March 21, 2005
Unsurprisingly, Tom Waits Can Write About Music
filed under: Idle ChatterVia Metafilter, an article in the Guardian UK with Tom Waits talking about his favorite 20 albums of all time. He writes about them in a way that makes you feel vaguely like your life is incomplete until you've heard them.
Excerpt:
3 Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart (Straight) 1969The roughest diamond in the mine, his musical inventions are made of bone and mud. Enter the strange matrix of his mind and lose yours. This is indispensable for the serious listener. An expedition into the centre of the earth, this is the high jump record that'll never be beat, it's a merlot reduction sauce. He takes da bait. Dante doing the buck and wing at a Skip James suku jump. Drink once and thirst no more.
Mind you, I'm not that fond of the Captain Beefheart I've heard. But gol' darned if I don't feel like giving this one a listen now, if only to remind myself that I probably don't fit Waits' definition of "serious listener."
He gives #8 to The Pogues' Rum Sodomy & The Lash, which is such a favorite of mine that my not-yet-two-year-old son knows the last lyric of every line of "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda." Quoth Waits: "It's whimsical and blasphemous, seasick and sacrilegious, wear it out and then get another one."
The whole list is well worth reading.
Posted by rjt at March 21, 2005 02:55 PM