Review Summary: Romeo is bleeding but nobody can tell,
and he sings along with the radio with a bullet in his chest
I found this record through a doomed old friend nicknamed Rosie. Rosie was a basket case, a pill-head and a committed vagrant – the type of endearing ***-up who, despite being on the bum, seemed to have connections just about everywhere downtown. Like any rover, though he always had a place to crash, he preferred to sleep outside. He made whatever dough he didn’t borrow or steal by busking, either playing crummy guitar or making strange inane carvings in wood chunks and selling them to tourists. In the summer, he was always in the money though, throwing big, open-space MDMA parties in a field outside a condemned hospital. I was at one of those raves when the cops raided it. Everyone was scattering and Rosie, ***ed out of his head on molly, hid out in what seemed like a safe, closed-off nook in his head, but turned out to be the back of a cop car. When the cops finished busting up the party, they returned to find Rosie, losing his *** because he couldn’t open the door from the inside. He was dragged to trial, given his second probation and state-sponsored rehab stint, and within a month was back out on the street. We met because I used to bartend around the downtown stretch where Rosie liked to haunt. In the winter months, I’d usually let him in to warm up and feed him cola and chips if his blood sugar was dipping from not eating for a few days. So he liked me, as much as his foggy brain allowed him to like someone.
Like most artistically-inclined screw-ups, Rosie fancied himself the last of the romantics in a cynical age. So as far as he was concerned, Tom Waits’ gutter-poet material from the 70’s and through the mid-90’s was written specifically about and for people like him. He also knew I loved Tom Waits because I played it at the bar often enough, and hosted Tom Waits Tuesdays once a week. He brought me this record for my birthday, a crisp vinyl copy that he’d obviously stolen from a shop, a bootleg release, and one of the few that Wait’s perpetual unauthorized distribution lawsuits didn’t manage to squash from production.
Live from Austin was put together as part of PBS’ now-legendary Austin City Limits concert collection, recorded in front of a live TV audience in the winter of 1978, a few months after
Blue Valentine. The set itself never saw an audio release until 2009. It kicks off with George Gershwin’s “Summertime”, a jagged trumpet and Waits cackling, coughing and moaning for a few seconds, before letting out a joke that coasts into a story that coasts seamlessly into “Burma Shave:”
When I was a kid, my dad had a 1957 Station Wagon, a Chevrolet. And man did I love that car. I used to go to the garage at night, turn out all the lights and roll up against it. I think that’s against the law. But I remember driving all the way across the country, when I was a kid, in the back. I remember seeing Burma Shave signs all the way across the country along Route 66. And this is a story about a young girl in a small little town called Marysville, somewhere around Yuma City, Chico, they’re all the same. All 23 miles, and you’re in the next one, and they’ve got a Fosters Freeze just like in the one you were trying to get out of.
“Burma Shave” continues to be one of Waits’ most outstanding tracks, a drunken lament to young kids running away from small towns, only to find out you can’t run from your lot. He lets the piano breathe, stretching the song for eleven minutes, improvising verses and pausing to do colour commentary for the audience.
A medley follows, starting off with “Annie’s Back in Town,” a then-new song written for Sylvester Stallone’s 1978 film,
Paradise Alley. The song, a beatific piano piece, never saw an official Waits album appearance, and was unfortunately omitted from the expansive
Orphans B-side compilation from 2006. “Annie” eases into “I Wish I Was in New Orleans” off
Small Change, before ending on a cheeky version of Harmonica Frank’s novelty song “Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo,” with Waits doing more ad-libbing with lyrics:
My daddy was a doctor,
My mommy was a nurse.
And I’m the little needle
That gets you where it hurts.
My uncle was a chemist.
A chemist he is no more.
For what he thought was H20
Was H2SO4.
Waits’ lounge troubadour act is on full display here. He preludes “On the Nickel” with a warped take on “Waltzing Matilda,” and gets out from behind the piano to do a soused cabaret dance to ”Romeo is Bleeding.” This period in his career was an important one. It would see him begin to move away from beat poet aping, and starting to carve out his own style, a singular persona that belonged solely to him and was owed to no one. His backing band are minimal compared to the full-on show of
Nighthawks at the Diner from just a few years before. They play it tight and loose when needed, and Waits’ voice, already noticeably gruffer, focuses on telling immersive stories of broken down Americana, rather than stringing together tattered couplets.
Though never approved by Waits himself, this live recording is a vital document in his timeline, and I’m glad it’s still kicking around. It shows him transition from a meticulous actor into a true performer, one with plenty of things to say and a hell of a marvelous way of saying them.
