Tom Waits 16: Bounced Checks and Beautiful Maladies

Besides being a very private man, Tom Waits is incredibly protective of his legacy. The lawsuits he’s won against advertisers that have borrowed his perceived style have financed his children’s college educations, and enabled him to record whenever he wants to, rather than according to the demands of a record company.

He also doesn’t like to be pigeonholed, and while he still performs some of his “oldies” from time to time, he generally avoids any connection to the barfly poet that graced most of his ‘70s work. That management contract ended around the time he married his wife, so there’s a pretty big dividing line between that Tom Waits and the one who emerged afterwards.

Various arms of Asylum Records anthologized that period in different ways. The US got the Anthology Of Tom Waits grab bag, while overseas markets got either the two-LP Asylum Years compilation or its truncated, resequenced CD version. In this century, Rhino used their access to the WEA catalog to issue Used Songs, which is more of a Hal Willner mix tape than an educational overview. Worth seeking out is the Bounced Checks import, which sported lesser-known album cuts, a few alternate mixes, a hilarious live exploration on “The Piano Has Been Drinking” and, best of all, an unreleased rarity in “Mr. Henry”, a classic portrait of a man stumbling home around dawn.

A lengthy sabbatical seemed to follow his somewhat high profile in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. In a move that screamed “contract obligation”, Island released Beautiful Maladies, a compilation of 23 tracks from his stint on the label. It’s a good introduction to that segment of his career, focusing on the rinky-dink orchestrations and vocals by way of a busted megaphone.

As the many one-off appearances, soundtracks and bootlegs can attest, there’s a whole pile of material not currently available. While some of the Island rarities and later nuggets have been collected, as we shall see soon enough, the Asylum period is likely to stay limited to those original albums. But we can dream, can’t we?

Tom Waits Bounced Checks (1981)—3½
Tom Waits Anthology Of Tom Waits (1984)—3½
Tom Waits Asylum Years (1984)—4
Tom Waits Beautiful Maladies: The Island Years (1998)—4
Tom Waits Used Songs 1973-1980 (2001)—3