Humphries - The Many Lives of Tom Waits

Wasted and wounded a bowed and battered figure, bent by the wind, scuffs around, then huddles on a street corner. A lamp-post his only friend. Neon rips the city sky. Theres a moon like a cuticle up there, patiently watching, and waiting

The scene shifts constantly, while remaining, somehow, the same: The symphonic city sound made up of subway, streetcar and siren runs on an endless loop; the backdrop traffic jam, crumbling tenement and subway steps; the cast panhandler, whore and drunk. And only the bar stool, isolation and alcoholic haze can help.

What the hell: one will prick his memory twoll numb the nostalgia and three might just help him forget. Memories, hell. A couple of shots will make them as faded as the photo of a fianc on a strippers mirror. He flicks a match beneath his thumb-nail and fires a cigarette. All the snatched, corroded and unwarranted memories are exhaled bitterly and moonwards in the smoke. He tugs the collar up around his neck and moves towards the bright, beckoning light

When everythings broken From inside looking out, its an urban hell out there. Like desolation row with a zip code. A place where the steam rises through the subway vents and makes every street look like its auditioning. Round the corner, beneath a street lamp, rain dogs howl at the moon, and the fire hydrants pump their useless water out onto a pavement that glistens and gleams like polished linoleum. The store fronts recoil from the neon glare, like an ageing hooker that cant bear the inquisitive light. From some tenement, a listless, crackling radio pumps out the tunes that no one bothers to hum anymore. Yesterdays songs, spluttering and cutting out, as the radio fails to make a connection.

And no one speaks English Heres where Spanish Harlem seeps onto 42nd Street. Youre going out there a nobody, Warner Baxter warns Ruby Keeler, as the first ten rows mouth along, but youve got to come back a star! Heres where bedlam gets into bed with squalor and celluloid dreams. This aint bling bling town; this is where the hoods from West Side Story slunk off, to open all-nite drugstores, so that when times got really hard, they could rob themselves. On that far corner, beatniks click fingers in synchronised cool, and stand, waiting for The Man. Nerves are played out through endless plumes of cigarette smoke. Blind brown-stones huddle together. Theres gotta be something more than this

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There are two coasts, East and West, with 3,000 miles worth of real life separating them. London is nearer to New York than New York is to Los Angeles. No wonder 90 per cent of Americans dont even have passports its a damn big country, why do they need to travel abroad? Who wants to cross an ocean? You stick your thumb out at the New Jersey Turnpike, and take Horace Greeleys advice You hitch a ride out west.

West is the frontier: the far end of everything. Its where characters from John Ford films still cling to the edge. The raising of every wooden church and timber school marking the birth of a new community, carving civilisation out of the endless sprawling wilderness. And each small but determined step echoes to a mighty swelling chorus of Shall We Gather At The River.

Today, its easier You can follow the long, snaking highway that bleeds across America. Soon the scabby blocks of New York are far behind; ahead lie wheat fields and mountains; desert and forest This is a terrain mapped in your minds eye by James Fenimore Cooper, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac. These are the heartlands the soul and steady heartbeat of the nation, dismissed by the elite of either coast as fly-over states.

But inside the car, its always night. Everything viewed at one remove, through the filters of shades, windshield, dust and the fug of cigarette smoke. The floor of the car is littered with Coors cans, burger wrappers and crumpled packets of Kents. The beat-up Buick eats up the miles, hurtling you nearer and nearer to the Pacific. Until, suddenly, youre out of the desert, and on the horizon palm trees stand sentinel. Then the neon takes over.

The shades stay on for a reason at Heart attack & Vine. The streets collide like a car crash and all the while, on every Hollywood corner, dreams live and die, seeping slowly down plugholes and into the sewers. Lives are worn through, beneath the sign that for nearly a century has offered hope, illusion and immortality Hollywoodland. A place where the good die young and the bad crumble under the weight of their broken dreams.

Los Angeles offers sun, palm trees and a limitless blue ocean. Thats what makes the city even more mysterious. Its the collision, and collusion, between the bright open space and the dark wickedness that lives behind the blinds of those big old mansions, crumbling along the low thousands of Sunset Boulevard. A cheap dick opens an eye: he sees empty cigarette cartons; cold coffee in Styrofoam cups; paperback novels with their spines shattered like the limbs of a war vet. In the corner, an unwatched television set howls endlessly, with nothing to say. A neon sign competes with the static from the radio and the hum of the refrigerator. Because hes on expenses, he blinks an eye out of the blind. Something blurred and vast registers. Outside, its America

Welcome to the theme ride of your imagination. Welcome to life lived behind the shades. Welcome to Waits world

Here are the ricocheted romantics bent out of shape by a broad who should have known better; the twisted psychotics; the loners; the losers Heres where the hobos ride the rails all their lives, because its the nearest thing they got to home. This is where a certain faded grandeur is de rigeur; you may be at the bottom of the pile, but youve still got to keep your shoes dry. And perhaps just perhaps shoes are the key to all this

Here are realists and romantics; pragmatists and poets; the dupes and the dreamers. A world where even the piano has been drinking, and the old guy slouched in the corner is hammering those 88s but wait a minute, hes not that old, though he looks mighty used is weaving a barflys tale of mystery and romance and poetry and imagination. Hes taking us to the heart of a Saturday night. His tender little trip inspired by a Sinatra-style reverie, a bruised and beaten soul, with a wisecrack and a tune for every bum in every bar from Manhattan to Malibu.