"Altar Boy"
'Orphans: Bastards,' 2006
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The play Alice, explored a few newsletters ago, included a song called "What Became Of Old Father Craft?"
The demo, which leaked in the '90s, sounds straight off of Small Change, just Tom in his woozy-drunk mode and a standup bass. He laughs periodically, and you hear the occasional traffic noise, as if it's being recorded outside. It even includes a chunk of the Lord's Prayer, recited in Latin (by someone else, I think) leading right into the line "I can order in Latin." It's also long, over six minutes, and it doesn't really justify that length.
When Tom recorded the Alice songs for an album a decade later, "What Became Of Old Father Craft?" didn't make the final cut. But he apparently did record it during those sessions, as an outtake version surfaced on the Orphans box set a few years later. Now retitled "Altar Boy," it more than cuts the runtime in half, tightening up the song. He also gives it a proper arrangement with piano and horns, rather than the jazzbo standup bass of the demo. It sounds like a proper song now, rather than the loose meanderings of 1992.
He also changed the lyrics fairly significantly. You can compare the two yourself at the Tom Waits Library. Most notable is that he cut most of the original first verse:
Now he's an altar boy, bound up in leather and chains
What became of old Father Craft
I'll never forget the Sunday he left
And gave me something special in the rectory
He's an altar boy
Corrected me in the rectory
And that's why I'm feeling so blue
Cause I'm an altar boy, what about you?
I'm just speculating, but maybe that "gave me something special in the rectory" business held an unwelcome new connotation after the Catholic Church scandals, which erupted in the decade between Alice the play (1992) and Alice the album (2002). The Boston Globe's investigations that inspired the movie Spotlight actually came out just a few months before Tom released Alice. At any rate, the formerly-titular Father Craft is gone from the new version, and the now-titular altar boy is made the song's new narrator - the lyrics becomes "I" instead of "he."
Here's the original six-minute "What Became Of Old Father Craft?" demo to compare: