A Review of Tom Wait's Bone Machine

Released September 8, 1992
Recorded Prairie Sun Recording, Cotati, California
Genre: Rock, Experimental
Length: 53:30
Label: Island
Producer: Tom Waits

In some ways, Waits is like Dickens or Shakespeare in that his catalogue is long enough, and large enough to have phases, style changes, and growth. In the burgeoning subcultures of artist-followings that wax and wane with the tumult of generational changes; the slothing off of the old and the induction of the new, and the cultural changes that form the prism through which we view things, albums, novels, plays, and films often see their own peaks and valleys over the coarse of time. Certain works age well, some don’t. There are innumerate factors as to why something falls out of fashion and why it comes back into favor but nothing is better than the debates about the value of these albums among the faithful. This leads me to Bone Machine.

Bone Machine is what many regard as the 1992 masterpiece of Waits, often cited as inspiration by acts (though without expression in their music) and heralded as a top 3 in the overall timeline. It also happened to be an album I never quite understood. Why its critical acclaim was so high, especially in hindsight, never jived with me. Its not to say that Bone Machine isn’t good, but, well lets start from the top…

If you’re standing at the bottom of 2010, reflecting back on a careers worth of music from Tom Waits, its hard to see how Bone Machine trumps his Big 3; The Heart of Saturday Night, Raindogs, and Mule Variations. That isn’t my opinion, that’s generally the critical worlds analysis save for those few institutions that pay their bills on contrarian’s smugness.

For one thing, its got one of the stronger consistencies of any album. The deviations on Bone Machine appear at the end, and you need to check back in with reality to make sure you haven’t immersed yourself too deeply in the album. One finds the difference of songs on albums like Bone Machine to be akin to that of the difference between bands in some tiny, “underderground” movement of a subgenre that enjoys its glory in the mouths of social renegades only to be relegated to the barging bins of ailing records stores in the far reaches of a nation, where big commercialism has yet to strangle the last vestiges of small business from the region. In short, only when it becomes all you listen to can you accurately sparse A from B.

Bone Machine also has the distinction of being a transitional record. Like Swordfishtrombones, Bone Machine stands on the cusp of an ethos redraft from the euro-centric vaudeville of the 80’s albums to the bitter and ragged Americana that came to embody the new century.

And forgetting all of this, it plays like the demo version of Mule Variations before it got cleaned up, rewritten, and had its plotlines revisited and sharpened.

At this point it probably looks like I hate the album, and think it sucks. Its understandable, but understand this is a preliminary vision, and if anything, a warning against approaching the album incorrectly. As I said at the top, albums are often reborn with new cultural understanding.

What Bone Machine does very well, and is its strongest attribute, is that it builds a world for its listener. Earlier I cited Dickens and Shakespeare, but for Bone Machine it might be more appropriate to cite Faulkner. Waits albums are often full of a cast of characters sprawling across the world; Raindogs has Sailors in Singapore, Soldiers in World War 2, and a bunch of guys hanging out in Union Square (presumably New York’s US). Heart of Saturday Night finds people in Wisconsin, San Diego, and the Moon. But Bone Machine is Faulkner because these characters are all in the same little town, if not in words, than certainly in musical accompaniment.

Where it is can be hard to tell, but as critics are want to do, we can look at the first track, “The Earth Died Screaming”, and surmise that towns might be irrelevant in the post-apocalyptic universe that these characters inhabit. And in this world, the music is lower than backwoods, in many ways its scrap yard. I use that word to help us understand, but to the characters, music might have to come from what you find laying in the rubble, organized scrap yards might be a thing of the past.

The music is coarser and darker than anything prior, and even Mule Variations only matched it in moments. The only album able to match wits (or scraping metal as it were) with Bone Machine is Real Gone, and at least that album has a map associated with it. The lumbering stomp of In the Coliseum and the coconut trot of Earth Died Screaming seem to approach the idea of on coming doom with the slow torture of wait in different capacities. It suggest that it may come on us as a mob of society agreeing we should all be slaughtered for enjoyment, or that it will greet us at our lowest, when the world seems desolate, and for no one to find our corpse.

Even when Bone Machine does manage to dust itself off and make itself presentable to polite society, it busies itself by foraging in the dark recesses behind closed doors where culture is gone, and people are the real, raw monsters that hide behind corsets and makeup, suits and toupees. On Murder in the Red Barn, Waits visits the silence of rural inclusiveness, even in the face of unspeakable horror and goes so far to relate its culture to being numb to such trivialities (“there’s nothing strange about an axe with blood stains in the barn, there’s always some killin’ you got to do around the farm”). On Going out West, it would seem our protagonist was headed for LA, but given the album, we might wonder if his overall delusions allow him to believe there was an LA left.

In each, the production is expertly woven into the plot. Every piano bench creek, blown-out speaker, and missed noted remains in, giving the album all the character flaws that come with humanity, to the elements those instruments represent.

Bone Machine, in the end, is a strong album, albeit alien in concept to the overall discography and certainly to the albums preceding it. I can’t say where I rank, in fact, many consider my ranking outright backward to begin with, but lists are for the simple-minded. If we cannot explore each element, down to the note and see how it balances with the world around it, we will lose sight of what truly matters, that we are few things more than the world we place ourselves in, and the characteristics the world places on us.

To that end, maybe we shouldn’t review Bone Machine as an album in time, but a soliloquy in an act, within a play, describing not the person but an ethos on the creation of how Waits makes his overall albums. One dark and murky rant through a rusted out megaphone, about how if we don’t all pay attention, the oceans going to swallow us up whole. Then again, there are days where that’s a blessing, and sometimes the ocean doesn’t want you that day.

Unmarked Gravestone

Kate's really into her Irish roots. I didn't really know how to take that because I've got a long history of dealing with my "Irish-ness" thats a mixed bag. Primarily, I never flaunt it too heavily for two reasons:

1. When I was a child, maybe 9, I asked my dad what my nationalities were.

"Irish, Spanish, and English"

"Yeah but we're more Irish right?"

I had yet to figure out that what I was wasn't necessarily what my parents were, or in this case specifically what my father was. To call a spade a spade, at 9 I was displaying an ignorance that surfaced as unintentional racism. What I knew of being "Spanish" was kids in separate classrooms who couldn't speak English well, and who I, not knowing any other Spanish people in my classes, wanted to distance myself from. I knew some Irish kids, they were my friends. The Spanish kids were weird, and I wanted nothing to do with them. I can still remember being in the cab of my fathers pick up and hearing the hurt in his voice.

2. The other point is identity-less assholes who find a large population here in Boston and hop on the Irish bandwagon as if it was a conversation piece. Even if it is, people here who wear it on their sleeve and tell you about it through a megaphone know very little about their heritage and it ends up being a conversation something like this...

"you irish?"

"yeah well my mom's 75% ir..."

"Fuck yeah man! me too!"

"...cool"

So for these reason and a few other minor ones, its something I've carried as an issue of pride and pain. Maybe that's the Catholic in me.

But as I've grown up and read more, I've refined who I was and moreover what I was interested in and what I should be proud of. I'll never escape the fact that I've got a name and a face like a pale, paddy fuck. Going home once in 3rd grade I remember a teacher asking if I was Irish. She told me I looked more Irish than Paddy Murphy's pig.

But in the end I'm not Irish, and I never will be. My last name isn't and neither is my father. I'd never really squared with being "American" for much of my life until recently either. For one thing, I'd never really left the country (Montreal sorta counts) and therefore I was always surrounded my other Americans. The other reason is that I always saw people touting their American heritage as a token of elitism. You know the routine. Somehow America was better than other countries because we loved freedom or something like that. I always saw America's praise-singers as people who always tried to make it worse.

But as I've grown up and had my share of debate from each side of the political spectrum, I've realized that both the Left and Right are correct: America is a deeply flawed country with a not so honorable past, and yet we're still the only place I'd ever want to be.

For whatever it is, the horrors of America are why its great. They aren't to be ignored or admonished as the aisles would tell you, but to be embraced as a true and honest heritage that all groups must journey through when they come here. They came for a dream, existed in a nightmare, and their offspring came to be born in the fire that was the United States. I saw a shirt recently that probably didn't intend to be this deep, but it summed up my feelings very succinctly.

I was in Urban Outfitters and I saw this t-shirt with a Notorious B.I.G. picture on it. It was white with a screened on photo of the man as a child, sitting in a folding chair on this fallow patch of dirt somewhere in New York (most likely Brooklyn) and all it said, scrawled over the photo, was "it was all a dream." Lord knows how that was intended but as Ian has told me countless times, authors intent was irrelevant.

I took it as the very thing I've come to experience in my time of growing in America. That this country cares very little for its new groups, and its poor and maligned. For all we compared the Soviet Union to Sparta, and the U.S. to Athens, we're still a very Spartan nation. If America teaches anyone anything its that one must pry not only his wants, but his needs from the death grip of its ruling class. Failure to unify, to move together and dream will only be met with more of the brutal same.

I wrote awhile back in Immigrant Waves about how the current immigration debate mirrors the debates we've had since the country started. I think we should recall the point where our grandfathers came to America in search of gold roads and raining money and found collapsing tenements and an infant mortality rate of nearly 20% for people of their ancestry. But for the Chinese, the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, Jews, and Middle Easterners, the Nation has come to be far more welcoming. Need not Apply Signs, Sacco & Vanzetti, Phrenology, and even Jim Crow are now a memory we've crushed beneath the bootheels of progress on the March.

America dances with a double-edged sword. Our freedom and fear of Tyranny makes anything here possible. That's part of the "it was all a dream" portion of the t-shirt. But in our insistence, we often leaves those who are new to fend for themselves. In some respects, its a hazing ritual that would be barbaric if we were more selective in its application. In others its the realization that the dream is pragmatic, and like so many scholars before us, we realized that a Utopia is not a lack of need but a lack of must. Where options prevail, where freedom is always hunted, progress cannot be stopped. I think when people show up here, and move past the idea that we're the promised land, it becomes everything they ever wanted, if not everything they ever dreamed.

To all our new brothers still chasing the Fairytales of America, I hope that you come to find America everything we've all found here eventually ourselves.

God Bless,
The Brow

Never go to D.C. before you’re elected.

As someone who sits a good 6 to 8 hours outside of the beltway, I listen to some of the gut-check predictions taking place down there, and I can’t help but wonder how much their all drinking down there.

Today’s politico is reporting that the Democratic Majority in the House, and possibly the Senate, is toast. Where? By what force? I get the idea that insiders have allowed their own instincts to congeal into facts, but just because the politically savvy believe the Tea Party Movement is Republican support, doesn’t mean they actually are. Like all internal movements, they are fully prepared to depose their own “leaders” for corruption. Big Government Spending is part of the narrative for Democrats, the Tea Party feels it has become so too for the Republicans – this is what they are looking to change.

Say what you will about optics but here’s how the Mid-Terms should be scored.

Republicans are on the comeback trail, or at least on course correction, if the following happens:

1. Michele Bachman keeps her seat.
2. Rubio wins Florida’s Senate seat.
3. Angle takes Nevada.
4. Boxer loses California (this is not a high hurdle)
5. Ensign/Vitter manages to hold on.

Everything else can boil down to normality outside of the Presidential Fervor. The Democrats were lucky to grab some of the seats they did in 2008. We can’t assume, for an example, that many of these states and seats will go blue forever.

Can Republicans unseat Democratic Leadership? Its looking like a tough sell in the Senate and only in the House if they pick up 39 seats. (I don’t think anyone assumes they can unseat Pelosi).

If you want my political 45 cents, Obama is letting the Congress hang out to dry. Show them as a do-nothing group and retake 2012. He keeps citing Reagan, but this is a move straight out of the Tip O’Neill playbook. Allow the economy to be the Republican’s again and savage them for a second time. It’s a big gamble, we’ll see how it turns out.

Pop

I’ve been told that my musical taste is eclectic bordering on indiscriminate. In seemingly unrelated news, I’ve also been told I’m very hard to watch movies, television shows, or listen to the radio with. The inference in tone and fits proximity to my own statements suggest its because I’m highly critical of most everything to do with art. I refute nothing.

Having said that it might be slightly vexing to know that I not only listen to pop music, but enjoy it to a large degree and will often prefer it to music I generally own. This audience isn’t something I’ve procured through romantic entanglement or occupational hazard.

I’d once known a man who claimed that Xanax was like a “reset button” for life. Similarly, I find pop music a sort of respite for a critical mind, which is no disparaging commentary but rather a compliment to its clear philosophical vision; The veritable post-wine cracker at the tasting. Where many make the mistake of seeing compliment become insult is in believing that there is no virtue in striving for simple goals (which much of pop most certainly does) and that without risk, music can’t simply be worth the listen.

While a good deal of the flack is given for the genres fan base, this is more of a lesson in psychology and sociology which no one has neither the time to listen, nor the patience to put up with my lecturing. While its certainly a large and valid topic, for the purposes of explaining myself, lets suffice with the idea that any disgruntled attitude toward anyone who listens to the music has no bearing on, nor should be calculated into the worth of the genre.

But just as in life where we cannot all be chemical engineers, neither, too, can all music push the very bounds of what is collective commonplace in the world of Western Popular Music. The tiny gears of the world are as vital to the machine as the engine or the fuel, and any value found in one or the other is nothing more than rationalization created to suit ones own vision of the economy of things.

At this point it might be hard to discern how this is a favorable comment (or how it was intended to be) at all. It has to do with, I suppose, my own vision of how things ought to be. Do we view music as a finished masterpiece to be reviewed plainly without the assumption changes were possible? A sort of divined and unwavering truth that was born in tact? Or do we conclude what I believe most would have found themselves bereft of the linguitical baggage that would come with this topic and conversation, that music is an ever-flowing muse, created to inspire rather than to be evaluated? The suppression fire that allows advancement; the felled tree that fertilizes the fallow earth?

President Kennedy once said, “Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride.” I find pop music to occupy that same position. Just a simple machine, whose operations learned in youth allow the complications of the adult world to be dismissed to the subconscious where all brilliance springs from, while the conscious mind unravels and heals from all the vexing bulwarks of a life with responsibilities.
In short: without simplicity now and again, there is no hope for the complexity that would satisfy our more critical thirst.

This position and its logic are obviously not airtight. Room for interpretation is till to soil. But the alternatives should always be presented if only to strengthen the opposition through the questioning that comes with debate. While many who relish the higher register complexities of progressive pieces might begrudgingly give pop its place, those willing to move in new directions will always be ready to start back at the bottom. Even if it means relearning those lessons of youth, as basic as they are, as frustrating as it might be to have to learn them again.

To take a line from Caddyshack: “The world always needs ditch-diggers too.”

Immigrant Waves

Is history repeating itself on the other side of the country?

In 1845, about 15 years prior to the Civil War, a potato famine hit Ireland so badly that anyone who had the ability left for greener shores. In many, many cases that meant New York and Boston.

The civil war had yet to be fought, so there were no immigration laws, the radical republicans had not yet taken the Congress, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments weren’t proposed yet. For all intents and purposes they’d become Americans by showing up here, but the WASP Ascendancy barely recognized them. They were not considered white; their Infant Mortality Rate was astronomical leading one Census worker to comment, “The Irish were literally born to die.” Signs reading “No Irish Need Apply” were regularly hung, and they lived, in most cases, in tenement housing; cramped, poorly built, structurally dangerous, and lacked maintenance.

But that was 165 years ago. Today we don’t question any man of Irish decendency as to whether or not he’s white. This may or may not have to do with an influx of other, darker races, but probably has more to do with how wide spread they’ve become. Today, give or take a few thousand, roughly 36 million Americans can trace their heritage back to Ireland.

And while they clung to their own cultural identity, they embraced with open arms (politically if not literally) the other immigrants waves of Italians and Eastern Europeans to form a permanent political majority for their political party. I am purposely not saying “Democrats” there because history shows their choice was less platform and more reaction. The Protestant Establishment in the former colonies was fierce, ruthless, and apathetic to the plight of the new immigrant classes. They forged themselves with a then dormant party and used it like a shield to take up the problems and struggles of the class. They did so then because the Republican Party then gave them no options to join their ranks.

In a seemingly “bizarre-o” world turn of events, Phoenix is the new Boston.

Ignore the conditions listed before. I don’t know that its wise to try and compare how the Irish lived then (two centuries ago) and how Latino’s live today. The Country is different, the regulations on housing, medical care, the social programs are, well first of all they exist. There was no such philosophy let alone law in the 1840’s that dictated how anything really had to be done. But politics isn’t figures on a spreadsheet, its perception.

The growing perception is, through talk of walls, mandated English, “anchor babies”, and SB1070 – as well as Amending the 14th Amendment – that the Republican Party are the WASPs to the Latino’s Irish.

If you’re following this furor, then I’m sure you’ve heard about the numbers. Fastest growing demographic, a birthrate that’s set to dislodge white people as being larger than all other minorities combined. (Note: Whites will still be a majority, they just won’t beat, as a group, all other races combined). But those are logic-tactics. You can almost hear, in a very avuncular tone, the father figure saying, “you’d better be careful now.”

The problem is not votes; the problem is dignity. And it isn’t American, its global and historical. Nations and peoples can be defeated, but if they are humiliated, they will tell their children of the vicious opression that faced them as they came to America, passed down like camp-fire horror stories that become a cemented reality unified with cultural identity.

Ask any eastern Frenchmen about the Nazi’s. As any Jewish Immigrant for that matter. Ask Southerners how they feel about General Sherman, or Iranians how they felt about the Shah. Civility and Diplomacy cannot be measured in the safety it provides the future.

Last night I watched Charlie Wilson’s War. If you haven’t seen it, you should do yourself the favor. But in it, the Afghani’s make a point to tell the Western World that they do not want food, or medicine. They want weapons. They want to defeat the Imperial Soviets and they want their land back. Its hard to imagine a better illustration of what dignity is than to mention a people who have almost nothing, living in rocks, and tribal villages and showing how all they want is to be left to their own devices. It’s saddening on a level one can’t imagine to have so little and be deprived of it still.

The Latino Community, prior to the dust up over SB1070, had two major concerns when it came to politics; Jobs and Education. Say what you will but those could go to either party, and it suggests that they came here not for themselves but for their children. Marco Rubio was on television two days ago echoing that sentiment when he responded to the recent moronic comments by Sen. Harry Reid.

The Latino community wants to be here, and they want to be American. The Irish still have their parades, the Italians, Polish, and the Portuguese their festivals. They still hand their language down to children. Mexican’s, Guatemalans, Cubans, et. al are doing nothing no less different than what the immigrant classes of the past have done, and unfortunately for them, that means engaging in the same struggles and legislative battles of every class before them.

Attoning for Sin

I guess I'm an attention whore. I was thinking the other day as I walked around that I hadn't been writing much because I had no focus anymore. I mean I guess I did, I love writing about politics, but the truth is I don't because I really like comments, and no one comments on the snooze-fest that is my electoral prognostication.

But in this confession I think I'm going back. Because I'd rather write than not, and I'd rather have no one following, and have all my comments be ads for male enhancement than hope I have an audience. Its a shameful thing to realize you're a shill, but at least the healing can being.

Who?

I feel awkward talking about my intent to pursue a political career someday. It sounds childish to me; equivalent to wanting to be a famous dancer or movie star. Not that I think either are necessarily comparable in obligation, but they seem to share an arrogance. I cringe a little when I hear myself say it because I know subconsciously I'm thinking "who do you think you are?"

Thankfully, at the end of the day I don't need to think I'm good enough. I think for me its good enough to say at the day's end that I went at it with the best intentions. To that end, I read this quote the other day and it struck me fairly hard...

He was no saint. Win or lose, there would be no canonization of Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. In a lifetime in politics he'd gouged eyes, thrown elbows, bent the law and befriended rogues and thieves. He could be mean and small-minded. But at his core there lay a magnificence of spirit, deep compassion and a rock-hard set of beliefs. He had a sense of duty that he refused to abandon for those whom Heaven's grace forgot - and he would sooner die on the floor of the House, or watch his party be vanquished and dispersed, than desert them. "You know you're right?" Millie would ask him, as he adjusted his tie at the door in the morning. "Yes," he would say, and he knew it -knew it- knew it like he knew the streets of Cambridge, the liturgy of Sunday Mass or how to stack a conference committee. "then do your best," she would say, and off he would go.

- Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century...

We've all read that quote or passage or something where a confluence of ideas we've had become clear, like the forged grains of our own constitution. For me, this passage might have summed up my political intentions and in those political intentions, a lifetime's worth of feelings, philosophies, and visions. We're never the product our grand ideals would call for us to be, but its good to know that great men before have achieved that greatness while falling short as well.

I don't need to make it a sap's story here, but I've been on the losing side of plenty of battles in my lifetime. Too poor, too ugly, too late, too unaware, or too bad - you sit there awake at night sometimes and wonder what you did to make something that shitty happen to you. I'm lucky enough to be able to bounce back, but I still burn up when I see it happen to someone else. That socially awkward kid who just wants someone to talk to them, or that poor son of a bitch who just can't seem to get some momentum going.

I didn't really get into politics until I was 17. Before that it was just my mother and my uncle reciting diametrically opposed platform planks while we went to get pizza, or for Christmas shopping. But politics to me is a cause you know before you understand it can be addressed in politics. So maybe I have my flawed days where I can be small-minded. God knows I can be vain and lazy. But for every moment I cringe at some social function when I tell people what I'd like to do, there are countless other times where I come around to find someone down and out, needing a job or struggling to get help moving out of their place and I remember that its a pretty shitty place out there sometimes. I can't say if I'll be a pol some day, and if I am what sort I'll be but I do know I've seen the face of Alzheimer's, and of single-motherhood and I know that I can at least do my best for those Heaven's grace forgot.

That justice is done, that mercy prevails. - Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr.