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The Bone Machine in the Garden: Listening to Tom Waits in the Anthropocene

2023; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 10; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/res.2023.a919340

2330-8117

Jim Coby,

Climate Change Communication and Perception

The Bone Machine in the GardenListening to Tom Waits in the Anthropocene Jim Coby (bio) It’s difficult to overstate the influence of Tom Waits’s music and personality in the world of contemporary American music. With a voice that critic David Durchholz once described as “soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car” (Bianculli 2011), Waits began his career as a balladeer in the vein of Tin Pan Alley. He soon began experimenting with his own image and voice, eventually evolving into an elder statesman of the indie-rock world, venerated by the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Joan Baez, and innumerable others. In the prefatory material for his 2011 interview with Waits, Tim Adams wrote for the Guardian that the singer-songwriter “gives the impression of being in a state both of constant startled awareness, and vague puzzlement at the world.” I suspect that Adams intended to describe Waits’s preternatural ability to absorb from the world around him, specifically to forge impressionistic images from the amalgamations of coffee shops and antique stores he frequents, and from the drifters and diner servers he chats up—in short, to present to listeners the web of humanity, warts and all, as he perceives it. Adams certainly wouldn’t be incorrect in this claim. Like the Beat poets he so admires, Waits masterfully weaves detailed tapestries of lives and places, real and imagined, throughout his catalog.1 Any given interview with Waits will highlight the artist’s acumen in “depicting low-life Americana with an exacting ear” as “he spins tall tales of hustlers, drunks, crackpots, and drifters who are never far from love or death” (Parles 1999, 244). And while it is difficult to argue with this type of assessment, it is worth [End Page 121] exploring the other modes and ideas that Waits interacts with in his songscapes. Beyond the obvious physical concerns of his songs, however, a more latent metaphysical subject emerges in his concern for the environment. And so while Adams’s commentary about Waits’s attentiveness to the world around him no doubt applies to his renderings of human subjects, it also equally relates to Waits’s ecological awareness. Especially in his apocalyptic song “The Earth Died Screaming,” Waits deftly presents a template for art in the Anthropocene and reckons with the absurdity and incomprehensibility of our near-future climate crises. The Beats, Kerouac especially, had an outsized role in Waits’s formative years. Indeed, Waits’s biographer Barney Hoskyns explains, “It was Kerouac’s America—a cityscape of displaced, marginalized street people—that hooked the teenage Waits” (2009, 37). The Beat influence can be read easily on the bulk of Waits’s early records: the pseudojazz scatting of “Pasties and a G-String,” the peripatetic longings of “Shiver Me Timbers,” and the boozy emotional candor of “Tom Traubert’s Blues.” But one need not dig even that far to locate Waits’s appreciation for the Beats, as his covering of the Kerouac-penned “Home I’ll Never Be” and his working with William S. Burroughs to produce The Black Rider clearly signal great affection. And while Waits’s catalog is a surfeit of urban ne’er-do-wells and haunted cityscapes, a second concern becomes equally apparent—that of environmental awareness. As Steven Watson notes in The Birth of the Beat Generation, Allen Ginsberg fullheartedly believed that much of the Beats’ legacy rested on their “spread of ecological consciousness” (1995, 304). And so, much like Kerouac’s deep (if deeply problematic) appreciation for itinerant Mexican laborers’ agricultural skillsets in On the Road or like the mystic admiration of a well-laid path in Gary Snyder’s “Riprap,” a latent ecological sensibility also undergirds much of Waits’s work. Especially in the “later, more challenging recordings,” environmental concerns loom large (Solis 2007, 27). A cursory reading of song titles reveals as much: “Dirt in the Ground,” “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me,” “Green Grass,” “Make It Rain,” and on and on. Undergirding these songs are two overarching concerns: appreciation and anxiety. These two issues cannot...