Word: hobos
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Waits' first release on indie Epitaph Records is also his first new album in six years. Like his literary cousins Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski, he returns to the same down-and-outs and restless souls, this time with more rumble, kick and bluesy musings than barroom rasped ramblings. Hobo yowler "Cold Water" will rattle in your head for days. Quieter moments are searing, Waits' gravelly voice bending like an old tree under the blade of a pocketknife. To top it off, he spikes the album with oddities like "Eyeball Kid." On Mule Variations, the music pounds and the lyrics...
...Freud. In 1923 Hart Crane, who wrote a poem about Chaplin, said his pantomime "represents the futile gesture of the poet today." Later, in the 1950s, Chaplin was one of the icons of the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac went on the road because he too wanted to be a hobo. From 1981 to 1987, IBM used the Tramp as the logo to advertise its venture into personal computers...
...real entertainment began when baritone Earle Patriarco's Sergeant Belcore took the stage. A classic miles gloriosus, this Belcore had a vapidity no strutting could conceal. Equally but independently ridiculous was bass Dale Travis' Doctor Dulcamara, a hobo-quack who bore an eerie resemblance to the poet Donald Hall. Dulcamara's vendor antics completely undercut his dramatic entrance and resonant "udite" ("listen!"), and his abracadabra, Darkwing Duck gesturings made one laugh out loud. If it hadn't been for the skillful comic acting of these two, the farcical plot would have been in awkward tension with the gorgeous music. Though...
...stop working. When I stop working, I hurt. My head, my back, my legs hurt. I get dizzy. I can't stop." However, in speaking as her younger alterego, Kingston acquired an oft-frustrated voice, touched with a confused innocence: "I don't want to hear Wino Ghosts and Hobo Ghosts. I've found some places in this country that are ghost-free. And I think I belong there, where I don't catch colds or use my hospitalization insurance. Here I'm sick so often, I can barely work. I can't help it, Mama." By reading out-loud...
...want to be left alone," says Doherty, whose back was injured in a tank accident in the Army. "When I come home from work and I've had a bad day, I watch The Lion King," he says. "It makes me cry." He has sheared his purebred Chow, Hobo, to look like a lion: "He's my buddy." Each night, Doherty drinks a 12-pack of beer. "It's the best pain-killer I know," he says...