I’ve done 65 of these posts—only 300 more to go! So let’s take stock of something that
probably no one is paying attention to but which, once you note it, might start
to give some a rooting interest. Like: which year has the most selections so far?
And, for those not given to such minutia: of the seven decades so far
represented—50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s—what are the relative
numbers?* Of course, others might
question things like “most represented artists”; that’s easy enough to keep track
of, but I’m more interested in how the representation across time works out.
Mainly because, if you haven’t caught on yet, this is all about time. Killing
time, biding time, re-living time, recreating time, and speaking across time. There
are three songs I like a lot called “Time.”
Today we’re talking about one of them.
With Rain Dogs, Tom Waits jumped forever into the top flight
category, proving that Swordfishtrombones wasn’t just a fluke and even bettering
that album, in my view. Rain Dogs is the album that, maybe, Waits always had
in him but had to go through some changes to arrive at. Part of what was necessary
was ditching, to some extent, the Beat ethos that was so much a part of what
his early career was steeped in. Or not ditch it, exactly. More like go beyond
it. And what that required, seemingly, was more inventive instrumentation. On
Rain Dogs, in particular, Waits is in Brecht-Weill country, or, rather, it’s a
Berlin cabaret in the bayou. Swampy showtunes. Swordfishtrombones.
And it also means taking a song like “Time”—in the tradition
of the piano ballads featured prominently on every Waits album through 1980—and
recording it with guitar and accordion and bass. But if we just talk
arrangements we’ll miss what makes this period of Waits’ writing so distinctive.
His lyrics, always full of characters and settings, often little stories or
first-person memoirs, have become more elliptical, full not just of images and
people, but built of phrases that are acts of poetry. Suddenly Waits isn’t just
a Beat wanna-be, he’s a major player.
Take a look at today’s song. This song isn’t anyone’s story.
It’s not a narrative. It’s a mood, yes, more than anything. Full of nostalgia
and longing. It encapsulates “a scene” wherein the likes of Napoleon and Harlow
are name entities, and even resurrects Matilda from what is still one of Waits’
greatest songs “Tom Traubert’s Blues” (for another time), but there’s no
insistence that all these people are conversant with what the song is getting
at. They’re examples, figures, illustrations.
And what they illustrate, in their mini-dramas of a line or two, is what the
chorus insists on: “oh it’s time, time, time, yes it’s time, time, time that
you love, and it’s time, time, time.”
Now, there are those who assume this is advice: “it’s time
you love,” as in: “it’s time you fell in love, or found a lover.” I’ve never
taken it that way. For me, the resonance of this song is in the fact that it’s
saying “it’s time (itself) that you love.” The repetitions of “it’s time, time,
time”—the words called out at closing time in a bar—let us know that, if it is time
you love, there’s only so much of it to go around (or to stick around for).
My insistence on this meaning may have to do with the fact
that this song came into my life after I had become a devotee of Proust’s
Recherche. When that happened (I was not yet 25), I finally saw what the Big
Theme of life was. Before that, what with Catholicism in my childhood,
Nietzsche in my teens, and Rilke around twenty, I would probably have said it
was God, or Man, or Death. Y’know, big concepts that don’t really exist unless
someone takes the trouble to articulate them. I mean, you can point to a man,
but not Man, and point to a dead creature, but not Death. But with Time, well,
you can pretend it’s just an abstraction, something imposed by the fact of
biology, but you can’t avoid it. It permeates. And Proust demonstrates how
“time”—the when—is the key aspect of life, even more so than “where.” For,
whether you stay in one place or move about a lot, wherever you go, there you
are: in time. It’s the wheel to which we’re strapped as we spin in our orbit
round that lazy old sun.
The key part of Waits’ song, where he renders a relation to
time in lines as good as anyone, is:
And they all pretend they're orphans
And their memory's like a train
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away
And the things you can't remember
Tell the things you can't forget that
History puts a saint in every dream
And their memory's like a train
You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away
And the things you can't remember
Tell the things you can't forget that
History puts a saint in every dream
Memory is a train where time equals distance: you can see
the train shrinking with distance, as it pulls away; you can see things getting older as
time increases, till the things you can’t remember and the things you can’t
forget keep common currency. Or, look how the figure works: what you can’t
remember tells what you can’t forget that history (could be both) puts a
saint in every dream. That last bit is a flourish; it's Waits being deliberately
poetic, with “saints” and “dreams” standing in, almost, for poetic conceits
themselves. But it’s saint, not angel. Didn’t I just mention Rilke? Remember
how he says, “my heart, listen as only saints have listened.” What is a saint? Someone who sacrifices the
glory of the world for the glory of God? Someone who is utterly selfless?
Someone who prays, who, to borrow a Donald Fagen line, “prays like a Roman with
her eyes on fire?” Whatever a saint is, there’s one in every dream, Tom tells
us, placed there by history. Damn good of history, I suppose, unless you’d
rather that we did without saints.
Waits, who elsewhere on this album, says “get me to New
Orleans and paint shadows on the pews,” knows that we all want to be in their
number when the saints go marchin’ in. So, history, we might say, dreams of
saints or, if we’re “desirous to be blessed,” then maybe
history is the dream of saints. A saintsdream. And so is time.
There are a lot of figures in this song for the kind of
endurance of the poetic conceit beyond its immediate denotative value—I might
mention those pigeons that fall around Matilda’s feet after she pulls that
razor from her boot; I might mention the stranger with the weeds in [his]
heart; I might mention the rain that sounds like a round of applause (a figure
that’s so good, but which is the part that most sounds like the “old Waits”); I
might mention the great use of apostrophe, (“so close your eyes, son, and this
won’t hurt a bit”), which reminds me of Jiminy Cricket talking to Pinocchio;
but the one I’m going for is: “as the dish outside the window fills with rain.”
There was a time when that dish was empty; there may come a
time when the dish is full of rain water and overflows; and there is a time
when it is neither empty nor full. And that’s where we are right now, watching it fill.
This link leads to Waits performing the song in his
film Big Time. It’s not a bad performance, but it is a performance. Waits on
stage tends to be stagey. Waits in the recording studio is a better artist
because what he has realized better than any poet you can name is that, with
poetry, delivery is a big part of the deal. And so he crafts not just the lines
but which voice will deliver the lines. And every song on Rain Dogs is
masterful, from that point of view. So I’ve linked to the Rain Dogs version
too, which maintains a very non-stagey off-hand, conversational tone that is
the hardest thing to maintain if you try to sing this song. On the album, Waits
delivers the song much more like the monologues he tends to indulge in on stage. And
that’s the way I like it, with the “when you wish upon a star” chords only
sounding with the chorus . . . . now, everybody . . . “oh it’s time, time, time
. . . “
*The breakdown so far: 1970s: 20; 1980s: 17; 1960s: 10;
1990s: 9; 2000s: 4; 2010s: 2; 1950s: 2; and in terms of most popular years, so
far: 1971 is winning with 5; tied at 4 are: 1973, 1980, 1984; tied at 3 are:
1967, 1969, 1972, 1978. So far, no artist has more than two songs, but that
will most certainly change, and those lucky mortals are: The Beatles, Bob
Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Lou Reed, The Rolling Stones, Tom Waits, Neil
Young.
So there you have it: can any
year top 1971? Do the Seventies have it sewn up, or could the underdog
Eighties prove victorious? And what about the Sixties and the Nineties—could
that be a key rivalry, with me pre-teen in the first and post-30 in the second?
Anyone want to lay odds on the top year for each decade? Who will emerge first
from the double-dip artists, and who will rack up the highest numbers?
1 comment:
Excellent analysis, excellent writing. I know the album well, and I recognize how much you got it right. I wish I were this good.
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