TOM WAITS ‘Blue Valentine (Remastered)’ – CD

$25.00 Inc GST

Out of stock

Description

Tom Waits had one of the wildest trajectories of any rock artist in the 1970s — or possibly ever. A regular presence in San Diego’s coffeehouse folk scene in the late 1960s, he was living out of his car when Herb Cohen, the manager for the Mothers of Invention and Linda Ronstadt, discovered him and helped to secure a record deal with the fledgling Asylum Records.

As the decade progressed, Waits grew weirder and woolier, indulging his penchant for weapons-grade schmaltz as well as his fascination with Beat jazz and the seedier byways of Los Angeles. His songs sprawled into strange recitations about gutter characters: strippers and barflies, hucksters and grifters, vagrants holding up lampposts and waitresses slinging hash. During it all, Waits maintained strict control over his craft — his music rarely seems haphazard — but bent his songs into new shapes to portray characters and convey emotions that didn’t have much of an outlet in pop music at the time.

Waits’ current label, Anti- is reissuing his first seven records, chronicling his time at Asylum Records. Among all the remasters in this series, from Closing Time to Heart Attack & Vine, Blue Valentine stands out as the finest in a great body of work. Newly remastered, they form something like a road trip through an America that maybe never existed except in Waits’ own head, or perhaps a novel about an artist defining himself against pretty much every major trend. A much-welcomed reissue and revisit into the darker and weirder face of the 70s!