The new release of West Side Story, I’m told, doesn’t include the big duet of Somewhere that’s in the 1960s movie. It was a big deal, with Natalie Wood and whoever the dude was singing their brains out. But I prefer another version – the surprising opening cut on Tom Waits’ Blue Valentine. Sure, the album includes, “Romeo is bleeding” about a gangster’s sad end. But the lush orchestra that opens the disc, and Tom’s rusty saw of a voice against those strings – that does it for me. Not the operatic clarity of Richard Beymer and the hope you might have for Tony & Maria. When you hear Waits, you know he never had a chance. And you know he knows it too. He opens it sweetly, or as sweetly as he can, a man allowing to think about the impossible. His voice has a subjunctive tense. He takes a long pause, as if to say “just let me enjoy the orchestra for a few bars, won’t you, before the end we both know is coming?”
He rises in the second verse, and you get a few clear notes cutting through the wreckage of his voice – a reminder of what it must have been before the years of hard use. But it’s not quite hope that makes his lungs fill, his range rise. It’s agony, it’s pleading that he can’t have, will never have the place, the time, the things that he sings of.
In Mark Knopfler’s Romeo and Juliet, another lover sings to a girl who has moved on. It’s clear he hasn’t. “When we made love, you used to cry. You said I love you like the stars above, I’ll love you ’til I die.” He’s talking about a Romeo & Juliet love, or as Mrs. Francis said in Sophomore English, “the kind of love only a dumb 15 – year-old can believe.” But in the next line, he gives it away. “There’s a place for us… you know, the Movie song.” Even singing up to her window, he’s still not a guy who reads Shakespeare. He’s not even a guy who can remember the title of West Side Story. “She says, ‘yeah, Romeo, you know I used to have a thing with him.” He never stood a chance, and he never understood that.
But Waits knows. As he falls from his vocal peak, “take my hand, and I’ll take you there, someday” the wind drops from under his voice, and he sighs the last three words, “someday, somehow, somewhere.” And drowns in the orchestra.
– Tom Waits- Blue Valentine- Warner/Asylum 1978.
(Note-the girl on the back cover of the disc is none other than Rickie Lee Jones. Given the beautiful pain that suffuses both of their work. I think I’ll pass on the ‘ ‘I wish I’d been there to see it” that naturally arises in such moments.)