautiful but surly blind girl (B˘atrice Dalle). In Rome, cab driver Gino (Roberto Benigni) engages in a heartfelt monologue confessing his past sexual exploits to his passenger, a priest who is dying of a heart attack in the back seat. The film winds down in the last melancholy vignette, taking place in Helsinki, as taxi driver Mika (Matti PellonpÙÙ) picks up three inebriated workmen who regale him with hard-luck stories. But Mika has a much harsher story of his own to tell.
Jason Clark@allmovie
Possibly the most mainstream film to date by the laconic, impressionistic filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, this agreeable (if overlong) project works in fits and starts, which is to be expected in a film that is so episodic in nature. However, Jarmusch’s acute eye for detail and his offbeat casting choices (including a pre-fame Roberto Benigni) pay off. The tone of the film is more lighthearted and playful than Jarmusch’s previous efforts, but still retains his trademark minimalist style. One of the main contributors to the film’s unerring sense of time and place is ace cinematographer Frederick Elmes, whose previous work with David Lynch and John Cassavetes proves notable here, where even the inside of a cab has an strange and inviting veneer.