Tom Waits and his dad, Frank.
Ever since I first noticed in 1999 how often Tom Waits refers to the Moon, I’ve wondered what else could be said about it, other than Tom Waits likes to refer to the moon. At least one valiant attempt to really get something said has been made, but I don’t think a “big picture” has ever been drawn. I’ll give it a try.
Waits has said he likes his songs to have some weather, a map in case you get lost, and something to eat in case you get hungry. This strategy — of, sort of, getting enough furniture into his rooms that you can live them — winds up being crucial to how his fans react to his work. People who love Waits clearly love doing the work involved in sorting out his references. They ask, what’s Mulligan stew? Where’s Murfreesboro? What’s a big black Mariah? Who’s Wilson Pickett? And the moon is part of this same song writing strategy — often, Waits even gives you the phase of the moon, maybe so you can find your way around in the dark.
Reading over the list of moon references, I’m reminded of my own aim for The Celestial Monochord, which is like the challenge some artists set for themselves — if you only stick to one medium and one theme, you could explore the whole world through them. It hardly matters what you choose — you can pull the entire universe through a little buttonhole. The iterations, the returning to the subject over and over again, eventually polishes the subject into a mirror that will reflect whatever you put in front of it. The moon face is ever-changing but repetitious, and seems to invite an artistic project like that. Waits chose the moon as one of his Great Themes — but really, it could have been anything.
Waits has always been an outlandishly romantic writer. Of course, especially lately, I mean romantic in the sense that the love notes he sings to his wife Kathleen can be heartbreakingly sweet. But, especially early in his career, I also mean that other romanticism — an unrestrained belief in impractical fictions, a body-and-soul dedication to lovely baloney. For example, Waits has said that he’s embarrassed by his early work, when he pursued the romance of the Great American Drunk (and he made sure that life and art did uncanny imitations of each other). And so, what could possibly be a brighter sign spelling “romance” (in both senses) than the moon? In a recent song, Waits asks, “What could be more romantic than dying in the moonlight?”
Waits is one of those musicians I mentioned earlier in the context of Mike Seeger — a middle class adventurer in revolt against his class, one who “can come most fully into possession of himself only in disguise.” As a young man, in the name of searching for his own true nobility — the diamond in his mind — he fashioned himself into one of The Common Folk that lived in his imagination. He renounced his Nobility in order to find it again.
In this context, I think about a line from “Shore Leave,” in which a sailor on leave writes home wondering “how the same Moon outside over this Chinatown fair could look down on Illinois and find you there.” It’s a reminder that the moon really does have a “universality” to it — it’s leveling, a commonality. The very same moon has been seen by Plato, Genghis Khan, Galileo, Hitler, Shakespeare, George Bush, Regis Philbin. It’s the ultimate folk image, because it’s been independently, organically rediscovered by everybody who ever had eyes.
I think Waits has used the moon’s commonness, it’s dailiness (actually its nightliness, which suits Waits better) to insinuate himself among us, among the ordinary — something he has needed both artistically and personally. The image of the moon — with its powerful combination of romance and ordinariness — is an emblem of that transcendent quality which Waits has always sought in being just plain folk.