He’d given two encores – and the house lights had long since come up – but the audience were still on their feet and making an awful lot of noise thirty minutes after Tom Waits had left the stage of Le Grand Rex in Paris. After forty-five minutes, and much to the relief of the bewildered theatre staff, the numbers had dwindled. Most had accepted that he wasn’t coming back and had reluctantly made their way to the exits. There was a stubborn, hardcore element, though, who carried on whooping, stamping, and roaring.
I know this because I was one of them.
It was the evening of 29th May 2000, which was either the first year of the twenty-first century or the last year of the twentieth, depending on your personal levels of pedantry. The venue, Le Grand Rex, was a lavish Art Deco cinema-slash-concert hall marinated in history, a marinade that presumably contained plenty of absinthe.
In other words, it was the perfect place to see a Tom Waits concert.
In 2025, Time Out ranked Le Grand Rex as the most beautiful cinema in the world, and who am I to argue with people who used to publish my listicles? As it happens, the place caught my eye years before I saw Tom Waits there, during my first visit to Paris. I’m no architecture nerd, but I know a good-looking building when I see it. This chic, sexy cinema looked so effortlessly cool, so defiantly Parisian, that I half expected it to light up a Gitanes and go for a wander around the Champs-Élysées with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Catherine Deneuve.
Inside Le Grand Rex on the night of the concert there was no sign of Belmondo or Deneuve, but there was a tangible buzz in the air. It was the kind of atmosphere I’d read about in vintage rock magazines with cover-mounted CDs about gigs that usually happened before I was born. Maybe someone reading this now can relate to the phenomenon. People had waited a long time for this night, and many had journeyed a fair distance. In my case, it had been a thirteen-year slog with a Channel crossing on top. The reason I’d travelled all the way to Paris to see Tom Waits was that I couldn’t get tickets for his London gig, and the reason I couldn’t get tickets for the London gig was that there wasn’t one.
Judging from the accents I heard in the lobby, I wasn’t the only one to make this pilgrimage. Waits would eventually perform for one night only at London’s Hammersmith Apollo in 2004, but the tickets were impossible to get hold of for anyone but Hollywood A-listers and their entourages. Many of us in Le Grand Rex that night in 2000 would return to the venue in 2008 when the European leg of the Glitter and Doom Tour once again bypassed the Big Smoke. The French Tom Waits fans who couldn’t get tickets for his Paris gigs must have hated us.
We took our seats. The lights dimmed, the drum roll started, and the crowd erupted. The drum kept rolling, he was taking his time, making us Wait. The crowd went quiet, staring at the stage. “What’s he building in there? What the Hell is he building in there?”
People were still being ushered to their seats when Tom Waits entered through a side door in the stalls. There was a very, very loud roar. The spotlight followed him up to the stage as he threw fistfuls of glitter at the frenzied audience while growling The Black Rider’s “Lucky Day (Overture)” into his bullhorn:
Ladies and gentlemen, Harry’s Harbour Bizarre is proud to present,
Under the Big Top tonight, Human Oddities.
That’s right, you’ll see the Three-Headed Baby
You’ll see Hitler’s brain
Lea Graff, the German midget who sat in J.P. Morgan’s lap
Like his then-recent album Mule Variations (1999), Waits’s set list touched on most of the bases of his long and varied career. He played plenty of material from his Island-era of radical reinvention and sonic experimentation, from 1983’s Swordfishtrombones through to 1993’s The Black Rider. Rain Dogs (1985), my Tom Waits gateway album and personal favorite, was surprisingly well-represented on the setlist. The only early, Asylum-era song in attendance was a faultless rendition of “Invitation To The Blues” from Small Change (1976).
Many concerts have their moments, but this one had an abundance of them. There was the sight of Waits sporting a mirrorball hat during Mule Variation’s “Eyeball Kid,” which seemed to fill the venue with a weirdly mesmerizing constellation of reflected light. Then there was his comically absurd interaction with a roadie fixing a snapped piano string, leading Waits to improvise a new song, which he assured us was “fresh out of the oven”. But the moment that turned me into a blubbering mess was when the audience (me included) sang along to “Innocent When You Dream” from Franks Wild Years (1987), prompting Waits to look up from his piano and purr, “Beautiful.”
His legendary skills as a between-song raconteur were on full display that night, offering top-quality surrealist anecdotes and asides at regular intervals. Explaining the ban on flash photography at the gig, Waits told us about his early career in the Bolshoi Ballet. He was at the top of a human pyramid when someone in the audience took a photo. “My career,” he explained, “was over in a flash.”
Later, an English guy in the audience heckled Waits about the lack of UK dates. “Y’know,” growled Waits, “I have these embarrassing family members who keep following me around.” Cue the band, who launched into Cemetery Polka, a song about embarrassing family members.
Forty-five minutes after Tom Waits had finished his second encore, a plump, harried-looking theatre manager in a dinner suit and bow tie combo took to the stage and cried, “Monsieur Waits is no longer here. He has gone to his hotel and is probably in bed now. Please, please go home!”
Le Grand Rex took one last drag from its Gitanes. It seemed like a good time to leave.
This is an updated and expanded version of an article that appeared in Gig of My Life, a zine produced to benefit the victims of the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing. Here’s the original piece.
Tom Waits – Le Grand Rex, Paris, 29th May 2000 – Setlist
Lucky Day (Overture)
The Black Rider
Jockey Full of Bourbon
Jesus Gonna Be Here
In the Colosseum
Strange Weather
Get Behind the Mule
Chocolate Jesus
Hold On
Eyeball Kid
Tango Till They’re Sore
Cemetery Polka
A Little Rain
Picture in a Frame
Invitation to the Blues
Innocent When You Dream
Gun Street Girl
Who Are You
Shore Leave
Rain Dogs
I’ll Shoot the Moon
Encore 1: Come On Up to the House
Encore 2: House Where Nobody Lives
Soundtrack to this article
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