"The Black Rider"
'The Black Rider', 1993
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Just a few weeks ago, a new interview with Tom popped up on YouTube. It’s from a recent documentary about his theater collaborator Robert Wilson, for whose plays he wrote the music for Alice, Blood Money, and The Black Rider. The full documentary is on YouTube here, and here’s the Tom-focused edit someone uploaded:
Most of that clip is Tom talking, but it does include a great anecdote from Wilson himself, describing a 4 AM phone call he got from Tom a few months before this was filmed. “I just found something and I want to share it with you,” Tom tells Bob. “Are you ready?” Then Tom proceeding to sing in what Bob calls “this high, clear voice, falsetto.” None of the usual gruff growl. Tom finishes, then says, “I never knew I could do that, and I had to share it with you. Bye.”
The Black Rider was Waits and Wilson’s first collaboration, written to a text by William Burroughs. The title song comes right at the top, just after the “Black Box Theme” I wrote about two posts back. The original production was filmed for German TV, so you can see both songs in action right at the start, the “Black Box Theme” opening soundtracking the titular black box from which emerges the cast, who sing “The Black Rider” led by the Devil himself:
And Tom was there! Not on stage — at least not at first. Though he wasn’t an actor in the production himself, in this older documentary (which is otherwise in German), you can watch Tom sing “The Black Rider” at opening night’s curtain call, shoved to the front of the stage to perform the song himself for the first time. I think that’s Burroughs standing a few people to Tom’s right.