by Kit OConnell
Watercooler: Hell Broke Luce
6:00 pm in Watercooler by Kit OConnell
Hi, y’all.
I had something else to write until I discovered this powerful new Tom Waits video, “Hell Broke Luce.” The song isn’t that new, but the video was published on Youtube just a couple days ago. An anti-war song with a definite military cadence, he explained the title in an interview with Slate magazine:
There was a prisoner in Alcatraz during a prison riot—this goes back to the ’40s. And during the riot, of course, everyone was nervous, and he scratched on the wall with a knife. And he wrote “hell broke luce,” and that’s how he spelled it. Alcatraz—they have an amazing bookstore. But I got separated from everyone else on the tour. After a while something happened with my headset, and I was out of step and I didn’t know where the rest of the people were, so I just sat in one of the cells for a while.
The song is from Waits’ 2011 album Bad as Me. Wikipedia reports that Keith Richards plays guitar on this song.
So what’s on your mind tonight? Hear any good music lately?
This is the latest myFDL open thread.
