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            Beginning with the creeping “Singapore,” there’s a certain dark, mysterious jubilance throughout Tom Waits’ “Rain Dogs.” Waits excitedly lays things down on this track as if he were a mad pirate with a glint in his eye, so much so that one could expect an evil cackle after the lines “We sail tonight for Singapore, take your blankets from the floor / Wash your mouth out by the door, the whole town’s made of iron ore!” Fittingly, after a nice double-bass saunter, the track fades out to the sound of stormy weather and we’re left not knowing what to expect next.

             Though two songs from this album (“Jockey Full of Bourbon” and “Tango ’til They’re Sore”) bookend the beautiful Jim Jarmusch film “Down by Law,” the swampy “Clap Hands” would not have been out of place in its black-and-white, panoramic cinematography, particularly the scene where the three escapees are sailing along the Louisiana bayous (“They all went to heaven in a little row boat”). Marc Ribot’s guitar solo cuts in to the side of the song exquisitely here, while the marimba is utilised to percussive perfection. While “Cemetery Polka” sounds like an after-hours gathering behind the scenes at a circus, on “Jockey Full of Bourbon,” Ribot again drops the song down smoothly, and once you’ve seen Jarmusch’s film, in one’s mind it’s hard to separate the song from those lovely rolling shots of the streets, cemeteries and balconies of New Orleans. Everything about this number is slick: its swinging tempo, its ability to set its own scene so well, the harmony of the whole ensemble, and, specifically, the ongoing dialogue forged between Waits and Ribot.

             “Tango ’til They’re Sore” clearly belongs to the lost, small hours of a near-empty bar where the smoke is still settling, as Waits winds down the night with a frank, drunken honesty. After the dark magic of the slinking, well-told “Diamonds and Gold,” things begin to slow down with the so-close-its-touching-you “Hang Down Your Head,” and by the opening of “Time,” for a second Waits almost sounds like Leonard Cohen, regretfully conscious of time passing. These heavy tunes of lament and regret display exactly why Tom Waits is the master of the “Closing Time” mentality.

             The title track begins with an accordion that sounds like a phantom’s church organ; it’s an effective opener for this rocking, falling song – one which is laid out delightfully by the feel of Ribot’s delicious chords slipping right the way down his guitar. There’s a great momentum and energy about it, the hoarse syllabic-balance of “with the Rose of Tralee” only helping to underline the great array of imagery Waits employs. The instrumental “Midtown,” sounds as if it is straight out of the old Batman TV show, with its exploding stars of “Pow!” and “Wop!”, or footage of cars speeding through darkened alleyways and knocking over trashcans, the only things missing.

             Waits’ storytelling gets its usual narrative excursion on the whispered, “9th & Hennepin.” Invitingly eerie, it couldn’t be a more perfect stage for Waits, as writer, to narrate with a calculated, atmospheric edge as he revels in his own insight and understanding of how the people of the world work: “I’ve seen it all, I’ve seen it all /Through the yellow windows of the evening train…” Meanwhile, the Southern taste to the inspired, banjo-straddled blues number that is “Gun Street Girl” makes it the kind of tune that would later influence the likes of Grant Lee Phillips.

             The stomping rhythm’n'blues of “Union Square” feels like it’s being performed behind chicken-wire in yet another all-night bar (one that serves fried-chicken), while “Blind Love,” on the other hand, introduces a country element to the fold in a simple, wandering track that sees Keith Richards cameo on steel guitar. Even after these two brief trips through different genres, the identity and feel of the album has long-since been established, and settles back comfortably with the swing of the horns in “Walking Spanish.”

             “Downtown Train” has “album closer” written all over it from the very first few seconds (although the drums perhaps sound a little dated); it would later even be covered and turned into a top-ten hit by Rod Stewart. Yet the show goes on with another brief instrumental in the form of “Bride of Rain Dog,” which makes you feel like you’re walking in on the end of a twenty-four hour old jam session at six in the morning. “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” however, is truly the last, classic gasp of Tom Waits’ evening, and here we find that he has been saving that extra bit of something special for his final thoughts. This is his growling swan song, shooting to life unexpectedly at the end with a Sunday-jazz brass section – one that’s oblivious to the now comatose troubadour, who’s perhaps lying knocked-out on the piano.

Artist / Group:
Tom Waits
Album:
Rain Dogs
Label:
Island
Released:
1985

Popularity: 1% [?]

           There’s something about this album that leaves me thinking, something strange… At first, it’s easy to digest, it sounds good; Tom Waits, the man who’d find it difficult to put a foot wrong, is suddenly back again with a slightly new direction, and it’s as brilliant as always. But then… I sit down with it, take out the inlay, and give the album my full attention.

            It opens with ‘Top of the Hill’, a slightly misleading track, in that its filthy funk serves as the kind of beginning you’d expect to find on a new trip to Tom Waits’ industrial wasteland. With a balance between the old and the new, with his characteristic sound on the one hand, and the introduction of scratching and human beat-box on the other, Waits takes his hat off to you in the dark, waving it with a wry smile. Suddenly, you realise that we’re, quite unexpectedly, closer than we’ve ever been to hip-hop Tom Waits style. Unforeseen as it maybe, however, it’s still all part of the plan. So too is the second track, ‘Hoist that Rag’, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the reunion between Waits and guitarist Marc Ribot more than any other. With its dustbin lid percussion clanking out a familiar and much-loved rhythm, this song could be easily fit in place on “Rain Dogs” — which, of course, is a very good thing. Its Latin feel even conjures up an image of Waits riding through Havana in a Chevy at night — also a very good thing.

            It’s with the haunting ‘Sins of My Father’, however, that things take a decided turn for the macabre. “Night is falling like a bloody axe / Lies and rumours and the wind at my back” Waits sings, telling a tale of the desperately fallen and their bid for redemption in crooked measures. ‘Shake it’, meanwhile, brings us straight into the seedy underbelly of a dingy motel room, screaming in tormented delight: “Put a towel on that lamp / You look hot in this light.” Meanwhile, with ‘Don’t Go into that Barn’ – the blues of a deranged lunatic on the loose – something begins to strike me about the heart of this LP.

            ”Real Gone” seems like an album of grainy episodes, vignettes of shady, solitary figures caught in their own personal nightmares with “spooky old barns,” “worn out cars,” empty “old picture shows,” and tumbleweeds. The shortened track names on the sleeve are a good signpost towards what lies in the accompanying lyric book. If one reads the text (complete with full titles) along with the music, it produces an extraordinary effect: it lets you know you have been wandering through a hinterland of murderers and disappearances, of the weight of secrets and hidden knowledge that buries it all down deep. It unsettles the rest of the album, and as if recovering from a sense of shock, even the most harmless number now becomes as loaded as “just another sad guest on this dark earth.”

            This theme of deathliness continues with tracks such as ‘Dead and Lovely’ (“She’s so dead / forever dead and lovely now”) and ‘Green Grass’ – a song that rattles forth like a whisper from a corpse in the ground: “Lay your head where
/ My heart used to be / Hold the earth above me / Lay down in the green grass / Remember when you loved me.” Waits takes up his usual reminder that he is a consummate storyteller at heart, with the tinny narrative ‘Circus’, sounding like a drunk private detective rasping into his Dictaphone over the sound of sinister, crackling vinyl.

            The homesick disillusion of ‘Day After Tomorrow,’ a political lament that almost seems tacked on, or at least, feels out of place from the rest of the songs (perhaps because it has also been used in “Future Soundtrack for America”), is gorgeous nonetheless. It works as a gem with a disarming message disclosed to us quietly at the end, just before the lights turn out. Stirring, even troubling at times, but a venture into Waits’ world is not something you turn down.

Artist / Group:
Tom Waits
Album:
Real Gone
Label:
Anti
Released:
4th October 2004

Popularity: unranked [?]

            Taking more than a long time in getting started, various roadies and band members took turns in standing on stage examining equipment, deliberating for an aye-brow-raising amount of time. As the venue continued to fill up until things became cramped, and the scratching of heads and rubbing of beards seemed no closer to conclusion, the words “anti-climax” began to flash through my mind.

             However, this kind of ponderous detachment, as I was to learn, only underlines the Zen-like quality that is emblematic of Iron & Wine’s particular craft of song-writing. What would follow from the trio was a soft, golden slumber (thanks, in part, to the lighting) of acoustic reveries which could be seen as impossible to sing unless in a completely tranquil state of mind.

             Though a drunken hubbub exploded with applause between numbers, the performance of the songs themselves risked being drowned out at any moment by the sound of a dropping pin. However, after a riveting interpretation of Neil Young’s “Mr. Soul,” which has to be considered on par with the original (Beam’s rendition of “Smokestack Lightnin’” [previously featured on SeeWhatYouHear Radio] also does something to rival its original), the pace began to step itself up. Within minutes, a surprise chorus made up from audience members on my left sprang into song from the very start of “Bird Stealing Bread,” and before long, the band had amplified themselves up into a rousing blues slide.

             Similar levels of enthusiasm were to be found when the beginning of each song (mostly taken from Iron &Wine’s new album “Our Endless Numbered Days,” but also including a nice take on a Stereolab song) was met a wave of “sshhhh” from pockets of the crowd. It also meant that when Sam beam began “Passing Afternoon,” the sudden litany of sing-alongs caused him to stumble the song to a halt in a distracted laughter. “I guess they were right about Ireland… Have you guys nothing better to do on a Friday night?” Beam joked, complying with the calls for a second encore. Possibly the quietest gig I’ve ever been to – but an enjoyable one all the same.

Popularity: unranked [?]

 It’s just after three a.m. when I sit down for an interview with Wayne Fontaine, former frontman of New Zealand’s Dogs on Prozac. These small hours of a stormy October night literally mark the end of the Kiwi’s visit to Ireland — a stay that eventually grew to take up over a half of a year-long, round-the-world journey. Fontaine found himself undertaking such a trip after Dogs on Prozac bassist Baz Turner and his girlfriend were both tragically killed in a car crash the day after a gig. At that moment in time, things had only begun to take off for the group, and, as it happened, the band had just been picked up for a major overseas tour by production company Pogomotion on the Monday following the accident.

Left – Right: Wayne Fontain, Morse, Baz Turner. Photo from dogsonprozac.com

            Up until that point, the music career of Wayne Fontaine had long been used to taking unexpected turns. At the debut performance of his first band, Jermimah Mud Duck, Fontaine had been suspended indefinitely from school after announcing “fuck the system!” to an audience made up of four hundred friends and family members. After getting himself readmitted on a technicality, it was not long before he was permanently expelled on abduction charges. Fontaine then went on to form bands “Asylum and Hypnocide” and “Green Gum Boots,” gigging with the likes of Tahu Jacomb, a classically trained “mad Maori genius.” Dogs on Prozac’s beginnings, however, took much longer to get off the ground. After initially using the insurance money from a stolen surf board to buy a guitar in order to form the band, Fontaine ended up moving away from Rotorua to the likes of Hamilton and Auckland, where he worked on film soundtracks until succumbing to a drug-induced nervous breakdown: “I was just tripping with the wrong people, man.” Deciding to move home to start anew with the band, Dogs on Prozac finally got in gear with a “good burst” of creative energy.

            In their first gig back together, they won recording time in the Waikato Battle of the Bands competition, won the previous year by The Datsuns. With a live show that involved multi-media projections and numerous costumes, the group gradually built up “a reputation for being a pack of freaks,” landing them supporting gigs with The D4 (Hollywood Records), live radio sessions, and even the number one slot on a viewer’s choice chart for their music video “The Insect Politician.” After opening for The Datsuns in a gig that saw Dogs on Prozac inadvertently steal the show, the band were left with a taste for more and decided to pursue a career as a group on a full-time basis. “Six months later, [The Datsuns] blew up. It was then that we knew we’d have to go to Europe to make things happen, to chase something down.”

            With “mastermind” managerTim Fulton at the helm, the band made new recordings, shot a video for “Fonzie Gets the Girls,” furthered their own promotion with “guerrilla tactics,” and set their sights on heading to England in mid-2003. The drummer, Olly Eason, however, didn’t feel ready for such a move and subsequently left the band, later to be replaced by “Morse” (pictured above). However, taking such a change in tandem with the sudden death of Turner, things looked to be all but over for the group. Yet, undeterred, Fontaine took to the studio to complete the production on the band’s recordings, still reeling from the loss. Enlisting Trent “TNT” Towers (a previous band mate from earlier musical incarnations)
and the original drummer, Eason, Dogs on Prozac performed a final sell-out gig for the launch of their EP, “Songs for the Soon to Be Dead.”

Photo from dogsonprozac.com

            Wasting no time in immersing himself in the music scene, including a brief, experimental stint with producer Ivan Jackman and Skuzzi Port drummer Chris Connaughton in forming “Death Metal Distortion Bastards,” Fontaine was impressed with what he found: “The musicians I’ve seen have been really talented, even day-to-day jamming in people’s lounges and all that kind of carry on – they’ve all been amazing. Yeah, there are some good things happening.”

            However, the lack of a regular outlet for performing live has come as a great source of frustration for the singer, leaving him with a feeling he describes as being “just impotent… Music is like my manhood, and playing live is like having sex.” A certain sense of respite came in the form of a one-off gig in Dublin’s Temple Bar Music Centre in July, where Fontaine performed some of his new material in an approach that involved combining spoken-word with the electric guitar: “It was exciting, it was cool, because I’ve never done anything like that before at all, and it was really interesting to see what the reaction was going to be… especially the spoken word stuff, because you have to rely on that imagery to carry the whole thing.”

Performing in Temple Bar Music Centre, July 2004.

            Along with planning to record the new album with a band, and potentially looking to tour overseas some time next year, Fontaine will
also be resuming his film-making once he returns to New Zealand in November. Although he feels that the marriage between sound and image is a problematic one (and something he’d ideally like to keep separate), Fontaine can’t help developing a clear idea for the execution of a video for “Wayne Fontaine’s Black Holes”: “It starts with an antenna system around the world, shooting up. I’m not sure if it’s going to be done with people, animation… or sock puppets (laughs) — just to debase the whole seriousness of the idea. But it’s basically sending waves through the television in lightning bolts, keeping people controlled by television — there’s a little bit of a back story to it. Then there’s a group of underground scientists who send off a mission into space towards a black hole because there’s been a beacon discovered. On the way there, just on the horizon of the black hole, the captain is possessed by aliens and ends up venturing into it by himself in a space suit, and as he falls deeper and deeper into it, he goes through a different, alternative reality in different states of being, evolving into a static electro-being that shoots across the universe and ends up shorting out all the telecommunications and setting people free.”

            The ease with which we relinquish our time to the lure of television is clearly something that troubles Fontaine. As a songwriter, he has often felt disgusted at the amount of references to T.V. that he has found in his own work, as if they had slipped in there subconsciously, only to be recognised once he had stepped back to take in the bigger picture: “The thing about T.V. is that it’s completely telling you what to see, hear, and almost teaching you not to think. It’s putting you in a trance-like state, seducing you…”

            Although he feels that he is still at an early stage in his career, after losing his friend and band mate to an untimely death, Wayne Fontaine has learned not to take anything for granted, even if it means accepting that your peak may already be in the rear-view mirror: “You’ve always got to think it’s your peak, simple as that… I imagine it haunts all people who have moved on in life, even just with simple things like being able to keep your balance when you’re older, watching some young person run down the stairs, and then having to hobble down them yourself,” he says, breaking
into laughter. “I remember when Tim Fulton, the manager of Dogs on Prozac, and I, were up working on a press-kit for the band. We were talking about bands that don’t realise when they’ve peaked, and they get pissed off because people aren’t flocking to their concerts like they used to be, or their faces aren’t on all the magazines. I was saying to him that you have to realise what your peak is, and I said ‘this could be our peak right now, working on this press-kit. This could be the peak of our careers.’”

Fontaine mooning

            For someone with so many detailed plans to look forward to, it’s certainly a sobering thought for the New Zealander. His laugh fades as he puts a hand to his jaw, looking down at the table contemplatively: “It’s a hard thing to ponder, until you’ve been through the process, I imagine… I try to say I don’t believe in anything, because the sun may not rise tomorrow, it might blow up, or whatever… you might die.” And with that, Wayne Fontaine steps out into the blustering dark to leave for the airport; the final destination of his trip, New York, laying in wait. Slightly dazed at such prospects of uncertainty, Wayne Fontaine is taking things in with one eye on what he’s been through, and one eye on what’s still to come.

Popularity: 1% [?]