No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.1
August 9th saw the release of a stripped down and emotive version of Tom Waits’ Get Behind the Mule. This previously unheard spiritual version features Waits’ growling bark accompanied only by a Wurlitzer, and gives the song an even darker, more murderous intent.
Listening to this gave me reason to go back and dig into the album it originally came from, Mule Variations, which was released just over 25 years ago and was Waits’ first album on the new ANTI- record label.
This was his first album in 6 years and showed the influence of everything he’d been listening to over that time: crackly blues, farm gospel, hip-hop, DJs and spiritual folk music. There’s an argument that Tom Waits’ music is artifice, but for me he is a storyteller who uses elements he reads and hears with a deft touch, creating fascinating characters. Mule Variations is full of this.
Big In Japan
This track busts in to life with Waits’ beatbox voice recorded on cassette before the bluesy funk kicks in, his singing voice processed through a bullhorn. The swinging memphis horns are easy to ignore, but they really add to this piece, as does Waits’ own note perfect guitar solo near the end of the track.
Lowside of the Road
What sounds like whispering banjos gives the rhythm and percussion of this song as Waits croaks his story. The instruments are not banjos, however, but the soft plunk of Smokey Hormel playing a cümbüş, a similar Turkish instrument and a ngoni, the African ancestor of the modern-day banjo. These interesting instruments add to the creaking mystery of the song, which features that signature Waits-like murderous imagery: “Well the clapper has been ripped out of the bell…”
Hold On
Chiming guitars surround the listener and we get one of Tom’s campfire tale, full of emotional hope - “You’ve got to hold on…Take my hand…”. It also gives us the first appearance of the marvellous Marc Ribot, and he’s restrained and precise, joining Waits’ own guitar on this warm song.
Get Behind the Mule
A delightfully dark guitar blues, powered by slapped percussion. Smokey Hormel sides out cool guitar lines and Charlie Musselwhite plays a subtle blues harp deep in the mix as Tom preaches: not the overblown evangelist but the finger-pointing streetwise street corner religious expert: “Always keep a sapphire in your mind…Always keep a diamond in your mind.”
House Where Nobody Lives
The first track not to be co-written with Kathleen Brennan, it has an Irish-Country sound and Waits sings with nostalgia about his past (a fabricated past, one assumes). Marc Ribot plays sweet lead guitar over Larry Taylor’s washing chords and Tom’s piano add a powerful emotional kick. Waits is a boozy narrator, steeped in experience.
So if you find someone
someone to have, someone to hold
Don’t trade it for silver
Don’t trade it for gold
Cold Water
This dirty prison blues allows you to virtually hear the chain gang clanking behind the voices. Christopher Marvin2 plays a thudding drum. It’s a 30s prison movie transformed into narrative music with a Beefheart vocal. Waits voice is perfect here, dueting with himself whilst Ribot’s sliding solo is dripping with bourbon.
Pony
Waits accompanies his folksy voice with guitar and pump organs on this sad but hopeful track. As I’ve said, some of Waits is artifice, but that’s because he is a storyteller who becomes a character in his tale. Here, I imagine him as a farmhand telling another fireside tale as John Hammond plays along with his blues harp.
What’s He Building?
There’s an argument that this is the darkest track on the album: an ensemble of noise and sounds as “The Voice”3 narrates a nosy neighbour’s gossip, possibly over the phone, to whoever will listen. He becomes a potential vigliante: “I swear to God I heard someone moaning low”. I admit I scoured maps looking for Mayor’s Income, Tennessee as I got sucked into this tale. I love how it ends of the dramatic, “We have a right to know…”
Black Market Baby
A swampy blues track that gives another of Tom’s tall tales. Crackling like an old 78 from the start, Ralph Carney’s horns squawk in the background. The track has so much air swirling around it, feeling totally live as he sings of a “Diamond that wants to stay coal” Ribot again delivers a perfect guitar solo, more overdriven than usual, but still restrained whilst it soars.
Eyeball Kid
The clanking percussion and a creeping, jerking backing from bass clarinet and bassoon are the real start of this song, a slightly bizarre tale by numbers and the one weak song on the record. Still, the percussion is marvellous.
Picture In a Frame
A bewitching love poem set to perfect piano playing. Reminiscent of his best 70s work, a smoky, relaxed jazz ballad, cleverley repeating beautiful words like “I come calling in my Sunday best…” It’s a song that drips with emotion that feels real, heartfelt, and honest.
Chocolate Jesus
This song pushes its way through the farmyard. It sounds like a banjo but the notes sat it’s Tom playing guitar on this blues track that praises commercialism and lazy belief4. It also reminds us of how advertising can lead to people “worshipping” products. Greg Cohen’s stand up bass thuds with percussive perfection on this one and Charlie Musselwhite’s blues harp plays the high, wailing solo.
Georgia Lee
Waits juxtaposes an almost nursery rhyme melody to the newspaper narrative of the death (murder?) of young Georgia Lee. He makes a powerful charge, “Why wasn’t god watching?” but the most powerful image comes in the final verse
Wild flowers on a cross by the road
And somewhere a baby is crying
For her mom
Filipino Box Spring Hog
Suddenly we get the most stomping, shouting, preachin song on the record. “The Boners”5 return, supporting Andrew Borger’s thundering drums. A song literally about cooking a pig, and it’s an insane recipe of sounds: shrieking blues harp, slices of Ribot guitar, sampled vocal tells and blasts of brass. A remarkable track compared to the rest of side four.
Take It With Me
Stripped to Tom’s piano and Greg Cohen’s bass, he gives another song that could sit on The Heart of Saturday Night. His vocals are low and clear - is it the really the same person as who sang on Filipino Box Spring Hog? And the song is full of the half-finished images he uses so well
All broken down by
the side of the road
I was never more alive or
alone
I've worn the faces off
all the cards
I'm gonna take it with me
when I go
In many ways it would be a perfect, beautiful end to the record but Waits gives us one more…
Come On Up To The House
We get one final version of Waits as preacher in this Western ballad of resilience. The chorus is a singalong drunken chant for people sharing a bottle around their “junkman’s choir”. The song closes the album with a cry of determination:
Well, you know you should surrender
But you can't let go
The final evangelical lines are finished by a barroom piano flourish and then we’re done. Ray Padgett write about this song on his highly recommended Substack:
It’s a remarkable album, a dusty story of characters that give birth to some of his best songs.
Like what you read? Buy me a coffee!
Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan (1651) pt. 1, ch. 13
Son of actor Lee Marvin. Jim Jarmusch tells a story:
Six months ago Tom Waits was in a bar in somewhere like Sonoma County in Northern California, and the bartender said, “You’re Tom Waits, right? A guy over there wants to talk to you.”
Tom went over to this dark corner booth and the guy sitting there said, “Sit down, I want to talk to you.”
So Tom started getting a little aggressive: “What the fuck do you want to talk to me about? I don’t know you.”
And the guy said, “What is this bullshit about the Sons of Lee Marvin?”
Tom said, “Well, it’s a secret organization and I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
The guy said, “I don’t like it.”
Tom said, “What’s it to you?”
The guy said, “I’m Lee Marvin’s son”—and he really was. He thought it was insulting, but it’s not, it’s completely out of respect for Lee Marvin.
The Sons of Lee Marvin is a tongue-in-cheek secret society devoted to iconic American actor Lee Marvin. The sole entry requirement for the club is that one must have a physical resemblance to plausibly look like a son of Marvin.
This is what is says on the album notes
“My father-in-law has been trying to get me involved in this other business. He's got these little lozenges that come in different flavours and they have a cross on one side and a Bible passage on the other. He calls them 'testamints.' The idea is that if you can't make the church service, you meditate on the testamint passage, then pop it in your mouth. We took the idea one step further with Chocolate Jesus.” Now magazine, by Tim Perlich, April 1999.
First heard on 1992’s Bone Machine