Words by Dan Maloney//Illustration by Ryan Flynn
Chicago Auditorium Theater
August 9th 2006
Patience is a virtue many don’t own. As a youngster, I waited two months once to get a Castle Grayskull only to break the door off a month or so later. All those Saturday hours mowing the lawn and doing yard work ended up not being worth missing Saved by the Bell and California Dreams. However, I have waited 25 years to see Tom Waits and I can say it’s worth a million Castle Grayskulls, albeit with doors.

Tom Waits doesn’t usually tour. Fans of his know this and when word gets out that he is coming remotely anywhere close, you suck up the 80 bucks or so and make damn well sure you’ll be there. I was one of thousands of other Waits fanatics in Chicago that somehow got tickets to see him within the five minutes the show was on sale at Ticketmaster. This remarkable feat made my year as you have to ask yourself, “How long a whiskey drinking/ chain-smoking legend lives for these days?” I’m crossing my fingers.

The Auditorium Theater is part of Roosevelt University and is located in downtown Chicago. The place is probably where you were taken as a young child to see the Nutcracker with your grandparents or any other popular theater production involving cats or elves. The place is gargantuan with beautiful pastoral murals on the walls and big half-circle lights around the stage that look like Saturn’s rings done up Vegas style. The place oozes class and it doesn’t surprise me why a cat like Waits would choose this spot for a one-off show.

Due to misreading the Auditorium seating chart, my seats that were on the 2nd Balcony ended up being in the nosebleeds. Yuppies with binoculars sat, eyes affixed to the stage, with eager anticipation. There were aging hipster dads dragging their sons along the aisles, bored lucky kids who would easily be more stoked to see Fall Out Boy. Shrugging off my eyesore of a seat, I decided to attempt to drown my sorrow in a $6 beer, only to find that beer sales had stopped already, ten minutes before show time. Despite my two strikes, I reassured myself by thinking, “Holy shit, I am seeing Tom Waits,” and I think, “There’s a goddamn vibraphone on stage with a hodge-podge of tricked out bullhorns!”

Tom Waits came out like a creepy, shadowy circus ringleader. His fingertips sprawled out behind the dimly lit curtain like cumbersome spider webs getting blown around. When he finally came out into the stage lights you could tell it was Waits. Pork pie hat…check…grizzly unkempt soul patch…check…. thrift store suit…. check…. Tom was up there with his son Casey Waits on drums, long time bassist Larry Taylor, Duke Robillard on guitar, and multi-instrumentalist Bent Clausen. From where I was in the not so cheap but cheap seats the band looked like a ragtag ant orchestra, but one that filled the theater with booming precision.

The set heavily consisted of songs off of Waits’ last few records on Anti. Aggressive percussive numbers like “Hoist that Rag,” “Get Behind the Mule,” and “God’s Away on Business,” weave between the ballad-like tunes of “All the World In Green,” and “Trampled Rose.” The band was talented, following Tom as he waved his hands around, stomping like a frazzled conductor.

One of the highlights for me was a short two-song set where Tom got behind a piano with just Larry Taylor and did “Tango Til’ They’re Sore,” and Small Change highlight “Tom Traubert’s Blues.” The latter was a song that reminded me of my late grandfather, who did the waltzing matilda all over Europe in WWII. Waits at the piano somehow transformed the gigantic, speechless theater into a small jazz haunt. Despite the intimacy, Waits struggled through the earlier crooning tunes, gasping to push his beat up shoebox voice to maximum output.

One of the other Waits live staples I was looking forward to is his seamlessly witty stage banter. Waits is a born storyteller and I was expecting to blanket myself in his fables like a shit-eating grinned boy with cookies and milk. The banter ended up being minimal but entertaining nonetheless. Waits cracked on the commercialization of Chicago by saying, “I used to stay at a hotel on the corner of Belmont and Sheffield, a dump of a place. Nowadays friends of mine regard that area as a place the wife bought her sandals or bought a smoothie.” Most of the tidbits pertained to Chicago and seemed off-the-cuff enough to feel unrehearsed. Another story dealt with a cult Chicago hot dog stand, where the owner referred to Waits as “Shit Bag.” These stories end up being something your drunken buffoon friends would probably say after that troubling fourth Makers Mark, but seemed all the more hilarious and cool because it was Tom Waits.

Waits somehow got through 18 songs plus two encores without tiring too much or boring the attentive crowd. Out of nowhere, songs like the sinister spoken word, “What’s He Building in There,” and the beautiful ballad “Time,” somehow made the stretched set list. It was an interesting guessing game to see which era Waits picked a song from next, however no one seemed disappointed with any of his selections.

The night closed with the encores of “Day After Tomorrow,” “Singapore,” “Whistling Past the Graveyard,” and “Time.” The acoustic guitar driven, “Day After Tomorrow,” about a frustrated overseas wartime solider, shot straight to the heart of every bleeding heart liberal in the place, which I’m willing to bet was a majority. The song was a fitting, hushed closer that showed Waits can not only be the batty wild-eyed moaner, but also the contemplative intelligent crooner.

The show was a rite of passage for me. I will most likely talk about this show as vividly as people bloat about seeing Nirvana or seeing Hendrix at Woodstock. Not necessarily because the show was the greatest executed performance ever, but because I felt like I finally caught the groundhog that didn’t want to be fetched. I saw that animal that grudgingly peaked its head to play, only to sheepishly return to the shadows for a long time.