Imperial Waits

Someone once said that listening to a Tom Waits CD is more like watching a play than hearing an album. So seeing a Tom Waits show is perhaps akin to some abstruse sensory overload that, no matter how high the expectation, will bite you like a shark. The Carre Theatre in Amsterdam is a beautifully classic, large auditorium with retracting chandeliers and burgundy seats.
The theatre fills, the lights disappear and Waits’ three band members take the stage to applause that feels wonderfully vehement in such an elegant, and seated, environment. Waits doesn’t tour Europe often and his fans are a loyal and passionate crowd, so much so that many of them happily paid five hundred quid on eBay for tickets to these tour dates. As the steady, minimal drum hits get going and the bass starts to rattle your ribcage, out comes Waits all twisted up in an ill fitting suit and pikey hat.
Grabbing the mic like it’s a woman and grimacing a contorted smile he begins ‘Rain’ from his new longplayer, Real Gone. It is a slow, pounding blues number, as emotive and provocative as its creator, and when he screeches lines like “Without her love/ Without your kiss/ Hell can’t burn me/ More than this/ I’m burning up all this pain/ Open up the heavens/ And make it rain”, the spine-tingling atmosphere in the room instantly drives home just why we’ve assembled here tonight from the four corners of Europe. Interestingly, Waits only played tracks from his last four albums at this show – though I was told he played some earlier work at the other dates – but it really proved that his recent commercial success (99’s Mule Variations sold 1m copies) has been thoroughly merited. ‘Hoist the Rags’ swells gorgeously with a fast, Latin-funk inspired groove while Waits’ young son helps with the rapid-fire bongo-led percussion. Indeed, when he gets the crown to ‘ya-de-die’ along with Reperbahm, the waxing and waning of rhythm and volume act like a plectrum on the entire audience’s heart-strings.
Sometimes the set is challenging; he’s taken to beat-boxing percussive hits vocally when playing live, but, much like life, these moments bring you to a new realm of appreciation and leave you wishing they’d never end. Other songs, like ‘I’m Still Here’, ‘Alice’ or ‘November’ are pensive ballads of the type only Waits can perform; gentle, softly replete with meaning and substance.
He didn’t talk very much, which would have been a shame if the tunes themselves didn’t speak more eloquently than any stage banter. His band was tight and lent him the perfect platform, in abstract sporadic percussion and great guitar solos, to keep his unique bark and whiskey-drenched drawl going for two hours and three encores. Stunning.