There’s always something to howl about.

Just Like Tom Waits’ Blues

I was wandering through a funky used record shop the other week, checking out the price per square foot in the 1890’s boutique storefront (but really hoping to get lost in my distant past), when I heard the voice for the first time in a decade, maybe longer. It was a voice that has been famously described as sounding “…like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a car.” I stood without motion as I was drawn in by the familiar guttural sonnets dripping through the scratchy piped-in speakers of the tiny alley store with its 14 foot tin ceilings, whose lease, according to my listing sheet, would expire in less than a month. At that moment, I have to admit, I felt more like a nostalgic sap with a $50,000 line of credit than a realtor on a due diligence assignment.

An acrid Chex mix of sad, ironic and romantically laced phases cured in a molasses melody of piano riffs, circus tent trombones, and tubas thickened the air for several minutes at a time before being snuffed out between tracks into an imaginary ashtray of half-smoked Chesterfields.  And then, like the unnamed but ubiquitously published critic wrote so many years ago,  ‘run over by a car.’  More than likely, an Ol’ 55, if you’re still following my drift. 

The young guy behind the antique glass counter wanted to sell me an evenly worn Tom Waits vinyl disk, just like the one I used to own, for “$20 US.”  I told him I didn’t have a turntable anymore, or a tape player of any kind, or even a decent set of speakers worth mentioning although I did have a CD player in both of my rides. He shook his head and gave me a funny look as if to say, “Dude, nobody listens to CDs anymore.”  Or maybe he was just high. I know I probably was at his age. He was talking very loud because I was wearing those ear buds tethered with white wire that everyone walks around with these days and probably just assumed I was simultaneously listening to my iPod while checking out what was left on the picked over record racks; you know us 50-something, multi-tasking, Baby Boomers with our $500 gadgets, nostalgic tastes, and homes flushed with equity.  We can be idiots.

“You’re sportin’ the same lid,” he motioned, showing me the familiar classic album cover of Tom Waits in a porkpie Stetson. It’s April here in the Midwest but there’s still a nip in the air and I think by now it probably goes without saying in this venue, that I’m a hat guy from way back and possess the Kodachrome to prove it. I own a lot of’ ‘lids,’ as they, or he, would say.

porkpie earbuds Anyway,  I also find myself tooling around town these days with my ear buds connected to the iPhone in my pocket because the tiny, perfectly paired Apple iPhone Bluetooth that I bought for $150 keeps getting blown from my ear on the windy side streets of Chicago and because it’s now a $50 fine to chat or text  on the cell phone while driving within the city limits.  And as you might imagine, I’m usually doing all of the above.

And on the rare occasion I actually do listen to music on the darn thing, it’s usually something my wife downloaded for her Work-Out Class as we apparently now share the same iTunes account.  In other words, I’m stuck with,  you want a “Piece of  Me” rattling around in my mind…

“I’m Mrs. ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’…..I’m Mrs. ‘Oh my God that Britney’s shameless’…”  Seriously.  It’s stuck up there somewhere above the neck and beneath the porkpie. Anyway, I tell the kid that I’ll take the Waits album and hand him my Amex card.  He gives me the look again.

“Caaache only, mon ami… US, preferably,” he adds. I tell him in my best bowery brogue that I’ll be back  shortly with the double sawbuck and Chuck E. Weiss but I get side tracked and never return.  Two weeks later the space is empty.

I guess I’d like to own a record store for the same reason I’d like to own a movie theater, or a classic Austin Healey dealership, or a vintage guitar store; to just sit around all day and entertain myself and my friends, or shoot the breeze with whomever walks through the door and hopefully, provide a service or make a sale of some sort that doesn’t require a closing technique. 

But I know this is just a variation of the same quixotic notion I’ve entertained most of my conscious existence; that great fortune and much happiness possibly awaits me around  every corner and all I have to do is wake up each morning and make at least the minimum amount of turns around the block of Life. I once declared to a college professor that I was an Existentialist.  She disagreed. I believe she suggested the title, Hedonist instead.  

After looking up the definition, I split the difference and settled on my own hybrid; Hopeful Romantic. I once bought a coffee house because I simply liked coffee—and  come to think of it, you don’t hear me talking about that $50,000 disaster too much anymore. I’m not certain who was singing in the background of my brain when I signed that triple net lease but given the place and time—odds are it was someone at least as poignant as Van Morrison.