Waits Returns to Where It All Began

“Good to be back on Western Avenue,” Tom Waits said Saturday during his concert at that street’s Wiltern Theatre. His audience applauded the local reference, an allusion to the early days when he scraped material off L.A.’s gritty streets for his colorful chronicles of the down-and-out.

Things have changed since that ‘70s incubation. Waits escaped the confines of the hipster hero caricature, discovered avant-garde rock and Weill-like cabaret, collaborated with theater visionary Robert Wilson and author William S. Burroughs, acted in movies for Jarmusch, Coppola, Altman, et al, moved to Northern California and raised a family and made himself scarce in the pop-music world.

But even after all that evolution, and after a 10-year absence from concerts, there was still a lot of Western Avenue in Waits on Saturday, the opening night of his three-show run. He cut the familiar rumpled figure on stage. Dust rose from the floor when he stomped his foot to the beat. He occasionally reached into his pocket and tossed glitter into the air, an illustration of both limited means and a determination to celebrate.

And Waits is still singing about the desperate and the downwardly mobile. But instead of sticking to dives and diners, he now finds them in a bigger world of rural outposts and small towns. It’s a rich, evocative topography of fringe Americana, and whether he’s describing a doomed beauty in “Hold On” or a surreal freak in “Eyeball Kid,” he’s always determined to locate a dignity and resourcefulness in his subjects.

Those songs--both from “Mule Variations,” his first formal album in 10 years and the occasion for this resurfacing--encompass the two basic Waits song forms: a rich, folk-country-pop ballad style suitable for your Linda Ronstadts and Bruce Springsteens, and an experimental brand of scrap-yard blues that is hard to imagine anyone else performing.

Except for “Black Rider,” the dark welcome that he sang through a bullhorn while entering the theater down an aisle, Waits avoided his cabaret material. He and his four-piece band (including “Mule” participants Smokey Hormel and Larry Taylor) zeroed in on the primordial, dust-raising stomp, delivering with a potent, infectious glee.

A set with Waits at the upright piano gathered threads of parlor music and other sepia-toned forms. This nostalgia creates a backdrop of bygone innocence that makes his characters’ loss of bearings even more evocative.

As a singer, Waits has maximized the range of his famously raspy voice, and as a performer he seemed a little warmer and more affable than in the past, initiating funny exchanges with the fans and offering bemused observations about the quirks and oddities that surround us.

When he flailed his arms and bent his legs, he looked like a scarecrow grabbing a live wire, and there’s no doubt that his persona is as consciously crafted as Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. It’s also often similarly true to the human heart, and when Waits reached way back to end the show with “The Heart of Saturday Night,” he sang a line that summed it all up: “Tonight’ll be like nothin’ you’ve ever seen.”

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* Tom Waits plays tonight at the Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., 8 p.m. Sold out. (213) 380-5005.