Forget Mark Latham's bucks party; forget the state of the US alliance. The real issue of substance rolling around the Canberra rumour mill is: have the faceless cabal behind the sinister JB Hi-Fi empire bought out Impact Records? Impact may not be the Best Record Shop In The World (Greville Records would still win any straw poll conducted at this house) but it has three advantages over almost every other record store in Canberra: it also sells comics; it has quite a good range, in terms of both quality and width (even David Sylvian's "Blemish" finally turned up there); and it isn't Sanity. So you can please excuse us for being a little bit anxious at present. We live in fear that next time we navigate the shady corners of Garema Place and head down the steps to Impact, we will be confronted with burly security guards at the door; wall-to-wall widescreen TVs and car stereos; boxes of empty CD cases and other useless junk crowding the entrance; the Satanic yellow-and-black colour scheme; the handwritten "sale/bargain" signs on every surface that hasn't been covered by individually painted facsimiles of the covers of recent hit records; and a range of CDs that defies explanation (you are likely to find that they will have multiple copies of something you've never heard of by some failed 80s band like, say, The Alarm, and nothing whatsoever by The Fall, while the only two Yo La Tengo discs will be "Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo" and the "Danelectro" ep).
Impact also has a quite reasonable Bargain Bin. Canberra readers are well advised to immediately head down there and pick up for a mere $15 a copy of Tom Waits' "Used Songs". Heck, I paid full price for mine, and I'm not complaining. What you get is not just another collection of "early" Waits material, but rather as near to definitive a compilation as you are likely to find. While you might still arguably be better served by going out and finding all of the records he released on the Asylum label, now you don't have to. The only thing I can think of that should be here but isn't is his version of "Somewhere", from "West Side Story". The novelty value is provided by a song off his first album, from circa 1973, which comes across as stock standard West Coast adult-orientated rock from the era, but which also gives a glimpse of Waits' voice at a time when is still carried in it some small vestige of the adjective "smooth".
Of course, one of popular music's great mysteries is how we get from these songs of the gravel-voiced troubador to the Tom Waits of "Swordfishtrombones", "Rain Dogs" and "Mule Variations". But maybe we don't have to. The time lost in arguing which is the real Tom Waits might be better spent just listening to the records - all of them, from both parts of his career. I don't know if they can be reconciled, but both (or neither, for that matter) may well turn out to be "real". With Waits, as with Beck, and (to pick a local example) Dave Graney, the divide between "person" and "persona" is so blurred and tangled as to be meaningless: may not, in fact, exist at all (cf, say, Nick Cave, or David Bowie, or maybe Robert Smith, all of whom, one imagines, melt away from the public to the private once the performance is over - which is not a criticism, just a comparison). Someone should do a thesis on this; me, I'm going to make a cup of tea.
