Written by | Dong Muzi
Listening to it is a cultural person. Hello everyone, here is the book reviewer's recommended book column "Urban Youth の Life Opinions". Twice a week, we're here to recommend a variety of good books, old and new.
The recommended book for issue 120 is Drunken Piano and Underground Blues: Tom Wiitz on Tom Wiez. It's a creative evolutionary history of Tom Wiitz's personality and music.
"I love adventure songs, horrific crashes, evil and heroism, romantic wilds and mysterious songs. I always wanted to live in it and never wanted to come out. "Tom Wiez
（Tom Waits）
He is an American musician, an actor, and a "son of the Beats" who has not been lost.
Despite his fascination with the atmosphere of decadence and depravity, Wiez arrives at artistic health. Wiitz is well-read and has a keen sense of contemporary pop culture. As for his rhetoric, it is as gripping as his diamond-accurate lyrics.
"Drunken Piano and Underground Blues: Tom Weiz on Tom Weiz", [Beauty] Paul Maher Jr., ed., Translated by Yezhi, Guangxi Normal University Publishing House, Xinmin Said, July 2020
Sentimental, absurd, weird... Those pompous words in youth literature, you can use to describe Tom Wiitz. Wiez is a singer with an overwhelming style. He once liked Bob Dylan, who later won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he was also a highly literary singer. At the same time, he is also a phenomenal actor.
Drunken Piano and Underground Blues: Tom Wiitz on Tom Wiez is the first tom Wiitz interview published in China. The book is in the order of eighteen records that Wiitz has released, and includes more than fifty interviews he has given to radio, newspapers and magazines over his forty years. It's a creative evolutionary history of Tom Wiitz's personality and music.
Tom Wiitz started out as a doorman at nightclubs and later entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The son of the Beats, along with Bob Dylan and Neil Young, was a contemporary singer-songwriter. Decadence, chaos, underclass and wandering... This is the lyric world of Wiez.
He always seemed deeply melancholy, as if ready to sell his soul for a glass of whiskey; he was fascinated by the lower classes of society and devoted himself to documenting heartbreaking romances. Wiez's unique bass is always a thing to remember. And his voice, "is as if after soaking in a bourbon barrel, hanging in the bacon room for months, taking it out and throwing it on the road and being run over by a car."
Indeed, Wiez looks like a drug addict, even though he hasn't been involved in drugs all his life. In the 1980s, when many rock singers were lost or sunk, Wiez completed the construction of himself, he pulled out the demon from the soul, filled the inner void, and built a whole auditory universe with one album after another.
In my opinion, the most fascinating thing about Weitz is the fusion of contradictions and changeable elements, and the continuous progress of creativity. Before moving toward self-destruction like other rock and roll players, he completes his personal nirvana by forming a family; he is obsessed with the atmosphere of decadence and depravity, but reaches artistic health; in interviews, he both reveals his temperament while creating mysteries and using wisdom to circumvent problems; he is approachable but inaccessible. Some critics say that Wiez "is a musician who is difficult to understand, at least from the looks of ugly or special" whether it is ugly or special. He has some nervous, eccentric and even absurd musical styles, and there are many lyrical minor keys that are diametrically opposed, quiet and sad.
Tom Waits is an American musician and actor. The distinctive bass, as well as the absorption of elements of pre-rock music, make up his style. Wiez has also appeared in a number of films, including Jim Jarmusch's Outlaws. His score for From the Heart was nominated for an Academy Award.
Over the course of nearly four decades of his career, Weitz's musical and artistic personality has changed. Times are changing, but Wiez has evolved in his own way and has not become a record company's marionette.
Moreover, Wiez's rhetoric is as gripping as his diamond-like lyrics. In Wiez's speech, we see: Alan Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Louis Armstrong, a street juggler, a billiard room regular, a tramp, a bard, Mark Twain, Charles Bukowski, Dean Moriarty, or the nameless singers in folk songs that Alan Lomax recorded for the Library of Congress.
Wiez was a practitioner of the great art of dialogue, and he made up stories like a touring performer or a tramp during the Great Depression who took a train to some unfortuated promised land. He seems to be one of the guys, as if he is the professional we all know, the best satirist, who can always come up with funny stories from lace anecdotes.
In fact, Wiitz is well-read, well-informed, and has a keen sense of contemporary pop culture. He never presented himself as a vitriol living in the past, even though his music eagerly borrowed from the past. Wiez has openly admitted that he is favored by music in various forms, old and new. He is everything, but he does not conform to the old ways.
As a phenomenal character actor, Wiez also played a series of outstanding roles, enough to make many Oscar nominees jealous. He was a tramp
(Aster Grass, 1987)
; A desert prophet on the brink of madness, tanned by the sun
(Domino, 2005)
; A male servant of count Dracula's house dressed in a corset and eating flies
(Four Hundred Years of Thrilling Love, written by Bram Stoke, 1992)
; A driver of a drunken limousine who was born out of nowhere
(Silver Sex, Men and Women, 1993)
。
In an interview, Wiez said: "It's not me who bury it, two days after the print music interview is printed, it will line up in the trash can." Interviews are uncountable, and they don't get locked in a vault and tie you up with what you say. "Drunken Piano and Underground Blues resembles a filing cabinet, when rock journalism was still dominant as an art form, and Wiez was one of the most valuable subjects.
Written by Dong Muzi
Edited by Luo Dong and Xu Wei
Proofreading Zhang Yanjun