Great musicians live and die live on stage and when I saw Tom Waits at the Beacon Theater back in 1999, he did neither but he was draggy enough for me to include he was overrated. And all these years later, I stand by my conclusion. Waits performs three party tricks:
Ballads
Experimental doo dads
Rockabilly
And he does them and he does them and he does them.
But who can spend a career rewriting "Downtown Train" and "Jersey Girl" a third of the time?
Anyway, I wasn't obsessive about Alice or the one prior to Alice, Mule Variations and got my kicks on the greatest hits released around that time.And while I can get off on his Elvis impressive impression rockabilly style "Get Lost" and a couple of songs later, "Back In The Crowd", Elvis in ballad mode,.
Some of this is very pretty stuff, the mandolin on the before mentioned is lovely. Some of it is nasty fucker shit, "Hell Broke Luce" is typical (for Tom) stamping obstreperousness. And some of it, "New Year's Eve", is none of the above at all! And though as it accumulates, it tends to lose focus and it can be painful to sit through the entire album (the deluxe version is almost an hour), still in smaller doses nearly everything kicks in eventually to a lesser or greater degree.
Grade: B+