Tom Waits' SWORDFISHTROMBONES:
Love and Crit and the Whole Damned Thing
Finding the Fulcrum point between heart and head
(in conversation with David Smay)
Picture yourself in a playground: swings, sandbox, someone's kid sobbing his heart out because he's fallen and his knees are bloody. Especially, picture the seesaw, the teeter-totter - you know, that long board with a perfect pivot point in the middle. Depending how weighty you get, you can always be on the ground; you'll have very little thrills or fun, but you're in control. Alternately, if you're less about the weight and heft, you have very little control, but you're always in the air.
That's the tradeoff. On the one hand, tell gravity to go to hell, get naked, shed the excess weight of clothing and worrying about it, and fly - a matter of pure visceral trust. On the other, look for the deeper meanings, look for the trappings, bedeck yourself with the weightier stuff, and you have the possibility of control - you just don't get to fly as high.
There's no right or wrong way here. Neither is invalid, merely different - some lucky people get to do both. I'm not one of them. In my head, the very bearable lightness of being is all about getting naked and trusting to the sensation. You can call it hedonism, but I just call it visceral: absorbing through the heart and groin and belly and the ends of your hair. The heavier stuff - the drive to approach it as much through the mind as through any other way, to take it apart and examine it, with the very valuable curiosity that sets the species apart in the first place - is the cerebral stuff, needing to know, the better to accept, to control, to understand.
It's a question of what you need. In my playground, I'm sitting on the end that's all the way in the air. I'm higher than what's left of the ozone layer, possibly naked. I'm certainly yelling wheeee!
What I'm doing in this playground is remembering the autumn of 1983. I'd just got married for the second time; I was home in California after some years in London. Loving again, after a horrendous fracture of the soul and heart, reformatting myself.
I was avoiding most music. Music hurt - the man I'd lost was a musician and it was razor blades. A vagrant guitar riff tensed me to diamond-edged hardness; a distant tinkle of piano keys left me sobbing and breathless.
But that autumn had a soundtrack, a beautiful scratchy elegant funky fucked-up noise that reached out, poked me in the belly button, growling. Come on in, girl, this is a love story and it'll be okay, it's always okay, it's never okay, you gonna trust this stuff or not?
I did, yes. Brave new world. I stripped down and rolled around in it. Tom Waits had been one of the last shows I'd seen in London. A mindblowing disconnect: him doing "Burma Shave" live onstage at the Royal Theatre, Haymarket, London, a lush little Victorian jewelbox of a venue: tassels, velvet curtains, crests on booths. Pasties and a g-string...
The soundtrack for my brave new world, the one in which the love story maybe wouldn't cut me to ribbons this time, was Swordfishtrombones. I listened to it in bits and pieces, as it was played on the radio. It didn't take the full lyric to 'Johnsburg, Illinois' before I was shedding protective layers, getting emotionally bare and skywalking. Love story, this album; love story all the way. Everything below the neck was really emphatic about that. Love story.
(Talking in email with David Smay, who has a beautiful scratchy elegant funky fucked-up little book called Swordfishtrombones out right now, as part of the 33-1/3 series of books on music. David: I agree that this album is a love song (to his wife Kathleen, but also, I think, a tribute to the things she drew out of him) but that's something I only realized very late after spending many years with it.)
That had me blinking. I heard "Johnsburg" first, and my eyes filled. That lyric? Love song! From Tom Waits! I can rub it all over myself and it won't take skin with it when it's done! YAY! I didn't know there was a Kathleen; I'd been vaguely aware that he and Ricki Lee Jones were a couple, years earlier. Not my turn to pay attention. I just knew it was a love song; the second song I heard from it, "Shore Leave", not only cemented the realtime romance of the album for me, it left me goofy reeling stoned.
( David: I guess I'd characterize my approach as being one where I had to learn and trust the emotional - I want to say logic but that's not really the right word - underpinnings of the songs. Many of the songs were very direct and beautiful and easy to access: Soldier's Things; Johnsburg, Illinois; Town With No Cheer. I followed the clues in Tom's voice - in many cases it was clear that he was singing in character, and at other times as a more removed narrator....Trusting the music also to guide me.)
Welcome to where I live. Music, at this end of the plank? Leap of faith. It's never anything else. I lack the genetic curiosity, or maybe just the willingness to have the magic trick explained.
Either way, welcome to the high bounce. Isn't it nifty up here? But of course, there's all the cool stuff I don't want to know about at the grounded end. Up, down, up. So where's the balance point in the middle of the board?
(David: I do prefer to get my musical jollies up front without working for it....But if I can see or sense the quality of the work, even if I can't access it immediately, I have learned - for me at least - it's a challenge that I should pursue.)
I savour that, thinking about it. Because, of course, he's right, and it points out a problem in the purely visceral approach: for us visceral types, there's no thrill of the intellectual chase.
Here's the issue: I hate crit - I have to hate it, basically. Music, above anything else in this world (including sex or poetry) is alchemy to me. It's a magic spell. It's a mantra. I'm open to wonder and trailing clouds of abracadabra and I don't want to know how the straw becomes gold. I run snarling, or I reach for my crossbow. Do. not. deconstruct. my. mantra.
Music is like orgasms. It's pure viscera. I actively don't want to know why it works - just bring it, yo.
David, on the other hand? He wants to know.
He and I go back a bit (eight or so years, which is not negligable in internet terms). We live about five minutes away from each other by car, fifteen minutes walking, with the eastern boundary of Golden Gate Park in the middle. His wonderful wife is one of my best friends.
David and I share a birthday, and have been known to drive each other stone batshit crazy. We are diametrically opposed on that teeter-totter.
Balancing point? We both love this album. And in any case, this book - also called Swordfishtrombones - is nothing like standard crit. Have we found the spot in the middle?
(Me to David: believe it or not, meant that way or not - about 70% of the book is gut stuff, just intensely lyrical. There are sections of the book - Caliban, Johnsburg, Gone to Earth specifically - that are almost purely visceral. Yes, the cerebral machinery used to get there is clear, and unrusted, and it's just fine - but it made it across to the other side of the seesaw where I'm sitting, and I absorbed it with my gut and groin. And yes, I heard it as a fragmented love story straight out the gate, and I didn't even know there was a Kathleen.)
David's a little bit off the ground at this point, if the piece in his book I've just reread - a gorgeous section called "Gone to Earth" - is anything to go by. Not every section of the book makes me this happy, mind you. The whole thing is very well-written - David is a solid writer and I wouldn't expect anything less - but some areas, the full analytic stuff, won't make it past my curtain. That's okay. We both love the album, different places, similar spaces.
(From "Gone to Earth", some splendid sun-dappled from the gut writing from David: The sun gets low and red in the sky, and he misses the noise of his kids. He misses the hurly-burly and the racket of them. He misses Kathleen and he wants to empty his pockets for her.)
Love story. Does it get simpler? I've had a faint whiff of the reasoning here and I'm down a little lower in the air; David, on the other hand, is off the ground a bit more, maybe getting that distant gut stuff like the smell of soft rain on the horizon. I can see where he's looked and made the connection in his head, and that's okay, so long as I keep my magic orgasmic shimmering curtain in its rightful place. There's a balance, to be found and remarked on.
(Me, to David: If an album puzzles me from moment one, I tend to never go back to it, because it means the musician's missed my gut and primarily hit my brain. I begin to itch, almost intolerably.)
The last album to do that to me was Tool's 10,000 Days. I could hear the machinery of Maynard putting it together. After one time through, I wanted to take him out behind the barn and smack him. "Dude. You gave me 'Forty Six and Two! You gave me 'Aenima'! You gave me frickin' 'SCHISM'! What is this manipulative shite?!" I've never listened to it again.
Rex Stout once had Nero Wolfe in an argument with a piano player: the question was "can music have intellectual force?" Wolfe (who was about as in touch with his own emotional core as a sack of doorknobs) said yes. The musician said that any music with intellectual force is failed music.
Crows and scarecrows and men named Frank - okay, yes, it's all in there. I'm not going to get too close to the earth on this one - this has masses of meaning, I'm sure, but the truth is, I don't care about the symbolism. It's one of my biggest issues with crit: as a writer and a musician myself, I feel very strongly that the only meaning worth mentioning is what it means to you, the end listener or the end reader. I don't personally feel any need to get deeper into To Waits' psyche - I live in the airspace where I listen to Postcard from a Hooker in Minneapolis and I have to wipe tears away because it's a fucking perfect lyric and I'm there and I love him. What else do I need to know?
Nothing. But, balancing, I realise it isn't fair to impose that lack of curiosity on anyone else. Curiosity - even though I don't have it - is a very good thing. All I can do is bounce the board.
(David: I should tell you that some sections of the book were written in an imaginary dialog with you. Not big sections but little paragraphs where I could hear your voice objecting to my describing folk songs in one way, and making sure to qualify my statement. Or the place where I characterized fiction as routing through the brain and music through the heart - I could hear your loud objections even as I wrote that.)
Dangling my feet off the board and blissing as the piano in Rainbirds brings me back to 1983, to a moment of realising that I actually would be able to listen to piano again in this life, that it could cut me and that was okay, maybe this was a survival story as well as a love story. And yes, it is, because I'm the end user, and that's what it is to me. A quarter century later, the memory of the song is still a sense memory. I hear no arrangements, no complexities, no nuts or bolts - just passion and regret.
Up and down we go, juggling what counts for each of us: love, and crit, and the whole damned thing.
