Great Songs from My Favorite Year in Music: 1985, Part 29

Tom Waits - "Jockey Full of Bourbon"



(Album Release: September 30, 1985)
Yes, it's another one that was released on my fourteenth birthday. And what gift could have as equally thrilled me as freaked me the heck out? Why, Rain Dogs, of course! Alas, however, I was introduced to the tin pan alley meets New Orleans clapboard shack meets drunken Bowery saloon magic that is Tom Waits quite a bit after that time. But, my actual introduction to Waits' gravel-voiced poetry of debauchery and woe, as if Charles Bukowski somehow channeled Louis Armstrong, was through Rain Dogs. Normally, it's difficult and disappointing, in a way, to start with an artist's best album. Despite the sprawling gutter beauty of Rain Dogs, this was somehow not the case with mining Waits' catalog and acquiring later releases. Real Gone and Mule Variations are arguably just as good as anything else he's ever recorded. In other words, I love everything Tom Waits does. I'm a devotee. Listening to Tom Waits is like walking through a carnival after closing, not quite sure whether or not there is a roustabout with a knife hiding behind the flap of a tent, or a clown sitting alone in the lowest ferris wheel carriage, inviting you to partake in a nightcap from a flask secreted in his polka-dotted jumpsuit. Very few other lyricists could come up with something as sublimely depraved as "Bloody fingers on a purple knife / Flamingo drinking from a cocktail glass / I'm on the lawn with someone else's wife / Admire the view from up on top of the mast." Marc Ribot's guitar and Tom Waits' voice came together in this song serendipitously. It was as if they had been longing for each other throughout history. And it took Waits' oddball production directions, such as "Play it like a midget's bar mitzvah" to make it all work. The video above, with two brief interruptions including an appearance by Waits himself, is how the song appears at the outset of Jim Jarmusch's film, Down by Law. The imagery of New Orleans seems to enhance the song's power and vice versa.