Sunday, Sep 19, 1999
Tom Waits
Get Behind the Mule
- Date
- Sunday, Sep 19, 1999
- Venue
- Orpheum Theatre
- City
- Boston, MA
The Mule Variations run — setlist.fm bills the tour Get Behind the Mule. Waits played the Orpheum three nights running that September; John was at the first. He had not toured in the US for a decade. No ticket survives.
What they played
- Jockey Full of Bourbon
- Jesus Gonna Be Here
- Earth Died Screaming
- Get Behind the Mule
- Chocolate Jesus
- Down, Down, Down
- Hold On
- Step Right Up
- Eyeball Kid
- Tango Till They're Sore
- Johnsburg, Illinois
- Invitation to the Blues
- The Ocean Doesn't Want Me
- The Briar and the Rose
- Innocent When You Dream
- 16 Shells From a Thirty-Ought-Six
- Walking Spanish
- What's He Building?
- Gun Street Girl
- I'll Shoot the Moon
- Filipino Box Spring Hog
- Swordfishtrombone
- Strange Weather
- Come On Up to the House
- Lucky Day
25 songs, from setlist.fm. Contributed by whoever was standing there taking notes.
The moment
A Tom Waits ticket in 1999 was close to a rumor come true — he hadn't properly toured since 1987, and Mule Variations, his first album of new songs in six years, brought him back out for a short, near-mythical run of theater dates. The album won the Grammy and outsold anything he'd made; the shows were the hard part to get. One night at the Orpheum with the junkyard orchestra, from a man who has toured maybe three times since.
From the time
- Mule Variations
“The 1999 comeback — his first album in six years, a Grammy winner, and the occasion for one of his vanishingly rare tours.”
The stub
No physical stub on file — this show was reconstructed from the
confirmation email. Drop a photo in public/stubs/ and add
"stubImage" to this show's record to attach one.