Tom WaitsDime Store Novels Vol 1Review

When Tom Waits released Mule Variations in 1999, it was widely seen as a combination of both old and new Waits. New Waits meant songs about oddball characters like the Eyeball Kid, growled à la Beefheart through a megaphone and played on a weird-sounding selection of homemade instruments. The "old" Waits songs harked back to his sozzled barroom days hunched over a knackered piano, singing witty and sentimental stories of barflies and other late night characters.

Dime Store Novel Vol 1 is as good a snapshot of Old Waits as you'll find. The gig was originally recorded for radio broadcast in a small Denver club called Ebbets Field, in front of what sounds like an audience of two dozen. Accompanying himself on guitar and piano, Waits rasps through a set that includes such favourites as ''Better Off Without A Wife'' and ''Ol '55''. It's all interspersed with drunken banter and, by the end, he's taking requests.

Anyone familiar with Tom Waits' early albums will know what's in store. This is an Edward Hopper painting set to music: drunks, waitresses, sailors and truck drivers all crop up. The only song here that's not from a Waits album is ''Good Night Loving Trail''. Written by Utah Phillips, ''the golden voice of the great Southwest'' - it's a mournful ballad about a cook on a wagon train.

Only 24 at the time of this recording, the singer still sounds like he's on two packs of Winstons a day and downed a couple of whiskies before the show. What's also remarkable, considering his relative youth, is the range of characters he portrays. On the heartbreaking ''Martha'' Waits imagines himself as an old man looking back on a youthful romance while ''SemiSuite'' sympathises with a stuck-at-home truck driver's wife torn whether to leave her man.

Tom stumbles off stage after 13 songs but the MC announces that he'll be playing again the following night, admission one dollar. On the strength of this entertaining set, it's likely that many took up the offer.