Franks Wild Years

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Since then I’ve looked for an in-road into Tom Waits’ music, which was provided to me in the form of a recommendation of the Frank’s Wild Years album. When the trains thundered past the backyard fence, bound for Oxnard, Lompoc, Gila Bend, Stanfield and parts south where the wind blew big, Frank would count the cars and make a wish just like he did when he was a kid. I also bought the excellent 192/24 digital file (mostly for headphone listening) but the vinyl edition simply sounds more realistic. The shared title of the album and the play is an iteration of "Frank's Wild Years", a song from Waits' 1983 album Swordfishtrombones. This album charts the wanderlust, desire and frustration of a thankfully under-portrayed character, allowing a greater sense of empathy and identification for everyone that chooses to step on board.

I was recently overtaken by an urge to listen to "Innocent When You Dream", which to me was the outstanding track on the album. Since its original staging the play has never been performed again, and official sources confirm that, at the moment, Waits doesn't want the play to be staged ever again. When the band had worked up and taped an arrangement, Greg Cohen would hand a cassette to Waits, who'd come in after rehearsing with the Steppenwolf actors. The first two of the trilogy will always be hailed, quite rightly, as sprawling, masterpieces of an eccentric artistry that has few rivals, but it seems as if the third will never be held in the same regard by many. As well as the unparalleled joy of keeping the publication alive, you'll receive benefits including exclusive editorial, podcasts, and specially-commissioned music by some of our favourite artists.They had met in New York City (December, 1984) after Waits had seen "Einstein On The Beach" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. After Waits' debut in Paradise Alley, he appeared in several other movies: Wolfen (1981), The Stone Boy(1982), One from the Heart (1982), The Outsiders (1983), Rumble Fish (1983), The Cottonclub (1984). Waits has often pronounced his love for vaudeville, as well as his wish that he could have been there for it. Storms often rage as to which Waits album is the best, with the skies looking to be perpetually inclement.

A Waits album described as individual and singular when compared to nothing but the rest of the oeuvre? He is a combination of Will Rogers and Mark Twain, playing accordian -- but without the wisdom they possessed. Some may be tempted see this as being done at the sacrifice or tempering of energy, but if anything it’s an intensification; a shifting of form; an inhabiting of a new skin. Blow Wind Blow" seems to be about a lost youth, humbled by fate, wishing desperately for something to happen, "Temptation" invokes a street opera singer who made just enough change to whet her whistle at the town-pump and preach the woes of vice to the willing and maybe not-so-willing.

For a video, men in retro suits with Stetson hats could very easily strut and snap their fingers to the beat of this song, down a dark alley.

What it does have, however, is quality songs in abundance, from the barnstorming opener, Hang On St. It is a manic harmony of all the voices and characters in his head, a stylistic gumbo that evokes a time that is not our own now and wasn’t even then, 25-years ago. Apparently the play was first planned to be staged in New York City, but somehow things didn't work out.That same year Waits released the album Swordfishtrombones with the hilarious Ken Nordine inspired monologue " Frank's Wild Years". Tom Waits (1985): "It actually starts out with Frank at the end of his rope, despondent, penniless, on a park bench in East St. Even when percussion is absent, the body-movin' tendencies are still present as accordions, pump-organs and even a rooster twist the narrative through a carnival of broken dreams. Franks Wild Years includes tracks such as “Cold Cold Ground,” “Way Down In The Hole” – versions of which were used as the theme music of HBO’s series The Wire – and “Temptation. As a humble scribe, trying my utmost to put down in words the passion, respect and admiration for an album and an artist that have brought me happiness, it is with great reluctance that I have to dabble in clichés.

E cosi quando ho visto questo suo meraviglioso lavoro ad un prezzo economico, non ho esitato un attimo.It's just wood and lights and people walking around until you somehow bang up against something, and something breaks, and something sparks, and something catches and then it has a life. Swordfishtrombones” is the first album (the albums title comes from a song on that), the second is the classic “Rain Dogs”. Waits creates Lewis Carroll imagery for you to play around in, it's a bit dank, but dammit if it isn't the most fun you have had in a long time. Subtitled “Un Operachi Romantico in Two Acts”, the album is an adaptation of a stage play Waits wrote and preformed in. Although I will never tire of espousing the greatness of Waits in whatever skin he chooses to inhabit, be it as a barfly raconteur, backwoods bluesman, dust bowl poet or absconding guest of an asylum, his electrical, prickly, scathing and firebrand form of the mid-80s is one that may rank as the most fearsome to behold.