"Baby Gonna Leave Me"
'Real Gone', 2004
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Fifteen songs in and "Baby Gonna Leave Me" is the first normal, on-a-proper-album Tom Waits song where I looked at the title and drew a total blank. Real Gone has never been my favorite Waits album, but I would have thought I at least knew all the songs. Apparently not.
Despite the title, "Baby Gonna Leave Me" is not some old blues cover. Tom clearly knows it sounds like one though; the lyric "I'll get my 32-20 and it'll have to do" directly references Robert Johnson's "32-20 Blues" (which Bob Dylan has covered).
Tom spoke about Real Gone's blues influence in an interview with the San Diego Union Tribune, though he basically ignored the Johnson part of the question:
Q: [Ray Charles] was a master of so many styles, including the blues, which has always been a vital part of your music. But the blues influence feels more pronounced on "Real Gone." For example, the way your microphone overloads as you sing on some tracks suggests Little Walter, only with him playing his voice instead of a harmonica. You even have a fleeting lyrical reference to Robert Johnson in the song "Baby Gonna Leave Me" in the line: "I'll get my 32/20 and it'll have to do." Are these coincidences, or are they intentional?
Waits: Well, you know, I throw all that stuff in there because it's always going around in my head. If it seems appropriate, I'll stick it in.
Overloading the mic is like, if you listen to all the records Little Richard did on Specialty, the mics were always being overloaded. No one had ever done anything like that before. There were probably people in the studio saying: "No, no, don't hurt the mic!"; and "Get that man off the piano!"; and "No playing (piano) with your feet!" He was un-containable - he was talking in tongues! - and the equipment hadn't caught up with the level of emotion coming from him.
What happens with me is, I heard the needle being mashed down and those great mics being trashed, and it creates an energy in the music. It's like somebody wincing. It's like scratching off the linoleum or breaking a window, and you still feel it (now).
"Baby Gonna Leave Me" features a genre we've seen a few times already, which I'm starting to think of as nightmare-beatboxing. Ultimately, though, "Baby Gonna Leave Me" feels like a lesser example than the other ones we've see ("Ain't Goin' Down to the Well," "All the Time," last week’s "Babbachichuija" sort of). The sound is cool as hell — biographer Barney Hoskins termed it “a gratuitous splurge of deranged noise" — but there's not much of an actual song underpinning it. It could have easily been cut from Real Gone and kept as a bonus track or something.
Waits only performed it a few times live, but I found video of one of those times, in London on November 23, 2004. As always when the studio recording features him sing over his own beatboxing, I wondered how he'd pull it off live. Seems like he just played a recording of the beatboxing and sang over it, which is slightly disappointing compared to doing it all live like “All Stripped Down”, though it is fun to watch drummer Brian Mantia at work. It starts at 1:09:58