Hard Ground – hard truths from Michael O’Brien and Tom Waits

Photographs by Michael O’Brien

Poetry by Tom Waits

Review by Douglas Heselgrave

See I remind them all

That there is a bottom

A bottom

I remind them all

That there is a bottom, Lord

Oh  yes, there is a bottom indeed

Yes there is a bottom

And it looks just like me

– Tom Waits

In many ways, both Michael O’Brien and Tom Waits owe their careers to the down and out.  This isn’t to say that rubbies the continent over have been saving their nickels and dimes to buy a photograph or the most recent collection of songs from either of these two artists, but rather that the early mythology of rounders, drifters and hobos have had more than a slight influence on the artistic development of both men. ‘Hard Ground’ is a new coffee table sized book that features O’Brien’s photographs of homeless people who use the services of Mobile Loaves and Fishes, a street ministry based in Austin, Texas.  The photographs are complemented by new poetry by Tom Waits.

As a young man in the mid seventies, Michael O’Brien worked as a newspaper photographer for The Miami Herald where his first assignment of note was to record the life of John Madden, a street person who lived under an overpass in a poor neighbourhood.  O’Brien’s sensitive photographs as well as the friendship that developed between Madden and the photographer struck an empathetic chord with many of the newspaper’s readers and went a long way to demythologize the plight of the homeless and mentally ill in Florida.  O’Brien’s chronicles of Madden’s daily life earned him two Robert F. Kennedy journalism awards.  In the intervening years, O’Brien worked as a photographer for Life, National Geographic and many more magazines before the changing nature of journalism and the corresponding decline of monthly magazines and daily newspapers meant that the number of regular assignments started drying up.  As a way of staying busy, O’Brien volunteered to take photographs of the people served by Mobile Loaves and Fishes.  He imagined he could complete all the necessary photographs in two sessions.  He was wrong.  Michael O’Brien shot hundreds of photographs of Austin street people between 2006 and 2009, the best of which are sampled in this powerful and truly sobering book.

After more than forty years in the music business, Tom Waits work shouldn’t be unfamiliar to anyone reading this.  From his earliest work to today, Waits has expressed an affinity for the underdogs and dregs of society that has naturally lead to comparisons with the music and poetry of Bob Dylan and early blues singers.  What has distinguished his efforts from Dylan’s is the lack of overt social agenda that could be found in his early songs.  Waits’ lyrics have always operated without finger pointing or simplistic social solutions.  Any implication of action or rescue is inferred from a reaction to Waits’ poetry and is not contained within it. Waits gives his audience credit for enough intelligence to do the socio-political math and so he never felt the need to beat anyone over the head.  If anything, his early work was sometimes criticised for idealizing the down and out and portraying them as tragic heroes and misunderstood if not beautiful losers.  The irony of his early work has given way to a mature compassion, and the simple – some would say almost weightless – poems that Waits has written to interact with O’Brien’s photographs are models of restraint and a kind of humble grace that can only evolve with a clear understanding of the thin line separating him from the people of whom he writes.

Maybe we are all members

Of an orchestra that is merely

Tuning up

And our curious trails

Are random scales

For a music that has

Yet to begin

– Tom Waits

Even without the recently inducted Hall of Famer Tom Waits’ poetry, ‘Hard Ground’ would be a worthwhile book.   With the addition of his chilling, direct and heart felt words, ‘Hard Ground’ becomes a worthy companion to ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, a depression era book that synthesised the photographs of Walker Evans and the poetry of James Agee to examine the plight of homelessness and unemployment in America.  Taken together, the books – published decades apart – create a feeling of discomfort  which forces the reader to acknowledge the still huge cracks that can be slipped through on the road to the American dream. The haunted portraits and disembodied poetic pleas confer that no amount of ‘new deals’ will prevent this problem from continuing to grow exponentially, and that the  huge and unlikely paradigm change necessary to affect change is just one more Rock Candy Mountain.

This review also appears at www.restlessandreal.blogspot.com

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