And now we come to Mr. Waits, he sits in a smoky bar room, hunched over a piano clothed in blue light and cigarette smoke. Coughing once or twice, he casts a casual eye over the audience embroiled in their own conversation, and whispers in a voice of gravel and cobwebs into the mike ...
"glad you all made it would have been real strange if no-one had of showed up tonight"
Then a rythmic beating on the ivories begins and as he rocks his voice catches between the notes being carried up by the smoke and heads begin to turn, the audience is hypnotised into leaving their world and being surrounded by his. The words call you to a place of emtptyness and fear where the wind whistles through the starved limbs of trees and the moon hangs overhead like an unblinking eye, he takes you.
Murder in the Red Barn
(Tom Waits/K. Brennan)
There was a murder in the red barn Murder in the red barn The trees are bending over The cows are lying down The atumn's taking over You can hear the buckshot hounds The watchman said to Reba the loon Was it pale at Manzanita Or Blind Bob the raccoon? Pin it on a drifter They sleep beneath the bridge One plays the violin And sleeps inside a fridge There was a murder in the red barn A murder in the red barn Someone's crying in the woods Someone's burying all his clothes Now Slam the Crank from Wheezer Slept outside last night and froze Road kill has its seasons Just like anything It's possums in the autumn And it's farm cats in the spring There was a murder in the red barn A murder in the red barn Now thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house Or covet thy neighbor's wife But for some Murder is the only door through which they enter life Now they surrounded the house They smoke him out They took him off in chains The sky turned black and bruised And we had months of heavy rains Now the raven's nest in the rotted roof Of Chenoweth's old place And no one's asking Cal About that scar upon his face 'Cause there's nothin' strange About an axe with bloodstains in the barn There's always some killin' You got to do around the farm A murder in the red barn Murder in the red barn Now the woods will never tell What sleeps beneath the trees Or what's buried 'neath a rock Or hiding in the leaves 'Cause road kill has it's seasons Just like anything It's possums in the atumn And it's farm cats in the spring A murder in the red barn A murder in the red barn Now a lady can't do nothin' Without folks' tongues waggin' Is this blood on the tree Or is it autumn's red blaze When the ground's soft for diggin' ANd the rain will bring all this gloom There's nothing wrong with a lady Drinking alone in her room But there was a murder in the red barn A murder in the red barn
But he was not always walking this twisted path of Faulkner, oh no, once he sang smooth and understanding croons to the loosers and bums of the East, then as the strings slowly dropped away and the backdrop of trumpets and saxaphones were put away in storage, what remained was so much bleaker, so much more mythic, and it is this territory that "Words of Fire, Ink of Blood" will cover in the weeks and months to come. This page as with most of the others at this point, is a taster, a look through the cracks in the boarded up windows of the tower of song. Soon those boards will be torn from their fixings with a crowbar and this page will expand.