12/25/2023 0 Comments Songs like dreams and nightmares![]() The music is a Waitsian concoction of pop, vaudeville, rock, cabaret, and blues. When the album appeared in September 1993, it was the first exposure to the tale for most people, even hardcore Waits obsessives. But he’d seemingly considered a Black Rider album all along, as half the tracks for Waits’s version were cut in 1989 in Hamburg during the making of the play. It premiered in Hamburg in 1990 and Waits went on to make Bone Machine. The musical this rogue’s gallery concocted was equal parts tragic and terrifying. In a 2006 podcast interview with Joel Selvin, Waits described Burroughs as “Mark Twain mad at you with a gun.” Burroughs, but the tragic 1951 accident in which Burroughs fatally shot his wife had to be somewhere in the director’s mind. There were probably plenty of reasons he chose Beat godfather William S. Wilson picked an equally outside-the-box artist to write the play. Using that last bullet in a shooting contest on their wedding day, the clerk takes aim at a wooden dove, but the bullet finds and slays his bride. To impress her father and win his bride, the young man, who can’t hit the broad side of a barn, makes a Faustian pact in exchange for magic bullets mysteriously guaranteed to hit anything he takes aim at, but the devil retains control over one bullet. Thumbnail plot sketch (spoiler alert): a young couple is forbidden to wed by the woman’s forester father because her beau is a clerk, not a hunter. ![]() Wilson-Burroughs-Waits telling is a dark, symbolic, and comedic affair. That version featured an altered (happy) ending. At the time, Wilson shared, “In my work, the emotion is sometimes hidden or buried and Tom’s music has a very deep emotional center for me.” Wilson was working on The Black Rider, a stage adaptation of an old German folk legend most famously told in Carl Maria Von Weber’s 1821 opera, Der Freischütz (The Marksman). The path to its creation began in 1988, when maverick playwright/director Robert Wilson needed a composer as unreservedly off-piste as himself to help craft his new musical. ![]() Not a cast album, this release is Waits’ interpretation and performance of the songs he had originally created for the stage production of The Black Rider. The Black Rider is a musical comedy/horror collaboration between three powerful American artists: Robert Wilson (director/designer) writer/Beat guru William S. A year after hammering his art down to its primal essence with the Grammy-winning apocalyptic stomp of 1992’s Bone Machine, Tom Waits ushered in a strange new beast on The Black Rider, with help from a legendary Beat author, an avant-garde theater visionary, and a nightmarish German folk tale. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |