Closing Time for Waits’s American Tour
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ATLANTA — A man who dredges his art up through a reservoir of phlegm, subterranean myth, vaudevillian shtick, fractured blues, and the fantastic testimony of a carnival barker, Tom Waits has long served as a kind of all-purpose synonym: He’s a one-man signifier of vintage American weirdness, whose gruff veneer gives way to soulful depths of tear-wringing melancholy.
Mr. Waits is also, at 58, far enough beyond the demands of a routine musical career that he doesn’t have to do much besides hang out at his Northern California compound and tinker with the arcane, homemade gizmos he uses to give many of his songs their uncanny shapes and antic percolations. Besides, he’s got actress and presumptive vocalist Scarlett Johansson doing his stuff now, right?
But Mr. Waits, who rarely goes on the concert circuit, loves show business too much to shun it permanently. He wrapped up his second American tour in two years here on Saturday. Atlanta’s historic Fox Theatre, an art deco movie palace, was as far east as Mr. Waits performed on his “Glitter and Doom” tour, sticking to a peculiar run of Southern cities that might once have been adjacent destinations on a railroad line.
The avant-hobo persona Mr. Waits invented for himself is perfectly theatrical, a pleasure in its knowingly eccentric permutations. He took the stage in a plain black suit and a black bowler, gesturing like a storefront preacher and kicking his legs behind him at odd, splayed angles, every stomp of his work boots triggering a cloud of art-directed dust and, occasionally, a percussive clang from an effects box. Around him, the stage was lit in bordello red and toxic green. Above, an array of battered megaphones evoked a junkyard variation on the handmade instruments of composer Harry Partch.
The challenge for this kind of show is how to recast a catalog of material — 19 studio albums in 22 years — without playing too easily to nostalgia, and how to tease (or aggravate) new twists out of material that is intimately familiar to hard-core fans — the kind who are willing to fork over $100 for a seat. Mr. Waits had several solutions. One was to turn the song over to the audience, as he did on the ballad “Innocent When You Dream” (from the songwriter’s Chicago stage production “Franks Wild Years”), accompanying everyone on piano. Another method was to dive headlong into character, as Mr. Waits did on the recitation “9th & Hennepin,” a noir-like rumble from the back pages of a pulp fiction that Mr. Waits delivered before a bare, dangling light bulb, laying on the gravel and the Ken Nordine baritone as he conjured a city of lost souls:
“And all the rooms they smell like diesel.
And you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept here
And I’m lost in the window, and I hide in the stairway
And I hang in the curtain, and I sleep in your hat…”
In a moment, Mr. Waits shattered the shadows with a stoic one-liner about a forlorn cocktail waitress: “There’s nothing wrong with her face that a hundred dollars wouldn’t fix.” Everyone was waiting on it, like a shoe about to drop.
But, as with many of his more dramatic pieces, Mr. Waits found intriguing ways to elaborate on the expected. Extrapolating and repeating lines became a given in his percussive, blues-steeped songs, whose lines about sin and salvation, crime and punishment, took on more primal meaning when Mr. Waits reduced them to a guttural wheeze or transfigured them in his murdered falsetto.
More surprising, though, was his band’s capacity not only to generate the fragmented shards and haunted-house creaks of the performer’s experimental efforts — guitarist Omar Torrez ably worked off the innovative template drawn by Mr. Waits’s erstwhile guitarist Marc Ribot — but also to play lyrically imagined, jazz-inflected instrumental passages that offset the ugly beauty of Mr. Waits’s tubercular howl.
The ensemble — which also featured the singer’s son, Casey, on drums, saxophonist Vincent Henry, and guitarist Larry Taylor — wasn’t averse to more traditional crowd-pleasing. “Get Behind the Mule” was worked into a freight-train blowout, with Mr. Henry wailing hard on harmonica and Mr. Torrez plunking a banjo. An encore of “Eyeball Kid” became a playful excuse for exaggerated sound effects, as Mr. Waits pretended to sling an eyeball, like a yo-yo, into the balcony seats, and donned a disco-ball version of his signature bowler, twirling in a circle like a voodoo priest in a hall of mirrors. Then he took everything down to basics and crooned “Anywhere I Lay My Head,” a hymn for all the rain dogs who have ever lost their way.
After the circus, a lonesome benediction — and a leg up on the eternal boxcar of the heart.