Worth his Wait in gold

IT IS more than 20 years since Tom Waits last performed in Ireland.

He is so cherished here, however, that he was met with a standing ovation the moment he walked on stage at the Rat Cellar, the large marquee erected in the Phoenix Park for the visit of his Glitter and Doom tour to Dublin. Waits grinned inanely, revelling in the adulation.

Then he got down to business. Waits’s singing has always been more of a croak than a croon, no more coherent with age. Even on a track like Rain Dogs, one could barely decipher what he was singing as “I want to dance with the Rose of Tralee”, but the audience cheered with gusto anyway.

Waits adopted the persona of a wrecked hobo poet early on in his career, and it is a role he has grown into. Indeed, in his black suit, boots and bowler hat, he looked like a refuge from Beckett’s Waiting For Godot.

He claimed to have bought the last dying breath of the late Henry Ford, on eBay: “It came in a coke bottle,” he dead-panned. “You won’t see many of those,” he said, revealing he keeps the bottle in his Ford car.

Waits’s band included his young sons, Casey on drums and percussion and Sullivan on clarinet, along with Patrick Warren from Dublin on keyboards.

Waits played electric guitar on tracks like Get Behind The Mule, acoustic guitar on Cold, Cold Ground, and piano on a handful of ballads like Tom Traubert’s Blues.

There was doom and gloom a-plenty, though it was leavened with a mordant wit, and as Waits sang “Make it rain! Make it rain! Make it rain!” on his final number that a shower of glitter fell from above him as rain thundered outside.

Waits returned for a three-song encore that included The Eyeball Kid, for which he sported a mirror bowler hat that reflected light all about the marquee. He finished with a mournful (It is) Time. “The band has gone home,” he intoned: “It’s raining hammers, raining nails.” And, as the crowd left there was a downpour as wild as Wait’s two-and-a- half hour set had been.