Franks Wild Years

Product Information

This tour resulted in Waits' next (live) album Big Time and its accompanying video ( Big Time, 1988). For those on the outside, he has disappeared from view and all that can be heard or seen is the trailing smoke and fading of sound. It's just wood and lights and people walking around until you somehow bang up against something, and something breaks, and something sparks, and something catches and then it has a life.

This rags-to-rags tale completes the trilogy that began with 1983's Swordfishtrombones (featuring the song "Frank's Wild Years," in which the protagonist torches his suburban SoCal house and heads north on the Hollywood Freeway). Elated to see that the Tom Waits albums are being reissued, one, I can retire the originals which are now too damn valuable to be playing, and two, Waits becomes available on vinyl for some for the first time. All these bulletproof songs, one after another": remembering Tom Waits's extraordinary mid-career trilogy". Waits is clearly the kind of person that can do the most ridiculous things in the world with a straight face. From the early off-kilter cocktail piano to the theatrical junkyard sound of his later work, I like it all.Tom Waits (1999): " You have to be a little foolish to do something because a play takes a lot of energy- emotionally, financially. Composed as a soundtrack to a stage show of the same title, it does not hang together as well as Tom's other show scores, like Blood Money or Alice, and in truth it always felt like the successor to Rain Dogs and Swordfishtrombones. In 1985 it was decided Steppenwolf Company was going to stage the play at Chicago's Briar Street Theatre.

Blues fumosi, marcette jazz da locale malfamato, musica da cabaret berlinese, anni 30 o già di li, innocue melodie sdolcinate sporcate, violentate da arrangiamenti tanto scarni quanto magistrali, musica da film muto ovviamente in bianco e nero, questo è "Frank's wild years", questo in fondo è Tom Waits, il mio vecchio amico Waits. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.In September 1978 Waits had his movie debut in Sylvester Stallone's Paradise Alley as pianist Mumbles. It was one of all-time-great LPs to start with, but for me this is the definitive version, and I can't recommend it highly enough.