It was a great concert. I’m not sorry I paid $100 for it. If you’re a fan, don’t miss a chance to see him. Details follow for those interested.
Let me get the negative out of the way first. At least for live performances, Waits seems to have abandoned most of his many vocal styles for the abrasive bellowing roar, or roaring bellow, that he uses frequently but not always in his recordings. (You can hear what I’m talking about here: listen to the samples of the first two tracks; the second is the voice he used 90% of the time last night.) This is really too bad, because there’s a huge and very effective range of vocal expression on his recordings. Maybe he’s wrecked his voice for anything subtle; I can’t imagine how anyone can make the sounds he does for more than a minute or two, let alone for an entire concert.
For the first thirty minutes or so of the roughly two-hour concert, I was less than enthusiastic. As is too often the case with amplified music, it was too loud for the space—not very loud in comparison to an out-and-out rock band, but still loud enough to muddy everything up and lose all nuance. And there seemed something slightly…I don’t know, stiff, or at least not relaxed, about the performance (both Waits and the band).
But as it went on either my ears adjusted or the sound guys tweaked things, so that the sound got better, and, whether because the artists were more into it or because I was, the whole thing seemed to kind of catch fire, and the rest of the concert was a delight, my complaint about the singing notwithstanding. Not surprisingly, the band was great, including a reed player who faked a horn section by playing two instruments at once.
Waits is a compelling performer visually as well as musically, coming across as some kind of eccentric but fascinating minstrel-hobo (with a dash of Pentecostal preacher). There was a lot of skillful and effective lighting, with the high point being toward the end where he put on a hat covered with spangles of some kind and became a human disco ball, with lights focused on the hat (I think that was during “Eyeball Kid,” which was another and better song than the one on the album).
Speaking of the Eyeball Kid, someone who blogs under that name has already provided a set list, for those interested.
From my Catholic point of view, a few songs toward the end were notable. There was “Jesus Gonna Be Here,” which, yes, is ironic, but never seems to me to be 100% so, followed immediately by one of his bleakest songs, “Dirt in the Ground” (we’re all gonna be just…). But then the closer was the desperate prayer of “Make It Rain,” and at the end of it a rain came down in the form of a shower of glitter. This is, after all, the aptly named Glitter and Doom Tour.
The crowd was interesting, by the way: from teenagers to people as old as Tom and me (he’s just a few months younger than I am). Not that many teenagers, really: the younger end seemed to be college-age and a bit up, like my daughter and her husband and their friends, all in their mid-20s, with the majority falling maybe (I’m guessing) between their age and the mid-40s. There were people covered in tattoos (and I wonder how many were fake) and people who looked like they just came from their white-collar jobs (e.g., me).
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Light On Dark Water 
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