Glitter and Doom
Jul 28, 12:09 PM
There was a moment in the Tom Waits concert at the Grand Rex in Paris last Friday – in the middle of Dirt in the Ground – when you could almost feel a chill go through the audience. The stage was flooded in blue light, the band was subdued, and Waits, in that extraordinary growl that is unlike any other voice on earth, repeated over and over: ‘I know… / you know… / we all know… / we’re all going to be / dirt in the ground.’
It has been years on end since the last major Tom Waits tour, and the Glitter and Doom tour has certainly been worth waiting for. I caught the Eurostar with a friend to Paris on Thursday, and on Friday after a day idling around in Paris, browsing in Shakespeare and Co. and sitting in the Jardins de Luxembourg eating some exceptionally good ice-cream served by a guy who resembled Tintin (even down to the quiff) with ADHD, we headed to the Grand Rex. It was not hard to find the venue: we just followed the pork-pie hats.
If you can’t get to see Tom Waits in a small, seedy bar that seats only fifty people (and, let’s face it, you probably can’t), then the Grand Rex is the next closest thing to a perfect venue, with its star-spangled roof, its walls covered with backlit mock-Moroccan architecture, and with an abundance of deep, red velvet curtains. Waits is a true showman, and from the moment he appeared, was in complete control of the audience. Swinging between deranged Deep South Baptist preacher, Vaudeville showmaster and late-night balladeer, it was quite a performance. From the clattering noise of Hoist that Rag to the beautifully simple tribute to his wife Kathleen Brennan, Johnsburg, Illinois, played unaccompanied by the band on the piano, to rambling tales of swallowing frogspawn whilst swimming in Parisian ponds and the seduction techniques of male spiders, there was both glitter and doom in abundance.
Waits played for two and a half hours and at eleven thirty, the pork-pie hats filtered out of the swelteringly hot auditorium and into the boulevards of Paris. We caught the Metro back to where we were staying, found ourselves a table at a pavement cafe and bought a beer. Paris seemed to glitter just a little more than before, but the doom-laden chill had not entirely dispersed. It was what we came for. We were not disappointed.