Franks Wild Years

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There was a time, I shudder in remembering, where I actually told a friend out loud, that I didn't like Franks Wild Years. I was recently overtaken by an urge to listen to "Innocent When You Dream", which to me was the outstanding track on the album. When the band had worked up and taped an arrangement, Greg Cohen would hand a cassette to Waits, who'd come in after rehearsing with the Steppenwolf actors. The theme from "If I Have to Go" was used under the title "Rat's Theme" in the documentary Streetwise as early as 1984.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Source: "Waits Measured: A Multifacted Singer Looks For New Directions" Chicago Tribune - Arts section (USA), by Lynn Van Matre. As well as the unparalleled joy of keeping the publication alive, you'll receive benefits including exclusive editorial, podcasts, and specially-commissioned music by some of our favourite artists. Tom Waits (1985): "The ritual around the theatre here [New York] is very well-established, and if you're comin' in from some other place, well, you wait for a table. We would have had to have taken it someplace else first before New York, and the chain just seemed too long and involved.Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan collaborated on the play as they had done on Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs. Tom Waits (1987): "It's the story of a guy from a small town who goes out to seek fame and fortune, but he steps on every bucket in the road. Temptation" and "Straight to the Top (Vegas)" featured in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), and "Innocent When You Dream" featured in Smoke (1995). There was some talk of retooling the production - building new stage sets - but by this point both time and money were in short supply.

Then you realise, after about the fourth listen, that life is indeed a vegas devil german barroom cast as an operatic spaghetti western and that fozzy really has missed his train. Kathleen Waits-Brennan was primarily responsible for the libretto and Waits himself was in charge of the music. When I arrived, I actually had a cab-driver say, If yer can make it here, yer can make it anywhere, jus' like Frank said.

Rudimentary versions of the songs appeared on a demo cassette labeled: Island, 1985 (as mentioned by Barney Hoskyns in Lowside Of The Road 2009). As the production was remounted in 1984 in New York, Waits met Gary Sinise and Terry Kinney and John Malkovitch from Steppenwolf which led to them talking about a partnership for Waits' upcoming theatre project. Waits has often pronounced his love for vaudeville, as well as his wish that he could have been there for it. Vinyl mastering is exemplary, given the fact that there is almost an hour of music packed in just 1LP.

See, by running a small theatre, if I want a blue light and an oversized cocktail glass and a red clock and a midget in a wet-suit, I can have it without having to send out, tuba, trombone, banjo, accordian, electric stick and an emcee with a pencil-thin mustache and a Mexican accent. The attraction of a melange of styles, a mad funhouse of talent, all treading the same bit of stage, is a historical concept that you don’t have to strain too hard to understand his passion for. For example, 'Innocent When You Dream,' a song of disappointment in love and friendship, has a winning melody, but it is played in a seesaw arrangement of pump organ, bass, violin, and piano, and Waits sings it like an enraged drunk. Swordfishtrombones” is the first album (the albums title comes from a song on that), the second is the classic “Rain Dogs”. Even when percussion is absent, the body-movin' tendencies are still present as accordions, pump-organs and even a rooster twist the narrative through a carnival of broken dreams.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). He must have had "great expectations" starting in 1979 with the "Why Is The Dream Always So Much Sweeter Than The Taste? The songwriting is, of course, legendary with some of Tom’s finest songs decorated in that trash can production he favored during this era. He points out the arbitrary nature of the arrangements by repeating 'Straight to the Top,' done as a demented rhumba in act one, as a Vegas-style Frank Sinatra swing tune in act two.

Tom Waits (1999): " First person we approached was Robert Wilson, and he didn't know what to make of it. At the road's end lies "Innocent When You Dream (78)," a moral that is told to Frank early on but doesn't hit home until the end, when it is heard in a lovely, tinnily nostalgic rendition. Franks Wild Years is an iteration of the track “Frank’s Wild Years” from Waits’ 1983 album Swordfishtrombones. Gussying ourselves up to war-song strains of 'Temptation', 'Straight to the Top' etc was an essential part of our ritual of getting ourselves 'in the mood' before emerging from the squalor of our Lower East Side tenement, ready to take on the world. 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.A review, essentially, is just one man's opinion, someone who came to the show and either liked it or didn't like it. Then came 1985's Rain Dogs, which mixed Brecht- Weill drama with Captain Beefheart bizarreness for an effect that conjured up a Saturday-night fish fry in the freak show of a decrepit circus. Tom Waits (1983): "This stage thing for me is a West Broadway musical revue for lack of a better description of it. Waits’ undeniable talent for gathering all the threads that everyone has inside them, knotted and frayed, and laying them out bare and making brutal sense of the chaos is what gives him, and this album its emotional resonance.