Tom Waits — Mule Variations

Between The Spines #2

Between The Spines — a newsletter looking through my record collection one CD and vinyl at a time.

Mule Variations by Tom Waits.

Format: CD and vinyl

Acquired: CD bought in unknown Geneva record shop. Vinyl gifted by brother.

Official release: April 16, 1999.

Recorded: Prairie Sun Recording Studios, California.

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Back in 2005 Friday night at The Nottingham House in Broomhill meant open mic night. An evening where nobodies like us could howl over the low hum of half-finished conversations and pool balls being sunk.

I’d never heard a Tom Waits song in my life, much to the despair of my Canadian friend and colleague, Darryl. He then climbed onto the little stage, grabbed his resonator and started finger-picking Chocolate Jesus, and something beneath my feet shifted.

Darryl didn’t leave it there. As we crossed riffs and shifts together at the pub we worked in, he kept feeding me deeper cuts and stranger corners of the Waits back catalogue, sometimes jamming songs together after hours while Coen Brothers films flickered across the pub projector.

I was still at Tom Waits entry level — not a bad place to be — when I was poking through the CD racks in a Geneva record shop in 2006 and came across Mule Variations.

Chocolate Jesus and Come On Up To The House were familiar, but aside from that, this was a whole new adventure.

Maybe Mule Variations wasn’t the ideal entry point. Then again, maybe it was perfect. Waits spends the record wandering through old ghosts — Bone Machine, Closing Time, Small Change, Swordfishtrombones — like a man rattling around his own scrapyard, offering a different perspective on the sound of decades gone by.

But Mule Variations is so wildly split in personality it could soundtrack a doomed arthouse romance and the next Saw trailer without blinking. My partner usually leaves the room when this record comes on. But in the following days my Spotify Friends sidebar tells me Hold On is playing from her account.

Half made up of junkyard folk rock that isn’t for the faint of heart with a second side that breaks your heart in two, while featuring Waits’ trademark post-70s percussion and postmodern Batman husk, it’s a record that stays with you one way or another.

Opening track Big In Japan sent shockwaves down my spine back in 2006, with Waits throwing percussive curveballs all over the place.

He later told Jody Denberg for Mule Conversations: “I was in a contest with myself in a hotel room. I wanted to see if I could sound like a band all by myself but without any instruments. So I just started banging on the chest of drawers and the wall, the headboard. Just trying to get that sound. The full band sound. And that’s what I wound up with. I hung onto it and looped it and sampled it.”

Fuzzed out guitars and the famous Waits croak join the rhythm de chambre to begin more or less where Bone Machine left off in 1992. But it’s Hold On that delivers the heaviest punch from the first three tracks.

A seminal moment not only for this album, but for his career. So gorgeous is the soundscape to this song, it feels like a blanket being thrown over you when the opening chords ring through. Waits’ vocal goes full 180, from downright creepy in Lowside Of The Road, to reassuring grandfather figure.

It’s in these moments when we see the softer side of the crooner that brings Mule Variations alive. Co-produced with long time collaborator, and wife, Kathleen Brennan, you can feel their bond through songs like Take It With Me: “Always for you, and forever yours. It felt like the old days, we fell asleep on Beaula’s porch. I’m gonna take it with me when I go.”

House Where Nobody Lives, Picture In A Frame and Georgia Lee sit in the same tender, late-night territory, but it’s Pony where Waits feels most introspective, even autobiographical, later telling Jody Denberg the inspiration behind one particular lyric:

“Evelyn’s kitchen, that’s my Aunt Evelyn, who passed away during the making of the record. Her and my uncle had ten kids. I guess when I’d been far away from home I’d think about her kitchen a lot, and a lot of people feel the same way when they’ve been far away from home. I dreamed about getting home to her kitchen so that’s why we put her in there, as a tribute to Evelyn.”

The darker heart of the album has that Waits percussive groove, with Get Behind The Mule, Cold Water and Filipino Box Spring Hog, unleashing his Hyde-side into the mix — Waits has angels on one shoulder and devils on the other.

And then there’s What’s He Building?, a piece of spoken-word paranoia so bizarre it could probably give children nightmares. But beneath the creeping dread and twitching curtains lies Waits’ dry humour at its best: observant, brutal and weirdly funny. And the more time you spend with it the funnier and more unsettling it becomes.

Mule Variations feels like a journey through every corner of Waits’ world — junkyards, kitchens, motel rooms, bad dreams and home sickness — delivered by an artist so strange and singular he still feels unmatched decades later. By the time Come On Up To The House finally rings out, I feel like I’ve survived some beautiful, strange night out.

And whenever Chocolate Jesus plays, I’m right back in The Notty again, watching Darryl do his growliest growl.