Tom Waits

Tom Waits should be giddy at the moment. Last night—in his first performance in five years, at Vancouver’s intimate 2,400-seat Orpheum Theatre—he strolled onstage in his regulation baggy black suit and skewed pork-pie hat, all spider-limbed and spectral, and then tore through most of the primal-blues jackhammers from his new album, Real Gone. He employed a pedal-activated, digital-delay device to recreate the vast vocal percussions that drive the disc—woofing nonsensical syllables like “Acka, poom-poom” or “Boom chicky-tatta” and replaying them as looped backbeats. Waits was more than animated—his lithe frame twitched and shuddered to the jarring rhythms.

And he was generous, as well. Alongside stark new numbers like “Metropolitan Glide,” “Top of the Hill” and the guttural “Hoist That Rag” (all co-written/-produced with his wife, Kathleen Brennan), he tossed in crowd-pleasing classics like “Tabletop Joe,” “Heart Attack and Vine” and “House Where Nobody Lives,” a signature track from his stellar ’99 Grammy winner Mule Variations (his first for hip indie label, ANTI-). The show—featuring Marc Ribot on guitar, someone called Brain on drums, Larry Taylor on bass and Waits’ son Casey on percussion—heads to Europe next, before reportedly swinging back through America in early 2005.

Waits should be overjoyed about other things, too. Like the smash-hit, sold-out London and San Francisco runs of The Black Rider, with Marianne Faithfull trilling the Brecht/Weill-ish lieder he composed for playwright Robert Wilson. Or another Wilson-commissioned soundtrack, Alice, whose “Kommienezuspadt” closed the Vancouver set. Or his umpteenth feature-film appearance, jawing over java with Iggy Pop in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes. Or even “A Little Drop of Poison,” the delectable ditty he contributed to the Shrek 2 soundtrack. After disappearing from the recording scene for most of the ’90s, this gravel-throated minstrel is experiencing a comeback, a renaissance rocketing the 55-year-old right back to the singer/songwriter vanguard—turf he first staked out back in ’73 with his decadent Asylum Records debut, Closing Time.

But today, when Waits shuffles into King Fortune Seafood, a Chinese restaurant a few blocks from the Orpheum, he’s simply smiling about last night’s triumph. He’s comfortable with it, as he is all his other lauded coups of late, seemingly happy to be back, happy to be hitting the road again and flexing those stage muscles. Sure, he’s also become the pet character actor of top-flight film directors like Jarmusch, Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola. And during his 30-year career, his songs have been covered by everyone from The Eagles and Rod Stewart to Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen (who ironically chose “Jersey Girl,” Waits’ note-perfect spoof of the Boss and his working-class-isms).

But Waits is remarkably humble about all this. So when he sits down at a secluded corner table, he thoughtfully sips several cups of jasmine tea and contemplates-in yarn-spinning raconteur style-much larger issues. Like what his good friend Fred “Herman Munster” Gwynne told him before he passed away, back when they were acting together in Coppola’s Cotton Club. “He said that when he goes to heaven, and God says ‘What did you do while you were down there?’ he’ll go, ‘I got a little piece of film I’d like to show ya,’” chuckles Waits, whose steely, blue-eyed gaze is as hypnotic and unwavering as Rasputin’s probably was. “‘It’s just a little clip from a Bertolucci thing I did called Luna.’ Fred said, ‘That’s all I’m gonna show Him, not The Munsters stuff, just the Luna clip.’ And that was it, just a great little moment for him.” Waits immediately liked Gwynne, he recalls, because “he was a seeker—he was always on a quest.”

The same tribute could be paid to Waits. His melancholy work—initially peopled with Munster-type misanthropes—has grown increasingly numinous and metaphysical over the years. When he warns on Real Gone, “Don’t go into the barn,” he feels no need to spell out why—you can hear in his Doberman snarl that something quite tragic, possibly bloody, took place there. And he’s not interested in the incident itself—just the haunted funereal pall, the sense of threat left behind. But when Waits himself arrives at the pearly gates some day, what life moments would he show? After talking with him for over an hour, one feels that it might be his whirlwind romance with Brennan, whom he met while working on Coppola’s One From the Heart. She taught him how to rethink himself—that he didn’t need the headaches of a major label or the smarmy industry figures who went with it, that they could go it alone as a songwriting couple and find receptive outlets later, once the music was completed. That purity of vision—uncluttered by any accepted rules of rockdom—paved the path for Real Gone and its startling human-beatbox experiments. And for the new relaxation that’s swept over the Northern California-based Waits, even on the eve of his demanding new tour.

So what kind of footage would the man choose to screen? It might not be Luna, but it’s damned close. So sit back and dim the lights … 4, 3, 2, 1—roll clip.