The piano has been drinking (not me)
TOM WAITS IN MAITLAND
When we arrived in Australia at the end of the
Although they have not changed their heightened
1970s one of the first things we did was rent a TV
bathos in decades, it seems to me Tom Waits’
set. And one of our first encounters with Australian
songs were the Dadaist anthems of the 1970s
television was the Don Lane Show. The particular
generation, with the music, the lyrics and the
program I have in mind is Lane’s interview with
performance going hand in hand to create the
Tom Waits in late April 1979, in anticipation of
distinctive sound we’ve admired for such a long
his Australian tour. Smoking and spreading ash
time. The final ‘’stanzas’’ in our song go like this -
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from his cigarette all over the studio and his host’s trousers, with a gravelly voice, a drunken mumble,
And you can’t find your waitress
a porkpie hat, funny and anarchic, Waits was
With a geiger counter
mesmerising and outrageous.
And she hates you and your friends And you just can’t get served without her
And so, a few decades later, to that child of the 70s, Joe Eisenberg’s swan-song at the Maitland Regional Art Gallery and his equally cheeky request: “I would like to have the biggest, contemporary, best, Tom Waits’ The piano has been drinking (not
And the box-office is drooling And the bar stools are on fire And the newspapers were fooling And the ash-trays have retired
me) work on paper exhibition created in part by
‘Cause the piano has been drinking
you for the greater good of the art world!!” Trust
The piano has been drinking
Joe and his almost 170 artists to turn the song’s
The piano has been drinking
gloomy scenario into something fresh, vital,
Not me, not me, not me, not me, not me.3
humorous even, and into an exhibition that looks like a snapshot of the very best in contemporary
What is the common thread of The piano has been
Australian art.
drinking (not me), a large and unruly exhibition
For the benefit of the very young “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)” was one of the songs on the Small Change album, released in July 1976 on the Asylum Records label. It’s a skid row travelogue, a song steeped in whiskey and atmosphere in which
inspired by such despondent and chaotic music? It is, I would say, a homage to the creative narrative of two inspired individuals – Tom Waits, the musician and Joe Eisenberg, the curator and director par excellence.
Waits illuminates a dark world of bars and all-night
There are distinct themes that bind groups
diners, an Edward Hopper painting world. On the
of artworks, woven together through visual
All Music website Bill Janovitz quotes Waits telling
association and conceptual threads. What can
interviewer Bill Flanagan about how Small Change
be said in general is that the works are small in
came to be: “I was in Europe for the first time. I felt
scale but powerful in imagination. The deceptively
like a soldier far away from home and drunk on the
simple idea has produced an engagement with
corner with no money, lost. I had a hotel key and I
the song’s content by the direct or oblique
didn’t know where I was.”
representation that has taken a multiplicity of
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