Tom Waits - Frank's Wild Years [Vinyl]

One of the greatest and most distinctive musical geniuses of the 20th century, Tom Waits was apparently a "barbarian" but in reality an erudite post-modern artist. As far as the juxtaposition of primitive and intellectual art goes, he was a worthy disciple of Captain Beefheart. Never as in their cases was McLuhan wrong: the medium is definitely not the message. His albums are galleries (or full-fledged operas) of misfits, eccentrics and losers. Below the surface, they are also parables of fall and redemption set in the age of urban decay. In a sense, his opus is a compendium of urban cacophony.

Franks Wild Years (Island, 1987), derived from a musical comedy in which Waits himself also stars, itself derived from the song four years earlier, is a kind of "opera buffa" that gives free rein to the junk culture with which Waits is steeped. It`s also a cross-section of the misfits to whom Waits has devoted his career.
It`s also, and above all, a sonic journey that embraces different genres, techniques, cliches, and moods. In addition to singing through an ox horn, Waits uses homemade percussion and old instruments bought at the junk shop.
The first act opens in the darkest depression with Hang On St Christopher, marching band fanfare, African polyrhythms and Beefheart-esque guitar cues. Straight To The Top is a raucous beefheartian swoon to the frenzied rhythm of an after-work rumba, Blow Wind Blow is even at funeral pace, a despairing wail for mandolin rag and organ spiritual over the moral ruins of the slums, Yesterday Is Here drags on with a mournful, sparse western tune. In Innocent When You Dream, one of his melodic masterpieces, a raucous, and somewhat drunken tenor accompanies a street organ with a tearful litany. Please Wake Me Up condenses into a cacophony the sound elements that Waits mixes and accumulates to recreate the atmosphere of the province at the turn of the century: street organs, marching bands, the sounds of 78 rpm records, South American dances, and melodramatic tenors. The poignant timbre of the accordion transforms some of the more mournful songs (More Than Rain, Cold Cold Ground) into gray, nostalgic Parisian chansons, and it is no coincidence that the second act closes with one of them, Train Song, which mourns the failure of all hope. The apocalyptic pessimism offers flashes of serenity only in the awkward tropical polka of I'll Be Gone (for accordion, marimba, and trombone), in the drunken, hallucinatory Frank Sinatra-esque jazz song of I'll Take New York, and in the woozy ragtime serenade of Telephone Call. Ribot co-leads several songs, most notably Way Down in the Hole. It`s the hardest and most melancholy record of his career, almost a point of no return for his unbridled nihilism.

Source: https://www.scaruffi.com/vol3/waits.html

Tracklist:

1. Hang On St. Christopher 00:00
2. Straight To The Top (Rhumba) 02:40
3. Blow Wind Blow 05:04
4. Temptation 08:36
5. Innocent When You Dream (Barroom) 12:18
6. I'll Be Gone 16:3