DB's Song of the Day (day 341): "CHOCOLATE JESUS" (1999) Tom Waits

One of the best was born today in 1949. Let’s hear it for Mr. Tom Waits!

I’ve already posted on a song of his from the Seventies, three from the Eighties, one from the Nineties. For today, I initially thought I’d go back to the first album of his that made a big impression on me: Small Change (1976) with its great lead-off track “Tom Traubert’s Blues.” That song put Waits on my mental map as someone to be reckoned with. But he didn’t sustain that level of effort and it wasn’t till that string of albums in the Eighties (I’ve featured a song from each) that I was solidly in Waits’ camp. And that sent me back to pick up some things I’d overlooked, and then came Bone Machine (1992) and I’ve taken a song from that as well. Which leads me to Mule Variations (1999) because it’s one of his best and it came along after Bone Machine had pretty much established a highwater mark not likely to be topped. Is Mule Variations “better”? I can’t rightly say, but I can say that it satisfies me more at this late date in my own odyssey. Waits, you’ll note, turned 50 the year it came out. So, yeah, let’s go with that one.

There has been worthwhile work released throughout this century too, but I’m not ready to dredge up the two albums of 2002 that derive from theatrical pieces, and Real Gone (2004) is a stretch into a new sound for Waits, very percussive and almost, at times, techno. I’m not as comfortable with it, though there are some standout things on there, like “Hoist That Rag” and “Sins of the Father” and “Make It Rain.” More recently, there were all those extra tracks on Orphans, which I posted about back when it came out in 2006, a year that, with Dylan’s Modern Times and Springsteen’s We Shall Overcome and Cash’s posthumous Hundred Highways seemed primed to return us to some kind of Beat essence of the Slump. But let’s not go there, huh, kids? And 2011 brought Bad as Me, which runs a nice gamut of the many moods of the man, but I’m not able or willing to pick one to be our tune of today.

From Mule, there were several candidates. I picked today’s song because, hell, it’s Sunday, and because I saw Waits perform it on Letterman when the album was released. And you can too, here.  If you been following these posts with any degree of regularity, you may have noticed that there are a few Jesus-inspired songs of one form or another and Waits adds a memorable tune to that list. The album boasts songs with the romanticism of his best efforts—“Hold On”—and with a great sense of the rambling existence that no one registers so well—“Cold Water”—and of a lusty, earthy joy—“Filipino Box Spring Hog”—and wistful regret—“The House Where Nobody Lives”—as well as eerie paranoia—“What’s He Building in There”—and chastened vigor, “Pony.” But “Chocolate Jesus” has even more to offer. It’s a sacrilegious ditty that is also, in its way, quite reverent. Joyce, in Ulysses, describes his man Bloom considering the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes from ingesting the Host at Mass. And why not even more contentment from digesting a chocolate Jesus? “Got to be a chocolate Jesus / Make me feel so good inside.”

Not that the speaker is saying the chocolate is blessed. He’s ingesting a chocolate in the form of Christ. And in that image Wait combines the hopes for the Resurrection with the hopes for a satisfying dessert. Both are close to the essence of a certain material spiritualism that the religions of the U.S. seem to grasp as their raison d’être. The song sounds like a sleepy Sunday, early, with that plunked banjo and looped cock a-crowing (Peter denied his Master before the third). The speaker isn’t off to church but to “fall on my knees every Sunday / At Zerelda Lee’s candy store.”

Then there’s that delightful rejection of lesser temptations—“don’t want no Abba Zabba, don’t want no Almond Joy.” And the image that unites our Savior with the mighty Mississippi (into which the Big Muddy flows): “He flows like the Big Muddy, but that’s OK / Pour him over ice cream for a nice parfait.” Yum, yum, a heavenly treat.

One can go on about how religion—the “opium for the masses” in Marx’s formulation—can easily provide pablum instead, or confection. The point is that the masses want what’s good for them and what’s good for them should taste good too. And with that you can merge the hucksterism of televangelists with the hucksterism of the manufacturer of chocolate treats. It should all go down smooth and make you crave more. Every Sunday. Hallelujah.

What’s more, if you’ve lived a Catholic childhood, then you know how intimately chocolate is associated with the Resurrection. Come Easter Sunday we’re biting ears off chocolate bunnies and letting chocolate eggs melt in our mouths. Would Jesus in his chocolate incarnation be out of place in the Easter basket?

Break off a piece, pass it 'round. Do this in remembrance of me. And lo! It came to pass.

DB's Song of the Day (day 229) "OL' 55" (1973) Tom Waits

Today’s song, from Tom Waits’ debut album, Closing  Time, way back in 1973, is here for old times’ sake, but it’s also here to commemorate 55 years on this planet for your humble narrator. The 17th is my day of birth, so why not go with a song title that indirectly alludes to the age reached? It’s an irresistible opening when heard that way: “Well, my time went so quickly / I went lickety-splitly / Out to my ol’ 55 / As I drove away slowly / I was feeling so holy / God knows, I was feeling alive.”

The situation and the feeling that Waits’ song captures so well, with its subdued sense of self-satisfaction leavened with a touch of lonesomeness, is the “morning after” departure by dawn’s early light from a woman’s bed. “Just a-wishing I’d stayed a little longer.” The scene of post-coital blues always puts me in mind of my older brother who, back when I was still virginal, first played this song for me—in both Waits’ version and the slicker, less bluesy version the Eagles released on On the Border (1974)—commenting that he was of the “leave as soon after sex as possible” contingent. I have to admit that’s never really been my experience, so what Waits portrays here is something I imagined back then and still pretty much only imagine. The lift of manliness with which he intones the following has a kind of testosterone kick to it: “Well, it’s six in the morning / Gave me no warning / I had to be on my way / Now the trucks are all passing me / The lights are a-flashing / I’m on my way home from your place.”

So now he’s put it out there. He had a nice night and now he’s got to get back to doing whatever he’s got to be doing. The image he makes so clear is of a guy on the road as “the sun’s coming up / I’m riding with Lady Luck / freeway, cars, and trucks / Stars beginning to fade / And I lead the parade.” There’s the sense of settling back into his solitary routine, with the woman back there behind him and what’s ahead is the rest of his day, maybe even the rest of his life. It’s dawn, and luck be a lady. And there’s a chorus of voices just in the background, giving grounds to his assertion that he’s “feeling so holy.” This guy could ascend into heaven if he’s not careful.

But all the power in the song is the tension between this lyrical moment alone and how he spent his night. It’s a transitional state, filled with the longing to go back (and that’s something, even as a kid in school, I could relate to—that feeling of wanting to go back to bed, regretting that you had to get up and get into a cold car, moving through a day that “gave me no warning,” a working stiff, back to work), and the simple contemplation of a moment on the road, blending in with—as we used to say, quoting the Firesign Theater—“the freeway, already in progress.” Back into the stream of life goes our hero, proud and manly and feeling alive, but wishing he’d had more time with his girl.

And that’s why I chose the song for today. We’re always wishing we’d had more time. We’re always joining the road—or the river—in medias res. We’re—some of us, anyway—reaching and moving past those “middle years,” just a-wishing we’d stayed a little longer, “And, Lord, don’t you know, that feeling’s getting stronger.” But however much “back there” beckons the road is only going one way. That’s built into the nature of time, even if the “Ol ’55” does have “reverse.” The song, with that one little detail, “out to my ol’ 55,” gets across a lot as well. This guy’s driving a car that—when the song was released—is almost twenty years old. It’s a throwback. It’s a car that was new when Kerouac published On the Road, indicating that Waits might be recalling himself as a teen—16 in 1955—or the car, like the Packards in Kerouac, his speaker still drives, dating from that time, a car proudly turned off the assembly line a mere ten years after “the Big One” ended. This guy, like my own birth was, is swaddled in post-war nostalgia.

For those who know primarily the raspier-voiced Waits this album is a bit of a revelation. The first Waits I knew was the Waits of Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) and Small Change (1976). He got to that classic Waits voice by degrees. On his first album, he’s a sweeter singer, able to exploit an understated pathos that creeps into almost every song on the album. It’s a late-night album, a pre-dawn album, an album for a guy who sits up to see the dawn, smoking, maybe sipping a little whiskey. An album for the hours between the closing of the bars and rising of the sun.