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Hearing the title track from Bad As Me reminded me of the weird and wonderful " private listening party" Tom held on YouTube to promote the album. If you haven't seen it, it's worth watching:
If you're reading this somewhere you can't easily watch a video with audio on, a brief summary: Tom starts playing clips of songs from the new album. He gets an unexpected phone call and, 45 seconds in, turns off the music.
"We have a situation," he begins. "Apparently there's no such thing as private any more." The private listening party is off. "I'm gonna have to rethink this," he says as he leaves. "I'll let you know what we come up with." Which brings us to his new, even more private listening party: Fans listen to the album one-on-one sitting next to Tom in a rusted Volkswagen Beetle, after being patted down by a security guard:
Funny and odd as it is, this video is, of course, basically a commercial. One that, since it's the 21st century, appeared on YouTube instead of your local TV station. It made me wonder what other commercials existed for Tom Waits albums. Not music videos - plenty of those - but ad spots.
There were fewer than I suspected, but that might be because the more run-of-the-mill commercials from yesteryear — a photo of Tom’s new album with some narrator intoning when it would be out — didn't get preserved. The ads that did make it to YouTube are far more interesting.
The bulk of them promote Rain Dogs, and are a series of five short films. They’re each exactly 30 seconds long to fit in a TV ad slot, but only barely mention that there even is an album. It’s kind of like those Super Bowl ads that leave you wondering what the product even is (though, in the sense that the product here is Tom, more effective).
In the first, standing outside an umbrella, Tom defines the term "rain dogs" and sings one line of the title track. Believe it or not, that's more music than most of these have.
In the second, Tom sits on some stairs while sharing a shaggy-dog tale about "Bob Christ of Bob Christ's Chevrolet." Some music plays underneath, but it's so soft I can't even tell if it's from the album. A "Blind Love" instrumental version maybe?
Okay, this next instrumental I recognize, it's the musical break in "Walking Spanish." Tom gets his hair cut by a guy who looks like Harvey Keitel. The punchline, to the extend this even counts as one, is Tom asking the barber, "Who cuts your hair anyway?"
Tom smashes a clock with a hammer in the next ad.
In case you haven't caught on by now, other than the first clip where he defines the term “rain dogs,” nothing that Tom says in these has much to do with the album he’s trying to sell. It’s more the Tom Waits lifestyle on display.
Aha! Back to an actual album tie-in with the next one, where Tom Waits recites the lyrics to "9th & Hennepin." Though even here, it's not explicitly stated this is a track on his new album. It just sounds like random beat poetry.
No other album had such an elaborate series of ads as far as I can tell, but I found two for Franks Wild Years. Both feature Tom as a ventriloquist having his doll sing "Blow Wind Blow" (interesting choice, it wasn't a single I don't think). The high point is when he unscrews the doll's leg and slips out a fifth of bourbon concealed there. They’re both in this one video:
Leaping forward in time, there's a relatively straightforward YouTube ad promoting the Glitter & Doom live album. Nothing to see here, except that brief snipped of live footage makes me wonder, were the shows filmed in their entirety? In which case, when are we gonna see the rest of the footage??
And finally, the other one I remember in real time, and to my money still the best of all of these: The "press conference" promoting the Glitter & Doom. Saying too much about it honestly spoils the surprises, so I'll just leave you with one word: PEHDTSCKJMBA. (I was at the “P” in PEHDTSCKJMBA myself, something maybe I’ll write more about sometime).
And yeah that's the instrumental verse from "Blind Love"
As soon as you started on the commercial theme I thought PEHDTSCKJMBA and was hoping for a reference