This came out in 1999 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
“My wife says I have two kinds of songs: Grand weepers and grim reapers,” rasped twisted troubadour Tom Waits last month during his first show in eight years at the South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Tex.
The gravel-voiced, Kramer-haired legend got no argument from the 1,600 rabid fans lucky enough to score tickets to the gig. And he’ll get none from fans who hear his long-awaited, magnificent new CD Mule Variations, his first album in six years and his debut for the punk rock label Epitaph.
No, Tom hasn’t gone hardcore. But the reclusive singer has found a perfect home at the indie outfit — a place far off the beaten track, where he can stretch out on the back porch in a creaky rocker, root around in the dusty attic, stay up and howl all night with The Eyeball Kid and Little Joe From Kokomo and bang away to his heart’s content.
And bang and howl he does. The demented thwacking that kicks off Mule Variations — it sounds like somebody beating holy hell out of a steamer trunk with a hunk of lumber — is instant proof that Waits may have been gone, but he hasn’t forgotten. The track it leads into, Big In Japan, is a grim reaper if there ever was one: A clanking, Beefhearty stomper with a grunting, groaning, grumbling Waits skewering his own supposed celebrity: “I got the clothes / Ain’t got the face … But hey, I’m big in Japan.”
Actually, in his 30-year career, Waits has made fans everywhere — and in its 70 minutes, the stunning Mule Variations has enough variation to please them all. Japan and Filipino Box Spring Hog will satisfy the grim reaper crowd; the jackknife guitar and nursery rhyme field-holler of Cold Water is perfect for Heartattack & Vine fans; the dark, flowing beauty of Hold On will charm Downtown Train lovers; and the spoken-word weirdness of What’s He Building seems geared for folks who want the next chapter in Frank’s Wild Years.
But Waits’ greatest strength has always been the grand weeper — nobody can squeeze a heart like he can. And he gets more chances than a cardiologist here on rough-hewn-yet-elegant ballads like House Where Nobody Lives and Georgia Lee, where he somehow transforms that chainsaw throat into a plaintive howl straight from his soul.
Listening to these tracks, you realize Waits’ wife was wrong. He doesn’t have two kinds of songs. He only has one: Masterpieces.
