Rating: N
Listening to Real Gone, you can picture Tom Waits checking out the White Stripes and thinking, “Yeah, I could do something even more simple and raunchy – and finish the whole album by suppertime!” Waits has gotten down and dirty with the blues many times before, but never have the Beefheart-filtered results sounded so consciously fucked up. It wouldn’t be at all surprising to discover that he’d cut his vocals straight to a hand-held cassette recorder while locked in the trunk of a rusted-out 49 DeSoto as he plinked on a cigar box strung with rubber bands. While you’ve gotta admire the don’t-give-a-shit attitude that inspired Real Gone, there’s really no reason to actually suffer through 14 tracks of Waits’s half-assed blather.