Performances: 1996 - 2000

1996

1997

1998

1999

Jay S. Jacobs (2000): "Waits's show was the event of the conference. It was one of the view live performances he'd given in over a decade and the first time he'd played Austin in over fifteen years. Tickets for it were like gold. Local fans, record execs, and journalists fought one another for them. Several people were caught trying to sneak in. Everyone knew it was going to be an amazing show. Taking the stage, Waits won over the crowd immediately, happily preaching to the converted. He played a strong and varied set, previewing the new album [Mule Variations] with "House Where Nobody Lives" and "Filipino Box Spring Hog," He threw in several tunes from his Island years and, to the delight of those assembled, dusted off the classic Elektra cuts "Tom Traubert's Blues" and "(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night." The band was smoking, and Waits was visibly enjoying his rapport with the crowd. It's sad that such an event had to end on a sour note. Waits was obviously shaken when a woman started heckling him from the crowd, calling him a sellout for allowing so many music-biz types to snatch up tickets, effectively shutting out his "real, " nonprofessional fans. While it's highly unlikely that Waits had decreed how the tickets would be divided up, the woman's words seemed to sting him nonetheless. It might have been because the heckler wasn't completely off base. The days of intimate gigs played in smoky little bars to audiences of twenty or so were long over for Waits. He could no longer lead the life of the troubadour who passes through town and has a drink with the patrons after the show. It was the classic irony of the entertainment business reasserting itself. the more successful you are at connecting with your audience, the more that audience swells, the more isolated you become from it." (Source: "Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits". Jay S. Jacobs, 2000)

"The magic is so quickly followed by mayhem. The night after Tom Waits plays the Paramount Theatre, one of the all-time highlights of SXSW, his friend and sometime-promoter Don Hyde is savagely beaten by bouncers at La Zona Rosa. The bouncers were trying to clear out the crowd after Alejandro Escovedo's set, but when Hyde wants to go backstage to get his bag, there is some jostling, and push soon turns to punch, then to kicks in the side. Hyde suffers five broken ribs, a broken collarbone and a separated shoulder. Waits vows to never play Texas again and has stayed true to his word." (Source: "20 years of music and mayhem" by Michael Corcoran. Austin360.com)

Start tour promoting Mule Variations
June 1999 - May 2000
(album released: April, 1999)
Tom Waits: vocals, piano, guitar, bullhorn.Larry Taylor: upright bass, guitar.Smokey Hormel: guitar, banjo, mandolin.Danny McGough: keyboards.Andrew Borger: drums, marimba, percussion

2000

Tom Waits (2002): "I appreciate having an audience: it's like kind of shocking sometimes. Like this group in Warsaw that wouldn't leave the theatre, and I was already back at the hotel getting ready for bed. They were just screaming and stomping and I was like, what do we do? Do we go back, you know, isn't the evening over? Or do we go back and play more? That was kind of an odd kind of moment, a tribute, I guess. They wanted to hang out and be in the place where it happened, that was cool." (Source: "Never one for the conventional" Inpress Magazine (Melbourne, Australia) by James Nicholas Joyce. May 1, 2002.)

End tour promoting Mule Variations
June 1999 - May 2000

Further reading
Time Line 1996-2000
Pictures 1996-2000
For setlists, please refer to The Dutch Dogs Site