Waits, Tom - Under The Influence

Actually Very Good
Unlike the other reviewer here, I have actually watched this DVD and my rating is based on the actual contents - not a presumption of what it contains. This film is a well made and entertaining feature - with a running time of almost 2.5 hours - about the artists who have influnced Tom throughout his career. The program is split into several sections each taking a different genre or artist and showing how Waits' music and/or style was informed by such. There is a fair amount of Tom Waits music and footage but also plenty of the artists who have provided him inspration. These range from Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski through Keith Richards and Captain Beefheart to Kurt Weill and Hoagy Carmichaeal - with time also given to Harry Partch, Ken Nordine and a range of others. All together this makes for a really interesting angle from which to view Tom Waits' music and career and I applaud the producers for coming up with somethig original and unique. If you're a true fan of Tom Waits I...

Waits from other perspectives...
These unauthorized critical examinations are really well-done, but generally essential only to the already-devoted fan. This is no exception. Waits, it needn't be said, is an enigma, and an American songwriting legend at this point. His music is instantly identifiable, from his gruff froggy vocals to his ramshackle, old-time vaudeville vagabond beat-poet persona. "Under The Influence" tackles exactly what inspired Waits through the years, and through the eyes of his collaborators and journalists, we see some of the jumping-off points that led Waits to forsake "pop culture" and embrace a timeless, historical context within his music and art. Beginning with the beat poets (especially Jack Kerouac), we get portraits of writers like Charles Bukowski and Ken Nordine, and musicians like Captain Beefheart, the Rolling Stones (chiefly friend and collaborator Keith Richards), avante-composer Harry Partch, and European songwriters Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht. Waits' widely-disparate...

Influences; inovation; expanding & reintroducing with perception
A great catalog of references that relate to the resources visible in the work of Tom Waits. Not a simple reworking or 'stealing' but an absorption and personalized use of influences drawn from major (if somewhat unfamiliar) sources with somewhat universal and compatible innovative approaches to expressing emotional & intellectual understanding of life. The absurdity, futility, injustice, and tragi-comic view of our common conditions with kudos to earlier (and current) artists who add to the vocabulary of artistic expression. A strong recommendation for this and the work of Tom Waits. A great musician, poet, word worker.

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