Franks Wild Years

Product Information

Titled for a play of the same name and authored by Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, 'Franks Wild Years' was performed by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 1986. 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. Whether all songs are meant to be the narrative of Frank alone, as the liner notes would suggest, or each track is an alter-ego of someone who just wishes they would leave mediocrity for their shot at the big-time, the spirit of it all is clear and felt through to the end.

All the voices in Tom Waits' head come out on this album: the growler (of course), the crooner, the preacher, the screecher, and the Vegas cheese ball.The album divides the story neatly into two acts and although titled “un operachi romantic”, there is no opera in Franks. But the remastering here is superb: it's sort of like a careful polish of the original that doesn't remove any of the worn-out patina or shine too bright a light into the darker corners, it just gives a gentle clean-up to all the intricate details without highlighting any of them unduly or separating any individual sonic element from the whole of the songs. In a period of his career that is sometimes described as ‘Brechtian’, Frank’s Wild Years comes out as being the most theatrical and cinematic of his albums.

Since its original staging the play has never been performed again, and official sources confirm that, at the moment, Waits doesn't want the play to be staged ever again.Well, uh, all of Frank's shortcomings rise up before him, right in the middle of him bragging in the bar. By bringing in the boundaries a little bit, Waits explored in depth ideas, characters and journeys that he only teased people with on Dogs and Swordfish. Source: Bill Schimmel interview December 12, 2007 as quoted in “Lowside Of The Road: A Life Of Tom Waits" by Barney Hoskyns. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. It is a manic harmony of all the voices and characters in his head, a stylistic gumbo that evokes a time that is not our own now and wasn’t even then, 25-years ago.

When the trains thundered past the backyard fence, bound for Oxnard, Lompoc, Gila Bend, Stanfield and parts south where the wind blew big, Frank would count the cars and make a wish just like he did when he was a kid. It's gonna actually unfold, unravel like - or I'm going to unravel, I don't know which is gonna come first. Tom Waits (1999): " First person we approached was Robert Wilson, and he didn't know what to make of it. Rudimentary versions of the songs appeared on a demo cassette labeled: Island, 1985 (as mentioned by Barney Hoskyns in Lowside Of The Road 2009).Laid aside was the blunderbuss loaded with coffin nails, torn pages of Burroughs, scurvy, hookers’ names and confetti. More memorable moments: "Innocent When You Dream" (both times), the vocal howling at the end of "Blow Wind Blow", and the lovely coughing fit after "I'll Take New York.

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. But for those of us on the train, we sit back and are treated to a piece of musical theatre that makes the world seem bright, lurid and garish when we emerge. Celebrate 5 of Tom Waits’ albums from the Island years, all of which have had an incredible impact on music history. It was a wonderful record anyway, but this version just takes all the things that were great about it to start with and gives you more direct access to all of them without losing anything in the translation.Source: "Waits Measured: A Multifacted Singer Looks For New Directions" Chicago Tribune - Arts section (USA), by Lynn Van Matre.