Small Change is an album by
Tom WaitsThomas Alan "Tom" Waits is an American singer-songwriter, composer and actor. Waits has a distinctive voice, described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car."...
, released in 1976 on
Asylum RecordsAsylum Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group, and is currently distributed through Warner Bros. Records. After various incarnations, today it is geared primarily towards hip-hop music.-Formation:...
. It was recorded in July 1976.
Small Change was recorded, direct to 2-track stereo tape, from July 15 to July 20, 1976 at the
Wally Heider Recording StudioWally Heider first opened up a studio in Los Angeles, California. Heider later saw the need for musicians involved in the nascent San Francisco Sound to have their own recording studio....
, in Hollywood, USA under the production of
Bones HoweDayton Burr "Bones" Howe is a Grammy-award-winning record producer and recording engineer associated with 1960s and 1970s hits, mostly of the sunshine pop genre, including most of the hits of The 5th Dimension and The Association, as well as music supervision of several films...
.
The album featured famed
drummerA drummer is a person who plays drums, particularly a drum kit , marching percussion or hand drums. The term percussionist applies to a musician performing on any percussion instrument, but usually refers to one who plays classical or Latin percussion. Most bands for Rock, Pop, Jazz, R&B etc...
Shelly ManneShelly Manne , born Sheldon Manne in New York City, was an American jazz drummer. Most frequently associated with West coast jazz, he was known for his versatility and also played in a number of other styles, including Dixieland, swing, bebop, avant-garde jazz and fusion, as well as contributing...
, and was, like Waits' previous albums, heavily jazz-influenced, with a lyrical style that owed influence to
Raymond ChandlerRaymond Thornton Chandler was an Anglo-American novelist and screenwriter who had an immense stylistic influence upon the modern private detective story, especially in the style of the writing and the attitudes now characteristic of the genre...
and
Charles BukowskiHenry Charles Bukowski was a German American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Bukowski's writing was heavily influenced by the geography and atmosphere of his home city of Los Angeles, and is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol,...
as well as a vocal delivery influenced by
Louis ArmstrongLouis Daniel Armstrong , nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana....
.
Small Change is an album by
Tom WaitsThomas Alan "Tom" Waits is an American singer-songwriter, composer and actor. Waits has a distinctive voice, described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car."...
, released in 1976 on
Asylum RecordsAsylum Records is an American record label, owned by Warner Music Group, and is currently distributed through Warner Bros. Records. After various incarnations, today it is geared primarily towards hip-hop music.-Formation:...
. It was recorded in July 1976.
Production
Small Change was recorded, direct to 2-track stereo tape, from July 15 to July 20, 1976 at the
Wally Heider Recording StudioWally Heider first opened up a studio in Los Angeles, California. Heider later saw the need for musicians involved in the nascent San Francisco Sound to have their own recording studio....
, in Hollywood, USA under the production of
Bones HoweDayton Burr "Bones" Howe is a Grammy-award-winning record producer and recording engineer associated with 1960s and 1970s hits, mostly of the sunshine pop genre, including most of the hits of The 5th Dimension and The Association, as well as music supervision of several films...
.
Music
The album featured famed
drummerA drummer is a person who plays drums, particularly a drum kit , marching percussion or hand drums. The term percussionist applies to a musician performing on any percussion instrument, but usually refers to one who plays classical or Latin percussion. Most bands for Rock, Pop, Jazz, R&B etc...
Shelly ManneShelly Manne , born Sheldon Manne in New York City, was an American jazz drummer. Most frequently associated with West coast jazz, he was known for his versatility and also played in a number of other styles, including Dixieland, swing, bebop, avant-garde jazz and fusion, as well as contributing...
, and was, like Waits' previous albums, heavily jazz-influenced, with a lyrical style that owed influence to
Raymond ChandlerRaymond Thornton Chandler was an Anglo-American novelist and screenwriter who had an immense stylistic influence upon the modern private detective story, especially in the style of the writing and the attitudes now characteristic of the genre...
and
Charles BukowskiHenry Charles Bukowski was a German American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Bukowski's writing was heavily influenced by the geography and atmosphere of his home city of Los Angeles, and is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol,...
as well as a vocal delivery influenced by
Louis ArmstrongLouis Daniel Armstrong , nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana....
. The music for the most part consists of Waits' hoarse, rough voice, set against a backdrop of piano, upright bass, drums and saxophone.
"Tom Traubert's Blues" opens the album. Jay S. Jacobs has described the song as a "stunning opener [which] sets the tone for what follows." The refrain is based almost word by word on the 1890
AustraliaAustralia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the continental mainland , the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans...
n song, "
Waltzing Matilda"Waltzing Matilda" is Australia's most widely known bush ballad, a country folk song, and has been referred to as "the unofficial national anthem of Australia"....
" by A.B. "Banjo" Paterson, although the tune is slightly different.
The origin of the song is somewhat ambiguous. The sub-title of the track "Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen" seems to indicate that it is about a time that Waits spent in
CopenhagenCopenhagen ; ) is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban area with a population of 1,167,569 and a metropolitan area with a population of 1,875,179...
in 1976 while on a tour. There, he apparently met
DanishDenmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe and the senior member of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries; southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and it is bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark borders both the Baltic and the North Sea...
singer Mathilde Bondo. Indeed, in a 1998 radio interview, she confirmed that she met Waits and that they spent a night on the town together. Waits himself described the song's subject during a concert in Sydney Australia in March 1979: "Uh, well I met this girl named Matilda. And uh, I had a little too much to drink that night. This is about throwing up in a foreign country." In an interview on NPR's
World CafeWorld Cafe is a two-hour long, nationally syndicated music radio program that originates from WXPN, a non-commercial station licensed to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. The program began in 1991 and was originally distributed by Public Radio...
, aired December 15, 2006, Waits stated that Tom Traubert was a "friend of a friend" who died in prison.
Bones Howe, the album's producer, recalls when Waits first came to him with the song:
He said the most wonderful thing about writing that song. He went down and hung around on skid row in L.A. because he wanted to get stimulated for writing this material. He called me up and said, 'I went down to skid row ... I bought a pint of rye. In a brown paper bag.' I said, 'Oh really?'. 'Yeah - hunkered down, drank the pint of rye, went home, threw up, and wrote 'Tom Traubert's Blues [...] Every guy down there ... everyone I spoke to, a woman put him there."
Howe was amazed when he first heard the song, and he's still astonished by it. "I do a lot of seminars," he says. "Occasionally I'll do something for songwriters. They all say the same thing to me. 'All the great lyrics are done.' And I say, 'I'm going to give you a lyric that you never heard before."' Howe then says to his aspiring songwriters, "A battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace / And a wound that will never heal." This particular Tom Waits lyric Howe considers to be "brilliant." It's "the work of an extremely talented lyricist, poet, whatever you want to say. That is brilliant, brilliant work. And he never mentions the person, but you see the person."
The song has been recorded by
Rod StewartRoderick David "Rod" Stewart, CBE is a British singer and songwriter born and raised in London, England and currently residing in Epping. He is of Scottish and English lineage....
on the albums
Lead Vocalist and
Unplugged and Seated under the title "Tom Traubert's Blues (Waltzing Matilda)".
Album closer "I Can't Wait to Get Off Work (And See My Baby on Montgomery Avenue)" has a simple musical arrangement, boasting only Waits' voice and piano. The lyrics are about Waits' first job at Napoleone Pizza House (still at 619 National City Blvd, National City, CA) in San Diego, which he began in 1965, at the age of 16.
Themes
At the time of the recording of
Small Change Waits was drinking more and more heavily, and life on the road was starting to take its toll on him. Waits, looking back at the period said:
I was sick through that whole period [...] It was starting to wear on me, all the touring. I'd been travelling quite a bit, living in hotels, eating bad food, drinking a lot - too much. There's a lifestyle that's there before you arrive and you're introduced to it. It's unavoidable.
In reaction to these hardships Waits recorded
Small Change (1976), which finds Waits in much more cynical and pessimistic mood lyrically than his previous albums, with many songs such as "The Piano Has Been Drinking" and "Bad Liver and a Broken Heart" presenting a bare and honest portrayal of alcoholism, while also cementing Waits' hard-living reputation in the eyes of many fans. The album's themes include those of desolation, deprivation, and, above all else, alcoholism. The cast of characters, which includes hookers, strippers and small-time losers, are for the most part, night-owls and drunks; people lost in a cold, urban world.
With the album Waits asserted that he "tried to resolve a few things as far as this cocktail-lounge, maudlin, crying-in-your-beer image that I have. There ain't nothin' funny about a drunk [...] I was really starting to believe that there was something amusing and wonderfully American about being a drunk. I ended up telling myself to cut that shit out."
However, beyond the serious themes with which the album deals, the lyrics are often also noted for their humour; with songs such as "The Piano Has Been Drinking" and "Bad Liver And A Broken Heart" including puns and jokes in their treatment of alcoholism, with the added humour in Waits' drunken diction.
Reception
It received critical reviews equal to or better than Waits's previous albums, but was at first a surprise commercial success, rising to #89 on the
Billboard chart within two weeks of its release. However,
Small Change fell off the
Billboard Top 200 three weeks later, and Waits was never to better its position until 1999's
Mule VariationsMule Variations is an album by Tom Waits, released 1999 on the ANTI- sub-label of Epitaph Records. It was Waits's first studio album since 1992's Bone Machine . It won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album and was nominated for Best Male Rock Performance for the track "Hold On"...
.
When asked in interview by Q Magazine in 1999 if he shared many fans' view that
Small Change was the crowning moment of his "beatnik-glory- meets-Hollywood-noir period" (i.e. from 1973-1980), Waits replied
Well, gee. I'd say there's probably more songs off that record that I continued to play on the road, and that endured. Some songs you may write and record but you never sing them again. Others you sing em every night and try and figure out what they mean. "Tom Traubert's Blues" was certainly one of those songs I continued to sing, and in fact, close my show with.
Artwork
The model posing as a stripper on the album cover is
Cassandra PetersonCassandra Peterson is an American actress best known for her on-screen horror hostess character Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. She gained fame on Los Angeles television station KHJ wearing a black, gothic, cleavage-enhancing gown as host of Movie Macabre, a weekly horror movie presentation...
, who later created the
horror hostHorror hosts are a particular type of television presenter, often tasked with presenting low-grade films to television audiences.In the early days of television, stations needed programming, and local stations frequently produced their own shows in-house, covering the gamut from children's fare to...
character Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.
Track listing
All songs written by Tom Waits.
Side One
Side Two
Personnel
- Harry Bluestone – violin, concertmaster strings
- Jim Hughart – bass
- Ed Lustgarden – cello, orchestra manager strings
- Shelly Manne
Shelly Manne , born Sheldon Manne in New York City, was an American jazz drummer. Most frequently associated with West coast jazz, he was known for his versatility and also played in a number of other styles, including Dixieland, swing, bebop, avant-garde jazz and fusion, as well as contributing...
– drums
- Lew Tabackin
Lew Tabackin is a jazz flautist and a tenor saxophonist. He is married to Toshiko Akiyoshi, who is a jazz pianist and a composer/arranger....
– tenor saxophone
- Tom Waits
Thomas Alan "Tom" Waits is an American singer-songwriter, composer and actor. Waits has a distinctive voice, described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car."...
– vocals, piano
- Jerry Yester
Jerry Yester is an American folk rock musician, record producer, arranger.Growing up in Burbank, California, Yester formed a duo with brother Jim, the Yester Brothers, and starting playing folk clubs in Los Angeles in 1960. While Jim was in the army, Jerry joined first the New Christy Minstrels,...
– arranger & conductor of string section
External links
- MacLaren, Trevor, "Tom Waits: Small Change", 2004 March 2 All About Jazz.com link