Taking Sides: Nick Cave vs Tom Waits

Shit, no. Beefheart only has two unimpeachably great albums: Doc At The Radar Station and Ice Cream For Crow. The rest of his catalog is totally hit-or-miss (track-by-track, album-by-album), and Trout Mask Replica is wildly overrated.

Waits all the way. Cave is a ponce who should have a shelf-full of Faulkner first editions dumped on him from a great height.

That being said, in the past few years I listen to The Birthday Party rather frequently and rarely listen to either Waits or Cave.

I think adding in The Birthday Party records and the choice between these two is much less cut and dry.

from this site alone - http://www.blogjam.com/neil_armstrong/ - I'd take Neil, but that's just me.

Tom Waits, however.....even in his more bizarre moments like The Black Rider...has never seemed as menacingly unhinged as Cave.

Thing is, you could say all these things about Cave as well!

or risk detroying the universe as we know it... .

very well then,

Tom Waits..

FACE OFF!

Since Nick cut his hair, I'd have to give Tom's hat the edge in coolness.

consistency always wins over weirdness dontcha know!

She's probably better off this way than looking like Tom Waits, so...Nick Cave.

She's probably better off this way than looking like Tom Waits, so...Nick Cave.

Yeah. I can't imagine P.J. Harvey looking like Tom Waits.

So the winner: Elton John. By a mile.

Truf.

Because he just said he didn't like it: if he went into some detailed reasoning then we could've argued as to how he's wrong ;)

''But not (the rest of it?) enough to try any of Tom's later albums? I'm genuinely surprised Julio! Rain Dogs is his best one too!''

I like the rest of it but I was just making a comment on how I really liked ribot's contribution to the record.

I'll def try some more tom waits (and nick cave). I just haven't got round to it.

I sort of like the symmetry of that statement, but it's not strictly accurate. Micturama or whatever it's called was a pretty patchy album but "Babe I'm On Fire" is as totally fucking wild and exuberant as just about anything this year.

Have you tried any of Marc Ribot's own stuff? I've heard some good things about The Prosthetic Cubans and Saints but I haven't actually heard them....

The real question is, which can smoke more tabs?

Wha? Have you never heard the skronky, malevolent majesty of "Fillipina Box Spring Hog"?

Oh, it's absolutely a generalization. I mean, it's not as though Waits has stopped writing pretty ballads, either.

Oh, come on: It's totally Decals! (ducks)

Whereas Cave, as over-the-top and absurd as he can get, never gave me the impression that he didn't always believe 100% in what he was doing. And I love Faulkner.

COLD WATER!

but overall pretty yawnsome!

BTW, Im hearing birthday party in some of the more avant-garde minimal style black metal lately.This is a good thing.

That said, we've got 16 Horsepower now so Nick may as well retire.

They both kick Beefhearts ass.Fuck Beefheart! that shit is irritating, like Zappa, just bullshit.

More of this perspective, please ^^^

For, it is correct.

It is about, as accurate

As, your idea of

Punctuation?

hating on Zappa is some half-informed bs

RONG

O I see well if the Wire said it

megalols

cogent counter-argument there

Daria g completely OTM upthread

TW is more likely to surprise (which is usually good), but NC has been more consistently JOTO...

-- Huckleberry Mann (Horace Mann), Monday, December 1, 2003 6:28 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark Link

a few years later it seems like you need to reverse this statement

Trout Mask Replica > All Cave and Waits. The latter two have good songs scattered about their careers, but I wouldn't be fanatical about either.

Well Nick Cave never wrote a song in my name so its going to have to be Tom Waits. Actually I take that back, I have respect for them both there are times I feel I have to ignore in their musical careers but for the most part, better with them than without.

i appreciate zappa but his sense of humor gets kind of tiresome

Haha Ian Penman OUCH: "a jack-off of all trades, and master of none."

My sentiments exactly.

this thread is pretty one-sided in favor of tom waits, but the last post here also predates, by seven years, nick cave losing the first of his two sons, which profoundly changed him and his music. i wonder if ilx people feel the same way today, in light of all that's happened. i love both cave and waits, but i am more deeply affected these days by nick cave.

i'm deeply affected by Cave being a reactionary nobhead

same

The more Cave opens up and reveals himself = dud

The more Waits opens up and reveals himself = classic

Re: Cave -- I don't like all the Red Hand Files posts but there are some beautiful words within them. Honest and forthright with the thorniest topics. Lyrical and eloquent even when spouting vague nonsense.

Every morning he swims in the closest body of water, regardless of location or temperature.

So many documentaries!!!

Our Alice got asked about Nick...

https://photobucket.com/share/4bc4f583-2ccc-4c48-bd48-1f16d17be82c

https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/y161/MarkGrout/AliceArticle.jpg

https://hosting.photobucket.com/images/y161/MarkGrout/AliceArticle.jpg

Waits has done the sensible thing of keeping well hidden and preserving the mystique. Cave has done the opposite; he was always best as an actor - pretending to be a vampire, pretending to be a murderer, pretending to be leonard cohen. the more he reveals of himself, the less I find myself wanting to listen to his music. I wonder if he'll be answering any questions on his website about palling around with Rod Dreher at dinner parties.

I could care less about Cave's reactionary views, his support for Israel or who he hangs out with. He's a fantastic singer, songwriter, lyricist and performer, and that's good enough for me. And his book Faith Hope & Carnage is extraordinarily beautiful and moving.

Absolutely no contest. Cave's increasingly horrible politics aside, he has to be one of the most overrated artists of our time. Birthday Party are fun, and 80s/90s Bad Seeds had their moments, but as soon as he bought into his own mythos and tried to become the next Cash/Cohen/Dylan he became a middlebrow bore. I find his singing on the last few records painful, and the overblown Christian rock of Wild God is a big pile of arse.

I'm not a huge fan of 70s Waits - some fine songs, but the Bukowski barfly persona is a bit corny. His schtick, songwriting and arrangements got much more interesting in the 80s. I can understand why some might find him to be a middlebrow listener's idea of an avant-garde artist - a more Mojo friendly version of Beefheart - but I think it's better to see him as a classic American songwriter who just wants to make things more interesting. Sometimes he can be overly theatrical for my tastes, but there's no denying songs as great as Downtown Train, Jonestown Illinois, Earth Died Screaming, I Don't Want To Grow Up etc. The latter was covered perfectly by The Ramones, so extra points. He's a fantastic actor too - recently rewatched Bram Stoker's Dracula and his Renfield is more nuanced and pathetic than I'd remembered.

If we're taking it down to the Cash test, Waits wrote the superb Down There By The Train for him - one of Cash's great performances. When Cave duets with Cash on Hank Williams' I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry he hams it up painfully, just awful.

So Waits all the way.

I'm a bigger fan of Waits, but the scales are a little unbalanced here. Waits hasn't toured since 2008, and hasn't released a new album since 2011. If we used that same cutoff date, then the last two Bad Seeds albums would have been "Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus" and "Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!", two of Cave's best. I haven't been a fan of his musical direction since then, though by all accounts he's remained a pretty rousing performer. I get the accusation that his act is all a, well, act, but he seems pretty dedicated to it, whereas Waits's activity the last several years has been more or less limited to *only* acting, and not really as that fantastic an actor at that, imo. Though one of my all-time favorite scenes (and Waits roles) is in Short Cuts, when he angrily throws down a little plastic bottle of booze that instead of breaking dramatically just comically bounces off the ground.

Anyway, they are both pretty consistent creations, with Cave sort of embracing a kind of radical honesty (for better or for worse) and Waits going for ... I dunno, radical dishonesty? His sentimental side and junkyard affectations sometimes seem just as phony as Cave's shallow fire and brimstone thing. But Waits is certainly one of the funnier interview subjects out there, for all the bullshit he drops. Whereas Cave, who could maybe use a better collaborator (like Waits has been lucky to have), is such an earnest interview subject that it can feel a little exhausting. But I likewise though Faith Hope & Carnage was pretty powerful.

If I had to choose one I'd prefer to be active and one I'd prefer to be semi-retired, I'd definitely prefer Waits be the one out and about.

I wonder... when Tom Waits writes a song for someone else to perform, does he record the demo version in the full "Tom Waits" voice, or does he revert to the Closing Time voice?

Speaking of AI, let us not forget the major victory Waits landed when Fritos hired someone to ape him and Waits sued and won.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNIJWCNEzTw

This was real, though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYOMPU18QjA

Surprised I've never commented on this thread, but it's a near and dear topic. Waits and Cave, along with Mark E Smith and Shane McGowan were the people (or personas) that defined how I think about words inside music. They were all ridiculously wordy, without the effortless ridiculousness of Dylan. My brain in my 20s felt so wordy, so incapable of resolving all the play and puns and references to get at how I really felt about myself in the world. These guys' verses were intoxicated stumbles through city streets that acted as a guidebook to emotions I couldn't grapple with by other means. Novels and movies fell short of what their songs could unearth.

They had a level of exaggeration and self-consciousness that kept me guessing and bemused for years. That Brechtian alienation tied in with my other literary interests - artifice that seemed to get to a deeper truth that realism couldn't touch.

There were times I'd get tired of the schtick and stop listening. Bad as Me, Real New Fall Album and Your Future Our Clutter, Lyre of Orpheus/Abattoir were all strong enough to resuscitate old enthusiasms.

All the comments in this revive resonate with me.

I did a close listening of the Waits catalog a year ago, I didn't find much I didn't love. Alice and Blood Money rose the most in my estimation. Watching 80/90s TV performances blew me away, but Big Time remained too theatrical for me, as it did when I saw a screening back in the day. The fez 'n' fedora visuals work really well at a certain dosage, beyond which they don't at all.

Cave though - I don't connect with anything after Lyre, but I can see why stuff like "Jubilee Street" resonates in pop culture more than his earlier work. I read the newsletter and cringe mostly, but also find thoughts that work for me more than his last two decades of songwriting. I don't like that he dropped the mask (The more Cave opens up and reveals himself = dud), can't listen to his stuff right now, but Your Funeral could hit me hard again any day. That one is also, perhaps, the most of a full-band effort in his solo career.

Mick Harvey was a lot of the Bad Seed magic in retrospect. Warren Ellis seems like the friend and collaborator Cave needs at this stage in his life, but a real drag on what I found musically animating. Rowland S. Howards' discography provides 100% of what need from that scene as long a modern-nobhead Cave makes the back catalog less palatable to me.

But hey, at this age, I don't need role models, and all of these guys' best moments owe tons to their collaborators. The four of them were involved with creating a demimonde songbook that is very rich, very funny and can still move me.