Underground

This (being the first track on Swordfishtrombones) actually marks the turning point in Tom Waits' music moves from his early style to his later, more Waitsian (is there any other word you can use to describe it?) work.

So maybe this song is autobiographical, documenting the point where his eyes are suddenly opened to a new world that has been there all along but has been invisible until now. "there's a big dark town/it's a place I've found/there's a world going on/underground"

Like Zemi said it is probably about some " lower class beings ". It could also be about ants. But of course it has a double meaning. We humans think we own the earth, but ants are much more numerous than we are, and they are almost everywhere on the planet. Perhaps, if all humanity dies, they will still live. It's about fearing people who work harder than you. One time or another, they will throw you out of your throne and you will find yourself UNDERGROUND!

Agree with wolfticket. Waits at this point moved away from his manager Bones Howe and started a personal and working relationship with his wife Kathleen Brennan. To me underground is about musical transition. From this point on we hear a more experimental Waits with more avant garde influences such as beefheart. I love this track and I think a transition musically is the meaning behind this.

i first heard this song on ROBOTS and i knew right away that it was waits. he is well known for his stories like this with dark settings.

I've been a fan of Tom Waits since I heard "God's Away on Business", and I've sort of been struggling to consume as much of his music as I can all at once, but this one rings as my personal favorite. I'm of two minds on the content; on one hand, it seems to be a song about a sort of underlying seediness (omnipresent in Waits' work throughout, especially his newer stuff), some kind of quiet, rolling hum beneath the Ivory Tower, perhaps the working class or the underbelly of any given city or society. On the other hand, it also reminds me distinctly of my night-shift work, which, I guess, ties into the 'working class' feel. I could be wrong, but, that's the vibe I get from it. It's about the metal-fire and the chemical stink of the high industrial guts of any major metropolis.

It could also be about the underground music scenes, Tom Waits is an underground musician afterall...

Imho this is a song about the unseen industrialism in many major cities not just in the U.S. but in many countries. Little sweat-shop areas where the normal citizen would never consider acknowledging.

this interview fragment from when Big Time came out (1988) has Waits opining crazily about moles at the beginning. So perhaps this song is really about burrowing animals and their "cities" and societies, and not allegorically about music at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyrDfCSZJmI

While I don't think this is the intended interpretation, I've always taken this song's lyrics as being literal, having the song be about a man discovering an underground civilization made up of large, black, groaning skeleton or skeleton-like creatures. Maybe they aren't creatures at all, but rather robots, golems, or automatons of some sort? Perhaps the roots he mentions are some sort of wiring, such as those you'd see on telephone poles?

Don't overthink this one. The song Town With No Cheer on this album is about a town in Australia, and so is this one. Coober Pedy. It's an opal mining town. The houses there are built underground because of the scorching heat, and there's even an underground shopping center. There's literally a world going on underground in Coober Pedy. The big black bones rattling around in the danger zone could be dynamite or explosive charges, miners tools, maybe even railcars carrying sedimentary rocks out of the mine for processing or the rocks themselves. Being on the other side of the globe, the people there are literally awake while the rest of the world (or at least half of it) is asleep.