“Are you still jumping out of windows in expensive clothes?”
Actually the future seems even darker now than back in ’92 while “Bone Machine” and it’s hypnotic textures, noisy percussion and experimental glows are still sounds fresh and its rich lyrics are still very actual.
“What does it matter, a dream of love / Or a dream of lies / We’re all gonna be the same place / When we die”…
What Tom Waits, Keith Richards, Les Claypool and David Hidalgo have in common? The bone machine. Several songs from the album were covered by several artists: “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” was covered by The Ramones for their last album, “Adios Amigos”, but also by Petra Haden and Bill Frisell on their album collaboration “Petra Haden & Bill Frisell” (2003), by Hayes Carll on “Trouble In Mind” (2008), and by Scarlett Johansson on her debut album, “Anywhere I Lay My Head” (2008). “Goin’ Out West” has been covered by Queens of the Stone Age, Gomez, Widespread Panic, Gov’t Mule, the Blacks and Australian blues guitarist Ash Grunwald. This song also is featured in the 1999 film “Fight Club”, while “Earth Died Screaming” is featured in the 1995 film “Twelve Monkeys”, and “Jesus Gonna Be Here” is featured in the 2005 film “Domino”, in which Waits appears.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo4Y0TxW41g&w=540&h=435]
“Rudy’s on the midway
And Jacob’s in the hole
The monkey’s on the ladder
The devil shovels coal
With crows as big as airplanes
The lion has three heads
And someone will eat the skin that he sheds
And the earth died screaming
While I lay dreaming of you
Well, hell doesn’t want you
And heaven is full
Bring me some water
Put it in this skull
I walk between the raindrops
Wait in bug house square
And the army ants
They leave nothin’ but the bones
And the earth died screaming
While I lay dreaming of you…”
“Bone Machine” won a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album and in 1992 reached position 176 in The Billboard 200.
The cover photo, which consists of a blurred black-and-white, close-up image of Waits was taken by Jesse Dylan, the son of Bob Dylan.
Critically acclaimed, noted for its dark lyrical themes of death and murder, and for its rough, stripped-down, percussion-heavy blues rock style, “Bone Machine” was released on September 8, 1992.
Track list:
01. “Earth Died Screaming”
02. “Dirt in the Ground”
03. “Suh a Scream”
04. “All Stripped Down”
05. “Who Are You”
06. “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me”
07. “Jesus Gonna Be Here”
08. “A Little Rain”
09. “In the Colosseum”
10. “Goin’ Out West”
11. “Murder in the Red Barn”
12. “Black Wings”
13. “Whistle Down the Wind”
14. “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”
15. “Let Me Get Up on It”
16. “That Feel”
“Bone Machine” was recorded and produced entirely at the Prairie Sun Recording studios in Cotati, California in a room of Studio C known as “the Waits Room,” in the old cement hatchery rooms of the cellar of the buildings. Waits said about the bare-bones studio: “I found a great room to work in, it’s just a cement floor and a hot water heater. Okay, we’ll do it here. It’s got some good echo.”
Officially announced for release on August 23, 2011, “Bad As Me”, the upcoming seventeenth studio album will be released on October 21, 2011 by ANTI- Records and is Waits’ first album consisting completely of new material in seven years since “Real Gone” (2004).
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27LLPANAgzw&w=540&h=435]
“The ocean doesn’t want me today
But I’ll be back tomorrow to play…”
