Tom Waits Bone Machine

The 11th album from Tom Waits, 1992’s Bone Machine, was his first to arrive in the wake of the new “alternative rock” landscape carved out by the likes of Nirvana’s Nevermind, U2’s Achtung Baby, and R.E.M.’s Out of Time. A consummate record-industry outsider for 20 years, Waits had a long discography of uncompromising sounds, experimental urges, and lyrical misery. But whether by accident or design, Bone Machine would end up as the most abrasive, cacophonous album of his career, clanging with errant percussion and sandpaper-throated howling about existential dread, death, and the apocalypse. Yet this was the early ’90s, a time when even the most out-there artist could find some space in the mainstream (which partly explains how Bone Machine wound up winning a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album). Recorded in a cavernous, un-soundproofed former cement hatchery in California, Bone Machine found Waits cobbling together a scrap heap of percussion, resulting in an album full of rust and decay. “In the Colosseum” features Waits playing the “conundrum,” his bespoke percussion collection that he whacks with a hammer, and that he once described as being akin to “hitting a dumpster.” Meanwhile, “Earth Died Screaming” finds Waits and a handful of co-conspirators trying to capture the sound of Smithsonian field recordings by banging two-by-fours against stones or wood. And “Such a Scream” features characteristically booming drums from future Guns N’ Roses drummer Brian “Brain” Mantia. Between the chaos, Waits provides some of his most tender ballads, like the tragic “A Little Rain,” inspired by a news story about a 15-year-old girl who accepted a ride in a stranger’s van. There’s also the sorrowful “Whistle Down the Wind”—which features keening violin and accordion from Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo—and “That Feel,” a highlight of Waits’ years-long bromance with Keith Richards, as the two duet on a wistful ode to the ephemeral. There’s also the tune “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” which received some attention from MTV—thanks in part to its Jim Jarmusch-directed video—but it wouldn’t break out until a few years later, when the Ramones turned the song into a pop-punk protest. It wasn’t the only Bone Machine track to enjoy a long pop-culture legacy: The twangy Hollywood fantasy “Goin’ Out West”—described by Waits as “just one of those ‘three chords and real loud’ things”—would be immortalized as the song playing right before Brad Pitt’s character explains the rules of Fight Club. Somehow, the harshest, strangest album of Waits’ career would be one of his most impactful.