"Cold Cold Ground"
Every Tom Waits Song is an email newsletter covering just that, in alphabetical order. Find more info here and sign up to get it sent straight to your inbox:
The cover of Franks Wild Years features Tom holding an accordion. Accordion is not, as it happens, an instrument he actually plays. But you’d be forgiven for thinking he did listening to “Cold Cold Ground,” a track with accordion about as prominent as it ever is in his discography. (David Hidalgo, who I last wrote about playing Latin jazz guitar and castanets on “Back in the Crowd,” handles it on this track.)
The accordion on the cover, and on this song, was in fact a core part of the Steppenwolf theater play Franks Wild Years that preceded the album. When Tom went on David Letterman to promote Rain Dogs in 1986, Dave asked him what this new play he was working on was about. Tom answered: “It’s about an American psychopath who plays the accordion and goes off to Las Vegas and ends up in blood stained Texas.”
I wondered if the song always features an equally prominent accordion when he plays it live. The most famous version, from the live album/film Big Time, certainly does. You can’t see it, but you sure can hear it.
Things got more interesting in the 2000s. Several times, once in 2003 at New York’s Avery Fisher Hall at a benefit organized by Hal Willner and again a few years later at Neil Young’s annual Bridge School benefit shows, Waits collaborated with the Kronos Quartet. Both times, they included “Cold Cold Ground” in their set, with the two violins, viola, and cello essentially substituting for the accordion part.
Here’s audio of the Avery Fisher Hall one, which didn’t make the official release:
And here’s a video of the Bridge School one:
Without the Kronos Quartet though, the accordion soon returned. Here’s a pretty-good video from one of his final concerts, in Milan in 2008. You get a quick glimpse of the accordion at the end, but you can hear it throughout, just as prominent as it was in the studio version, and on the album cover.
This album cover is responsible for how I first heard Tom Waits and subsequently became OBSESSED. I started playing accordion in high school and ran across Frank's Wild Years at a flea market. The cover art caught my eye, and it was only a dollar. Rain Dogs was also in the pile, and it had a song called "Cemetery Polka", so I figured this must be accordion-heavy music. Although it wasn't what I expected, I immediately fell in love with the utter weirdness and beauty that is Tom Waits.