Franks Wild Years

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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. 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. Tom Waits – vocals, pump organ, Optigan, guitar, vocal stylings, rooster, piano, Farfisa, Mellotron, drums, conga, tambourine 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.

The first two songs on Franks Wild Years have a similar feel to the band Morphine. They more than likely got their sound from Waits. "Blow Wind Blow" is a bit tedious. "Temptation" makes me imagine Waits crossdressing. The vocals are hysterical. "Innocent When You Dream" is the saddest drinking song I've ever heard. "I'll Be Gone" is a great way to recover from it, with a polka beat and pompous trombone. "Yesterday Is Here" had me anticipating a gunshot and closeup of Clint Eastwood smoking one of those cigars that he hated so much during the filming of the "Man With No Name" trilogy. The trombones don't go away though. They're combined with distorted flutes on "Please Wake Me Up." I can't help but laugh. Born and raised in the shadows of the Grampians, David M Western grew up with no one around for miles with music shaping his view of the world, humour and perspective. Mixing alt-country, indie and folk, his songs are introverted anthems set to take you through a whirlwind of emotions and nostalgia, likened to Wilco, Father John Misty, Waxahatchee and Blake Mills. Waits was writing through the night in an artist’s community building in Greenwich Village (he used to get home at 5am, just in time to feed his baby daughter). “There were tiny little rooms and each one had a piano in it,” he later recalled. “You could hear opera, you could hear jazz guys, you could hear hip-hop guys. And it all filtered through the wall.”

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Engineer [Additional] – Bill Higley, David Glover, David Knight (3), Lorita Delacerna*, Mike Kloster, Stephen Shelton (2), Tchad Blake It closes a chapter, I guess,” Waits said when Franks was released. “Somehow the three albums seem to go together. Frank took off in Swordfishtrombones, had a good time in Rain Dogs and he’s all grown up in Franks Wild Years.” 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. 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.”

Larkin, Colin (2011). The Encyclopedia of Popular Music (5th conciseed.). Omnibus Press. ISBN 978-0-85712-595-8. 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.’” Cromelin, Richard (August 30, 1987). "Waits: Dreamlike, Distant". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved February 14, 2016. 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 ]Every lyric was an effortless rhyme you could only dream of ever writing. Falling off the tongue so beautifully, but never giving easily, keeping half the story to itself. Waits was playing a character with a darkness and humour that felt far more genuine than anything trying to be, I dunno, genuine in 1985. But what really got to me more than anything was the feeling, when you listened to each song, that you were literally standing next to Tom Waits as he sang. Something about the way they placed the microphones in the room. You could feel the musicians scratching, blowing and beating this world into existence right next to you (and oh my god those weird guitar lines!) with an energy and spontaneity as if they had only just figured it out. Ribot remembers how Waits would often be writing the lyrics moments before he sang them. “The groove was the main thing, which he would keep trying to communicate with the way he was moving his body and guitar.” As Richards recently said in an interview with Uncut: “[Tom] had a lot of rhythms going on in his head and in his body… the groove is another word for the grail. People search for it everywhere, and when you find it you hang on to it.” Kent, David (1993). Australian Chart Book 1970–1992 (illustrateded.). St Ives, N.S.W.: Australian Chart Book. p.331. ISBN 0-646-11917-6.