TOM WAITS Real Gone 12" Vinyl 2xLP Anti 86678-1 Gatefold Cover Printed Sleeve

$

27

Tom Waits

Real Gone
12" Vinyl 2xLP Album Printed Inner Sleeve

Item Description: 

On Real Gone, Tom Waits walks a fraying tightrope. By utterly eliminating one of the cornerstone elements of his sound -- keyboards -- he has also removed his safety net. With songwriting and production partner Kathleen Brennan, he strips away almost everything conventional from these songs, taking them down to the essences of skeletal rhythms, blasted and guttural blues, razor-cut rural folk music, and the rusty-edge poetry and craft of songwriting itself. His cast includes guitarists Marc Ribot and Harry Cody, bassist/guitarist Larry Taylor, bassist Les Claypool, and percussionists Brain and Casey Waits (Tom's son), the latter of whom also doubles on turntables. This does present problems, such as on the confrontational opener, "Top of the Hill." Waits uses his growling, grunting vocal atop Ribot's monotonously funky single-line riff and Casey's turntables to become a human beatbox offering ridiculously nonsensical lyrics. It's a throwaway, and the album would have been better had it been left off entirely. But it's also a canard, a sleight-of-hand strategy he's employed before. The jewels shine from the mud immediately after. The mutated swamp tango of "Hoist That Rag" has stuttered clangs and quakes for drums, decorated by distorted Latin power chords and riffs from Ribot, along with thundering deep bass from Claypool. On the ten-plus minute "Sins of My Father," Cody's spooky banjo walks with Taylor's low-strung bass and Waits' shimmering reverbed guitar as he ominously croons, revealing a rigged game of "star-spangled glitter" where "justice wears suspenders and a powdered wig." It's part revelation, part East of Eden, and part backroom political culture framed by the eve of the apocalypse. It's hunted, hypnotic, and spooky.

In stripping away convention, Waits occasionally lets his songs go to extremes with absurd simplicity, such as on "Don't Go into That Barn," a musical cousin to his spoken "What's He Building?" from Mule Variations. But there's also the downright riotous squall of "Shake It," which sounds like an insane carny barker jamming with R.L. Burnside, or the riotous raging blues of "Baby Gonna Leave Me." There are "straight" narratives such as "How's It Gonna End," with its slow and brooding beat storyline, and the moving murder ballad "Dead and Lovely," with its drooping, shambolic elegance. There's the spoken word "Circus," with its wispy spindly frame that features Waits on chamberlain. And "Metropolitan Glide" feels like a hell-bent duet between James Brown and Captain Beefheart's Magic Band, followed by the fractured, busted-love, ranting-at-God pain that rips through "Make It Rain." The tender "Green Grass" is among Waits' finest broken love songs; it's movingly rendered by a character who could have resided in one of William Kennedy's novels. The set closes with "Day After Tomorrow," featured on MoveOn.org's Future Soundtrack for America. It is one of the most insightful and understated antiwar songs to have been written in decades. It contains not a hint of banality or sentiment in its folksy articulation. Real Gone is another provocative moment for Waits, one that has problems, but then, all his records do. His excesses, however, do nothing to cloud the stellar achievements of his risk-taking vision and often brilliant execution. - Thom Jurek

©&? 2004 

Thanks: Roz Simmons, Tomales 4-H 

All songs © 2004 Jalma Music (ASCAP) 

Les Claypool appears courtesy of Prawn Song Records 

Gatefold cover. Catalog number as written on sleeve and run-out grooves. Track D5 is not listed.

Tracklist 

A1 Top Of The Hill

Bass – Larry Taylor

Guitar – Marc Ribot

Percussion – Brain (26)

Turntables – Casey Waits

Vocals – Tom Waits

A2 Hoist That Rag

Bass – Les Claypool

Guitar – Marc Ribot

Percussion – Brain (26), Casey Waits

Vocals – Tom Waits

A3 Sins Of My Father

Banjo, Guitar – Marc Ribot

Bass – Larry Taylor

Guitar, Vocals – Tom Waits

Percussion – Brain (26)

B1 Shake It

Bass – Les Claypool

Guitar – Larry Taylor, Marc Ribot

Handclaps – Brain (26), Casey Waits, Mark Howard, Trisha Wilson

Percussion – Brain (26)

Vocals – Tom Waits

B2 Don't Go Into That Barn

Bass, Guitar – Larry Taylor

Guitar – Harry Cody

Percussion – Brain (26), Casey Waits

Percussion, Vocals – Tom Waits

B3 How's It Gonna End

Banjo – Harry Cody

Bass – Larry Taylor

Guitar, Vocals – Tom Waits

B4 Metropolitan Glide

Bass – Larry Taylor

Guitar – Harry Cody

Guitar, Vocals – Tom Waits

Percussion – Brain (26)

Turntables – Casey Waits

C1 Dead And Lovely

Bass – Larry Taylor

Drums – Casey Waits

Guitar – Marc Ribot

Guitar, Vocals – Tom Waits

C2 Circus

Bells – Mark Howard

Chamberlin, Vocals – Tom Waits

Drums – Casey Waits

C3 Trampled Rose

Banjo [Cigar Box] – Marc Ribot

Bass – Larry Taylor

Percussion – Brain (26)

Vocals – Tom Waits

C4 Green Grass

Bass – Larry Taylor

Guitar – Marc Ribot

Guitar, Vocals – Tom Waits

D1 Baby Gonna Leave Me

Bass – Les Claypool

Guitar – Marc Ribot

Percussion – Brain (26)

Shaker, Vocals – Tom Waits

D2 Clang Boom Steam

Vocals – Tom Waits

D3 Make It Rain

Bass – Larry Taylor

Drums – Casey Waits

Guitar – Marc Ribot

Vocals – Tom Waits

D4 Day After Tomorrow

Bass – Larry Taylor

Guitar – Marc Ribot

Guitar, Vocals – Tom Waits

D5 Chickaboom (Hidden Track)

Jacket Condition: M

Brand new!

Vinyl Condition: M

Brand new!

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