"Dirt in the Ground"

'Bone Machine', 1992

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Some days, “Dirt in the Ground” is my favorite Tom Waits song. But the first version I think of isn’t Tom’s own.

Let me back up. A short personal story.

I can tell you exactly when I got into Tom Waits. It was July 26, 2006. That was the day Bob Dylan played “On the Nickel” on his XM Radio show Theme Time Radio Hour. I’d first tried Tom the year before, downloading Rain Dogs from a shared server using my college campus T1 line (that was a big deal at the time), but didn’t make it through “Clap Hands” before pressing the stop button. “On the Nickel” finally hooked.

I wrote more about that in the “Clap Hands” entry. Point being for today’s purposes, summer 2006 is when I got my first taste I actually liked, and, thanks to aforementioned T1 line and ease of illegal MP3 downloading, got in deep fast. By the following summer, I was an expert. That summer, June 2007 to be exact, I went to Bonnaroo, the music festival in Tennessee. Tom Waits didn’t play there. But I saw a Tom Waits song performed anyway.

One band I was very into at the time (unlike Tom, it didn’t stick) was Cold War Kids. They were touring behind their first album, Robbers & Coward. It was very Band-indebted, weird and wooly, before the band pivoted to make radio rock like Diet Foo Fighters. My favorite song of theirs was and remains the propulsive and yelpy “Hospital Beds.”

Down in Tennessee one afternoon, it’s hot as hell, I’m packed into a side stage watching Cold War Kids. A few songs into their show, frontman Nathan Willett sits down at a beat-up old upright piano and start banging out familiar chords. He soon begins to yelp (his voice was very yelpy), “What does it matter…a dream of love or a dream of lies…” The drummer slammed various pieces of percussion, and all the band’s old-weird-Americana voices joined in on the chorus. The song was, of course, “Dirt in the Ground.”

This was probably the first Tom Waits song I’d seen performed live by anyone. And a relatively deep cut too, something only real superfans—of which I was newly one—would know. They sounded phenomenal doing it too, a perfect song for them. I was blown away. And the two minutes they played of it turned out to basically be an intro to one of their own numbers: my favorite song of theirs, “Hospital Beds.”

You can hear the pairing below, straight from the soundboard. It appears their “Dirt in the Ground”->”Hospital Beds” segue was short lived; the band did it for just a few months in 2007. According to setlist.fm, they’ve now played “Hospital Beds” 381 times. They’ve played “Dirt in the Ground” four. Bonnaroo ‘07 was one. (YouTube has a dark video of one of the others).

The next year, 2008, I returned to Bonnaroo. The festival put on a late-night superjam featuring Les Claypool and Gogol Bordello performing entirely Tom Waits songs (not, sadly, “Dirt in the Ground”). Kirk Hammett from Metallica, fresh off headlining the mainstage, sat in to shred on “Big In Japan” and “16 Shells From a Thirty-Ought-Six.” You can see a bit of it here:

Bonnaroo that year ended on Sunday, June 15. The next day, some kind soul on the Bonnaroo forums gave me a ride to the Nashville airport. I hopped a flight to Phoenix, a city I had never been before (or since). The next two nights, I saw, for the first and only time, the man himself. Tom was kicking off his last tour to date, Glitter and Doom, with two nights at Phoenix’s tiny Orpheum Theatre.

The second night, guess what song he played for the first time ever in concert, almost 20 years after he first recorded it?

“Dirt in the Ground.”

Here’s a fan recording of the song’s very first outing (which took me over a decade to find), from June 18, 2008 in Phoenix, almost exactly a year to the day after I saw Cold War Kids do the same song almost two thousand miles away.

So yeah. Some days, “Dirt in the Ground” is my favorite Tom Waits song.