Franks Wild Years

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Waits has often pronounced his love for vaudeville, as well as his wish that he could have been there for it. The attraction of a melange of styles, a mad funhouse of talent, all treading the same bit of stage, is a historical concept that you don’t have to strain too hard to understand his passion for. In a period of his career that is sometimes described as ‘Brechtian’, Frank’s Wild Years comes out as being the most theatrical and cinematic of his albums. This is Waits’ love letter to vaudeville. 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. Yet the emotional grievances and desires that it speaks of are continuous and universal. 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. Take the songs individually and enjoy them. After saying that, the tunes do work together forming a cemented album. Larkin, Colin (2011). The Encyclopedia of Popular Music (5th conciseed.). Omnibus Press. ISBN 978-0-85712-595-8.

The band formed from the ashes of Luxury, a project with both Marcus and Daniel which ended due to a member relocating overseas during the covid crisis. Initially as a way to keep the momentum going, Hot Tubs Time Machine turned into a regular project. Going from writing the first batch of songs in two and a half weeks for their first show with local punks Blonde Revolver, they’ve gone on to play festival lineups for Wrapped Up 3, Chopped, and become one of Melbourne’s most entertaining live bands. As Hutchings tends to do, he haspivoted again stylistically, returning to a more traditional sounding solo album withA New. Waits' vocal talents are on full display here. "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. "I'll Be Gone", one of my favorite Tom Waits' songs, summons to life a mad drunk husband, hopeless in his current family-bound situation, yearning for a life larger than labor/wages/moonshine.At a time when major label songwriters were leaning towards the middle of the road, he jumped the guard rail, and kept on going. Waits was forging a new path and reinventing his sound. Encouraged and aided by his new wife and writing partner, Kathleen Brennan, it’s she who encouraged him to throw all his disparate influences together and find the place where they overlap. It was a place that mixed field recordings, Caruso, tribal music, Lithuanian language records, and Leadbelly. But nobody could have predicted his transformation into the experimental tunesmith and avant-garde performer fans recognize and revere today. For the follow-up, 1985’s Rain Dogs, Waits doubled down. The characters occupying his songs were more outrageous, the crazy-quilt approach to musical arrangement even more unpredictable, the writing more unfettered and imagistic, and the whole thing was painted on a bigger canvas. Waits brought aboard crucial collaborators like former Richard Hell & The Voidoids guitarist Robert Quine, Lounge Lizards sax man John Lurie, The Uptown Horns, and most importantly, percussionist Michael Blair and guitarist Marc Ribot. The latter two turned out to be Waits’s sonic soulmates, commanding an arch artillery that perfectly complemented the leader’s loopy visions. These critically acclaimed works are a monument to an artist’s ability to break through into new creative territory.

He was interested in a wider kind of Americana’: Waits on stage in Chicago, 1978. Photograph: Paul Natkin/Getty Images For the second album of his trilogy, Rain Dogs, Waits and Brennan had moved from the west coast to New York, into a loft apartment in Little Spain, not far from Union Square, which Waits furnished with stuff he found on the streets. He was, he said at the time, completely overwhelmed with the immersive noise and talk of the city. “For the most part it’s like an aquarium,” he told one interviewer. “Words are everywhere. You look out of the window and there’s a thousand words.” That clamour of found poetry made its way into his songs, just as the skip-reclaimed furniture found its way into the apartment. He had a sense, he told David Letterman at the time, that living in lower Manhattan was like “being aboard a sinking ship. And the ocean is on fire.” That feeling ran through Rain Dogs (the name is a reference to the city’s rough sleepers, “people who sleep in doorways… who don’t have credit cards… who fly in this whole plane by the seat of their pants”). For his Wild Years adventure, Waits chronicles the journey of a small-town boy to the big city of dashed dreams and a hatful of troubles. Therein a swirl of characters delineates the truth of the disparate lives of various denizens of the metropolitan demimonde. The picture created throughout this manic album is one of Waits sitting in the corner of some subterranean dive bar as a coterie of interesting souls wander in and play out their roles in the theatre of his twisted imagination. Ahead of their physical releases, all of the albums are available to stream today featuring the newly remastered audio, allowing fans to hear how these landmark recordings now sound better and more vivid than ever.The 80’s trilogy, as it is sometimes called, was a monumental achievement for Tom Waits. His new approach to songwriting was immensely innovative, and strengthened the atmosphere of his world of underdogs and castaways. Swordfishtrombones introduced the new style, Rain Dogs brought it to perfection. Where does this leave Franks Wild Years? Daniel and Marcus are Hot Tubs Time Machine.Marcus Rechsteiner (UV Race) and Daniel ‘Tubs’ Twomey (Deaf Wish/Lower Plenty) play a little Saturday arvo show at Franks Wild Years, Thirroul,showcasing their own strange brand of bedroom pop, new-wave and electronica. They’ll be joined by Solo Career.

It’s the sound of four musicians being themselves, reacting to life as they effervesce in the glass of life, right next to God’s dentures. Not always pretty, but invariably some kinda fun. Michael Blair, who later played with Lou Reed and Elvis Costello, provided percussion on the album. “For a multi-percussion player, it was like: pinch me, please. You know, how many times in your life would anyone ever get a chance to play with somebody who wrote so well, all these bulletproof songs, one after another. They could all really be pop songs, if you arranged them in a different way. Or if the singer had a different type of voice.” Working with experimental composer Francis Thumm, and taking inspiration from the music of found-object composer Harry Partch—plus Waits’ friend, Captain Beefheart—the renowned singer-songwriter reinvented his sound, album by album. 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. Themes of journeying and discovery are ones that can’t be escaped. 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. Mortality is a recurrent theme, from “Dirt In The Ground” (“We’re all gonna be. . .”) to “All Stripped Down,” “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me” (a tale of contemplated suicide), “Jesus Gonna Be Here,” the rambunctious paean to childhood, “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” and certainly the broken-hearted, confessional classic Waits ballad, “Whistle Down The Wind,” which was beautifully covered by Joan Baez on her titular 2018 album. Waits explained at the time: “Yeah, ultimately, it will be a subject that you deal with. Some deal with it earlier than others, but it will be dealt with. Eventually we’ll all have to line up and kiss the devil’s arse.”

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The song "If I Have to Go" was used in the play, but released only in 2006 on Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards. The theme from "If I Have to Go" was used under the title "Rat's Theme" in the documentary Streetwise as early as 1984. "Yesterday Is Here" appears in " The Night Shift", the second episode of the 2023 mystery drama series Poker Face. [10] Critical reception [ edit ] Now living in Melbourne Australia, he is what many consider to be the artists’ artist. He has built a dedicated cult following with his earnest interrogations of the mundane, the unusual, the tragic and the beautiful. Bringing his full 5-piece band on tour, his live show is captivating as it is sobering, cementing him as a frontrunner for the most intriguing indie folk artist of the year. On Tom Waits’s 1983 album, Swordfishtrombones, there is, in among a lot of fabulously unhinged musical experimentation (Tony Bennett described the record as “a guy in an ashcan sending messages”), a 90-second ballad of such tender beauty that it explains all the rest. The song was written for Waits’s wife, Kathleen Brennan – “She’s my only true love/ She’s all that I think of, look here/In my wallet/That’s her” – and named after the town, Johnsburg, Illinois, in which Brennan grew up. The pair had got together on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1981 film One from the Heart, for which Waits was writing the music and Brennan editing the script, and had married a couple of months later at 1am at the 24-hour Always Forever Yours Wedding Chapel in Los Angeles. Christgau, Robert (January 26, 1988). "Christgau's Consumer Guide". The Village Voice . Retrieved November 17, 2015. Some of the press: Musician: “a raw-boned masterpiece.” New York Times: “Nothing short of breathtaking.” Rolling Stone: “Rich with spiritual longing.” Chicago Tribune: “bursts with color and emotion.” Billboard: “One of the finest records of the year.” Washington Post: “His finest album.” Melody Maker: “Ragged glory.” New Musical Express: “Scary, mournful, morbid and easily one of Tom’s best.” Select: “Tom Waits’ supreme achievement to date, his ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude.’”