Title:Blood Money By: Waits, Tom Released by: Anti Released on: May 7, 2002 Rating (out of 10): 9 Date: 05/25/2002
Misery is the River of the World. Everybody Row.
24 year-old Tom Waits began his debut album with the declaration, “Well my time went so quickly,” and unwittingly kicked off one of the lengthiest and most consistent careers rock & roll has seen. That album, Closing Time also contains “Martha,” a sure contender for the saddest song ever written, on which young Waits role-plays as Tom Frost, an old man calling a former girlfriend—one to whom he hasn’t spoken in 40 years—to tell her he still loves her. Ironic, then, that when Tom Waits introduced himself back in 1973, he did so not only as a man whose cigarette-scarred voice alone revealed a world-weariness far beyond his years, but as a man prematurely obsessed with his own mortality, while his most recent work finds him giddily nihilistic—now, nearly 30 years later, playing the carnival barker recast as the ferryman on the river Styx, advising us to smoke ‘em if we got ‘em.
Waits co-wrote the music on Blood Money with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, to accompany a Danish production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck directed by Robert Wilson, with whom Waits also collaborated on The Black Rider and Alice (Side Note: the music from Alice, based on the life of Alice In Wonderland scribe Lewis Carroll, though written in 1992, saw release on the same day as Blood Money.) Widely considered the first modern play, Woyzeck depicts its title character’s slow descent into insanity. Remarkably, Büchner died at age 24, leaving Woyzeck largely unfinished.
Knowledge of the source play doesn’t greatly enhance the enjoyment of Blood Money, except in a few crucial spots (When Waits rasps, “Men do foolish things,” on “All the World is Green,” he addresses Marie, the woman whose betrayal drives Woyzeck mad and whom he subsequently murders. Later, Waits sings, “Can you forgive me somehow/ Maybe when our story’s over?”) But the similarities between Waits’ and Büchner’s life and works—the obsession with death, poverty and virtue; the fact that Büchner died, poor and unknown, at the same age as Waits was when he recorded Closing Time; an old man in Woyzeck sings, “There’s nothing on this earth will last,” an eerie echo of the opening lines of Waits’ debut album—give Blood Money a fascinating, dark luster and a macabre spirituality. Waits simultaneously plunges head-on into the gruesome subject matter of Woyzeck and infuses it with a wry humor appropriate of the man who once slipped the line, “All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes,” into a song about living at the edge of your wits in the seedy part of the city.
Much like Woyzeck itself, Blood Money takes some time to wrap your mind around. Waits fluctuates between characters—sometimes morphing into the carnival ticket-taker who flashes a toothless grin as he urges you to enter, “There’s always cheese in the mousetrap. It’s a deal!” sometimes singing as Woyezeck himself. “Misery Is The River Of The World” conjures images of Waits with a megaphone, hovering above 1000 weathered men wearily marching on the road to hell, as he barks twisted encouragement like, “All the good in the world you can fit inside a thimble and still have room for you and me.” The piano that falls in and out of “Misery” may seem beholden to Waits’ slave driver, but “Everything Goes To Hell” counters with a baritone sax played by a rogue member of Satan’s marching band.
Things never seem to come off quite the way they should. “Knife Fight” sounds more like a covert militia, armed with spitwads, gearing up for an attack. The constant, grim fascination with the underworld stands in stark contrast to the regretful “Lullaby”—and there he goes again, whispering, “Nothing’s ever yours to keep,” to his infant child. With its meandering cello and half-assed amorous praises, only “Coney Island Baby” comes off as even remotely out of place—presumably because it lacks precisely the thing that makes the rest of Blood Money so great: a casual hope in the face of utter despair. Thankfully, “All The World Is Green” quickly makes up for it, as you can almost hear Waits’ bemused smirk when he describes “balancing a diamond on a blade of grass.”
Interestingly, the album ends with “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” a detached curtain call of a number that effectively notes the difference between 1973’s Waits, who practically expected to live a life full of regrets, and Blood Money’s Waits, who sings, “My favorite word is good-bye.” Obviously, he spent these thirty years coming to terms with his reticence to die and now, instead of wasting his time trying to prevent his own suffering, he merely shouts, “Who gives a good goddamn!”
That alone would make for compelling music, but the way that Blood Money ties that struggle together with Woyzeck’s also makes it haunting. If the young, brooding Waits had done this score it would have been too much—too miserable—but our older, wiser Waits possesses the perfect combination of cynicism and idealism to pull it off. At one point in Büchner’s play, Woyzeck says, “Our kind is miserable only once: in this world and in the next. I think if we ever got to heaven we’d have to help with the thunder.” In the opening song on Blood Money, Waits trumpets, “Misery is the river of the world. Everybody row.” Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.
