Hearing Tom Waits live will never reveal the man behind the myth. In each of three live albums that span his forty-year career, Waits has always sounded near death, if not undead. Since his first live album, 1975’s Nighthawks at the Diner, Waits has drifted like a drunken ghost out of beatnik clubs to wander across the nocturnal Earth, growling out taller tales with each album. With his third, Glitter and Doom, Waits’ monstrous bellow has only grown as grotesque as the characters that haunt the vaudevillian graveyard in which he has always toiled.
Split into two parts, Glitter and Doom begins with a seamless compilation of live tracks hand-picked from the tour’s sold out performances. Forged into one beastly fantasy, the first disc captures the swagger of a grand ball attended by the ghostly sailors of “Singanpore” from 1985’s Rain Dogs as well as the brooding reanimation of Leadbelly in his cover of “Fannin Street” from the tomb of his most recent three-disc compilation Orphans. Free from the distortion of the modern studio which turned Waits’ last several albums into virtual circuses, the swampy band churns together to turn blues and classicism into gargling grandeur.
For the second part, entitled Tom Tales, Waits rambles on a Tulsa stage over jokes about Swastika soups and the etymology of “the graveyard shift” amid commenting on unique Oklahoma laws against getting fish drunk. Narrating a documentary of a scorched planet earth, Tom Waits is like a boogeyman who has kicked out the door of our imagination’s coffin just to show us how dismal things can get. Waits seems to develop captivating split personalities with each disc, but at times the contrast detracts from the mythic Waits that lurks behind every street corner and bayou in the world.