*SPOILERS for the play Woyzeck*
Let me say this upfront: Blood Money is my favourite Tom Waits album. This might not be a popular choice; its continuous intensity might be less appealing than its melancholic counterpart Alice (which has a couple more hopeful tracks), it isn’t as diverse as Rain Dogs and it isn’t the full blown horror of Bone Machine. It probably helps that this is the first Tom Waits album I listened to, but what Blood Money has, more than perhaps any other Tom Waits record, is the theatrics. Much of that comes from its production, another theatrical collaboration with the great Robert Wilson, only this was their third production chronologically – ten years since their first – and that experience can be heard throughout the record; the forcefulness has but increased since The Black Rider, but has brought with an extremely pitch black sense of humour.
But let’s not forget that the musical in question was an adaptation of Woyzeck, George Buchner’s incomplete masterpiece that rides the line between naturalism and expression, between a precision and sprawling nature, full of characters that are victims of their societal and emotional circumstance, but the central character essentially an anti-hero (the central “affair” is left so ambiguous so as to change the entire tone of the piece depending on adaptation*). I cannot think of a tale more suited to Waits’ predilections as an artist than the play with which he spins the narrative of his music (at a streamlines and focused, for Waits, forty-two minutes). Blood Money is a cabaret of diseased minds.
Did I mention before that it’s intense? Because it’s intense. That tension is built and manipulated with on the very first song, “Misery is the River of the World,” with its marching beat punctuated with arpeggios that give the impression of being in the middle of a boat on the verge of capsizing. This is precisely a water which, in the Woyzeck play Franz Woyzeck would dispose the bloody knife with which he killed his wife. Tom’s voice on this track is essentially staccato breaths, exemplary of him pushing his vocal style to its absolute breaking point throughout Blood Money. The album’s most quoted line comes from here, “if there’s one thing you can say about mankind/there’s nothing kind about man.” A mission statement to be sure, but perhaps even more of a striking message is the notion of the devil building a chapel to counteract God’s church, “like the thistles that are growing ’round the trunk of a tree.” Even this record’s quietest and most delicate moments, there is the assurance that a natural darkness is inevitably going to come. Has Tom Waits worked with Werner Herzog yet?
That religious battle progresses in “Everything Goes to Hell,” with the existential proclamation that the narrator believes we don’t even go to heaven when we’re good. The title is expressed in the midst of erratic and wild percussion, perfectly matched with battling saxes from both sides of the headphone, fighting to see which can be the most wild. That wildness calms down with what is one of this record’s rare calm moment, the jazzy piano ballad of “Coney Island Baby.” The beautiful muted trumpets and sax help to tell the story of a love that seems to be for, quite literally, a dream girl (“Every night she comes/To take me out to dreamland”). This notion is not just based on that opening line, or the crackling of the background that feels like we have recorded a moment in the mind (I wish I could have seen this staged!) but the central image of Coney Island, constructed fun, a metallic structure that is meant to concretise the very concept of joy.
Speaking of dreams, the instrumentation of “All the World is Green” feels like the instrumentation from Rain Dog’s “Singapore” spaced out as though suspended in time. It’s the track filled with the most outright melancholy, with a quiet voice from waits surrounded by just as faint percussion and jazz instrumentation. The green of the title is both one of beauty and one of envy, the whole thing having the distancing quality of being stranded on a raff Castaway style in the ocean. These issue of abandonment is confronted on one of this albums key centrepieces, the sinking ship tango of “God’s Away on Business,” an evocative title that not only equates God to the business types who make our narrator’s enemy, but also that companies in turn act as Gods, missing when the time is around to accept responsibility. The “leak in the boiler room’s” double meaning of a room where unlicensed brokers can sell potentionally worthless stocks also meant this song’s (almost too) obvious use in the Gibney documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. “Another Man’s Vine” then caps this trilogy of loneliness with a euphemistic story of infidelity, a “red rose blooming on another man’s vine.” With the ever ascending and descending horns, and slogging notes from both piano and marimba, the thing that doesn’t make this dark track completely depressing is that “Golden Willy” is just funny to say.
The intention suspicion that such an act implies makes itself evident in one of the album’s two instrumental tracks. “Knife Party” is a chaotic piece of jazz with atonal guitars that create anxiety beyond the screeching sax and rustling percussion. By contrast, “Lullaby” is suitably relaxing. In the Woyzeck play Marie sings a lullaby to her son, but here Tom’s voice gives it a completely different tone. It is one that acknowledges a break that we can never return to (“daddy’s never coming back”), again highlighting that even the tender moments have an oncoming inevitability of darkness, but until then we shall enjoy the warm and tender feelings radiated from the reeds and lighty played acoustic. That is of course before we thrown back directly into the absurd with “Starving in the Belly of the Whale” with a propulsive, instructive beat that feels like we are running from said creature, knowing that we can’t escape. The eerie bells and harmonica only add to the intensity with their high picture insanity, and the lyrics heightened the seeming natural and animalistic determinism of the scenario our protagonist – or in turn, us – are in (As the crow flies/ It’s there the truth lies).
That inevitably is confirmed with “The Part You Throw Away,” a track that implies the self-justification of inevitable murder that will occur after he his finished contemplating (in terms of the Woyzeck narrative, it references both the plan to murder his wife, and his soldier past in “I have done this/ Many times before”). The creeping certainty is punctuated by the many plucked and harsh strings, all waltzing along to the tune of their own destruction. This moves along to the “climax” (not conclusion, I should stress) of “Woe” and “Calliope.” For one that doesn’t know the play, “Woe” comes across as shorter piece of piano ballad romantics from Waits, a beautiful melody of piano key and orchestra strings that is as precious as its description of the ribbon as his “favourite thing that you’ve worn.” However, its darkness reveals itself in two ways. First is the description of the “skin that’s pale as bone,” indication that the protagonist has now, as in the play, killed his wife (I could be wrong, but I believe in Woyzeck a ribbon is evidence of infidelity. I’m doing all this from memory). But the second indication comes from the next track, the truly horrifying atonal nightmare of “Calliope,” the second instrumental of the album. Given its name the screaming whilstles likely come from the title instrument, and its clash with trumpets and strange music box style metallic crashes all help build up and release the intensity that the last 38 minutes has been building upon.
Which in turns moves us on to the final track, the conclusion, what we could call this album’s ending credits. That is “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the song that is probably in the ranking as my single favourite Tom Waits song. There’s many reasons for this: the beautiful and old fashioned jazz that wouldn’t be out of place with Louis Armstrong; a jazz which in turn personalised by the strange organ sounds that could only come from a Waits song. But I also think it contains many of Waits best and most vivid lines, whether it is his description of the suicidal gamble of his psyche, life as both bipolar and a game to win (“I always play Russian roulette/ It’s seventeen black and twenty-nine red”); the way it contrasts his themes of degenerates (“gutter”) and religion (“pew”); it’s dark sense of humour in “I’ll always remember to forget about you,” and its central sentiment, a noble and likely true proclamation that in an album context becomes especially more poignant after we have just spent time with this narrator being both abused and carrying out terrible acts.
Blood Money is a cavalcade of anthems to terror. Terror from society, terror from nature, terror from other humans, terror from yourself. In many ways it is indeed just as much a horror story as Bone Machine. But the cavalcade part is just as true as the terror – as is the anthemic nature of it all – and with this album Waits supplies with, in my opinion, his best examinations and detailing of the lower ends of life, paraded in front of us to see and hopefully find some sanctuary in. It’s my favourite Waits record.
But if you don’t agree, so much so that you even dislike this record, don’t worry. Another one came along the same day
What did you think of the album, though?
Tom Waits Album Rankings
- Blood Money
- Rain Dogs
- Bone Machine
- Swordfishtrombones
- Mule Variations
- Franks Wild Year
- Blue Valentine
- Heartattack and Vine
- Small Change
- Closing Time
- The Black Rider
- Nighthawks at the Diner
- The Heart of Saturday Night
- Foreign Affair
* This is where I reveal that another reason this album hit me in all the right ways is that in college (for Americans, probably your High School) I created an adaptation of the Woyzeck play for a mark. It was to be set in the round, in a bowl, as a giant clock stage for the characters to come out as gears that dislodge and disrupt the system. I even planned for the clock to start moving after the “infidelity” scene and eventually hit 12 during the plan for murder, as that was how many scenes apart those scenes had. Fair enough, it probably took away from the more aquatic themes of the play, but hell, I still got a good grade for it. Any on the nose qualities of being “cogs in the system, man!” aside, I would still one day love to an adaptation for real one day.