Franks Wild Years

Product Information

All these bulletproof songs, one after another": remembering Tom Waits's extraordinary mid-career trilogy". Titled for a play of the same name and authored by Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, Franks Wild Years was performed by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 1986. Jacobs (2000): "Terry Kinney was set to direct Frank's Wild Years, but just a few weeks before it was scheduled to open, Kinney resigned (or was fired) over creative differences with Waits. He wins a talent contest and some money on the crap tables, but then he gets rolled by a cigarette girl, and - despondent and penniless - he finds an accordian in a trashcan, and one thing leads to another, and before you know it he's onstage. It's got lots of laughs and songs, something for the whole family, opening soon at a theatre near you.

At the road's end lies "Innocent When You Dream (78)," a moral that is told to Frank early on but doesn't hit home until the end, when it is heard in a lovely, tinnily nostalgic rendition. Rudimentary versions of the songs appeared on a demo cassette labeled: Island, 1985 (as mentioned by Barney Hoskyns in Lowside Of The Road 2009).It's a Tom Waits album, and I cannot envisage giving less than five stars to anything that bears his name.

It wouldn't surprise me if the entire band laughed until their faces hurt after they recorded this take. The pit musicians (some of the Rain Dogs group) were: Greg Cohen (bass, horns), Ralph Carney (saxes), Michael Blair (drums, marimba, glockenspiel), Bill Schimmel (accordion, keyboards) and Morris Tepper (guitar). It is a front-to-back album and will reward those who attend, like a cinematic experience, straight through to the bitter end.

Captain Beefheart could jump into the music at almost any moment of Franks Wild Years, yelling something like "broma' seltzer blue umbrella! Subtitled “Un Operachi Romantico in Two Acts”, the album is an adaptation of a stage play Waits wrote and preformed in. Vegas, devil, german barroom, operetta, spaghetti western, the Muppets (fozzy bear missed his train). Frank's Wild Years is separated into two acts, but you can forget about trying to understand any continuous story that Waits may be trying to tell throughout the album.

Temptation" and "Straight to the Top (Vegas)" featured in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), and "Innocent When You Dream" featured in Smoke (1995).

For the better part of a year after its release, Franks Wild Tears was the nightly go-to-pump-uo album for me and my roommate. Elated to see that the Tom Waits albums are being reissued, one, I can retire the originals which are now too damn valuable to be playing, and two, Waits becomes available on vinyl for some for the first time.