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When you search for calliope videos on YouTube, you get a lot of this:
Is it any wonder that Tom Waits would not only use an instrument that looks/sounds like that in his music, but name an entire song after it?
The calliope appears not only on this track, but also “Misery Is The River Of The World” and “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” all off 2002’s Blood Money (recently reissued along with Alice for the albums’ 20th anniversary).
Here’s how RagPiano.com describes the calliope’s history:
From the time the steam calliope was invented by J.C. Stoddard in the 1850s, it found a special niche in circuses and riverboats. Requiring a boiler to generate steam to blow through the pipes, calliopes ranged from 32 to 53 notes in scope, and some models could be heard for several miles. This was good for showboats or circuses announcing their arrival in town, but bad for the individual playing the device, and the premature onset of deafness was commonplace among calliope performers. By the early 1900s, many calliopes were automated through the use of a cylinder or roll, which didn't replace artists altogether, but helped to minimize their exposure to the noise.
In an interview promoting Blood Money, Waits confirmed that the instrument was, as he put it, “ear-bleedingly loud.” He added in a different interview (lotta people asking him about the calliope I guess):
It’s got 57 whistles. The sound is incomparable. You can scream right at the keyboard of a calliope and not be heard… There’s a motor in another room. Actually, a background in car repair is gonna help you more in working on a calliope than a background in music… I’m not allowed to play it around here. I have neighbors. It’s like a car up on blocks right now.
In one of the Annie Leibovitz photos for a Vanity Fair article promoting the album, you can see Tom sitting at his calliope:
You can see more of the instrument itself in this (low-res) outtake. It looks like those 57 whistles he mentioned continue down the back of the instrument:
“Calliope,” the song, is just calliope, the instrument, Tom playing the giant tubes along with regular collaborator Nik Phelps on trumpet. He’s no doubt having a whale of a time. At the end you can hear him loudly laughing in the background.
If you had to sum up Waits in one instrument it would be the calliope.