"All Stripped Down"
'Bone Machine', 1992
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The first 40 seconds of "All Stripped Down" are a solo performance. But they don't sound like one. There are distorted vocals (Waits), background hollers (Waits), maracas (Waits), and some thumping percussion (also Waits). It's more a cacophony of noise than a song, really, but it's effective as hell.
He recalled in an interview, "We recorded it at home. I have this tape recorder at home that I love so much. I recorded all these really rough tapes on it and loved the grit that I got."
When the song itself starts, Waits is no longer alone - Larry Taylor plays bass and, more prominently, Joe Gore adds guitar leads. But it's still distinctly Tom's show, doing a distorted chorus-line all by himself. It sounds like an old girl group song distorted beyond recognition, several different versions of Tom in conversation.
I was curious how he could pull off these layered-vocals live. He hasn't tried often. But I found a couple live versions, one from a benefit show in 1996 and another from the Real Gone tour in 2004. Impressively, he manages to do both vocal parts in real time, lurching back and forth between a high falsetto and a more guttural low voice. I uploaded them here:
In the Bone Machine press kit, Tom described “All Stripped Down” as "about death, but it's also a sexy thing, too. It's like Jerry Lee Lewis. Walk a line between Jesus and girls," adding later, "They say that's what you have to do before you can get into heaven. You have to be all stripped down. You can't go to heaven with your body on. You just go up there with your spirit."
Always quotable, that Tom. But I like even more a line elsewhere in the press kit, apparently written by someone else. It describes the song as “a kind of Mardi-Gras-in-Purgatory that explains dress code for the Rapture."
Update April 2022: Aforementioned guitarist Joe Gore shares a few thoughts about this song:
On “All Stripped Down” I was going for the smallest, cheapest, tinniest sound I could get. I think I was inspired by Tom’s nasal-toned vocal. Tom’s rhythms are so irregular here! Ordinarily I probably would have counted out all the time are read from my notes, but like I said: Tom works fast. So I’m pretty much guessing where to come in, and I’m usually “wrong” — which turned out to be right for the song.
I like the funky guitar and the scary percussion. People would sit up straight if this was played loud in public.