Tom Waits RETRO ISSUE: Small Change by: Steve Scully Mon:08-Oct-07 Label: Asylum Year: 1977 WB rating 92 out of 100

No one else makes music like Tom Waits. The only flaw in this uniqueness is that Tom Waits himself consistently makes music like Tom Waits. Small Change, another in a quickly-increasing line of whisky-drenched, piano-clad forays into American debauchery, is Waits not taking a step forward as such, but remaining stationary, perfecting his craft. Album highlights ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues’ and ‘Invitation to the Blues’ are character pieces like we’ve come to expect: his protagonist is a lovelorn insomniac or a weathered alcoholic, his landscape painted in the coffee-stained hues of incurable, pessimistic nostalgia. Yes, Waits still growls and snarls his way through these tales of strippers, waitresses, the homeless and the hopeless – America’s forgotten – with the vigour of a freshman, but now exudes the confidence and skill of a true senior in his field. In short, Small Change may have all the hallmarks of a Waits record, and it may be painfully similar to all three of its predecessors, but it is received in a far purer form than ever before.

A re-working of traditional Australian folk song ‘Waltzing Matilda’, ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues’ is a piano-jazz ballad playing upon the ambiguities of the original song’s lyrics: “Hey friend, can I borrow/A couple of bucks from you to go/Waltzing Matilda.” The wordplay we’ve come to expect immediately reveals itself, “I’ve lost my St Christopher”, and his subject matter is typical of Waits’ fetish for his town’s downtrodden – “the girls down by the striptease shows.” The beautiful empathy brought to this track is in stark contrast to the up-beat ‘Step Right Up’, where our narrator acts the spruiker, selling “smoke-damaged furniture” and the like, in cheesy salesman rhetoric. The album is paced this way throughout, for every evocative ballad there’s an up-beat number with more than its fair share of comedic logorrhoea (“Change into a nine-year-old Hindu boy/Get rid of your wife”).

‘I Wish I Was in New Orleans’ is a cool, smoky lament. He may be stumbling toward New Orleans with “A bottle and my friends”, but one can’t resist thinking the bottle is Waits’ one true friend, drunkenness being such a potent theme on Small Change. This is no more obvious than in ‘The Piano Has Been Drinking’, where confused rambling takes the place of depressing reminiscences: “The piano has been drinking/And my necktie is asleep.”

‘Invitation to the Blues’ is Small Change’s centrepiece. Waits’ lyricism is perfect: you may not be able to “take your eyes off her”, but she’s nothing but “an open invitation to the blues.” It elucidates all the false hopes and ruined dreams of Waits’ heroes and heroines, for whom hope and success are nothing but intangible impossibilities. Backed only by a lone drummer in ‘Pasties & a G-String’, Waits takes the same landscape and tilts in to comical extremes. “Smellin’ like a brewery/Lookin’ like a tramp,” he ventures into the world of bacchanalia from an askew, strangely positive angle. Without the tinge of sadness, we’re now viewing this world through the neon lights of seedy strip-clubs. “I’m getting harder than Chinese algebra,” he blurts out: the wordplay is admirable, the subject-matter distasteful, but the whole picture is nothing short of intoxicating.

With the pungent smell of stale liquor, Waits shows us that dreams are not all they’re cracked up to be. Nonetheless, this hopelessness is unutterably joyful, and wallowing with the detritus can be twice as fun as sipping cognac with the toffs. So, order “another cup of Java”, sit back with your pack of smokes and let Waits’ trademark croon seep through your pores only to rip you to shreds. For one moment, I implore you to ignore the cleanliness and shininess of today’s pop and immerse yourself in the filth of realism; Small Change is as near-perfect as Waits has been, and as near-perfect an album as this year may yet see.