An old-blues hound, Waits now makes his own. "Lowside of the Road" rides a lo-fi sonic rumble made by instruments with names like Optigon and Chumbus and Dousengoni. The booze-soaked raunch called "Cold Water" stumbles along like an imaginary hobo who's hooked down some LSD with his hooch; Marc Ribot's bitingly thick-tongued guitar is hilarious. "Get Behind the Mule" uses delta-blues doggedness, a saying attributed to Robert Johnson's father and Chicago blues veteran Charlie Musselwhite's lurking harmonica to set jabbing vignettes of murder and fear that finish with a simple moral: "Pin your ear to the wisdom post/Pin your eye to the line/Never let the weeds get higher/than the garden/Always keep a sapphire in your mind/Always keep a diamond in your mind."

Our imaginary hobo ain't churchgoing, but he believes that how you live matters. "This world is not my home/I'm just passin' thru," Waits bellows in "Come On Up to the House," a few lines after wisecracking, "Come down off the cross/We can use the wood." That's characteristic. He holds nothing sacred, but like most of the people he meets, he has a code of ethics. And so the lyrics put old queries in moving ways and aren't embarrassed about exploring how most folks understand their lives: "If there's love in a house/It's a palace for sure/Without love.../It ain't nothin but a house/A house where nobody lives"; "You been whipped by the forces that are inside you"; or "sometimes there's nothin left to do/You gotta hold on, hold on, take my hand, I'm standing right here, you gotta hold on." Of course, the tunes also regularly turn maxims inside out. "Take It With Me" undercuts the cliché with a list of impressions and memories and the love of another, the things that survive. "Black Market Baby" is about "...a diamond that/Wants to stay coal." But Waits never lets hipster cool mask genuine heartbreak. Take the story of "Georgia Lee," in which the chorus returns over and over to the unadorned, chilling question, "Why wasn't God watching?"

Waits has a smashed foghorn of a voice, somewhere between Beefheart's and Howlin' Wolf's, and he uses it to ruminate and yelp and scream and croon and plead and threaten. It can be a blunt, heavy instrument, but he wields it with incongruous dexterity--even, at times, lightness. The ways he can ask "Why wasn't God watching?" make your pulse heat up. His clashing vocal overtones can surround a note the way a clot forms around a gash.

You can't make a hobo, even an imaginary one, flinch easily, and Waits's scrapbook is full of things we'd mostly rather sidle past or turn our backs on.

As in "What's He Building?": Musique-concrete clanging, hissing and feedback set spoken lyrics that start like this: "What's he building in there?/What the hell is he building/In there?/He has subscriptions to those/Magazines...He never/waves when he goes by/He's hiding something from/the rest of us...He's all/to himself...I think I know/why..." It ends starkly, "We have a right to know..."

With all these snapshots rolled into his knapsack, Waits is an American bricoleur. Before you grab a brick to heave at me, let's say that just means he's one of our very own cranks from a very long line, the yowling and yawping sort of romantic barbarian seer who gets tossed into the tank by bored cops and takes in the turned backs and locked doors as he passes through town, sympathizes with the pregnant women and Vietnam vets begging on the freeways, steps into the cool and still graveyard for a nap, and then hunkers down with an old stray dog in front of the furniture-store window to catch a little TV. In fact, you probably don't want a guy like him hanging out in your neighborhood, even if he is named Walt Whitman or Harry Partch or Kenneth Burke, Woody Guthrie or Charlie Mingus or Allen Ginsberg. You're thinking 911 if he's named Howlin' Wolf or Lenny Bruce or Captain Beefheart or Richard Pryor. Why put up with Tom Waits?

Here's one reason: He can show you what you already know and make you believe it again.

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