Tom Waits Glitter and Doom

I'm not a real big "year in review" type of person, but we did do some pretty nifty things during the past 12 months. One of which was driving to Columbus, Ohio to see Tom Waits, quite likely my favorite musician of all time.

I mean, face it, how many people would I really drive to Ohio to see? Twice, in fact, as it was a couple years prior when we drove to Akron to see him play as well. The good news is that the Akron show was simply fantastic...and the better news is that the Columbus show made the Akron experience seem like eating a big pile or horse poo with hair mixed in with it.

Thinking about it, that sorta sums up Akron in general...but that's a different story.

Shortly after the Columbus show (or, for that matter, all the shows on the tour), there were hundreds of raves about the experience and many "what Tom means to me" type of gushings all over the net. Maybe the interesting thing about the cult-like following that Waits seems to get for his shows is simply the genuine appreciation everybody seems to have for his talent and engagement as a performer.

I don't have any personal enlightenment episode to share; I think my friend Josh summed it up quite nicely on a voice mail he left for me when he said, "holy smokes what a show." The set list was just a blast, starting with a rocking version of Lucinda morphed with Ain't Goin' Down to the Well, ripping right into Down in the Hole (at which point he could have ended the show and I still would have been happy as fudge), and closing with Time as if we were all in a fairy tale. But it was probably during Innocent When You Dream, when he engaged the entire auditorium in a singalong, that I realized I was probably at one of the best shows I would ever attend.

Huh, perhaps that is a personal enlightenment episode.

With any 400 mile trip to see a 2.5 hour show, there were a lot of fun ancillary stories as well. We were so blinded by rain at one point in the city of Columbus that we simply parked the car right in front of what turned out to be a great Italian restaurant, we went to The Book Loft which was a neat, and quite large, bookstore we had visited years ago, and we spent a good deal of the trip saying, "okay, really, this is the last time we are ever going to Ohio."

But the real gem under the investment of time and miles was the show. I'm glad we were fortunate enough to attend.