MASARYK UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF EDUCATION

Department of English Language and Literature

Were-Waitsing: Gothic Elements in the Musical Imagery of Tom Waits

Master’s Thesis

Brno 2019

Supervisor: Author: Mgr. Pavla Buchtová Bc. Jakub Jiaxis Svoboda Abstract

This thesis focuses on the musical imagery in the songs of American singer- songwriter Tom Waits, with special attention paid to Gothic elements in Waits’ music, as well as in his on and off-stage presence. As Waits himself eludes critical efforts to be labelled – his art and music is described in an array of genres as wide as blues, jazz, vaudeville, industrial and experimental – this thesis undertakes to present him as a Gothic artist, a view which has so far been academically neglected. The thesis analyses two key notions of the gothic genre, as portrayed and manifested by the artist, primarily the wound-healing duality and the notion of shape-shifting as a form of code-switching between personas and genres, thus showing that for Waits the Gothic is a medium through which he can confront the intact American discourse with the disfigured, peripheral socio-cultural domains.

Key words Tom Waits, American Gothic, Southern Gothic, wound, healing, shape-shifting, liminality

2 Anotace

Diplomová práce se zaměřuje na obraznost v tvorbě amerického písničkáře Toma Waitse, se zvláštním ohledem na gotické motivy ve Waitsově hudbě, stejně jako na umělcovu sebeprezentaci na pódiu a mimo něj. Waits samotný uniká snahám o škatulkování – jeho tvorba spadá často do širokého spektra žánrů jako je blues, jazz, vaudeville, industrialní či experimentální hudba – tato práce jej však představuje jako gotického umělce, tedy z pohledu který byl v rámci akademického diskurzu opomíjen. Práce analyzuje dva klíčové momenty gotického žánru, tak jak je ve svém díle Waits manifestuje, a to dualitu rána-hojení a motiv měňavce, jako formu code-switchingu mezi personami a žánry. Ukazuje se, že pro Waitse je gotický žánr médiem skrze které může konfrontovat intaktní americký diskurz s deformovanými, periferními socio-kulturními sférami.

Klíčová slova Tom Waits, americká gotika, jižanská gotika, rána, hojení, měňavec, liminalita

3 Declaration

I hereby declare that this thesis is my own, that I worked on it independently and that I used only the sources listed in the bibliography.

Prohlášení

Prohlašuji, že jsem závěrečnou diplomovou práci vypracoval samostatně, s využitím pouze citovaných pramenů, dalších informací a zdrojů v souladu s Disciplinárním řádem pro studenty Pedagogické fakulty Masarykovy univerzity a se zákonem č. 121/2000 Sb., o právu autorském, o právech souvisejících s právem autorským a o změně některých zákonů (autorský zákon), ve znění pozdějších předpisů.

In Brno on 26 March 2019 ………………………………………… Bc. Jakub Jiaxis Svoboda

4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the supervisor of my diploma thesis, Mgr. Pavla Buchtová, for embarking with me on this uncanny journey, as well as for the time she devoted to discussing the focus of the thesis and the invaluable feedback she provided to my writing. I would also like to thank my wife Jana and our little Jasmínka for making any of this possible.

5 Contents

1 What The Hell Is He Building In There?...... 7 2 The Gothic – An Overview...... 11 2.1 Haunting...... 12 2.2 The Obscure...... 15 2.3 America – Dark And Grotesque...... 22 3 Shapeshifting...... 25 3.1 Persona And Persono...... 26 3.2 Spin Me A Yarn...... 31 4 A Wound That Will Never Heal...... 40 4.1 Invitation To The Blues...... 41 4.2 Trombones And Bones...... 50 4.3 War Machines...... 58 5 Conclusion...... 71 Bibliography...... 76

6 1 What The Hell Is He Building In There?

Before Tom Waits was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in

2001, Neil Young in his induction speech introduced Waits as “undescribable”, labelling him in an array of professions as broad as “performer, singer, actor, magician, spirit guide, changeling”. Young reminisced that he had seen Waits standing in a bunch of dust, and he thought that he saw sparkly things coming off him, and, having looked at him while he was singing, he said to himself “Is my vision going? I’m seeing three, maybe four people up there now. And they all seem to be waiting for the other one to finish so that they can come in.” This seems to be a very apt description of the man whom Young claimed to be impossible to fathom.

It is this very undescribability, this lack of a heterogeneous focus which makes the art of the American singer-songwriter Tom Waits complicated to grasp academically. Although there have been attempts to cover the artist’s life and work, namely in three biographies – the first to be published being The Many Lives of

Tom Waits by Patrick Humphries (1989), followed by Wild Years – The Music and

Myth of Tom Waits by Jay S. Jacobs (2000) and Hoskyns’ unauthorised attempt at a comprehensive biography titled Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits

(2009). The range of full-fledged academic texts is limited to a handful of articles from academic journals, primarily dealing with the musical aspect of Waits' lengthy career, most of which are cited in this thesis. In the anglophone academic context, two more book-length studies on Waits have been written – one being Tchir’s

Master’s Thesis focusing on Rain Dogs titled Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs: Influences and Musical Genre (2013) and Corine Kessel’s Master’s Thesis bearing the title

Human Oddities, Raid Dogs, and Other Wanderers: Character and Narrative in

7 the Music of Tom Waits (2000), which was subsequently published as a book titled

The Words and Music of Tom Waits (2009). Tchir’s thesis, although it predominantly deals with a single album, views Waits' work as “a musical pastiche par excellence, drawing from multiple disparate sources and freely integrating them into his oeuvre” (78), which seems to be a fitting description of what the author of the present thesis labels as shapeshifting tendencies. In the 2009 book re-vamping of her thesis Kessel, on the other hand, analyses a body of Waits' lyrics ranging from Waits' debut album, Closing Time (1973) to the three-disc song collection, Orphans (2006), stating, in a somehow exaggerated manner, that through his career, Waits “guides the listener through the underbelly of society, through the deepest despair of the human condition, through the crazed nightmares and psychotic episodes of his delusional characters” (129).

As regards academic context of English studies in the Czech Republic, inquiries into the Waits matter are limited to merely a single bachelor thesis written by Filip Drlík titled Tom Waits: A Songwriter on the Edge, which predominantly deals with the question of authenticity in Waits' art, albeit in a slightly informal fashion which would benefit from a clearer scholarly focus.

Firstly, the present thesis does not aim to present a comprehensive account of Waits' artistic endeavours, nor does it wish to limit itself to a single theme which would be analysed in a selected body of lyrics. It shall rather strive to grasp the works, and marginally also the life, of an artist whom Young so aptly described as a changeling, a kind of doppelgänger, a sort of vampiric character who in his art presents the Other face of America, the Uncanny as defined by Freud, the abject as proposed by Kristeva, from a Gothic perspective. What is meant by Gothic in relation to Waits is the fact that both textually and musically he tends to present notions which are eccentric, peripheral, as opposed to those which might be best

8 labelled mainstream, or central.

Secondly, the term “Gothic” is not only viewed as a discrete literary genre, or the ensuing body of texts which contain motifs and topoi which would generally be labelled as such, including graveyards, were-beasts, Thornfield-like mansions, supernatural forces and the omnipresent feeling of fear and claustrophobia, but rather as a kind of lens through which an author views the surrounding social reality and the individuals occupying it. This perception of the Gothic, i.e. that which lies on the periphery, or in spatio-temporally liminal realms, is further described in the second chapter of this thesis, which serves as a groundwork for the analysis of Waits' works. The term “liminal” is described by anthropologist Victor

Turner in 1990 as “fructile chaos, a fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities”. As far as Waits' art is concerned, it represents one of the key notions in the spatio-temporal domains conjured in his songs, as shall be demonstrated in

Chapter three. In an earlier essay from 1974 (“Liminal to Liminoid, In Play, Flow and Ritual”), Turner defines liminal periods alongside transition periods, or rites of passage, as moments during which “subjects pass through a period and area of ambiguity, a sort of social limbo which has few (though sometimes these are most crucial) of the attributes of either the preceding or subsequent profane social statuses or cultural states” (57). This understanding of the liminal as a spatio- temporal (note that Turner mentions both “period” and “area” of ambiguity) fuzziness, a kind of realm in which both the proto-rules and post-rules do not apply, presents a unique opportunity to reflect and experiment, either for the

Waits-artist or for the characters he conjures. These experiments are reflected in the title of this introductory chapter, which is a citation of Waits' voyeuristic song

“What Is He Building In There?” from Waits' 1999 eclectic album Mule Variations.

Chapter four is then devoted to a Frankensteinian body of lyrics, assorted

9 chronologically from Waits' early 1970s Gothic endeavours to the latest album Bad

As Me released under the label ANTI- in 2011. This dissection should serve the purpose of analysing these lyrics, as well as the medium through which they are presented, that is Waits' vocal performance. In addition, Waits' queer musical philosophy will be discussed, in so far as to show that the Gothic has always been there. In doing so, the thesis aspires to trace the development of Waits' Gothic vision of America, demonstrating that this vision encapsulates a shift from personal to collateral, especially in its relation to the treatment of a principally Gothic notion of the wound.

Consequently, the primary aim of this thesis is to present the Gothic as a medium through which Waits can have the American majority face the minor, the neglected, the disfigured and the wounded, and trace ways through which these patients can possibly be treated, if not in the hope of ever reaching a point beyond which they might be eventually healed.

However, let us not spoil the party by regurgitating the point: first of all, it is necessary to demonstrate how this thesis understands the Gothic by presenting a brief overview of its development, accompanied by rather haphazard detours towards the thesis scope, that is the works and life of Thomas Alan Waits.

10 2 The Gothic – An Overview

Ever since the first emergence of the term, with the sacking of Histria at the mouth of the Danube in AD 238 (Groom 2), “Goths” and the Gothic – a term which replaced its old equivalent “barbarian” – were associated with “Other”. Romano-

Gothic relations were far from friendly, and often escalated into open conflict, which was in turn reflected by Roman poets such as Claudian, who refers to Goths as “supernatural, a threat emerging in dreams and ill omens” (ibid. 3). It is surprising to notice that modern understanding of the Gothic has retained many of these elements which haunted the imagination of Romans as early as during the reign of the Easter Roman Emperor Valens, who fell in the battle of Adrianople in

AD 378, his body never to be found (ibid. 3). Even today, Ancient Romans are perceived as a symbol of power and order, while Goths tend to be viewed as outsiders and barbarians. This principle can also be applied to modern Gothic art, which has the orderly majority face an invading minority with unhomely tastes and subversive attitudes.

However, the Gothic can hardly be defined in such simple terms: over the centuries, it permeated numerous art forms. In the Middle Ages, referred to as the

Dark Age by Renaissance thinkers, the Gothic encompassed architectural inventions such as the flying buttress and, predominantly, the pointed arch. This new invention enabled the previously dark buildings to be filled with natural light, its dominant verticality stressing the proximity, and at the same time the distance of the divine. These contrasting notions, including the increasing omnipresence of death in the Middle Ages, even in the sacred space of the cathedral by means of the grinning skull or memento mori, are entwined in Gothic art of virtually any form

11 (Groom 22).

2.1 Haunting There is yet another notion which would become closely related to Gothic art

– iconoclasm. In 16th century England, various events demonstrated profound radicalist, dissident-like tendencies, such as the exhumation and public burning of

Beckett’s bones in 1538. Interestingly, Waits has also been referred to as an iconoclast – for example in Deusner’s review of the reissued Asylum albums, as well as by Waits' own record company, ANTI-, in their article which followed his above-mentioned induction into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame. This iconoclasm is namely due to the subversive nature of his music and also due to the many stylistic borrowings he employs in his songs, partly mocking the respective styles

(such as in “Big In Japan”, which makes fun of rock music stardom), partly using specific aspects of these styles, including genre-specific instruments, to his own benefit. The 1999 song “Chocolate Jesus” for instance employs the blues harmonica of Charlie Musselwhite in a stripped version of a mock-religion folk blues song.

These borrowings and experiments are closely connected to the already-mentioned notion of liminality as defined by Turner the aforementioned 1974 essay:

“Liminoid phenomena develop apart from the central economic and political processes, along the margins (…) – they are plural, fragmentary, and experimental in character.” (85) Turner’s views are thus closely linked to the way Waits operates within his musical realms, for his iconoclasm engulfs a wide spectrum of genres which are blended in rather eccentric ways.

Nevertheless, in the 16th century Reformation swept Europe in lightning speed, destroying abbeys and churches and leaving them in ruin. These pillagings, however, had an ironic effect on the future Romanticist art, invoking an aesthetic of

12 ruin, a theme which permeated many Romanticist works of art, including poetry and painting. Although 16th century Reformists meant to create a historic rift, it was this very rift which generated artistic interest in what came to be called

Romantic landscape. Church ruins thus also became a form of memento mori by themselves, in which the past constantly haunted the present, or, in Groom’s words

“the attempts to break with history also revealed the inescapability of the past and the extent to which it haunted the present” (28). Waits' characters are also frequently haunted by their past, especially in their attempts to radically break with their former attachments, as will be further discussed in the following chapters.

In essence, the motif of haunting plays a pivotal role in most Gothic discourse: the present is inescapably haunted by the past, which is clearly demonstrated in the case of the cardinal Revenge Tragedy, Hamlet, in which the main male protagonist meets his father’s ghost who greets him thus:

I am thy father's spirit,

Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,

And for the day confined to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away. (1.5)

The revenant haunts the subject, alluding to the liminal space it occupies.

This escape is both temporal and spatial, once again opening up a rift which stirs actions and provides the story with momentum. Liminal spaces are fundamental building blocks of Gothic fiction, it is exactly this space in-between, both in time and space, where most Gothic action happens, or, as Broadhurst proposes, they represent something which is “located at the edge of what is possible” (12). It is exactly in this psychological in-between where another Shakespearean hero,

13 Macbeth, dwells, “teetering on the margin between the material world and the dreamlands of the Faerie” (Groom 41).

However, the first novel to be generally labelled Gothic appeared over 150 years after the publication of Macbeth, and it featured the actual term Gothic in its subtitle – The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Written by Horace Walpole,

Otranto interestingly correlates with the topic of the present thesis, for its author played with the notion of authenticity and forgery, claiming that:

The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of

England. (...) The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of

Christianity; but the language and conduct have nothing that savours of barbarism. (...) If

the story was written near the time when it is supposed to have happened, it must have

been between 1095, the era of the first Crusade, and 1243, the date of the last, or not long

afterwards. (Walpole 39)

It is worth noting how Walpole attempts to persuade the reader as to the manuscript’s origin, not much unlike Waits when he speaks about the origins of his own art, such as in the case of the lost tapes with songs which were then featured on the compilation album Orphans, only after they were purchased from a plumber in Russia. As Waits says “This is a guy who’s somehow got hold of these tapes. A plumber! In Russia!” (Maher 434). In any case, the audience may never learn whether this rediscovery story is authentic or not.

As far as Early Romanticism is concerned, one of the most profound Gothic writers was Thomas Chatterton, a fatherless, prophetic poet who published mature work as early as at the age of 11, and who also frolicked with the notion of authenticity, attributing his works to Thomas Rowley, an imaginary fifteenth- century monk. Adopting a different literary persona, distancing himself from being

14 the creator and originator of his art, Chatterton opened up a rift through which he could channel his artistic ambitions, once again a kind of liminal space in which art could develop. His premature death by his own hand at the very early age of 17 mythicised Chatterton’s heritage, and his name appeared in later Romanticist works of Coleridge (“Monody on the Death of Chatterton”) and, most notably, another poet to die prematurely, John Keats (sonnet “To Chatterton”). Chatterton’s figure continued to haunt visual artists as well, as demonstrated by the Pre-

Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis in his canvas “The Death of Chatterton”. The haunted poet’s heritage became absorbed in the flow of Chattertonian hauntography which followed.

2.2 The Obscure Another principal notion of the Gothic appeared in Edmund Burke’s 1757 treatise on aesthetics titled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, where the author discusses obscurity. Burke claims the following: “To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes.” (43) In this respect, obscurity, as defined by Burke over 200 years before Waits would record his debut, is still valid, and in fact represents one of the key notions wherever Waits' art is concerned. Waits himself stressed this in a 2002 interview with the British director

Terry Gilliam, with whom he was to work on fantasy drama The Imaginarium of

Doctor Parnassus seven years after the interview. At the beginning of the interview, Gilliam compliments Waits on his music, saying that it gets his brain and parts of his body to “vibrate differently … – it scares [him] and thrills [him] at the same time” (Maher 301). To this, Waits responds:

15 Yeah. I like old records. I think what I like about old records is… the surface noise

sometimes I like more than I like the music itself, or the two combined that creates some

kind of a ghost. When you’re listening to an old, scratchy recording of Caruso, it always

sounds like he’s trying to reach you from far away and you want to help him. You kind of

lean into the speaker. (ibid. 301)

This neatly corresponds with what Burke describes as “obscure” – Waits systematically creates music which does not present a clear picture of reality, but rather one which is verbally or musically blurred. Obscure instruments which

Waits decided to use in his songs for example include the Stroh violin, which is a violin with a trumpet-like bell attached to it, employed on the 2002 album Alice

(Maher 318). By opting for the verbally or musically obscure, Waits triggers various kinds of associations the listener’s brain might have with the respective sounds (or unusual, obscure words), thus generating a haunting effect his songs have. This notion of haunting, and the actual hauntology surrounding Waits' music, will be further discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 of this thesis.

At this point, however, let us take a single example to demonstrate the notion of verbal obscurity, as it is presented in a 2006 song from the album collection, Orphans, titled “2:19”, which contains a story of a man whose lover leaves an unnamed city, while he watches her get on the train:

now I've always been puzzled

by the yin and the yang

it'll come out in the wash

but it always leaves a stain

sturm and drang

the luster and the sheen

16 my baby leaving town on the 2:19

Here, Waits' treatment of the lyrics is rather unusual, obscure even, for it leaves the listener wondering what “sturm and drang” and “luster and sheen” stand for. This provokes the mind of the listener, not unlike as Gilliam confesses above, making them thrilled and scared at the same time, for one keeps wondering “what on Earth do those words mean?” Interestingly, as Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us,

“Sturm and Drang” is an 18th century German literary movement, which was a reactionary movement which “sought to overthrow the Enlightenment cult of

Rationalism“. This metaphorical interpretation of a movement opposing rationalism is linked to the man’s feelings in “2:19”, and creates a noteworthy blend of motifs: what was originally obscure on the surface (i.e. “What on Earth does Sturm and Drang mean?”) adds additional meaning to the textual message of the song, that is the possible interpretation that the woman’s leaving defies reason.

Another song which plays with the notion of verbal obscurity to a substantially higher degree is the 2002 “Kommienenzuspadt” which contains several words which convey some meaning but the rest are, as Waits claims, “pure gibberish” (Maher 331). Waits refers to these vocal experiments as “subvocalizing”, relating them to proto-languages in which words had primarily onomatopoeic function (ibid. 331). Although the words in the songs are seemingly devoid of real meaning, the way Waits delivers the message, changing his intonation, playing with the lyrics, the song does communicate with the listener and invokes various images in his or her brain, even subcounsciously. This can be demonstrated by one of the

YouTube comments made by “Jammydodger482” to the song: “after i heard this song i whent (sic!) to bed i had a dream where a massive rabid decomposing monster of a white rabbit was chasing me singing this and clawing at me so i cut his

17 head off with a chainsaw".

Let us however return to the notion of obscurity. Groom defines seven types of it, including meteorological (mists, could, wind), topographical (chasms, the boundless ocean), architectural (prisons, crypts), material (masks, veils), textual

(riddles, clotted language, obscure dialect), spiritual (religious mystery, mysticism, summonings) and psychological – hallucination, madness, and, most notably, hauntings (76).

Virtually all these motifs are to be found in Waits' art. Firstly, there are allusions to various weathers, such as in songs “Strange Weather”, “Emotional

Weather Report” and “Rain Dogs”, as well as Waits' own jokes about weather being one of the key ingredients in a song (Maher 271). Secondly, Waits toys with sailor motifs in songs such as “Shore Leave” and “Singapore”, containing inescapable liminality which will be further discussed in Chapter 3. Thirdly, Waits' interest in obscure language can be noted, for example in the above-mentioned Orphans song

“2:19” and, finally, religious obscurity may be traced in Waits' adoption of the role of the fire and brimstone preacher, as demonstrated for instance in the 1980s song

“Way Down in the Hole”. This preacher-like stage stylisation functions obscurely, for the audience does not know whether Waits is being serious when he “preaches” in the song. Such obscurity can be for instance found in the 1999 Letterman performance of “Chocolate Jesus”, in which he uses a police megaphone which distorts his voice, so that the message he preaches is also distorted, especially to listeners who are not completely familiar with the song’s lyrics. This fuzziness owes to Waits' ambivalent relationship with religion as such. Although he would admit that he comes from a family of “teachers and preachers” (Humphries 31), he does not present religious themes in a clear, necessarily positive fashion. In fact, in his stage banter he would introduce some of his songs in a grotesque, mock-religion

18 manner. In his introduction to “Train Song” from the 1988 album Big Time he provides an anecdote about a Union soldier whose testicle was pierced by a bullet which would then land in the ovaries of a girl who was a 100 feet from him, thus answering a question he as a performer “gets asked a lot”, that is whether “it is possible to get pregnant without intercourse”. Religious obscurity was also present in one of his film roles, in Tony Scott’s 2005 film Domino, where Waits plays a kind of deus-ex-machina preacher, who appears out of nowhere (which is an act of obscurity in itself) in the middle of the desert, only to guide the main character,

Domino, back onto the right path.

However, let us for the time being return to our Gothic overview. Another

Gothic character in classical literature who may be placed on our timeline would be

Bertha Mason, the proverbial “mad woman in the attic”. Bertha was both a source of haunting and a victim to her own ghosts – a phantom who roamed the

Thornfield mansion, occupying a drugged world of confinement and nocturnal dreams, reminding Jane of the foul German spectre – the Vampyre (Brennan 26).

This repression of the past, this abjection of the Other, which does not fit within the master (i.e. Rochester) discourse, makes Bertha a clear example of a character who would easily find her place in one of Waits' songs. However, Waits' abject characters are usually males, and their ghosts are presented from a male perspective, or as Sollis poignantly argues, “there is a male-centred social world invoked in many Waits' songs” (38). Nevertheless, Brennan notes that “what unites many Gothic novels is their concern with transgression and the disintegration of boundaries (…), [collapsing] the barriers between the master and servant” (27).

This Gothic notion of disintegration is tightly linked to what Waits is preoccupied with in his music, as will be discussed in the following chapters.

By and large, in the nineteenth century, together with its preoccupation with

19 vampires, the Gothicisation of science was particularly prolific when it came to the emergence of Gothic texts (Groom 92). These included Mary Shelley’s

Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula – both of whom are, not unlike Bertha

Mason, sources of haunting and actual victims of hauntography. Isabel van Elferen defines hauntography in her Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny as

“hauntology operating through mediation, with media as the agents disclosing the hauntological abyss behind the symbolic order they transmit.” (16). That is to say, what has become the cannon of the Gothic genre has been foregrounded by critics

(i.e. the mediators) as classic Gothic texts containing certain (surface) elements common in the Gothic genre. However, the present thesis aims to show that the

Gothic, and Waitsian Gothic in particular, goes far beyond a set of criteria which can be applied to label it as such, including the recurring topoi presented in the opening chapter of this thesis. Rather, the Gothic may be viewed as a tendency, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 4.

Nevertheless, vampires seemed to sweep Britain in the nineteenth century, during which another canonical Gothic novel was published – the aforementioned

Dracula (1897). In spite of the evident surface sexual elements, Dracula is in fact a subversive critique of Western capitalism (Groom 97), with the central vampiric character indulging in consummation acts such as this one:

The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate

voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she

actually licked her lips like an animal (...) Lower and lower went her head as the lips went

below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. (...) I

could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and

the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a

languorous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart. (Stoker 32)

20 This links Dracula to Waits' own subversive treatment of the topics which he presents in his songs. For instance, what may on the surface seem to be a simple recount of love lost in the 1980 “Ruby’s Arms” also functions as an invocation of the emptied life of a man at the bottom of society who, upon parting with his lover, has nothing left but his clothes. This is in stark contrast to capitalist accumulation of wealth so embedded in the American dream, yet the song’s creation, that is very early 1980s, corresponds with a time during which American economy was undergoing a long recession. As a result, “Ruby’s Arms” indirectly points to economic themes which lay under the surface of the song, but which are nevertheless buried within the collective unconscious of the American nation at the turn of the respective decade.

Besides being a critique of the dangers of wealth accumulation, Dracula is also primarily concerned with modern technology, and its Gothic, occult aspects, such as typewriting, phonographs, radio communication and surgery pioneering.

The machine as a Gothic tool, that is the replacement of witchcraft with technology, plays a dominant part in Waits' art as well. Waits will frequently allude to mechanical aspects of music as a product of various (not necessarily musical) instruments which are indispensable in the process of his musical creation, such as in this 1992 Bone Machine album interview:

Most machines take on a certain kind of human quality, even a bicycle, particularly an old

bicycle that’s been ridden a lot, even when nobody’s on it. (...) I saw a picture of a bottle-

making machine and a guy working it, back in the 20s. (...) there was something very

human, something very animal about it (...) I like those sounds. I wanted to explore more

machinery sounds. (Maher 218)

21 2.3 America – Dark And Grotesque Although it shared certain elements with the European Gothic, such as an interest in the dark aspects of the human mind and society, North American Gothic pursued rather different goals, which were closely linked to the central themes of

American pursuits, primarily when it came to the notion of the frontier. Originally a frontier society, Americans constantly faced liminal challenges, including the early indigenous tribe threats, frontier wilderness dangers, and subsequent self- mutilation of American identity through the institution of slavery. American fiction is, as Leslie Fiedler famously argues in his 1966 Love and Death in the American

Novel, “bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a Gothic fiction, non-realistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation” (29).

The grotesque is a central element in most American Gothic fiction, especially as far as the Southern Gothic genre is concerned. A uniting force of what is hereby labelled as the grotesque could be best summed up in Bjerre’s words as a

“disturbing juxtaposition of conflicting elements; a site of transgression that serves to challenge the normative status quo” (4). This general view of the term shelters the various topoi which appear within the context of the American Southern

Gothic, including physical deformities, disfigurements, prosthetic limbs and so on.

In other words, these represent markers which allude to an array of wounds certain individuals have suffered, thus making them peripherally distant from the intact, healthy individuals who set the norm. In his songs, Waits portrays many such individuals – for instance the 2004 song, aptly titled “Circus”, features characters including “one-eyed Myra, the queen of the Galley”, “Zuzu Bolin” with his “mouth full of gold teeth” and “Poodle Murphy” who had a high fever which “took a piece of her ear”.

22 Nevertheless, the first novel to be considered as a representative of the

American Gothic was Wieland; Or, the Transformation: An American Tale, written by Charles Brockden Brown in 1798. Wieland already contained elements typical of American Gothic fiction delineated by Fiedler above, including a focus on the psychological origins of horror and its young, vulnerable female narrator

(Bailey 269). For the purpose of this thesis, the line of American Gothic classics which followed could be simplified into Poe, with his notorious “The Fall of the

House of Usher” – Melville and his treatment of the haunted captain in Moby Dick

– Lovecraft, with his traumatic Cthulhu series – Flannery O’Connor and her shell- shock novel, Wise Blood – Capote, with his reporter-style recount of a shocking murder of an innocent Kansas farmer family titled In Cold Blood – Morrison and her African-American haunting story, Beloved – to a postmodern Gothic contribution by Danielewski, The House of Leaves (2000), with its fragmentation through multiple narrators and the “self-reflexive contemplations about echo, embodiment and their Gothic overtones” (van Elferen 187).

As it has already been noted, American Gothic fiction is distinctly marked for its interest in the grotesque, which functions as a truly realistic portrayal of the

American society. As Leslie Fiedler puts it in his introduction “[the] most serious as well as [the] funniest [American] writers have found the Gothic mode an apt one for telling the truth about the quality of [American] life" (8). In fact, what the

Gothic manages with indispensable efficiency is to uncover and challenge the naivete of foundation tenets of American society: “freedom from persecution based on difference, original equality and opportunity, the possibility of self- determinism” (Bailey 271). By digging up the ghosts buried within the nation’s conscience, Gothic art subversively foregrounds challenges which the major society dismisses as undesirable. This is exactly what Waits manages to accomplish in

23 some of his most profound “low-life” lyrical stories which appeared on his pre-

Swordfishtrombones albums, such as “Invitation to the Blues” and “Small Change”

(discussed in chapter 4.1), as well as his most recent “war” songs such as “Hell

Broke Luce” (see chapter 4.3.).

In general, Waits' musical, textual and media performance contrasts with what Baudrillard claims in his America, when he states that

[In America] the charm to be found in social graces and in the theatre of social relations is

all transferred outwards into the advertising of life and lifestyles. This is a society that is

endlessly concerned to vindicate itself, perpetually seeking to justify its own existence.

Everything has to be made public: what you are worth, what you earn, how you live – there

is no place here for interplay of a subtler nature. The society’s ‘look’ is a self-publicizing one.

(85-86)

It is exactly the interplay of a subtler nature which makes Waits a Gothic, and, therefore, a subversive artist, as he often-times, as will be shown in the following chapter, strives to slip away from justifications and closed endings. By doing so, he challenges the core of the American self-perception and self- presentation. Waits' songs and performances will, owing to their open-ended, liminal nature, refuse simple conclusions, but rather raise more questions, thus becoming intellectually stimulating. This open-endedness is discussed in the following chapter, for which the term shapeshifting is adopted.

24 3 Shapeshifting

Very little can be said with absolute certainty when it comes to the life and art of Tom Waits, and virtually all the Gothic notions mentioned in the previous chapter play a role as far as he is concerned. Waits' art is obscure, he and his characters frequently operate within temporally and spatially liminal dominions, and he also rarely discusses his music without bordering on, or openly transgressing into, the grotesque. Broadhurst defines liminality in music as that which “accentuates heterogeneity, the experimental and the marginalized”, listing the “neo-Gothic” as one of its hybridised quasi-genres which concentrates on

“presenting the sublime through disruptive sounds, combined with tropical lyrics that provide wide metaphorical effects”. In other words, liminal music is “music that challenges traditional ideas of aesthetic judgement” (139). These views fittingly summarise what Waits accomplishes via his treatment of liminality which is a tool which enables him to experiment with already-established genres.

Closely connected to liminality lies a term which this thesis aims to employ in order to cover the multitude of Gothic elements present in Waits' art – shapeshifting. Originally a mythical notion, already present in ancient totemic and shamanistic religions, shapeshifting also includes fundamentally Gothic creatures such as werewolves and vampires, as well as Navajo skin-walkers and mimics. In

Scottish mythology, the shapeshifting kelpies, or water kelpies, were spirits which frequently took the form of horses or even humans, used to trick, deceive and even kill unwary humans. Unwary humans can easily be tricked by a skilful shapeshifter into believing what he or she desires them to believe.

The notion of shapeshifting, or, as this thesis understands it, putting on a

25 mask, has thus played a pivotal role in Waits' performance ever since he entered showbusiness. He would initially appear as a battered old man, and would frequently allude to his gerontophilia in later interviews, such as the one he gave to

Mojo in 2004 in which he claims that “I wanted to be an old man when I was a little kid. Wore my grandaddy’s hat, used his cane, and lowered my voice. I was dying to be old.” (Maher 268)

Yet the reader must be careful when he or she listens to Waits tell a story about himself – even when he is recounting his distant youth, and actually describing an early form of his own shapeshifting, or were-Waitsing if you prefer.

Thus, Waits may be acting like the aforementioned kelpie setting a skilful trap to catch the unwary. Truth is much sought-after by Waitsian fans and scholars, including one of his unauthorised biographers, Barney Hoskyns, who famously complains about Tom’s and his wife’s, Kathleen Brennan’s, complete unwillingness to cooperate in the process of writing Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits in the book’s introduction. However, it is exactly this unwillingness on the side of the

Waits/Brennan duo to participate in the truth-seeking quest which makes Waits a

Gothic artist. As Veeder states: “In Gothic, it is not truth that produces pleasure but rather pleasure that produces truth.” (28)

3.1 Persona And Persono As Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter claim in their introduction to a book on the Mediaeval mask, “assuming a mask, for whatever reason, consequently involves the wearer in a public statement about identity which is hard to separate from performance” (8). The actual term mask has etymological origins in the Latin persona (character), which is closely linked to the actual role the character played, as well as to the character’s identity (ibid. 8). This aptly applies to Waits, as for the

26 audience, it is the Waits-persona which surfaces every time the artist decides to give an interview or perform in public. In essence, the Waitsian persona is indeed inseparable from the performance, for each specific performance in time becomes isolated from its context, and consequently forged into a hybridised artifice in which the Waits-person is blended with the Waits-persona. To illustrate what is meant by this hybridised artifice, let us resurface an old interview which became a part of a 1979 short film called A Day in Vienna, shot by two Austrian film-makers

Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rosacher during Waits' European tour to support Blue

Valentines. As Hoskyns claims, it was not a proper interview, but Waits had rather wanted to tell stories (215). Rosacher and Dolezal therefore drove him to a

Viennese petrol station where he nostalgically remembered an old self-operated gas station called Spotco’s, and its owner who would never have believed him if he told him that “One day, Spotco, I’ll be leaning on a gas pump in a gas station in Vienna,

Austria.” According to Waits, to this Spotco would have definitely said “You gotta be outta your mind.” Here, Waits steered the film into the direction he chose, and thus created an artifice in which the Waits-persona remains projected into the original speech event so strongly that the Waits-person almost vanishes from it.

What is even more noteworthy in relation to Waits is the fact that, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the Latin “persona” may have originated from

"persono", which means to sound through (per = through, sono = sound). Indeed,

Waits' shapeshifting and shapeshifted characters are often-times closely linked to the way he operates his paramount instrument, that is his voice. Waits operates his voice both on the synchronic and the diachronic levels: it has evolved through the decades, both intentionally and unintentionally, and it performs various functions in his songs. Let us then discuss the Waitsian per-sono, that is his voice.

Waits' voice has developed a hauntology of its own, as critics have tried to

27 label it ever since he started experimenting with it on a larger scale, which would be roughly after the emergence of Heartattack and Vine. When asked about his early voice during an interview on Real Gone (2004), Waits responds with a metaphor:

SS: When do you feel you found [your voice]?

TW: Hmm…

SS: By your second album, The Heart of Saturday Night, we got glimpses.

TW: It was very ill formed, but I was trying. There was spoken word on there. I don’t know,

in those days I think I really wanted to see my head on somebody else’s body.

(Maher 370)

Adopting roles is thus crucial for Waits – he may well be one of the best- acting singers in the business. This constant diachronic transformation from character to character on the individual albums, however, represent an act of self- preservation, as demonstrated by another answer to Tom Lanham from Paste in

2004:

TL: And you’ve also learned how to constantly reinvent yourself. Not for the audience’s

sake, of course, but to keep yourself interested, amused.

TW: Well, that’s really the goal, isn’t it? You have to keep yourself interested, and you have

to be endlessly curious. And I may be a bit more eccentric, and I don’t really care about

what people think. And to a large degree, I don’t really care what anybody thinks. Because I

have my own kinda world I’m in. (Maher 391)

In this respect, Waits' shapeshifting is an inseparable part of the role he performs for himself in his “own kinda world”, that is in his own world as a musician and performer. However, it is not as simple as it may first appear: in music, shapeshifting is inevitable. As Van Elferen states: “musical time is not only out of joint but but also subject to continual rewriting. In listening, repetition

28 becomes difference.”(27) Therefore, one always has to bear in mind that while

Waits himself is “out of joint”, his audience is exposed to temporally conditioned shifts his songs undergo. In other words, that songs, although seemingly fixated as artifices on albums, develop in the minds of listeners. Every listening occasion pushes the original experience further and further into the past (ibid. 27), and the listeners consequently long for the original, irretrievable feelings that particular song evoked.

This shows that it is not only Waits' voice but also the actual songs which shapeshift diachronically, depending on the occasion, which consequently determines the musical experience Waits decides to transfer to his audience. Let us take one song which has been in Waits' repertoire ever since it first appeared on on the eponymous album, Rain Dogs, originally released in 1985. Textually, the song, which originated during Waits' 1980s New York era, paints a cubist image of lost souls: rain dogs are dogs who had lost their sense of smell after it rains and are not thus able to find their way back home. This metaphor is embraced by Waits in the actual lyrics as he sings “For I’m a rain dog too.” The album version of “Rain Dogs” has the feeling of Weilean expressionism (Hoskyns 299), with Marc Ribot’s short guitar riffs and Michael Blair’s marimba. It is this very song which Waits chose to play as one of the pieces he performed when he was inducted into the Rock-and-

Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. However, the song was transfigured into a different organism: Waits sings in a mellowish voice, behind the beat, trying to catch up with the song as if he was remembering the lyrics. In addition, the song has a slower tempo, there is no clarinet, and Waits holds on to the phrases which were originally cut short – in the last line, “whispered to me”, contains a distinctly prolonged last syllable.

How different does this version sound from the one recorded for the 1988

29 album Big Time: these “Rain Dogs” start with Waits literally howling like a wolf

(with clear Howling Wolf, and even Dracula references), and they are presented in a harsh voice. Waits growls and mumbles, turns around in circles, as if hypnotised by the accompanying accordion and clarinet, waiting for the band to transpose into a kind of Russian dance. To this Waits bursts into a Cossack dancing fit, revolving his hat above his head and then finishes the scene with a sly grin.

To complete the triplet, let us analyse another version of “Rain Dogs”, this time from his 2008 performance during the Glitter and Doom tour. This rendition is devoid of electric guitar, does include the clarinet, and has Waits completely concentrated on his vocal and body performance. The clarinet is strongly present here, though, as it supplies a central solo which is over a minute long. The solo is

“conducted” by Waits – it is on his signal that Vincent Henry’s clarinet is foregrounded, while Waits stirs the audience into a unanimous clap, until the song returns to its swing and has Waits introduce the band.

The list of shapeshifting songs could for instance include “Jesus Gonna Be

Here”, originally a 1992 bluesy song from Bone Machine. The song features only an upright bass and slide guitar and Waits harshly shouting the lyrics in sandpaper fashion, and even coughing from the strenuous effect this had on his vocal cords by the end of the song (the cough was kept on the album). This song would then be transformed to a completely different effect in the already-mentioned 2005 film

Domino, where it appears non-diegetically as an introduction to yet another Waits' shapeshift into a preacher-like deus-ex-machina character who prophesies

Domino’s future. Here, Waits' distinctive voice is used to convey a grave, central message in the film. “Jesus Gonna Be Here” would then be ultimately transformed into a carnivalesque-like piece with electric guitar, saxophone and piano solos, recorded for the Glitter and Doom Live album in 2008. Gone is Domino’s gravity,

30 the last mutation is playful, verging on the grotesque.

3.2 Spin Me A Yarn In many respects, Waits is extremely aware of setting the stage whenever he decides to appear in public. This might be the case why he tends to avoid situations which he does not have solid control of, such as film premieres and press conferences. In fact, he has only done a single press conference so far, which was aimed at promoting the Glitter and Doom Tour in 2008. The conference footage shows Waits answering a series of questions, grinning in-between the flashing cameras, fabricating about the role of the stars in the choice of the cities which his ensemble would visit over the tour. If put together with lines, the cities would complete the constellation of the Hydra. Sophisticated, one may think. However, as it is the case with a hydra, once you think you have overcome it, two new heads appear instead of the freshly-slain one. This is exactly how the audience is yet again fooled by the well-constructed performance the whole press conference turns out to be because towards the end of the “conference highlights” footage, as Waits is getting up to leave, he lifts up the needle from a turntable only to show the journalists’ questions, reactions and laughter were pre-recorded. The room where the supposed conference was held is in fact completely empty. One may only speculate whether the “press conference” was recorded at the local Petaluma school which one of his children attended at the time and how they managed to keep the whole recording secret until it was release by ANTI-.

This leads us to the already-mentioned interviews, and Waits' clever selection of setting. For Waits, interviews have frequently been staged, and the interviewers framed, although at earlier points in Waits' career they did not actually realise this. One example of an early Waits interview, where he is

31 consistently in character, would be from an Australian TV show, The Don McLane

Show, from 1979. Waits, 29 at that time, slowly wobbles into his armchair, smoking a cigarette, his hat tucked into his forehead, looking shy and reserved. However, his character consistence makes the host gradually more and more uncomfortable, so that he has to play by Waits' rules, including being accused of reading the words for the next questions “right off the page”. The host is trapped in Waits' own grasp of the speech event, and is at the end rewarded with a prophetic answer to his question about Tom’s perception of showbusiness ambition: “DL: ‘Do you worry about achievement?’ TW: “I worry about a lot of things, but I don’t worry about achievement.’”

It is also noteworthy that Youtube users comment on this video as being the source of inspiration for Heath Ledger’s Joker, which is also elaborated upon by some popular online media, including Marc Bernardin in the Hollywood Reporter.

Be that as it may, the audience will never know, as Ledger passed on before he could tell the whole story (if he ever would), thus creating a whole hauntology around the supposed connection. Still, Joker’s and early Waits' voice and body language overlap to a staggering degree. This is in fact a part of the Gothic dimension in Waits' life, for “all major Gothic novels are open-ended to an extent unmatched in other modes and that this mobility is fundamental to their pleasure- producing capability.” (Veeder 30) It is exactly this lack of completion, this impreciseness, these fuzzy boundaries, which are so vitally linked to human understanding of nature through language. Thus, Waits' life becomes a Gothic novel of its own.

To shed more light onto Waits' perception of interviews with various journalists, some of the settings which Waits chose for those speech events may be listed. These encounters had varied perlocutionary forces on the interviewers,

32 depending on Waits' mood and choice of setting. Robert Elms for instance claims in his 1983 article for Face, published just after the production of the groundbreaking album Swordfishtrombones, that “If you’re a fan, [Waits] is a myth, if you’re not he’s a nobody.” (Maher 136) Elms also stresses the choice of setting, appreciating that “dragging me down to the tawdry glamour of a ghetto was a sweet move” (ibid. 138), and claims that “questions about [Waits'] private life tend to be met with refusals or yarns” (ibid. 139). This is interesting choice of wording, for the very same word, “yarn”, concludes the song from the eponymous album – “Swordfishtrombone”. “Swordfishtrombone” is an enigma on its own as one may wonder what a swordfishtrombone actually is – is it an animal or a musical instrument or possibly both. The song tells the story of a veteran soldier who returned from the war and nobody really knows how to approach him, as he is basically indexical:

Now some say he's doing

the obituary mambo

and some say he's hanging on the wall

perhaps this yarn's the only thing

that holds this man together

some say he was never here at all

What is meant by “indexical” is possessing rumour-like, referential qualities, as it is the case with the famous icon-index-symbol distinction, where the metonymous index is often likened to smoke which points to fire, i.e. the source field. In this way, Waits himself, just like the protagonist of “Swordfishtrombone”, is a rumoured character, constructed of smoke signals which were gathered by the media and subsequently mediated to create a Waitsian hauntography. When asked

33 a direct question regarding this matter in a 2006 interview after the release of the compilation album Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, Bastards, Waits responded with unusual sincerity:

AP: Is there a Tom Waits mythology?

TW: I’m sure there is. The fact is most of the things that people know about me are made

up. My own life is backstage. So what you “know” about me is only what I allowed you to

know about me. So it’s a ventriloquist act. ... There’s nothing you can say that will mean the

same thing once it’s repeated. (Maher 423)

For this brief moment, it seems that Waits lifted the smoke screen, or he rather confessed its existence openly, admitting that his involvement in the

Waitsian showbusiness hauntography has a clear focus: to perform an act which may eventually trick the audience into feeding the fire whose source they do not see save for the smoke it produces.

However, to return to the notion of vocal shapeshifting, let us take two examples of songs from different periods, and demonstrate what functions this shapeshifting performs. The two songs are separated by thirty years – “Shore

Leave” first appeared on Swordfishtrombones in 1983 and “Don’t Go Into That

Barn” was included on Real Gone (2004). Both the songs are short stories in themselves and they feature Waits' raspy vocals which resemble jazz readings from his earlier albums such as Small Change.

“Shore Leave” tells the story of a sailor enjoying the liminal period of freedom, passing his time in the harbour, “squeezing all the life / out of a lousy two-day pass”. Waits recounts what the sailor experienced in the strophes in spoken-word fashion, in voice close to whisper. However, the listener is exposed to a rapid change of expression mode as Waits breaks into singing in the chorus in

34 which he quotes directly from the sailor’s letter to his wife. Therefore, the song works on two levels, or layers rather: one is the spoken word mode attributed to the narrator (which may evoke the feeling of inner thought), and the other is direct speech in the singing mode. The latter conveys deep emotions and it seems that the sailor were distancing himself from those emotions. It almost feels as if it was somebody else singing the sentimental lines of: “and I'm so far away from home / and I miss my baby so / I can't make it by myself / I love you so”.

What follows is Marc Ribot’s guitar solo after which Waits breaks into a howl, repeatedly singing the song’s title for as long as 40 seconds. This howling represents a full fifth of the song total playtime and adds yet another layer into the song’s vocal mediation. It is as if the sailor was obsessed with being stuck in this spatio-temporal liminality, and Waits was mediating his pain through various howl-like mutations of “Shore Leave”. The sailor thus becomes trapped in a twisted web of variations of sameness, which is exactly what Waits does when he creates a song: the characters are going to be trapped in the haunting space of “their” particular song.

“Don’t Go Into That Barn” also works on several different levels of vocal mediation. First there is the underlying rhythmic chanting, consisting of growls in which Waits chants the words resembling something like “whooo-ha”. These vocal, percussive chants skilfully blend a form of beatboxing, which is a technique originally associated with hip-hop, present in more songs on Real Gone, such as

“Metropolitan Glide”. “Metropolitan Glide” represents a Waits-invented instructional song on how to perform a strange, obscure dance (Maher 356).

Besides this song, beatboxing also appears for instance on “Baby Gonna Leave Me”, where it takes form of a series of vocalised “ka-booms”. This blend of modern genres such as hip-hop and older, blues-associated musical patterns represents a

35 form of shapeshifting, an aforementioned “neo-Gothic” approach to the creative process. As a result, the product which follows is closely linked to what was labelled by Broadhurst at the beginning of this chapter “a hybridised quasi-genre”.

When asked whether these chants and incantations were pre-recorded loops, Waits responds: “it wasn’t a loop. The trouble with loop is once your mind realizes that it’s a loop it stops listening to it, just like you stop looking at the patter on the tablecloth.” (Maher 375) Consequently, the song will never lose its haunting effect, as confirmed by some of the Youtube users in the discussion under the song, including the following comment by a user Rosario Spatola “I have this album on vinyl, and this song is frightening on my sound system. As if he's in the room w/ me, surreal”. This comment points to a similar notion suggested by Van Elferen in her subchapter on liturgical music: “repetition often remains repetition in chant upon chant. It is exactly the timelessness of the repeated sameness, the ‘explosive excess’ of repetition, that endorses the timespace of transcendence.” (32) As a result, Waits' repeated chants on Real Gone, cleverly webbed so as to avoid the dangers of the listener’s mind blanking them after a short listening period, have this exact haunting effect.

Waits originally composed “Don’t Go Into That Barn” rather minimalistically, which is typical of the whole album, and the version which appeared on the 2004 album is stripped to vocal percussions and guitars. The 2017 remastered version is substantially richer and spookier and in fact it represents a shapeshifted form by itself. It starts with horns which permeate the whole number and Waits' voice is much more foregrounded, especially as far as his shouts and whines are concerned. This suggests a complete rethinking of the message which

Waits intended for Real Gone to convey, which was confirmed by ANTI- upon the remaster’s release in a short article titled “Real Gone Remixed & Remastered

36 Available Now”: “Some of the new mixes are radical transformations from the original versions and the whole album crackles and steams with fuller intensity and more vivid intimacy.” This intimate dimension of Waits' vocal delivery is a naturally Gothic feature which brings the recipient right into the middle of action, as will further be shown in the case of “Hell Broke Luce” in the last chapter of the thesis. The overall reworked haunting effect of the song is also confirmed by Andy

Gill in his Guardian review of the album, where he describes the droning background horns as a vehicle which “lends a deeper undertone of menace behind the hysteria.”

For the purpose of this thesis, the 2017 version of the song will be used, as its richness adds another layer to the already haunting effect the 2004 cut conveyed. Above the already-mentioned background layer of Waits' chants and the droning horns which paint the basic canvas of this rural murder story, Waits delivers the lyrics in almost spoken-word fashion yet again, breaking into a howl for the chorus, which sounds like a warning. This howling creates tension between the stanzas in which the background story is told and the menacing chorus. In this respect, the song correlates with “Shore Leave” analysed above: Waits' singing mode is used to convey a strong, emotional message and the raspy spoken-word story provides the other, background layer. The former mode works paradigmatically and foregrounds a certain message which Waits treats as important, while the latter operates on the syntagmatic, cause-effect level.

As far as the lyrics of “Don’t Go Into That Barn” are concerned, Waits paints a vivid, spooky image of a countryside with “black cellophane sky at midnite” and

“big blue moon with three gold rings”, menaced by a fugitive called Everett Lee who is “high on potato and tulip wine” and haunts the song’s protagonist. However, it is complicated to decipher the actual message, as the protagonist may only be

37 hallucinating: “I called Champion to the window / And I pointed up above the trees

/ That's when I heard my name in a scream /Coming from the woods, out there”.

He himself is thus haunted by sonic imagery which has indexical source: the screams come from the woods, from “out there”. This “out there” element is typical of American Gothic, and reminds the audience of country murders and rural horrors such as those in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

In fact, the song does contain a haunted house: “Behind the porticoed house of / A long dead farm /They found the falling down timbers / Of a spooky old barn”. The collective “they” here correlates with the collective, communal, feeling of

“A Rose for Emily”, with sentences as blunt as “So the next day we all said, ‘She will kill herself’; and we said it would be the best thing.” (Faulkner 14) However, Waits' recount of the transgressions is distant, unresolved, once again indexical rather than witnessed. This is in contrast to Faulkner’s story, where the actual secret of the haunted house is discovered and blatantly exposed in a single sentence: “The man himself lay in the bed.” (ibid. 19) Waits does not provide any simple conclusions, for his Unheimlich (buried, hidden) is always-present: “When the river is low / They find old bones and / When they plow they always / Dig up chains”.

What lies buried on the grounds of the house, which may be interpreted metaphorically as the American socio-historical space, in the sphere of Freud’s unhomely, is what actually bothers the song’s protagonist: it is exactly the centuries of transgressions and violence, and chains may suggest slavery even. The unhomely is thus not in opposition to homely, but rather contained within it, under the surface, just like the bones and chains, and it is displayed naturally, for rivers simply will dry and ground will be plowed. This is the natural order of things.

The ultimate paradigmatic shapeshift comes in the last fourth of the song

38 where Waits, after he has sung the chorus, switches to a whiskey growl, chanting a succession of direct questions relating to (crime) concealment, such as burying one’s fire, covering one’s tracks and hiding one’s gun. What then follows is a series of place names which create a kind of road map of the Southern states, suggesting omnipresent danger, as if the original inebriated fugitive could be hiding anywhere.

The supposed map refers to a water journey which slaves undertook, as Leigh

Brown mentions in a 2003 article which the song may have well been inspired by:

“It was an eight-mile trek down the Walton Pike to the landing at Dover, Ky., where they would board flatboats for a perilous 1,150-mile journey: Dover to Covington,

Covington to Louisville, Louisville to Henderson, Henderson to Smithland,

Smithland to Memphis, Memphis to Vicksburg, Miss., and on to the infamous

Natchez slave market.” However, it could also be understood that repressed transgressions always surface, no matter where one plows: in the South, one always digs up chains. In this respect, Waits' “Don’t Go Into That Barn” is a prime sample of the Gothic, as it is understood by Veeder: “I believe Gothic is, of all fiction’s genres, the one most intensely concerned with simultaneously liberating repressed emotions and exploring foreclosed social issues.” (23)

This leads to the second notion this thesis aimed to analyse, that is the role

Waits' art plays in the American conscience, especially in relation to wounds the nation inflicted upon itself and ways in which such wounds may be healed. The following chapter will therefore analyse wounds and healing in Waits' songs, both on the synchronic and diachronic level, and trace the evolution of these notions in songs from various decades of his career.

39 4 A Wound That Will Never Heal

Wherever Waits will go, he will most likely be asked to play “Tom Traubert’s

Blues”. This song, which was first recorded for his 1976 album Small Change, contains the following lyrics, which Waits' former producer, Bones Howe, cited in the seminars he gave to aspiring songwriters, claiming that he will give them a line of poetry they had never heard before (Jacobs 78): “and it's a battered old suitcase / to a hotel someplace / and a wound that will never heal”.

The song, now over 45 years old, has become a source of haunting for both the artist and the audience. The circumstances of its origin are well known: according to Howe, when Waits wrote it, he had drunk a bottle of liquor, and then vomited, both physically and artistically, a song which was to remain in his stage repertoire ever since. Waits' self-mutilating, alcohol and drug abuse wound which

Waits felt when he wrote the song has then over the years become a recurring channel through which a part of Waits' now-Unheimlich persona can be revisited.

As a result, this particular song contains dual signification: on the one hand it points to a time Waits was a troubled, unsettled young man (that is pre-Brennan and pre-family), and on the other hand it functions as a source of healing through art via referring to a cathartic moment in his own life.

In this chapter, therefore, this very notion of wounds and healing will be discussed hardly ever in separation, evading seeing them as binary opposites. The thesis will on the contrary aim to present them as interconnected concepts, with one influencing the other and vice versa. The prism through from which the two notions will be presented is a diachronic one, starting with early songs such as the above-mentioned “Tom Traubert’s Blues” and other songs from Small Change,

40 namely Waits' lyrical encounter in “Invitation to the Blues” and the reporter-style

“Small Change”. Gradually, the thesis analysis will arrive at the most recent songs from the latest album Bad As Me, including the post-apocalyptic “Chicago” and the anti-war “Hell Broke Luce”.

As it appears, Waits' perception of these paramount Gothic themes diachronically shifts from that of a detached spectator towards a more direct role of a person who is imminently affected by the wounds he witnesses and adopts as his own. In other words, personal wounds which were originally recorded in the songs over time become sources of collateral damage which affects virtually the whole

American nation. In this respect, Waits follows the already-mentioned Fiedlerian definition of American fiction as predominantly a Gothic one: sadist and melodramatic.

4.1 Invitation To The Blues In the first chapter of this thesis the Gothic was defined not so much as a genre or a discrete literary mode, but rather as a “fluid tendency” (Savoy 6), a prism through which reality is filtered in such a way which tends to favour Other, thus centralising the marginal through skilful foregrounding of the fractured and dismembered. The term dismembering is here seen as having two core meanings – missing a part which was originally there and also not being a member of a group, or being abjected. Consequently, Waits' interest in characters and stories which are in some way or another crooked, mirrors Savoy’s understanding of the Gothic who claims that it is conditioned by “a proximity of Otherness” (6).

This impulse which tends to favour Other seems to be of fundamental importance to Waits: his Gothic mode of perception arguably originates in the fact that he himself comes from an incomplete family – in 1992 he said in an interview

41 “when you come from a broken home, you’ll always feel attracted to things that are also broken” (Hoskyns 18). As a result, even his very early songs already show gravitation towards stories of people who are either physically or emotionally damaged, and frequently haunted by wounds, present and past.

Such haunting is also the case in “Martha”, a song from his first album

Closing Time (1973), which tells the story of a middle-aged man who calls his old flame years after they had separated. The song is presented as a monologue in which we get to hear only the man’s point of view: “And I feel so much older now, and you're much older too / How's your husband, and how's your kids, you know that I got married too”. Towards the end of the song, the man confesses that he still loves his former girlfriend until the “line” breaks after the melodramatic chorus with his haunting memory of the time they had spent together: “And I remember quiet evenings, trembling close to you”. As it appears, this may have well been

Waits' own confession had he not married the woman who was to become his lifelong partner and musical collaborator, Kathleen Brennan, settled down and had three children.

Be that as it may, this early Waits song contains a personal wound which was unresolved, and which Waits leaves so: in fact, he rarely decided to play it live, save for a scarce occasion such as the 1974 performance in Denver, during which he still retains his original, gravel-devoid, folk voice. Interestingly enough, this very song found its reflection in a 2018 number “Hello” composed by the pop diva

Adele, whose lyrics allude to a similar situation:

Hello, it's me

I was wondering if after all these years you'd like to meet

To go over everything

42 They say that time's supposed to heal ya

But I ain't done much healing

Adele’s song seems to be haunted by Waitsian imagery of the 1970s (that is the pre-Swordfishtrombones era) in which Waits was already interested in the fractured world of America’s wounded, presented from a reporter-style perspective, that is a detached, seemingly objective one.

The album which demonstrates these reporting tendencies to a great extent is the 1976 Small Change, whose opening number, the already-mentioned “Tom

Traubert’s Blues”, has remained a Waits staple ever since it was recorded. The actual song even starts with a wound, which serves as an in-media-res vehicle:

“Wasted and wounded, it ain't what the moon did / I got what I paid for now”. In the song, a soldier finds himself lost in a world where “no one speaks English and everything is broken”, a world fractured in itself, providing little comfort, with the only refuge in becoming a refugee, if only he had the money to afford the trip. The song contains a fragment of a popular Australian folk song, “Waltzing Matilda”, originally a poem by Banjo Patterson, first recorded by John Collinson in 1926.

However, Waits strips the song of its original jolly undertone: for his protagonist, this wanderlust is an unresolved desire, a craving for an escape which would provide little comfort. Waits' protagonist is aware of this, claiming that “Matilda is the defendant / she killed about a hundred”. For this reason, the wound stays open, and, as it has already been mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, it “will never heal”– towards the end of the song, in the spatio-temporal liminality of the fading evening, the protagonist says goodbye to “Matilda”, and, conversely, to his dreams:

“an old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey /and goodnight to the street sweepers / the night watchman flame keepers / and goodnight Matilda, too”.

43 After the last lines of the song, the strings repeat the chorus of the original folk song, and the ultimate hobo confession comes to an end. However, it is important to note that although the song may be emotionally touching, the actual protagonist is not interested in sentiment. Waits creates a skilful tension between the song’s tone and the actual lyrics in which the protagonist refuses other people’s compassion, claiming that he does not want their sympathy because “the streets aren’t for dreaming now”. As a result, the wound which the soldier feels in the song will (and can) never be healed, for he refuses help. In this respect, the song partially reflects the state Waits was in when he was recording the album: the protagonist’s ordeal mirrors the demons which Waits was facing in the mid 1970s, namely self- mutilation through alcohol abuse and overwork from constant touring (Maher 64).

The wound-healing duality is thus disbalanced towards the former half, with only glimpses of the latter counterpart, primarily by means of self-abusive escape, which may eventually result in artistic catharsis, as has been just shown.

There are two more songs which deal with the wound-healing duality on

Small Change: “Invitation to the Blues” and “Small Change”. In the former song, which is a piano ballad with Waits delivering the story in spoken-word, jazz- reading fashion, a man almost role-plays an encounter with a waitress who reminds him of Rita Hayworth, while he in turn feels “just like Cagney”. The term role-play here refers to the tone of the song set by the man’s stylisation, as well as the fact that he may be seen as an unreliable narrator. This unreliability may owe to the fact that for the most part of the song we get to hear only his part of the story, that is, his version of what he learned about the waitress, such as the fact that she used to have a sugar daddy, drive a candy-apple Cadillac and was “accustomed to the finer things”. He is ultimately left in two minds as to whether to stay or leave the town, until he finally accepts the lady’s “invitation to the blues”. The song

44 represents yet another clever choice of scope, as we learn many details about the waitress from the male protagonist, who is provided with only very limited space to express herself. This ties the song to the aforementioned 1973 piece “Martha”, where relationships are also viewed from masculine perspective in wishful thinking fashion. “Invitation to the Blues”, however, contains a reverberated feminine wound which is only sensed by the song’s protagonist, a kind of indexical message he may have received from the manner the waitress served the customers. In any case, we are allowed only a single glimpse into the waitress’s past in the fourth stanza (see in italics):

but you can't take your eyes off her

get another cup of java

and it's just the way she pours it for you

jokin with the customers

and it's mercy mercy Mr. Percy

there ain't nothin back in Jersey

but a broken down jalopy of a

man I left behind

and a dream that I was chasin

and a battle with the booze

and an open invitation to the blues

The last line provides a shift of perspective, for it belongs to the protagonist, not the waitress, as he stirs his imagination towards further surmises. Waits' waitress mentions alcohol in the song, which Waits rhymes with the word “blues”, suggesting once again that this might have been his own battle which he was fighting at the time.

Interestingly, the song found its counterpart on the 2006 collection

45 Orphans, on which Waits reads a Bukowski poem titled “Nirvana”, in which a traveller finds himself in a cafe, encountering a waitress much less menacing than the 1976 one, in a place which has a substantially more comforting feel to it:

he wanted to stay

in that cafe

forever.

the curious feeling

swam through him

that everything

was

beautiful

there,

that it would always

stay beautiful

there (77)

However, as opposed to “Nirvana”, the male-female encounter in “Invitation to the Blues” does not provide soothing comfort: the protagonist will only “stick around for a while”, feeling that he has nothing to lose. This unstable seeking of comfort, accompanied by a sense of danger in settling down, both physically and emotionally, still points towards a desired presence of healing which is not fulfilled because the man falls in love with the idea of the woman rather than the woman herself. After all, the woman’s voice is only overheard in the song, she does not communicate directly with the protagonist. On the contrary, the man adopts a voyeuristic perspective and is content with it, which is a dangerous approach as regards the process of healing, as Martin suggests when he claims that “discursive pleasures of spying and hiding function to exacerbate rather than to heal the

46 wounds caused by repression” (27). As a result, Waits' character, owing to the fact that he cannot truly connect with the waitress, remains trapped in his own liminal visions of what may be or may have been.

The other song mentioned above, “Small Change”, demonstrates even stronger voyeuristic tendencies than “Invitation to the Blues”. It contains a recount of a murder during which a thief nicknamed Small Change was killed with his own gun. It is a detached description of the aftermath of a murder in a bad neighbourhood, which leaves most people unmoved: the policemen make jokes about “some whorehouse in Seattle”, the prostitutes still “smear on”, with their mouths which “cut just like razor blades”. In fact, all the human protagonists whom the narrator presents are almost devoid of feelings and interested only in their own benefit, such as the newsboy who steals Small Change’s pork pie stetson hat and the cabbies who allegedly go through his pockets. This is in stark contrast with the inanimate objects in the song which are genuinely affected by the tragedy, and do feel wounded: the marquees do not weep but go “stark-raving mad” and the hydrants “plead the 5th amendment”. This contrast may point to Waits showing lack of genuine emotions in people from the Other America (i.e. the neglected, lower classes), who are so accustomed to witnessing violence that it no longer moves them, not even when a boy who is “only in his teens” is killed with his own gun. The wound is thus not only witnessed but directly reported by the surroundings, by the inanimate Other America, which was there at the time of the crime, and has its own story to tell. For this reason, places adopt a certain genius loci, which is an accumulation of events which took place within their vicinity. For

Waits, this constitutes an inseparable part of Other America, and “Small Change” demonstrates that Waits is by no means a glorifier of the American low-life: on the contrary, he is a mere mediator of events which the major society neglects, with

47 critical approach to the humans involved in them.

The following albums, Foreign Affairs (1977) and Heartattack and Vine

(1980), contain two songs which allude to similar themes of relationships gone wrong and the man having to deal with the emotional consequences, becoming wounded in the process: “Muriel” and “Ruby’s Arms”. They are both, as it is often the case with Waits, presented from the male perspective or, rather, as Gabriel

Sollis puts it, many of Waits' songs “invoke a male-centred social world” (38). In

“Muriel”, Waits presents a glimpse into an evening filled with loss, while the protagonist roams the town and reminisces about a girlfriend he had lost. Here, he is troubled by not being able to deal with this emotional wound:

Muriel since you left town

The clubs closed down

And there's one more burned out lamp post

On Main Street

Down where we used to stroll (...)

And Muriel how many times

I've left this town

To hide from your memory

And it haunts me

Similarly to “Martha”, we are thrown into a world in which matters are beyond fixing, primarily due to the man’s incapability to act constructively –

Muriel’s boyfriend tries to escape his demons rather than face them, only to be

“haunted” by the memory of the girl, in clear Gothic-like fashion, with “one more burned-out lamp post / down where [they] used to stroll”. The solution for Waits' character here is cheap cigars and whiskey bars, but this does not provide much

48 comfort, for “[he]’ll see [her] every night” nevertheless. Notice the future tense used, and the dual meaning of “will” as either a simple future prediction or a repeated action typical of a certain individual (from the German vollen, meaning want), possibly suggesting that he voluntarily delves into his nostalgia.

The other song mentioned above, “Ruby’s Arms”, might actually have been a prequel to “Muriel”, as it tells the story of a soldier hurriedly leaving his girlfriend in the liminal space of early morning hours. The listener will never learn about the true nature of the break-up, as yet again we are told only the masculine version of the story, for Ruby is sleeping while the man “feels [his] way down the darkened hole and into the morning” and is hence deprived of voice. The man decides to leave behind all the clothes which he wore when they were together, save for his railroad boots and leather jacket, both items associated with being on the road, and possibly hoboing. He thus wants to evade objects which would remind him of his lover, only to finally buckle and take “a scarf off of [her] clothesline”. This single action shows that he is not utterly convinced he wants to leave everything connected to Ruby behind. In fact, as demonstrated above in “Muriel”, he never will because the memory will always be there to haunt him.

Being the last number on the album, and coincidentally the last song recorded for the Asylum label, “Ruby’s Arms” represents Waits' goodbye to both his former songwriting career (the next regular album to follow would be the groundbreaking Swordfishtrombones in 1983) and also to his old flame, Rickie Lee

Jones, whom he had dated before he met his future muse, Kathleen Brennan. In this respect, the scarf which Ruby’s lover took off of her clothesline is the Rickie

Lee reminder which Waits shall carry with himself for the rest of his career.

However, Waits only presented the male point of view, and Rickie Lee refuses to tell her part of the story, waiting whether Waits' wife will allow her to say anything

49 about the two of them (Hoskyns 487). Be that as it may, the wounds presented in the pre-Brennan era actually quite mirror Waits' own life: they are untreated, neglected, and show little signs of healing.

4.2 Trombones And Bones When Waits had said goodbye to his former way of life, as well as to his former way of creative production, that is after a brief songwriting intermezzo with

Francis Ford Coppola on a soundtrack to One From The Heart, he was becoming gradually more involved in musical and songwriting experiment. In fact, One From

The Heart was a detour, a quiet spell before a storm which was to become unleashed in 1983 in the form of Waits' highly esteemed experimental record,

Swordfishtrombones. The whole album represents a radical shift from Waits' previous style: most frequently, critics allude to its experimental percussions and usage of obscure instruments, such as the harmonium and freedom bell (Maher

129), as well as the change in Waits' voice, which now, as suggested by Barney

Hoskyns in the 2008 documentary Tom Waits: Under Review 1983-2006, featured hints of Captain Beefheart and the African American blues singer, Howlin’ Wolf.

However, what is even more crucial is Waits' departure from concretely portrayed situations towards increasingly metaphorical abstractions.

In the second chapter of this thesis, “Shore Leave” from

Swordfishtrombones was analysed in relation to the shapeshifting aspect of Waits' art. Textually, the song also deals with the theme of wound and healing, adding another layer to the former analysis. In “Shore Leave”, the sailor’s tension is created by the absence of the loved object: however, as opposed to “Ruby’s Arms”, it was not him who decided to be separated from his love. In this respect, “Shore

Leave” is a continuation of “Ruby’s Arms”, representing a more attached

50 relationship, which is however still unfulfilled, at least as far as the song’s liminal space is concerned. In a way, the sailor almost manages to banish the memory of his wife as he describes all the events on his shore leave in the first stanza, until he eventually sits down and writes a letter to her. In Kristeva’s words, “from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master” (11). Thus, no matter what the sailor does, he will be haunted by the image of the woman he is attached to, and will strive to make contact with her. In this respect, “Shore Leave” represents quite a radical shift of male perspective on relationships – instead of deliberately deciding to escape attachments, the man becomes aware of their importance and strives to make a connection, confessing:

“I can't make it by myself /I love you so”.

Swordfishtrombones also introduces a new topos, demonstrated in

“Soldier’s Things”, that is the soldier/war theme. Once again, this is a dual concept, for one cannot exist without the other, and one in essence produces the other. The soldier/war topos is also intimately associated with the wound/healing duality and thus clearly falls within the scope of this chapter. Wars are inevitably social matters, and inflict wounds which are both individual, that is affecting the soldiers involved in them, and social, or, as this thesis refers to them, collateral, that is, affecting the whole American nation. As Veeder claims, “societies inflict terrible wounds upon themselves and at the same time develop mechanisms that can help heal these wounds” (21). Waits' treatment of the soldier/war topos moves diachronically from individual wounds which a soldier suffered and which are reflected in the songs by means of haunting devices, towards collateral wounds which point to global conflicts which the American war machine participated in and which in turn damage the nation at home.

“Soldier’s Things” presents a musical recount of various things left behind

51 by an unknown soldier, containing a random selection of items such as “bathing suits and bowling balls / and clarinets and rings”, including his rifle and a medal for bravery. All the items, when put together, form a mosaic of a cubist nature which forms a picture in the listener’s head of who the soldier might have been.

These items represent a haunting device, and are strictly referential in their nature: the soldier is not present, but keeps howling from Kristeva’s place of banishment through the medium of the objects which used to belong to him. These objects allude to the soldier in a fashion similar to that which was described by Waits in case of the old bicycle which had been ridden a lot and eventually takes its owners human quality (see the end of chapter 2). The soldier’s fate is neatly packed in a single box in which “everything’s a dollar” – in this way, the associated memories are moulded, and everything can be obtained by the customer at the same value, both his patent leather shoes and the medal for bravery. The value of his war efforts and the pertaining wounds is thus measured by someone whom he has no connection to (i.e. the pawnbroker), hence becoming mere curios, evoking no compassion: the detached, generic indefinite article in “a soldier’s things” would indeed suggest so. Here, the soldier is only “a soldier”, that is one of many, and the items which he had left behind have only indexical value, akin to the already- mentioned song “Swordfishtrombone”, which incidentally also deals with a war veteran.

In 1987, following the groundbreaking Swordfishtrombones, Tom Waits decided to take a slight detour to the world of musical theatre with Alice, for which he composed the accompanying music in 1992, and Woyzeck, the progenitor of the album Blood Money (Alice and Blood Money released simultaneously in 2002), a play originally written by Georg Büchner in 1837, based on a true incident of a soldier who loses his mind only to murder his beloved (Maher 298). Both the plays

52 were directed by Robert Wilson, an American avant-garde stage director, playwright and visual artist, who had asked Waits to collaborate with him on the music which would accompany the plays. However, as the stories in Blood Money and Alice were not Waits' own creative endeavours, they shall be left out of the scope of this thesis.

The next significantly “wounded” album, Bone Machine, originated in 1992, almost 10 years after the emergence of Swordfishtrombones. It contains some of

Waits' most apocalyptic songs, including “Earth Died Screaming” and “Dirt in the

Ground”, and sounds like a “cacophonous symphony of metal and flesh syncopated to a grand piano of skeleton chords over and under a junkyard of missives” (Maher

210). This cacophony is also reflected in the discordant lyrics, which contain strong opposites and harsh, directly juxtaposed binaries, as in the case of “Earth Died

Screaming”, with lyrics such as “hell doesn’t want you / and heaven is full”.

For the purpose of this thesis, three songs from this album will be analysed: the aforementioned “Dirt in the Ground”, the suicidal ballad “The Ocean Doesn’t

Want Me” and the Southern Gothic flavoured “Murder in the Red Barn”. Waits himself admits that his approach to song-writing had undergone a shift towards a doctor-like, medical treatment of song composition, diagnosing them even to see whether they do not “have maladies that are impossible to deal with” (Maher 232).

Song which would be thus cast away can become cannibalised in a kind of

Frankensteinian fashion: “take the head offa him and put, sew it onto this guy, immediately. Keep him alive until the head has been severed.” Waits also admits collaboration with his wife, Kathleen, with whom he had now formed an inseparable creative team (ibid. 231).

However, let us return to the opening number of Bone Machine titled “Dirt in the Ground”, which represents a vision of the ultimate end of human existence,

53 after which nothing remains, only “the wind through your bones”. This terminal wound leaves the spirit with no connection to the body which it had occupied, severing the bond which had once been there:

'Cause hell is boiling over

And heaven is full

We're chained to the world

And we all gotta pull

And we're all gonna be

...just dirt in the ground

As there is no afterlife, we remain “chained to the world” in biblical “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” fashion, yet the ultimate Hamletian question remains: what does indeed happen when the struggle is over? Waits' narrator poses an interesting variation on this question, asking whether “Along a river of flesh / Can these dry bones live?”, that is whether it is possible that bones of dead people retain some fragments of life. When compared with some of the songs analysed previously,

Waits' art may hint that the material is what in fact matters: Small Change’s ordeal stays embedded in the gumball machine which is his tombstone and the slaves’ bones are plowed to the surface when another crime occurs. Although “Dirt in the

Ground” supposedly fades away with the ultimate question unanswered, when viewed within the framework of the Waitsian world, the answer lies in the question being asked. In other words, the answer to the question what happens after we die is exactly in the act of posing it. Interestingly enough, “After You Die” is actually the last song on the newest Waits album, Bad As Me (2011) and thus the last Waits song to appear on his solo album up to the present. It is a bonus, hidden track on the Deluxe version of Bad As Me, and features a sequence of similes which liken

54 death to various obscure sounds and images, such as “a declining graveyard” or “a shining brave star”. Waits thus leaves the question unanswered, even after 21 years which divide the two albums.

Another Bone Machine song, “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me”, also deals with the theme of the ultimate wound, but from a rather different perspective: we are told the narrator’s recount of an unsuccessful suicide attempt. The character of the song is strangely attracted to the theme of death, merging the Eros and the

Thanatos principle into one: “the ocean doesn’t want me today / but I’ll be back tomorrow to play”. In this song, Waits used ideas suggested by his daughter,

Kellesimone, coining up the words “strangels” (a blend of “strange” and “angels”) and “braingels” – angels who live in your head (Maher 231). In doing so, Waits was trying to achieve child-like innocence which would aid him in producing textually original songs.

The character of the song, which Waits himself calls a “little suicide note”

(ibid. 231) dreams to find peace and quiet: “I’d love to go drowning / and to stay and stay”. As suggested in the previous paragraph, Waits, just like in the case of

“strangels”, blends the principles of Eros and Thanatos, presenting a song which contains a loving attraction to death by one’s own hand. The ultimate decision to heals all of one’s wounds lies within an act of self-destruction, or annihilation even, for “all they will find is [his] beer / and [his] shirt”. As a result, there will be no flesh-trace left of the person. Here, healing is attempted by committing the ultimate act of evasion, i.e. suicide, unlike in the previously-discussed songs in which the man simply decides to leave and try to find luck in a different place.

The song then ends with a triple repetition of “the ocean doesn’t want me today”, which is then followed by synthesised sounds, representing a sonic haunting experience in which words no longer echo, suggesting absence of human

55 speech. Only sound is left, pointing to the voice of nature. In a way, the song’s setting, as well as the sonic haunting towards its end, alludes to a passage from

Chapter VII of Dracula in which the count comes to England during a sea storm

(see the sonic haunting italicised):

Shortly before ten o’clock the stillness of the air grew quite oppressive, and the silence was

so marked that the bleating of a sheep inland or the barking of a dog in the town was

distinctly heard, and the band on the pier, with its lively French air, was like a discord in the

great harmony of nature’s silence. A little after midnight came a strange sound from over

the sea, and high overhead the air began to carry a strange, faint, hollow booming. (66)

Incidentally, Waits had a part in Dracula, filmed by Francis Ford Coppola, playing the deranged Renfield, Dracula’s obedient servant. To a certain extent,

Bone Machine is closely influenced by this Gothic experience, during which Waits would have to put insects in his mouth and wear hand restraints, similar to metal braces originally designed for piano players in Italy so that they would hold their hands straight, which was extremely painful (Maher 227-228). Therefore, much of the theatrical pain and suffering which Waits was exposed to during the shooting of

Dracula was projected into Bone Machine. Waits returned to the notion of suicidal attraction in a later film, directed by Goran Dukic, Wristcutters: A Love story

(2006), where he plays a commune leader who joins the protagonists in their search for the people in charge of suicide afterlife. Wristcutters is a film which, not much unlike “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me”, is situated in a solely liminal realm where the threshold of life has been crossed but true death has not been reached yet.

Another song dealing with the motif of death is “Murder in the Red Barn”, a predecessor of the already-mentioned “Don’t Go Into That Barn” (see Chapter 3). It

56 contains a Southern Gothic-flavoured recount of a murder on a farm committed by an unspecified culprit. Similarly to “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me Today”, the song also plays with the notion of life blended with death, suggesting that “for some murder is the only door thru which they enter life”. Is almost looks as if murderers have no contact with life, save only for situations in which it is taken. The discoursive space which is presented in the song encompasses possibly a single village, whose inhabitants exchange remarks about a murder which vary from speculation – “was it pale at Manzanita / or Blind Bob the racoon” – to directly witnessing the arrest (“they smoked him out / they took him off in chains”). The community thus functions in mosaic-like fashion, compiling assumptions to form a shared discourse, which at times takes the shape of a resigned, sarcastic sideline:

“there’s always some killing / you got do around the farm”. However, we do not get to know whether the arrested person was the true culprit. In fact, the police may have taken the wrong person, for after the arrest, the weather changed to the worse

– “the sky turned black and bruised” and months of heavy rains followed, which may represent a bad omen. Ultimately, it might be the community deciding on who to blame, and the only source of truth may be the surroundings, which points back to notions suggested in “Small Change” (see above): “Now the woods will never tell / What sleeps beneath the trees /Or what's buried 'neath a rock / Or hiding in the leaves”.

Nature is the true witness of human wrongdoings and it may heal the wounds humans are not capable of treating. Thus, the sea provides solace for lost souls wanting to commit to it, and the woods will bury the remains of the murdered person (“Someone's crying in the woods /Someone's burying all his clothes”), not sharing what they had witnessed. However, “Murder in the Red Barn” represents another radical shift from the likes of “Small Change”: here, humans do care about

57 crimes, and these do affect them. This shift possibly owes to the fact that the crimes happen outside the urban realm, whose dwellers could be less likely moved by violent acts. Although still, there is little trace of healing in the “folks’ tongues wagging” process: this is yet to come on the later albums.

4.3 War Machines After Bone Machine, Waits took a 7-year musical holiday, during which he devoted most of his time to his family, as well as to his work in film and theatre

(Maher 243). During the break between albums, Waits was gathering material in his usual, reporter-style fashion, with substantial help of his wife and collaborator.

He was gathering snippets of news and stories from local newspapers, such as in the case of one of the characters from the 1999 album Mule Variations, Birdie Joe

Hoaks, a 12-year-old girl who had swindled Greyhound (Maher 273). He then frequently used this material in songs which he composed in the previously- mentioned Frankensteinian fashion, informing Bratt Martin in an interview from the same year that all it takes is “your dad’s army uniform and your mom’s Easter hat and your brother’s motorcycle and your sister’s purse and stitch them all together” (ibid. 256).

Mule Variations was the first album which followed Bone Machine and continued developing Gothic themes from a rural, or as Waits himself came to call it, “sur-rural” (ibid. 255) perspective. The album presents various American Gothic notions such as intimate voyeurism (“What’s He Building?”), modern Victorian freak shows (“Eyeball Kid”) and personal reflections of local tragedies (“Georgia

Lee”). Mule Variations represents a variety of styles Waits had explored in the past, ranging from folk to experimental rock, and it eventually won a Grammy for the

Best Contemporary Folk Album.

58 The wound-healing duality is arguably best represented in “Georgia Lee”, a song about a local Petaluma tragedy of an African American girl who had been neglected by her parents, only to be found dead in the woods, not having been searched for after she had disappeared. Waits presents her story in condensed fashion, playing the piano, accompanied only by an upright bass, drums and violin.

The song starts in an almost romantic fashion: “Cold was the night, hard was the ground / They found her in a small grove of trees”. The chorus is an unusually sincere plea to God, inquiring why he was not there for her, a plea which is radically different from recounts of tragedies from older songs such as “Small

Change” and “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me” discussed previously. Had it not been for Waits' artistic endeavour, Georgia Lee’s fate would have probably been forgotten. However, as it stands, Waits' previously distanced narrator (compare with “Small Change”) decides to step inside the story and present his perspective which is devoid of cynicism of a detached urban witness. The song closes yet again with the description of the tragedy’s surroundings:

There's a toad in the witch grass

There's a crow in the corn

Wild flowers on a cross by the road

and somewhere a baby is crying

for her mom

As the hills turn from green back

to gold

The natural cycles continue despite the tragedy, yet the narrator is aware of girl’s voice, and makes sure that she is heard, even though there is nothing left to be done. In this respect, the otherwise unnoticed wound does not pass unnoticed any

59 more, as Georgia’s cry remains embedded in the song and continues haunting those who were unwilling to help the girl. Therefore, Waits' “Georgia Lee” functions similarly to the aforementioned Beloved by Morrison, with its ultimate, litanous repetition that this was not a story to “pass on” (Holloway 75). The choice of wording is also noteworthy – in the course of the song Georgia in transformed into a baby (notice the usage of the indefinite article), crying for her mom. In this respect, she could function generically as any girl, that is, almost as any neglected child. This is a radical shift of perspective within the wound-healing realm, as this song may suggest that healing can be found in discourse, that is in providing voice to the (mortally) wounded. By summoning a girl back into the living, sonic space,

Waits' narrator ensures that the wound is not forgotten and that it can be treated if one cares about what had happened. The personal wound thus also gradually becomes a collateral one, as Georgia’s previously intimate, local story becomes part of American musical discourse. This collateralisation is even more substantial due to the fact that Mule Variations was an extremely successful record, winning a

Grammy for the Best Contemporary Folk Album. Simply put, gradually more and more listeners were aware of Waits as an artist and his music was thus starting to have greater impact on the American public.

Another song from the same album, the already-mentioned modern take on the Victorian freak show motif was titled “Eyeball Kid”. In it, Waits introduces us to a damaged individual who strives for fame:

Well he was born with out a body

Not even a brow

I made the kid a promise

I made the kid a vow

He's not conventionally handsome

60 He'll never be tall

He said "all you got to do is

book me into Carnegie Hall

Once again we get a, this time literally, dismembered character who strives to overcome his handicap by distracting the audience’s attention from it. His original wound becomes marginalised in order for his most valuable asset, that is his beautiful eye, to be displayed and admired: “He's just a little bitty thing / He's just a little guy but women go crazy / for the big blue eye“. Interestingly, Eyeball

Kid’s birthday coincides with Waits', for they were both born on 7th December 1949.

This may suggest a link between the character and Waits himself, possibly implying that Waits is indeed the damaged Eyeball Kid, thus using the song and its central character to face his own troubled past. However, when asked about Eyeball Kid having the same birth date as Waits in an interview in June 1999, Waits would bluntly state that this was “just a coincidence” (Maher 275). The song nevertheless represents a metaphorical vehicle for facing one’s insufficiencies without giving up, especially in America, a country which swears to provide a chance to everyone regardless of their origin.

The song also deals with the notion of religious mysticism, which is a variation of Waits' own preacher-like persona mentioned previously:

We are all lost in the

Wilderness we're as

blind as can be

He came down to teach us

how to really see.

61 Here, Eyeball Kid enters the religious show-business and provides a channel towards spiritual enlightening (or eye-opening if you wish), so long as the audience pay the price of the ticket to see the show. One may easily visualise American TV evangelists and the immense sums of money involved in this business, a notion which Waits mocks in “Chocolate Jesus” from the same album.

Similar concepts of healing through discourse can be traced on the following studio album, Real Gone, which was released in 2004, and which continues to develop the soldier-war theme in a new fashion. There are two songs which namely operate on the national discourse level, in so far as they deal with war themes from the perspective of those involved in them: “Hoist That Rag” and “Day After

Tomorrow”. In the former song, Waits presents a picture of a pirate ship, carrying ruthless criminals who plunder the shores which they visit: “So just open fire / As you hit the shore / All is fair in love / And war”. Even Waits clearly admits that the song is political (Maher 261), correlating the “kids coming home from Iraq” to his son, who was tin his late teens at the time the album was recorded (ibid. 361). By sharing the experience of the soldiers who had fought for their country abroad,

Waits brings these issues literally back home, and expands the wounds felt by these soldiers onto the shared American discoursive space, making them collateral. In other words, any American soldier who fights in a foreign country can be likened to one’s own family. The consecutive wounds are hence transposed to the whole society, becoming political issues. In response to John Valania’s question whether in “Sins of My Father”, which also appears on Real Gone, Waits is talking about

George W. Bush, Waits claims that he is “talking about [his] father ... your father ...

[Bush’s] father. The sins of the father will be visited upon the son.” (ibid. 361) This biblical dimension of the shared sin, transposed from the father to the son, is indeed associated with the American heritage, in which wars, both domestic and

62 abroad, play a crucial role.

While “Hoist That Rag” paints a picture of ruthless killing and chaos, the penultimate song on Real Gone, “Day After Tomorrow”, returns to the notion of an intimate male confession towards his lover who is far away. In this respect, it follows the discoursive space left by the soldier in the aforementioned “Shore

Leave” (1985), although here Waits' character, a young soldier aged 21, transcends the binary between him and his wife, asking “And Tell me how does God / Choose, whose prayers does he / Refuse?” In this sincere confession, he admits that he is not fighting for justice, but merely for another day in his life, and for a distant image of being back home. Yet again, Waits' character is trapped in the liminal space of the song, close and yet far away from his deliverance – his plane will not touch down tomorrow, but on the day after tomorrow. This postponement of the ultimate goal of being reunited with his family, which is essentially the true intimate purpose of every soldier, increases the soldier’s longing. Meanwhile, he will just do what he’s been told for soldiers are “just gravel on the road” and “only the lucky ones come home”. This suggests negligibility of individual soldiers and their uncertain destiny. However, Waits makes sure that this personal confession does not go unnoticed, as it was the case in “Georgia Lee”. While originally, Waits' soldiers were mere memories, as it was in the case of “Soldier’s Things” mentioned in chapter 4.2, the soldier in “Day After Tomorrow” is intimately close to the listener, as if his letter was addressed directly to them.

The triplet of the “war machine” albums is then completed with Waits' last album, the 2011 Bad As Me. Originating after another long creative break, it found

Waits a content, family man aged 61. However, the actual album can hardly ever be described as a product of a man content with what is happening around him. As

Tim Adams points out in his 2011 Observer interview upon the album’s release, if

63 there is one theme which has been constantly recurring all through Waits' career, it is the sense of “imminent dereliction”. This is exactly true in the case of the opening song of the album, “Chicago”, which Adams describes as “the most convincing runaway train you've ever heard” (ibid.). In fact, “Chicago” alludes to original blues motifs from the Great Migration songs by African American bluesmen, for whom this city represented a paradise where everyone could find their place, irrespective of their origin. As Rowe puts it in Chicago Blues, it was “the last remedy poor people had to overcome their economic circumstance” (27). In this respect, Waits' lyrics echo the notions which shaped post-war America, updating them to a modern seeking of refuge in what resembles a post-apocalyptic world:

The seeds are planted here

But they won’t grow

We won’t have to say goodbye

If we all go

Maybe things will be better in Chicago

This search for healing away from one’s home which is tainted, and where crops fail, opens questions regarding consumption of natural resources and what mankind will have to resort to should it run out of them. Incidentally, roughly at the same time Waits was recording the album, he played a small part of a pawnbroker in Hughes’s post-apocalyptic film The Book of Eli, which may have influenced the tone of “Chicago”. Be that as it may, the opening song of Bad As Me deals with wounds which can hardly be healed, that is wounds in the ground itself, over which humans have little control, although they are their most likely originators. As opposed to wounds in human relationships, here, Waits presents wounds in the relationship between humans and the space they occupy: “There’s so

64 much magic we have known / On this sapphire we call home / With my coat and my hat / I say goodbye to all that”. In a way, the song reminds one of “Ruby’s

Arms”, although in “Chicago” the protagonist does not part with his lover, but with his homeland. There is one substantial difference however – he does not depart alone. This suggest a shift of perspective away from trying to deal with wounds alone, by means of a hobo escape anywhere, towards a more rational departure for a specific destination, be it remote and romantically indistinct: “You know where I can be found / Where the rainbow hits the ground”.

Another song from Bad As Me which also operates in a fractured, broken world is “Hell Broke Luce”. It depicts a more radical form of desolation, as the listeners feel that they had been dropped right in the middle of an open armed conflict. The title of the song is a clever blend of two meanings. Firstly, it stands for

“hell broke loose”, suggesting the atrocities of an armed conflict. Secondly, it alludes to a veteran from Iraq, Jeffrey Lucey, who committed suicide after returning home, due to post-traumatic stress which he had suffered. Lucey’s mother Joyce describes his death as something that “should never have happened”, reminiscing that her son was “caught between the humanity of what he saw and what he had to do”. She resumes that her son was let down by the government

“who sent him to fight their war of choice”(Iraq Veterans Against the War and

Glantz 157).

“Hell Broke Luce” is a portrayal of a series of war wounds suffered by Luce’s fellow soldiers, including drastic, fatal ones such as “Boom went his head away /

And boom went Valerie”, combined with its loose link to the fate of a real soldier who killed himself as a result of being involved in an armed conflict. This shifts the paradigm of an originally detached observer giving a recount of a tragedy (e.g. in

“Small Change”) towards a traumatised character who is right in the middle of the

65 suffering, literally yelling his story, with the help of Waits' raspy, shamanistic, chant-like vocals. In addition, the song ends with Luce being back home, away from the trauma, but still reliving it through the music, with machine gun sounds filling the sonic space. These traumas leave Luce hardly able to function, wondering about his future, desperately confessing “Now I’m home and I’m blind / And I’m broke /

What is next”.

Waits transplants Luce’s liminal experience back into the American context, linking his personal story with questions about the government’s policies (“How is it that the only ones responsible for making this mess / Got their sorry asses stapled to a goddamn desk”). Such an approach represents a clear shift of focus in the grasp of the wound-healing dichotomy, that is the urge towards the collective understanding of wounds which, as distant as they may seem, are shared by the whole American society. Consequently, they become inseparable parts of the

American national narrative. In other words, personal wounds suffered in distant, abject space, become collateral wounds inflicted upon the whole nation, mediated by Waits' music. In a way, this is a Gothic notion par excellence – as Savoy claims,

“societies inflict terrible wounds upon themselves and at the same time develop mechanisms that can help heal these wounds” (21). In this respect, most Waits' characters are the victims of the wounds which America had inflicted upon itself, and Waits is gradually more and more aware of his role in the process of mediating these wounds. This awareness results in Waits' artistic participation in the process of healing.

Although initially Waits' characters find little sympathy and understanding in their human surroundings, Waits eventually collateralises their wounds in so much that they can hardly be overlooked. Subsequently, they operate on a scale larger than a merely personal one: the war wounds originally suffered by a specific

66 soldier (Jeff Luce in this case) enter the public domain through art, consequently gaining more exposure. Eventually, these wounds have a haunting effect on the listeners within the American musical discourse. As a result, Luce’s tragedy becomes a nation’s tragedy, and simply mediating Luce’s story through music contributes to making the public aware of the wound, pushing it towards possible treatment. However distant this treatment may seem, Luce’s longing for home

(“Can I go home in March?”) may suggest that it is there where healing lies.

However, for Luce, there is little hope, for his mother is dead and he returns home disfigured. Yet still, Waits' song is a clear anti-war appeal, one which he recently revisited when he joined Marc Ribot in his cover of an old Italian anti-fascist ballad

“Bella Ciao”, which appeared on Ribot’s 2018 album titled Songs of Resistance. The song has has obvious anti-Trump connotations, especially given the visual message of the music video, directed by Jem Cohen, showing anti-establishment protesters.

“Hell Broke Luce” also has strong visual appeal, for the music video which accompanies it, directed by an American visual artist Matt Mahurin, has a haunting effect, depicting symbols such vultures, marching skeletons, and Waits with an eye patch and a sabre, alluding to the aforementioned 2004 pirate war shanty “Hoist

That Rag”. In addition to this, the video shows Waits dragging a house behind him on a rope, which adds to Luce’s longing for home mentioned previously.

As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, Waits' diachronic treatment of the soldier/war topos, in connection to the wound-healing duality moves from personal, detached wounds, presented in a sentimental, pawnshop fashion to a direct, drastic report of what war looks like from first-hand experience. By transporting the listeners from their homes to where the abject is at, Waits confronts the American audience’s (sub)consciousness with seemingly distant wounds which are consequently shared within the American national narrative.

67 This perception of refusing displacement of the abject is in contrast to the

American narrative tradition, for example in the case of one of the ultimate books on sin in America, The Scarlet Letter. As Fiedler claims “The carnal act upon which adultery depends is not merely unnamed in The Scarlet Letter; it is further deprived of reality by being displaced in time, postulated rather than described.”

(230) What Waits does in “Hell Broke Luce” is in stark contrast to Hawthorne, and this is exactly what makes Waits a Gothic songwriter. Through his late songs he, in

Fiedler’s words mentioned at the end of chapter 2, tells the truth about the quality of American life. In doing so, Waits correlates with another great American lowlife poet, the aforementioned Charles Bukowski. Let us cite the following passage from the last chapter of Bukowski’s Post Office:

I went back and sat down. 11 years! I didn't have a dime more in my pocket than when I

had first walked in. 11 years. Although each night had been long, the years had gone fast.

Perhaps it was the night work. Or doing the same thing over and over and over again. (…)

II years shot through the head. I had seen the job eat men up. They seemed to melt. There

was Jimmy Potts of Dorsey Station. When I first came in, Jimmy had been a well-built guy

in a white T-shirt. Now he was gone. (…) They had murdered him. (114)

Although this “war” was fought on the home front, the passage contains elements similar to those dealt with in “Hell Broke Luce”. In Bukowski, the reader is also faced with a character who is in the service of his country, aware of his fellow worker, Jimmy, being almost mortally wounded on the job. This process of internal collapse is gradual, similarly to what Jeff Lucey underwent in the aftermath of his return from Iraq.

In late Waits, gone is the pawnshop sentiment and melancholic hobo-style escape from a situation which proves to be discomforting to the protagonist (as was seen in “Ruby’s Arms”) – fears and wounds are to be faced if one hopes to find a

68 cure. “Hell Broke Luce” is a song which the protagonist of “Shore Leave” would much likely tell if he was given a more realistic voice. This is one of the crucial shifts in Waits' treatment of the soldier/war topos since it first emerged on

Swordfishtrombones – what was originally a sentimental memory of an unnamed soldier’s fate glimpsed through objects he had left behind, becomes a haunting visit into the very heart of the fray, machine gun sounds and all. In doing so, Waits shows his dissatisfaction with America’s involvement in global conflicts, irrespective of which war it is this time.

While early Waitsian treatment of soldiers may have resembled a romantic advertisement for army service, the 2011 confessions from “Hell Broke Luce” and

“Day After Tomorrow” are realistic, sincere pictures of what war feels like.

Therefore, they have a substantially stronger haunting effect on the audience, and

Waits' shamanistic chanting amplifies this effect. As Veeder claims: “The shaman in turn functions more like a transitional object than like a Western physician, since healing is produced not by him but through him. The shaman with his chanting and powerful yoge drink enables a creative play through which the patient cures himself in ways that help explain the play of Gothic healing.” (33)

In this respect, Waits' vocals function as a channel, a kind of yoge drink which aids its recipient in the healing process. However, the wording “the patient cures himself” is crucial here, for the recipient needs to show an effort to embark on the healing journey and relieve their conscience of the abject sufferings, finally admitting to themselves that all this is not their fault. The process is similar to what

Waits underwent along his journey from alcoholism and self-destruction, partially as a result of being left without a father figure, probably best summed up in the song “Sins Of My Father”. It is incidentally Waits' longest song, with playtime over

10 minutes on the 2017 remastered edition of Real Gone:

69 I'm gonna take the sins of my father

I'm gonna take the sins of my mother

I'm gonna take the sins of my brother

Down to the pond

I'm gonna wash them

I'm gonna wash them

I'm gonna wash the sins of my Father

I'm gonna wash the sins of my Mother

I'm gonna wash the sins of my Brother

Till the water runs clear

Till the water runs clear

In the end, to arrive at a point where healing is not so distant any more, to find a cure for Georgia Lee, Jeff Luce, you name them, what we humans can do to find a possible cure for past sins, is to admit to ourselves that they were wrong, and relieve ourselves of them. This can be catalysed, as Waits demonstrates in his music, primarily through discourse, the lack of which points the characters this thesis analysed into a cul-de-sac. The road they decide to take during the liminal phase has undesirable consequences, such as in the case songs like “Ruby’s Arms” or “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me”. In other words, Waits demonstrates in his art that a wound neglected, a wound not shared, a wound not talked about, a wound abjected is a wound which cannot be treated. In order to seek healing, we have to reflect upon our wounds, be they American or of a different origin, and we have to wash ourselves off of them. Till the water runs clear.

70 5 Conclusion

The thesis has concentrated on Gothic elements in the musical imagery of

American singer-songwriter Tom Waits. Labelled “undescribable” by Neil Young during the induction ceremony into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Waits shares many aspects with the Gothic genre, especially as regards the notion of obscurity and the treatment of liminal spaces as those “apart from the central economic and political processes, along the margins” (Turner 85). Therefore, the primary aim of this thesis was to present the Gothic as a medium through which Waits can have the American majority face the minor, the neglected and the wounded, and trace ways through which these patients can possibly be treated.

In the introductory chapter the Gothic was defined as a kind of lens through which an author views the surrounding social reality and the individuals occupying it. As far as Waits' art is concerned, the Gothic represents a tool with which he can, both textually and musically, present notions which are peripheral, as opposed to mainstream, or central. Several key concepts pertaining to the Gothic were delineated, including Turner’s notion of liminality, that is a spatio-temporal fuzziness, as well as the wound-healing duality. Then, the thesis stated to trace the development of Waits' Gothic vision of America, with his diachronic shift from personal to collateral wounds and the possibilities of healing.

The second Chapter presented an overview of the Gothic, focusing primarily on its role associated with the concept of “Other” ever since the term first appeared in connection to Ancient Rome and their contacts with the outsider, barbaric

Goths. This metaphor can also be applied to modern Gothic art, which has the orderly majority face an invading minority with unhomely tastes and subversive

71 attitudes. The chapter discussed several Gothic motifs, such as haunting in works including Hamlet and obscurity, as defined by Edmund Burke. For Waits, obscurity is a means of presenting a blurred picture of reality, for example via the usage of obscure instruments and sounds which seemingly do not fit into songs. In addition, the chapter discussed the notion of abject in the case of Bertha Mason, the proverbial “mad woman in the attic” in Jane Eyre, as a subversive tool which challenges the master discourse, as well as Waits' own subversive treatment of the topics which he presents in his songs.

A description of the American Gothic context then followed, stretching from the first American Gothic novel Wieland to Danielewski’s post-modern Gothic endeavour in The House of Leaves, sheltering them under Fiedler’s vision of

American fiction as bewilderingly Gothic fiction of darkness and the grotesque within the realm of “light and affirmation” (29). The chapter concluded with a claim that Waits is a subversive artist who challenges the core of the American self- perception and self-presentation and that his songs and performances refuse simple conclusions, but rather raise more questions, thus becoming intellectually stimulating.

As far as the concept of shapeshifting in connection to Tom Waits is concerned, it can be said that the Waitsian persona is indeed inseparable from the

Waits-person. Waits' voice also shifts shapes, both synchronically and diachronically – it performs various functions in his songs and has evolved through the decades, both intentionally and unintentionally. In addition, the actual songs also shift shapes diachronically, depending on the occasion during which they are conjured. This consequently determines the musical experience Waits decides to transfer to his audience, as demonstrated by the evolution of the artist’s staple number “Rain Dogs”.

72 Besides actual song evolution, Waits also adopts different roles in interviews which he skilfully stages, becoming in control of the speech event, revealing only as much as he desires to the journalists who encounter him. This enables him to elude questions focusing on topics which he finds either too personal or too detached from his songs. Thus, during interviews, Waits would put on masks which enable him to make the Waitsian persona inseparable from the performance, blending reality with a well-staged act, such as in the case of the “interview” he gave to two

Austrian film-makers, Dolezal and Rosacher as early as 1978.

As regards the role of the wound-healing duality and the way it operates on both the synchronic and diachronic levels, the thesis studied a body of lyrics ranging from the earliest songs on Waits' debut, Closing Time (1973) to his most recent album, Bad As Me (2011). Waits' very early songs already show magnetism towards stories of people who are either physically or emotionally damaged, frequently haunted by wounds, present and past. Initially, the wound-healing duality is thus disbalanced towards the former half, with only glimpses of the latter counterpart, primarily by means of self-abusive escape through alcohol and dreams.

Another important notion, closely related to the wound-healing duality is the soldier/war topos, which, seen from a diachronic perspective, Waits originally presents as individual, indexical wounds. Such approach was used for instance in the 1983 song “Soldier’s Things” where wounds are reflected in the soldier’s possessions which function as haunting devices. Waits then proceeds towards increasingly collateral wounds which point to global conflicts which the American war machine participated in and which consequently damage the nation at home, as it is in the case of “Hell Broke Luce” (2011).

This collateralisation is also present in Waits' treatment of death. While in

73 his earlier works, he deals with it in reporter-style fashion, such as in “Small

Change” (1976), with its unmoved, cynical spectators, his later works contain emotionally touching, deeply personal recounts of local tragedies (“Georgia Lee” from Mule Variations, 1999). Finally, terminal wounds become shared, as presented in an African-American slave chant of “Don’t Go Into That Barn” (2004), with its communal feeling of past tragedies resurfacing whenever another crime takes place. This resurfacing demonstrates that abjected, neglected wounds, keep returning, challenging the “master discourse”, urging to be treated.

Tom Waits thus demonstrates in his art that a wound neglected, a wound not shared, a wound not talked about, a wound abjected is a wound which cannot be salved. This salvation can be catalysed, as Waits' later songs show, primarily through discourse, the lack of which points into a cul-de-sac, a wrong, selfish choice which we make during the liminal phase filled with, in Turner’s 1990 words,

“fructile chaos”. In order to seek healing, we have to reflect upon our wounds, be they American or of a different origin, and we have to wash ourselves off of them.

At least that is what late Waits proposes in his 2004 “Sins Of My Father”: “Till the water runs clear.”

However, the thesis should hardly finish with a statement as conclusive as that – there is certainly more evidence to be gathered as far as the Gothic dimension in the music of Tom Waits is concerned. As illustrated on the previous pages, Waits' art is abundant in the Gothic. Thus, although the thesis discussed songs spanning from Waits' 1973 debut to his most recent album released in 2011, it presented only a confined analysis of the works of the artist whose career spans for over four decades. Inevitably, certain aspects of the Gothic have been analysed rather marginally, such as the role of religion and the way the Waitsian persona treats it, as well as the role of verbal obscurity and, ultimately, Waits' acting career.

74 However, addressing all these issues would be a feat that the limited space of a

Master’s Thesis can hardly allow to accomplish.

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