Tom Waits' "Hell Broke Luce" - A Cautionary Tale

Hatred is sterile; it breeds nothing but the image of its own empty fury, its own nothingness. Love cannot come of emptiness. It is full of reality. Hatred destroys the real being of man in fighting the fiction which it calls "the enemy."

- Thomas Merton

After releasing mysterious teasers to the media and to his fans, the enigmatic Tom Waits finally revealed what he had up his sleeve: not tour dates (as many expected), but a new music video for the song "Hell Broke Luce" from his latest album Bad As Me. 

The disturbing video immediately signals that war is the subject of the song, waters not unfamiliar to Waits. He's spent time wondering about the horrors and heartbreaks of war in songs like "Day After Tomorrow," "Hoist That Rag," and "Road to Peace."

What immediately sets it apart from these other songs, though, is the overpowering sense of chaos raging in the song, amped up by Flea on the bass and Keith Richards on guitar. It's full of clamor, clapping, and alarms, but sounds somehow hollow and meaningless; "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." 

So I found myself daring to ask that perennial and perplexing question: what is Tom Waits up to?

First, I'm of the school that believes that, whenever trying to unravel a work of art, it's always important to go to the primary source - the creator - to see what they have to say about it. Hopefully they don't say too much, but do offer some kind of insight into what the work might mean.

In an interview with Slate last year, Waits commented on the title of this song, saying:

"There was a prisoner in Alcatraz during a prison riot...during the riot, of course, everyone was nervous, and he scratched on the wall with a knife. And he wrote 'hell broke luce,' and that's how he spelled it."

In typical Waits form, the answer raised more questions. So the interviewer re-focused his attack, noting that it sounds like a very pointed war song. Waits replied:

"Loaded. Anyway. … I've been hearing that line a whole lot: 'You had a good home but you left.'...Keith [Richards] said that officers will hate that song, but enlisted men will love it...It's an answer to 'Be all you can be.' I'm having a conversation with them about it. It’s a cautionary tale. Obviously."

After the release of the video, Tom Waits had this to say about it:

"Matt Mahurin has created an apocalyptic war dream to accompany the song 'Hell Broke Luce.' Kathleen [Brennan, producer] and I envisioned it as an enlightened drill sergeant yelling the hard truths of war to a brand new batch of recruits. The video grew from the gnawing image of a soldier pulling his home, through a battlefield, at the end of a rope. I think you will agree, it's uplifting and fun."

Of course, no uplifting fun to be had here whatsoever - but the statement does point us in a certain direction. The song isn't about the cold abstractions of wars and nations, but about the concrete people in the trenches. More to the point, it's about the "hard truths" of war wearing these people down; about young men and women who give up their "good home" and "porch" to fill ditches, march, cough, toke, and kill or be killed; who come home feeling disordered and lost to themselves. 

Now, right away it's important to note that Waits isn't getting too political here. Modern politics, as we see time and time again, tends to cheapen important debates and polarize debaters without ever so much as grazing the heart of the matter. Waits is not using smooth rhetoric or lofty equivocations to appease one side and alienate another, but the brute and ugly portrayals of war to unsettle every single person that hears it. 

Jeff Lucey

In fact - as many fans noticed - the "Luce" in the title and some lyrics in the song ("What was your name? It was Jeff") seem to point to the life of Jeff Lucey. Lucey, a young man from my own Western Massachusetts, served in Iraq and came home with post-traumatic stress disorder, and eventually committed suicide in June of 2004. In a letter to his girlfriend he wrote while overseas, he said: "I have done so much immoral shit during the last month that life is never going to seem the same, and all I want is to erase the past month, pretend it didn't happen." In the months after returning home, he was tormented by bad memories, and suffered from hallucinations, insomnia, and estrangement from loved ones. 

Although there is some speculation that his memories were actually delusions fueled by mental illness, his father was convinced that his experience in Iraq was without question some kind of catalyst in his unraveling. "Something happened to Jeff that had him totally fall apart and be destroyed," he said in an interview with the Boston.com. "What it was I don't know. Whatever happened - whether it was a collection of things, whether he assumed collective guilt - there is no question his experiences there planted something within him that was almost like a cancer." 

Ira Hayes

The cautionary tale at work here mirrors the classic folk song "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," which tells the story of a Native American soldier who became famous for helping to raise the flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima of World War II, only to fall prey to alcoholism and self-destruction after returning home a decorated hero.

"Hell Broke Luce" thrusts us into the pit of this despair and confusion, makes us feel - if only for a few minutes - the inner horrors that so many of us non-soldiers will never know. As you watch the crazy imagery of the video, and listen to that guttural voice curse, huff, and chant, you feel the torment, the rage, the confusion, the chaos at the heart of war. In doing this, Waits doesn't denigrate soldiers - instead, he compels us to have a deeper respect for their fortitude both during and after their service.

As far as being a kind of commentary on war and violence, the song is more a spiritual commentary than a political one. It shows us the internal nadir that war is uniquely disposed to plunge a person into, without saying whether such a risk may be just, necessary, or heroic. Its focus is the nothingness of hatred that war can so easily summon, and the destructive effect it can have on the people involved. Other "anti-war songs" feel like a meteorologist analyzing a hurricane on a radar screen; "Hell Broke Luce" is the view from inside the storm, one that soldiers themselves - as Waits says - will appreciate for its grittiness.

More importantly, by bringing us as deep into the hellishness of war where peace is no longer an option, the song indirectly highlights the importance of doing everything we can to attain and sustain peace. It's a sort of upside-down look at the lesson of some the greatest spiritual teachers of the 20th century, from Gandhi, to Marin Luther King Jr. to Pope John Paul II: that provocative nonviolence, not war, is the most effective and and most noble weapon, and the most in line with God's creative act.

Or, to quote the current Pope: "War, with its grief and destruction, is always justly considered a calamity in contrast with the plan of God who created everything to give life."

This video leaves you with an understanding of the horror of this state of grief and destruction; more importantly, the horror of creating it, orchestrating it, desiring it, or wishing it on anyone else without exhausting every other option hinging instead on nonviolence and love.

And that - if I can be so bold - is just what I think Mr. Waits was up to.