Deadbeats

It is infinitely probable that nobody other than HLoF and I give a tinker’s shit about this but what the hell. Just stumbled on this forthcoming boxset from Mad Tom O’the Waits. Apparently it collects 24 rare and 30 unreleased tracks from over the years. Predictably enough Waits describes it best on the Anti website:

When I was small I always thought that songwriters sat alone at upright pianos in cramped smoky little rooms with a bottle and an ashtray and everything came in the window blew through them and came out of the piano as a song… and in a weird way that is exactly what happens.

What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead-end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear.

At the center of this record is my voice. I try my best to chug, stomp, weep, whisper, moan, wheeze, scat, blurt, rage, whine, and seduce. With my voice, I can sound like a girl, the boogieman, a Theremin, a cherry bomb, a clown, a doctor, a murderer… I can be tribal. Ironic. Or disturbed. My voice is really my instrument.

Kathleen and I wanted the record to be like emptying our pockets on the table after an evening of gambling, burglary, and cow tipping. We enjoy strange couplings, that’s how we got together. We wanted Orphans to be like a shortwave radio show where the past is sequenced with the future, consisting of things you find on the ground, in this world and no world, or maybe the next world. Whatever you imagine that to be.

If a record really works at all, it should be made like a homemade doll with tinsel for hair and seashells for ears stuffed with candy and money. Or like a good woman’s purse with a Swiss Army Knife and a snake bite kit.

Orphans contains songs for all occasions. Some of the songs were written in turmoil and recorded at night in a moving car, others were written in hotel rooms and recorded in Hollywood during big conflamas. That’s when conflict weds drama. At any rate these are the ones that survived the flood and were rescued from the branches of trees after the water’s retreat.

Gathering all this material together was like rounding up chickens at the beach. It’s not like you go into vault and check out what you need. Most of it was lost or buried under the house. Some of the tapes I had to pay ransom for to a plumber in Russia. You fall into the vat. We started to write just to climb out of the vat. Then you start listening and sorting and start writing in response to what you hear. And more recording. And then you get bit by a spider, go down the gopher hole, and make a whole different record. That was the process pretty much the last three years.

Then we met Karl Derfler, a wizard engineer who works at Bay Side Studios in Richmond, CA, in the science fiction part of town. A battlefield medic, he did a Lazarus on a number of the songs and recorded all the new material.

On Orphans there is a mambo about a convict who breaks out of jail with a fishbone, a gospel train song about Charlie Whitman and John Wilkes Boothe, a delta blues about a disturbing neighbor, a spoken word piece about a woman who was struck by lightening, an 18^th century Scottish madrigal about murderous sibling rivalry, an American backwoods a cappella about a hanging. Even a song by Jack Kerouac and a spiritual with my own personal petition to the Lord with prayer… There’s even a show tune about an old altar boy and a rockabilly song about a young man who’s begging to be lied to.

I think you will find more singing and dancing here than usual. But I hope fans of more growling, more warbling, more barking, more screeching won’t be disappointed either.

In an attempt to shoehorn some relevance to all of this and writing… erm… I listen to him a lot while working and he features as a recurring character in The Organisation.

Good enough.

I gave magicians a hard time once; talked of them in vaguely dismissive terms in my foreword to The Imagineer. I forget the precise words I used, but the inference was clear: charlatans to a man.

There’s been much talk in this vein of late, what with David Blaine suspending himself over London for 44 days, encapsulated in a glass box with no food. Silly bastard.

For my part I was lying through my teeth. The idea of the stage magician versus ‘genuine’ practitioner suited me in the foreword to a book about the miraculous, it was a nice hook to hang an introduction on. Truth be told, I adore magicians, would desperately like to be one.

As a child I would thrash away at my Paul Daniels compendium set making the same orange sponge ball disappear time and time again (until, eventually, time and negligence performed the feat for good and I was left with a set of meaningless plastic cups and vases). David Copperfield thrilled me with his shocking spectaculars - walking through the Great Wall of China, making The Statue of Liberty disappear, all illusions that made me hate that sponge ball for being comparatively inadequate.

Like many childhood desires (ability on the piano, comprehension of science) my butterfly-like mind with its impatience and intolerance for failure dismissed my attempts to seriously learn the ‘art’. Rather than gently practising sleight-of-hand and card manipulation over and over until my cumbersome fingers did what was asked of them I would get angry at my perceived inability within half an hour and give up. It seems typical that as we grow older, more patient and dedicated to the developing of skills, we have so little time in which to develop them.

I had a second chance later when I needed to learn some brief magic routines to use as filler during my time as a Ghost Tour guide in York. I now have the most basic knowledge of a few close-up illusions and can, on a good day, do incredibly naughty things to a deck of cards while shuffling them.

In recent years there has been a revival in popularity for magicians on our television screens, due, in no small part to the previously mentioned Blaine with his superb close-up magic. Derren Brown (the most exciting and skilled performer for many years in my opinion - whatever that’s worth) finally got the audience he’d deserved. Magic was the new rock and roll…

For a while…

What is it today with the fickle nature of the masses? I’m reminded of my intolerant attitude as a child, throwing something down because it had angered me with its complexity. The attitude towards Blaine at the moment is bordering on the violent, the ‘cage’ being attacked, the ’stunt’ being dismissed as ridiculous by the vocal majority. Derren Brown produced his fascinating and thrilling ‘Russian Roulette’ special which was criticised before airing and ‘debunked’ after. Why? What is it about you bastards that will insist on raising something up before burning it down?

It was this attitude that sparked The Imagineer in me all those years ago; this desperation to engender the ghost of childhood; that joy of spectacle that is beaten out of us all too soundly through adolescence. Magicians also seek to do this, drag your emotions back to the incredulous shock of innocence, make you believe (however briefly) in the existence of more beyond this. They are fantasists in their own way.

It seems we don’t want fantasy any more, has this world become that perfect? Good, I’m glad, just surprised I didn’t notice.

Off to drag my old text books out, beat The Devil’s Picture Book into submission, see if I can’t achieve a little magic…

G.

Spread the love, it’s good for your skin:

	Listen to: Tubular Bells Vol.3- Mike Oldfield Yeah, I know, reeks of ‘cash-in’ but this is my favourite of the three in many ways; probably because it is, in my mind, the soundtrack to The Imagineer, every track evokes a chapter or moment. An album that sounds like magic.
	Read:Mr. Punch - Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean This is the third week running for Mr. McKean, this just won’t do, an embargo must be put in place for awhile I feel. Still, this haunting tale has the loss of childhood innocence at its core, the point when magic fades and real life kicks in. Now if that’s not a perfect choice for this week I don’t know what is! We shall hear much of Mr. Gaiman in these pages, only fair to warn you… if there’s one man who manages to hang on to magic it is he…
	Watch: Derren Brown - Inside Your Mind - Derren Brown New DVD or Video containing material from the ‘Mind Control’ series plus extra stuff. A consummate showman and illusionist this takes the old ’svengali’ routines and gives them an exciting spin. Oh… and if the whole ‘papers said he cheated and used blanks’ crap surrounding the Russian Roulette special is concerning you: A blank bullet fired against the skull would cream your grey matter across the walls with just as much gusto as live ammunition. Don’t fret… it’s just the spoilsports again… watch this and believe for ninety minutes.