Four times chorus, twice the first verse, once the second and then only half - was it somehow not quite enough for three decent verses plus chorus in the usual order?
Oh what - Tom Waits always has enough ideas, sounds, images and ideas.
The "neat and usual" was simply never his goal.
If he wrote a song, the music should break out into the new, untried.
The same applied to the lyrics: no decent stories, messages or emotional floods, instead a golden pot with scraps of meaning, allusions and riddles that stimulate the listener's imagination.
After all, the title "Jockey full of Bourbon" clearly states that alcohol plays a leading role, and in the last verse of the first stanza the jockey makes a diagnosis for himself that leaves nothing to be desired in terms of clarity.
The change of scene continues in the second stanza, without any discernible rule.
The arbitrariness comes about because verbs are used sparingly: a subject is named, a characteristic called (“Bloody Fingers on a purple knife”), but then the verse is already over and a new image follows, pointing to a lawn where ego helps a woman commit adultery.
On the roller coaster of life and language
Is it the jockey again who talks about himself like in the first verse?
It's likely, but it doesn't matter.
All verses, all images, whether "Cuban prison bars" or a homely "mohair vest", contribute to the atmosphere of apart, brokenness and irony around which the song revolves.
The third (half) verse goes all the way to Asia, maybe to an amusement park and a roller coaster - in the meantime you've gotten used to the lurching of the content, since the stable meter and the rhymes offer enough support.
The chorus, which paraphrases a traditional nursery rhyme, goes straight to the heart: “Ladybug!
Ladybug!
Fly away home, your house is on fire, the children all gone".
German-speaking listeners may be reminded of "Maikäfer, flieg", which also quotes a catastrophic fire.
Be it a beetle or a little bird - a delicate little creature whose young are in danger touches everyone and asks for rescue at the last moment.
Experimental mambo rock?
Waits' hoarse voice shuffles through the lyrics in a monotonous singsong, providing a steady background hiss to the steely melody played by Marc Ribot's guitar.
The melody is the center, it should dig itself into the memory, the singer and lyrics only follow secondarily - a typical Waits trick, just like the rhythm, a mambo, which runs counter to the usual rock structures, which is why Wikipedia calls the song " experimental” or “indie”.
The 1985 album "Rain Dogs", from which the "Jockey" was released as a single, documents the first collaboration between Waits and Ribot and was a success.
For the cover of the album, Waits chose a photo by Swedish photographer Anders Petersen, who shot a black and white series about the "Café Lehmitz" on the Reeperbahn in 1970.
After fifty years, the illustrated book of the same name was reprinted last autumn (by Schirmer/Mosel), with a short foreword by Waits, who remembers how impressed he was by these pictures.
"When I discovered Anders Petersen in 1985, I had the feeling that I had found a compatriot ... He captured something with my eyes that I could hear, smell, taste." Waits recognized himself in the underdogs of the Hamburg scene. That Photo on "Rain Dogs" shows a portly woman and a young man whose vague resemblance to Waits inspired Waits to comment:
"Me and Liza Minelli right after she got out of the Betty Ford Center," grimly joking about himself. Betty Ford, Liza Minelli, and Tom Waits were alcohol experts and knew their way around alcohol clinics.
Tom managed to remain a master even in the face of mockery about his addiction.
But the Jockey full of Bourbon's moment of glory came when Jim Jarmusch joined John Lurie and Tom Waits and hired Italian Roberto Benigni as a third man, along with Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller to shoot Down by Law with the quartet , his first feature film in black and white.
The intro consisted of steady tracking shots down a few suburban New Orleans streets, beginning with a darkly gleaming hearse, and those who had eyes to see saw one of the finest cinematic exposures ever seen, and those who had ears to hear heard how a quirky song,
sung by a husky voice
, that was helped to perfection by image sequences.