"Black Box Theme"
'The Black Rider', 1993
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Listen to the first ten seconds of “Black Box Theme.” You might assume, as I did, that someone was going nuts on a xylophone or marimba. But that sound is actually an extremely cool Indonesian musical instrument called an “angklung.” This video shows it in action:
The only other Waits song to feature the angklung is “Shore Leave,” off Swordfishtrombones a decade earlier. I admit I have more trouble making them out the mix though; I think that’s them in the background at 3:34? Listen for the sound of tin cans there, apparently. In a press interview promoting the album, Tom said, “I tried to add some musical sound effects [to ‘Shore Leave’] with the assistance of a low trombone to give a feeling of a bus going by, and metal aunglongs the sound of tin cans in the wind, or rice on the bass drum to give a feeling of the waves hitting the shore.”
“Black Box Theme” also marks our first song from The Black Rider. As noted when I wrote about “Alice,” this album was really the soundtrack to a play, Waits’ first with director Robert Wilson. The “Black Box” theme, it turns out, is one of the first sounds the audience in the theater would have heard. It soundtracks the opening moments of the play, before the devil begins to sing. Wilson explained how the play begins in an interview:
I made a prologue to introduce the company. It begins with a black box standing up. The devil and the entire company come out of the box until they all stand in a line in front of the stage, as in a circus where all artists are introduced at the beginning. Then the devil sings a song [“The Black Rider”]: "Come on along with the Black Rider, we'll have a gay old time. Take off your skin and dance around in your bones. I'll drink your blood like wine. Come on along with the Black Rider, we'll have a gay old time..." Anyways, the audience gets a certain idea what the piece is going to be like. Then the characters disappear and the black box gets bigger and bigger, until the whole stage is engulfed in this black spot.
From Wilson’s website, here is a picture of the titular Black Box. So picture the devil emerging from this the next time you listen to this piece of music. Along with that Indonesian guy playing “Happy Birthday” on the angklung.
