Swordfishtrombones

33⅓ Main Series #53

by David Smay

Two entwined narratives run through the creation of Swordfishtrombones and form the backbone of this book. As the 1970s ended, Waits felt increasingly constrained and trapped by his persona and career. Bitter and desperately unhappy, he moved to New York in 1979 to change his life. It wasn't working. But at his low point, he got the phone call that changed everything: Francis Ford Coppola tapped Tom to write the score for One From the Heart. Waits moved back to Los Angeles to work at Zoetrope's Hollywood studio for the next 18 months. He cleaned up, disciplined himself as a songwriter and musician, collaborated closely with Coppola, and met a script analyst named Kathleen Brennan - his "only true love".

They married within 2 months at the Always and Forever Yours Wedding Chapel at 2am. Swordfishtrombones was the first thing Waits recorded after his marriage, and it was at Kathleen's urging that he made a record that conceded exactly nothing to his record label, or the critics, or his fans. There aren't many love stories where the happy ending sounds like a paint can tumbling in an empty cement mixer.

Kathleen Brennan was sorely disappointed by Tom's record collection. She forced him out of his comfortable jazzbo pocket to take in foreign film scores, German theatre, and Asian percussion. These two stories of a man creating that elusive American second act, and also finding the perfect collaborator in his wife give this book a natural forward drive.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Biography, Journalism, History, Essays

143 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2007

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Captain Beefheart and at various times Bob Dylan, Tom Waits invented himself a "character" as deliberate as anything you find in a Broadway production and stuck to it, both onstage, in his songs and patter, and offstage, in his interviews. It was a radical idea. In the 70s he was the Last of the Holy Beat Barroom Singers, and if there was genuine melancholy in his art there was also a thick air of affectation hanging like Los Angeles smog over the whole enterprise, from the Edward Hopper album covers to the Bukowski and Lord Buckley jive talk. Me, I couldn't take him seriously for a second. I'd had enough with Captain Beefheart's Mr Natural nonsense, which all the journos lapped up like it was mother's milk laced with bourbon. Beefheart's music is sublime, of course, anyone can see that, he was the guy who could hit targets no one else knew were there, but we didn't have to buy the whole cutesy-folk-sayings and the tree surgery and the never went to school and the seven and a half octaves. Enough.
So anyway, Tom Waits met Kathleen Brennan who wasn't in the music biz and wham, he reinvented his whole thing right on the spot. No more Bukowski. And for three albums everything was better than wonderful - Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years (1983-87). In more benevolent times these three albums would be issued to every child on reaching the age of fifteen by the school authorities. Before 15 they couldn't take it.
So anyway, beginning with Bone Machine in 93, Tom Waits changed again, and whilst I salute him in refusing to rewrite the same stuff, like many others can only do, I couldn't follow him. He appeared to want to make records he thought Captain Beefheart himself should have been making if Beefheart hadn't have been crippled with MS, and if Beefheart had been seized with a mania for Karlheinz Stockhausen, Einstürzende Neubauten and Bang on a Can. It was difficult terrain, the musical equivalent of dragging the carcass of an elk across ploughed fields. It sounded like tuneless noise, like experiments in found sound. It was the parting of the ways for me and Tom Waits.
But two of his Frank trilogy albums are in my all time top 20 and will forever be so. This book is an okay celebration of a great, mad, original, serendipidous dance of delight called Swordfishtrombones.


SHORE LEAVE


Well, with buck shot eyes and a purple heart
I rolled down the national stroll
And with a big fat paycheck strapped to my hip-sack
And a shore leave wristwatch underneath my sleeve
In a Hong Kong drizzle on Cuban heels
I rowed down the gutter to the Blood Bank

And I'd left all my papers on the Ticonderoga
And I was in bad need of a shave
I slopped at the corner on cold chow mein
And shot billiards with a midget until the rain stopped
And I bought a long sleeved shirt with horses on the front
And some gum and a lighter and a knife
And a new deck of cards with girls on the back
And I sat down and wrote a letter to my wife

And I said, baby, I'm so far away from home
And I miss my baby so
I can't make it by myself
I love you so

And I was pacing myself, trying to make it all last
Squeezing all the life out of a lousy two-day pass
And I had a cold one at the Dragon with some Filipino floor show
And I talked baseball with a lieutenant over a Singapore Sling
And I wondered how the same moon outside over this Chinatown fair
Could look down on Illinois and find you there

[degelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing about Tom Waits and his songwriting process is difficult because he is intentionally evasive and opaque. Instead Smay opts to dissect the album track by track, blending facts with myth and going off on tangents, which is exactly what Waits is all about: showing more and more, but with time you realize he's telling you less and less.

Also have to add that Smay's writing and word choices are sublime. There are some great lines and paragraphs that you can sink your teeth into, like something out of Nabokov or Eugenides. I ate it up.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good addition to the 33 1/3 series examining Tom Waits' classic album Swordfishtrombones as a turning point in his career. The author, David Smay, dissembles and plays with facts as much as Tom Waits does, both in his songs and in his interviews, meaning that the story of the album that Smay tells takes on the same sort of rambling, mythic quality that the album does. It's not reportage, there aren't many interviews, and he can't actually back up anything that he says (except that Tom Waits wears plows on his feet); it's more a collection of personal reflections, inferences, and wild lies.

Which is as it should be.

Some might not like this approach, complaining that they bought a book to learn about an album only to discover that the book was at least 50% bullshit. Personally, I kind of liked that about it.

I always think that I want to learn more about FACTS Tom Waits -- know precisely how he made some sound on an album, or what his influences are, or what he was thinking when he wrote some song. When I start looking for those answers and find more of Tom's tall tales, I realize that I never wanted the answers in the first place, and that the mystery is much more satisfying. I'm glad that Smay realizes this too.

[Bjorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

There were places in America before Johnson's Great Society that had fallen off the map. It was beyond mere lawlessness; it was a bizarre landscape.

All of Tom Waits' albums, but especially Swordfishtrombones by virtue of being such a wild departure from what he'd done before, are set to some extent in what Greil Marcus called the Invisible Republic, the Old Weird America. A world of people and places left behind or stepped off. None of it remotely real, but all the more real because of it. That's why you can't trust anything Tom Waits will tell you, and also why the real actual facts around his life aren't nearly as interesting as the stories he tells. It's like the question of who wrote Shakespeare's plays; Shakespeare is the guy who wrote Shakespeare's plays.

What I love about Smay's books is that he never tries to explain the songs, or tell The Truth about Waits. Well, almost never. As heartwarming a story as it is, and as respectful he is, his interest in Waits & Brennan's marriage occasionally gets slightly too far into tabloid rock journalism. But for the most part he uses those weird, noisy, somehow ever-ancient songs as springboards to discuss Waits' entire career, his influences, his fellow travellers, and his methods, all the while acknowledging that he's working with a story that's a Story. In the end, all I know for sure is that Tom Waits was born in 1653 and that I need to go listen go Swordfishtrombones again.

[Jedidiah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eh. I enjoyed reading it to some extent--it's about Tom Waits, after all--but this book is exactly what you'd expect from some hack writing about Tom Waits. Not that Smay is a hack, but this book makes him sound like he's trying too hard to emulate Waits' style as prose, and trying to hard to paint a picture of Waits based on his lyrical imagery. There isn't really much insight to Swordfishtrombones here either. Smay manages to say a lot without really saying anything of value. There is a paragraph or two describing the timeline around the time of the album that was interesting, and there were facts here and there I hadn't heard before, but the book as a whole isn't very good. It isn't bad either, it's just...eh.

(reading the preface again after I finished it I couldn't help but think "you really skipped your son's big championship game to write THIS???? Poor kid.")

[Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Have you ever read a book and thought: "This is a person who enjoys the sound of his/her own voice?" Welcome to such a book.

I receive the 33 1/3 books for review on most occasions and this has to be the worst of the bunch--not because it's not informative (on a primitive level) or almost fun to read but due to the author trying desperately to turn phrases, to be witty, to be cute, to be poetic.

When describing songs, it's always hard to find new adjectives and phrases to explain to someone unfamiliar with the work just how it sounds but Smay tries too hard and delivers too little.

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book presents an interesting historical perspective on Tom Waits, noting that at the beginning of his career he was classed in the same group as Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen. According to Smay, "nobody in 1974 would've put money on Tom Waits's career being the one that would be producing vital work in the twenty-first century. He was too nostalgic, too sentimental, too hokey in his beatnickery, his voice too limited. Even the most generous projection of Tom's career from 1974 would probably include a hedge against a likely terminus in either cirrhosis or throat cancer."

Smay's account helps explain why it didn't turn out that way.

This book proceeds song-by-song through the album Swordfishtrombones, which Smay rightly sees as the fulcrum in Waits's career. It was this album on which he first collaborated heavily with his wife Kathleen Brennan, who encouraged him to expand his musical and lyrical range of reference and suppress some of the sentimentality in his work (she apparently particularly hated his song "Saving All My Love for You," from Heartattack and Vine).

It was on that album that Waits took chances and opened up new artistic space that he continues to mine up till the present. "Rain Dogs is a perfect album, every song both daring and fully realized. There are a few places on Swordfishtrombones where Tom pulled back just a little from the risk." Smay identifies "Frank's Wild Years," "Down, Down, Down," and "Gin-Soaked Boy" as examples. However, he asserts, "Being imperfect doesn’t diminish Swordfishtrombones’ greatness though. Rain Dogs had a place to land; its predecessor had been well received. It had a net. Swordfishtrombones juggled live ammo on the high wire and there was no net at all."

[Alex Sarll]

Swordfishtrombones isn't my favourite Tom Waits album, but it's the one that got a 33 1/3 book, and only the most crushingly canonical acts get more than one of those. Turns out it isn't David Smay's favourite either, but it's the one that gives him the best opportunity to delve beneath the cliches and the (largely self-started) myths of Tom Waits, because this was where Waits reinvented himself. And it's the hook on which you can hang a consideration of Tom Waits' personal and professional partnership with the enigmatic Kathleen Brennan, because this was their first collaborative effort. And it's the one where, when the analysis starts to pall, you can cut loose and let fancy fly because, well, that goes for all Tom Waits albums. Like so many of the series, this is a fascinating little curio.

[Karlton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very good analysis of the album and how it fits in both with its times (1983) and its place in Tom Waits's albums. The audio version is great, but I want to buy the print version so I can easily check out all of the other albums Smay mentions.

[Josh Hornik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Average book about an amazing album.
Would've liked more info on the recording of the album.

[Elena Passarello · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been the best of all the 331/3s so far. It's a little Lawrence Weschler-y, even.

[Vince · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome little book about the recording of this album, plus little snapshots of Tom Waits' life. This whole series is excellent, I also recommend OK Computer and Loveless.

[Nate]

David Smay takes a unique approach to this book that I quite like. It’s essentially a song by song analysis, but sprinkled with factoids, historical asides, and fictional imaginings that paint some sort of picture of the album and its creator. He forgoes the tired formula of dishing out the artist’s biography before discussing recording sessions and the album’s impact. It’s more scattershot, like a stream-of-consciousness notebook. You never know what Smay is going to talk about next in the context of Swordfish’s songs. To that end, I only recommend this book to Waits superfans. Smay namedrops Waits collaborators, influences, songs, and obscure references usually with no background; if you get it, great, if not, sorry. I’m a massive Waits fan, and much of what he discusses about the man and album I already knew, though I learned a few things about the three years before Swordfish when he met Kathleen Brennan and changed his style. Then again, we’re taking about Tom Waits here, so who knows what’s true. Really, what I enjoy most about this book is how Smay discusses the songs. He’s got a smart, funny, casual writing style that’s a good fit for the idiosyncratic subject matter. To discuss this album in some sort of linear fashion wouldn’t quite work, and I commend Smay for going about it in his own way, tying together disparate concepts and figures to make his own sense of Swordfishtrombones. Experiencing any album, but this album especially, is such a unique and personal thing for everyone. So it does right to just jot down whatever comes to your mind about it. All in all, a fascinating little book.

[Curmudgeon · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the more enjoyable entries in the 33 1/3 series, at least out of the ones I've read so far. The book manages to tread a delicate line between fiction and nonfiction, providing plenty of footnoted information (with citations!), drawing lines between related songs and themes both within Waits' own oeuvre and those of his contemporaries, indulging in a little respectful speculation, and taking off into occasional atmospheric flights of fancy, full of scarecrows and dirt and the sort of haunts one imagines Tom Waits, well, *haunting*. Most impressively, it manages to do so while only being minimally pretentious--in the hands of a less skilled author, it could easily have become overly precious and grating. It's a bit on the short side, and might lean more towards impressionism than academic analysis, but it's a fun read. (I only took two months to read it because I got distracted by other things I had out from the library; it can easily be read in a day or two.)

[julieta · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one is now my favorite book of this series. I love Tom Waits, and this book is pretty complete with how his music transformed from this album on. The sound of Tom Waits is pretty unique, not only because of his voice and the way he uses it, but the images and stories he writes about. The instrumentation he uses also, is such an important part of his sound. I really could not separate any of the elements of what he does. His relation to sound, Kathleen Brennan, his wife and co writer for most of his albums, so much stuff about him. I recommend also reading the book on interviews of Waits, he is just such a great artist, and actor, just all around greatness.

[Brad · Rating 2 out of 5]

The thesis that Swordfishtrombines was a turning point for Waits is interesting. But what fills the book is the author's tiresome patter that probably was much more fun to write--it is creative--than it was to read. The author also makes countless references, most of which go over my head, which takes some effort. It wasn't a bad book, but wasn't particularly insightful, informative, or necessary.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book provides some good background and history in the book. It gives some context to the creation of the album, though very little of the information is new or revelatory.

Unfortunately, about half of the book reads like Tom Waits fan fiction, where Smay attempts to write tall tales about Waits in a pseudo-Waits voice…and it gets pretty cringey.

If you read this, be prepared to skip over a lot.

[Misho · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful and moving guide to a transitional record that proved to be a milestone in the shaping of the current Tom Waits sound. This 33 1/3 book, much like the other one in the series I've read (Unknown Pleasures), contains a lot of interesting trivia and is written with a personal, devouted fan touch.

[Ruari Paterson-Achenbach · Rating 3 out of 5]

so like it was interesting because I love the album and the stuff about Waits himself was super interesting but GOD David Smay's writing style is annoying - like just because you're writing about waits doesn't mean you have to try and be waits and say some psuedo-masculine-cool-shite every few sentences to try and look clever x

[Dean Wilcox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like the best of the 33 1/3rd series this one develops a strong desire to listen more deeply to a well-known album with new ears. As is fitting for an exploration of Tom Waits gamble on making the music he wanted to make this book is often wry, smarmy, and with a penchant for diversions and anecdotes. The perfect combination.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

To sum up,

"Tom Waits wears plows for feet."

"Tom Waits is a big, fat fucking liar."

"Tom Waits wears plows for feet."

This book goes down easy like a spoonful of musical Irish whisky.

100,000 stars!

[Joe Ream · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author wonders a bit and at times forces his ideas onto the material, but covers sufficient Waits lore surrounding not only this album but a good bit of his career.

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun analysis of an artist we'll likely never really know and a brilliant album that will probably never be revealed as more than conjecture.

[Cail Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even better second time around.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

A perfectly weird companion piece to the album. The digressions, the observations, the hair-pulling plethora of references shape this one out to be a favorite of the series.

[Jitte Van · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal.

[Djll · Rating 3 out of 5]

I should've perused this one in the bookshop more thoroughly, because it's mostly the kind of self-referential over-the-top gonzo rock journalism writing that I don't have much love for. Only Lester Bangs could really do it, and even he phoned it in sometimes.

*Never finished. Put it away and forgot about it until Goodreads reminded me I'd started it.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another volume in the 33 1/3 series, this time covering Tom Waits' 1983 album Swordfishtrombones. This was the album that marked a radical transformation in Waits' style and sound, from down and out jazz singer to troubadour of a strange America drawing on a wider and weirder set of influences and instrumentation. Smay thoroughly explores not only the album itself but this transformation it signaled. Happily, this means that he discusses the albums that preceded an followed, showing the relationships and contrasts among them. Smay also delves into the effect of Tom Waits' marriage to Kathleen Brennan on his musical style. Brennan is not only Waits' spouse, she is a close collaborator on all his work since Swordfishtrombones, and Smay looks closely at her role in both the transformation and the work that has followed. Smay's insightful critiques and analyses of Waits' work was quite illuminating and fascinating.
Smay occasionally sprawls and rambles, but in a good way. One of the pleasures of reading this book is the way it widens the focus out from Swordfishtrombones the album to tom Waits the musician. Smay's ability to take on a writing style that echoes Waits' lyrics is also delightful. This book is wonderfully steeped in the Waits' music and aesthetic, and since I am a huge Tom Waits fan, I really enjoyed this book.

[Joe · Rating 1 out of 5]

This could have been a great little book but falls way short. It claims to be a source of information on Tom Waits’ life and inspiration during the time he wrote and recorded the album that was the broad turning point in his career, Swordfishtrumbones. That recording saw him shift from being a folky piano troubador to an experimental beat genius.
I bought the book because I wanted to hear about what caused such an inspiring change, some of which I knew had to do with meeting his wife Kathleen Brennan, an experimental playwright who has become his writing partner and muse.
Instead you get a book full of similes and antidotes by an author who writes as if he loves to hear himself talk. While attempting to capture feeling of Waits’ bohemian poetics, he rambles on about nothing, delving into the well-established myths of the man, while offering absolutely no new factual information.
After a while I gave up and started to skim the book from chapter to chapter looking for something worth reading, but found little in the way of real insights and no new information. A real disappointment, welcome to ebay book...

[Rupert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a real pleasure and contains great analysis of Tom Waits' pivotal album. Unlike most rock/pop music books, it doesn't rely mainly on biographical content. It only points toward aspects of Tom Waits' life that truly affected his life and his art - like his meeting his wife Kathleen Brennan who became a co-writer and who took a tough stance against the more sentimental side of his songwriting. Or the fact that he had given up drinking for good and entered AA around the time he worked on and put out Bone Machine (one of my favorites). That would definitely help explain the agony and exorcism of that powerful lp.
Like the Velvet Underground & Nico entry in the 33 1/3 series, the author provides great social and artistic context for the album. Occasionally the writer goes out on a wobbly poetic limb to capture Tom's spirit. Though it may occasionally fall flat, it seems appropriate to take chances when writing about such a daring artist's most daring album.