Frank’s Wild Years
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Look at the eyes of this cute and rather worried looking chihuahua. What sad story do you see? What tale of despair and dreams gone bad? What demons? What lost angels?
If you don’t already know from the title of today’s post why the chihuahua is here on the blog on this first Monday of summer, you will soon enough. And, if you do, you know the twisted little story we’re going to look at this week.
But first, let’s set the scene. Specifically, my scene. I don’t know about you but where I am it’s 100+ degrees and the skies in the valley are full of smoke from fires that are burning in the hills — some natural, but most started by the careless or the sinister. It’s hot and hazy. The kind of hot and hazy that makes you want to give up before you can even drop the first ice cube in the glass. A lot of the stories in the crime section are about people who, fueled by alcohol and the heat, just suddenly snapped. And I’m in a sleepy, friendly mid-size city. Next week I’m headed further west to hot and hazy Los Angeles — one of my favorite cities, but the one that Raymond Chandler famously described thus:
Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy car tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick, bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.
 “LosAngeles04” by Thomas Pintaric |
| The Hollywood Freeway, with Los Angeles in the background. |
Again, I don’t know about you, but where I am and where I’m headed, the murder ballads that tell tales of the cool swirling rivers of yore, where young maidens are drowned among the fluttering fronds at the hands of jealous lovers — well, that all seems far away in both time and place. It’s too hot and dry here for that.
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| The Los Angeles River — there’s no water here, hasn’t been for a long time, which makes people go a little crazy. Clip from the film Point Blank (1967) |
This week, then, something to match the atmospherics I’m in and headed toward — something hot and hazy and slow and stylized and sinister and sharp and dry. And dark and icy and cool. In all this heat and haze, please — give me something a little dark and icy and cool.
 “Tom Waits Praha 2008 01” by Gut (Anna Wittenberg) |
Ahhhhhh. Perfect. Tom Waits — quintessential Los Angeles, an artist who has been described as “noir as night,” that brooding, stylistically wandering jazzbo whose voice itself is like murder, and whose characters are all the angel-headed freaks you’d never care to admit you’d like to meet: the drunks, the junkies, the scam artists, the liars, the strippers, the hookers, the pimps, the johns, the killers, the wasted dreamers, or the simply no longer young and beautiful, if they ever were. All of them still looking for something.
Until someone drives a nail into their forehead, that is.
 Photo by Charlie Stinchcomb |
And with that, I think we’ve set our scene. This week I take a few quick, furtive glances at “Frank’s Wild Years,” from the 1983 album Swordfishtrombones, which marked a critical stylistic shift for Waits. The first time I heard this important little murder tone poem I laughed out loud and, at the same time, felt like I’d been punched, hard, in the gut.
Clocking in at barely over a minute and a half, the song always packs a powerful punch for me no matter how many times I hear it. It also takes us down quite a few highways we haven’t yet driven here on the blog. First there’s all that jazz and spoken word. And then our murder weapon this time is fire (or is it?). And the murder itself isn’t even a homicide, it’s a dogicide. Or, more precisely, a chihuahueñoicide.
That’s right. The chihuahua’s name is Carlos. And he’s one dead dog (or, ahem, is he?).
“Frank’s Wild Years,” Tom Waits
> Lyrics
Tom Waits performing Frank’s Wild Years live on Letterman
Stay cool and stay tuned this week, folks. We’re going for a short, wild little ride.