Gone Real

Tom Walts

Way back in 1976, a journalist from ZigZag magazine asked Tom Waits about his plans and got this reply: “I don’t know, I might go to Phoenix. It’s close to Los Angeles. I drive with a wild hare up my ass every night, giving the finger to the oncoming traffic... Drive to Phoenix in a 1954 black Cadillac four-door sedan every now and then …Watch out for falling rocks and eighteen-wheel vehicles. Watch out for the clap. Watch out for fifteen-year-old girls wearing bell bottoms who are running away from home and have a lot of Blue Oyster Cult albums under their arm… If you go to the Tropicana Hotel, watch out for Chuck E. Weiss, ‘cos he’ll sell you a rat’s asshole for a wedding ring.”

Well, what else do you expect from Tom Waits?

Back in 1976 he was a loaded storyteller walking the alleys of West Hollywood. Untouched by Flower Power, though there might be some Bob Dylan poems among the junk in his sordid lodgings – but more likely Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski. The less junk the better, if you’re 26 and living like a rolling stone. “You’ve got a cigarette, but you ain’t got a match. You’ve got haemorrhoids, need a shave and … that’s fascinating.”

Yeah, you check out the street and it looks like there’s kind of a... Kind of a blur drizzle down the plate glass And as a neon swizzle stick is stirrin’ up the sultry night air Looks like a yellow biscuit of a buttery cue ball moon Rollin’ maverick across an obsidian sky And as the buses go groanin’ and wheezin’

Down on the corner I’m freezin’ On a restless boulevard at a midnight road I’m across town from Easy Street… Nighthawk Postcards (from Easy Street)

An odd-looking guy wearing a baggy suit, a bootlace tie and pointy shoes, Waits is the poet of midnight wanderers and shabby drunks; the delirium, hallucinating roller coasters of galloping words, obscene staccato, screeching engines, amputated train whistles, weird trips of broken streets. Stuff happens to him. One morning, his phone exploded with outraged calls from friends. “You son of a bitch, how could you do that? We all trusted you and you just went and sold yourself out!” It turned out someone stole his voice for an advertisement, and Waits had to go to court to prove he wasn’t a potato chip. Try imagining that.

Tom Waits was born in 1949 in San Diego in the back seat of a yellow cab in the parking lot of Murphy Hospital. His father, a Spanish teacher, used to drive his boy over the Mexican border for haircuts, because booze was cheaper there. One day a thick fog descended as dusk was falling and Tom was out swimming. An enormous pirate ship came out of the fog. There were dead pirates hanging on the mast and falling off the deck and smoke coming off its sails. Tom was close enough to where he could touch the ship’s bow. “Well, boy, saw a pirate ship, huh?” said his parents, and called him home to dinner. That was his childhood.

That ship of fools has drifted through his life ever since – in America’s crazy streets, full of idiot laughter, misfits, slow dying and miracles. Gravelly voices yelling: “You like us nice and clean, how do you like us filthy?” Just draw closer. Waits spent years tuning his ear to the language of white trash and its unruly poetry. He washed cars, flipped burgers and worked as a nightclub doorman, living the downside of the American Dream like his hero Bukowski.

An odd-looking guy wearing a baggy suit, a bootlace tie and pointy shoes, Waits is the poet of midnight wanderers and shabby drunks...

And then he regurgitated the lot. “They’re harmful to swallow,” says Waits of his albums. “If rash develops, discontinue use and consult a physician.” Holding back isn’t his thing. “Play it like your hair’s on fire. Play it like a midget’s Bar Mitzvah,” he told an interviewer from GQ in 2002. He wants to see the very guts of sound, the naked skeleton of song. For Waits, one of the most exciting sounds in all of music is that of a symphony orchestra warming up, preferably in an open field when an airplane is roaring overhead and a lorry grumbling far away. Even the best musician needs to have his tongue untied, you have to set the song free and let it live a life of its own. Otherwise you leave the recording studio with your arms bloodied and the dead body of the song lying on the table…

Critics have given up trying to define his style. His early provincial blues mutate into bebop rhapsodies, to become a swordfishtrombone hullabaloo to the sound of wrecked accordions, instruments made from junk or found at pawnshops, like the Mellotron and the Chamberlin. Waits squeezes all kinds of horrible and wonderful sounds from America, tying them in a sailor’s knot of tragedy and comedy. As he told Jim Jarmusch in 1992, “There are so many sounds I want to record. Carnival stuff… I still haven’t got a really good metal sound – when you see like swords in a real sword fight, or a real anvil with a real hammer.”

Making songs is like “trying to trap birds” or “photographing ghosts” – recording mumbling, nightmares, wolves howling on highways. The best music is overheard from neighbors playing with their radio, as a badly tuned Mexican guitar twangs in dense fog and a Chinese band moans Cuban tunes in Kentucky. Or listen to this air-horn from a train that it looks like a vacuum cleaner with horns attached, which a gloomy rocker from the garage next door soldered up and brought as a gift. You can hear the laughter of friends and an ugly falsetto. Burroughs strikes up a tune that Marlene Dietrich once sang. There was a one-armed piano player in Chicago; the song he played over and over again was called Without a Song.

And then there is Waits’ sand-paper voice, rubbing all ways. He has a million stories in his head, waiting to disclose in a bar with a picture of Mona Lisa without any eyebrows. Or you can hail a taxi and say “Take me to the Taft Hotel” on Sunset Boulevard; it’s nice in the summer when there’s a carnival across the street. Then you can race through the suburbs, the realm of the American Dream, counting road-kill and making up rhymes like:

I want a sink and a drain And a faucet for my fame...

At a New York café with walls painted a revolting puce shade, you can sit at a corner table with a red-checkered tablecloth, overhearing unbelievable things. Waits loves such places and could list flophouses, bars and Chinese joints all over the country. See for yourselves and have fun… Hear the tapping of salt-cellars, the exasperating creaking of wrecked chairs, customers coughing and mumbling. Through the glass you can see a fight outside, surely over some girl on drugs, everyone around here knows Annie …

Tom Waits

In fifteen minutes, the scene changes, you’re done with your rubbery pizza, and the waitress is the right girl to marry. A yellow cab pulls to the curb with a rustling sound, you see “a transvestite leg come out of the cab with a $150 stocking and a $700 shoe and step in a pool of blood, piss and beer left by a guy who died a half hour before and is now lying cold somewhere on a slab”. As a gigantic moon rises overhead Waits’ tender, rasping baritone croons Night on Earth. To the terrible wheeze of The Earth Died Screaming, an Eraserhead shuffles along Eighth Avenue sucking up houses through a straw…

His 1985 album, Rain Dogs, is about losing and finding. “You know dogs in the rain lose their way back home… ’Cause after it rains every place they peed on has been washed out.” On the song Bride of Rain Dog, “the dog that’s following the dog that’s supposed to know the way back” is “the one with the hair that goes straight up, with the big blue eyes and the spiked collar and the little short skirt and no underwear.”

How else would Tom Waits sing about the woman who changed his life? Waits met Kathleen Brennan in

Hollywood in the early 1980s, in the “drunken, spinning, time-warping delirium of a good New Year’s Eve party in someone else’s house”. An Irish Catholic – “She’s got the whole dark forest living inside of her” – Kathleen is “an incandescent presence” in his life and music. He once claimed he fell for her because she was the first woman he’d ever met who could “stick a knitting needle through her lip and still drink coffee”. They paged a pastor and got married one night.

“She’s the egret in the family,” Waits says. “I’m the mule.” They have written many songs together – “You know, ‘You wash, I’ll dry’, you find a way to work.” He told GQ that Kathleen dreams like Hieronymus Bosch: “She’ll start talking in tongues and I’ll take it all down.” Kathleen is out of bounds and does not give interviews. It is, however, known that she’s the force behind at least half the texts in Frank’s Wild Years. “She’s a diamond who wants to stay coal” goes the refrain to Black Market Baby in Mule Variations…

Tom Waits

Waits has been lucky with his associates. Meeting with Keith Richards in 1987, “I was expecting a big entourage like a Fellini movie and they just tumbled out of a limo. He comes in laughing, shoes all tore up,” Waits told Robert Sabbag of the Los Angeles Times. It was also at that time that he began collaborating with director Jim Jarmusch on an ongoing series of short films, Coffee and Cigarettes. As Waits reminisced to Magnet, “For me, they were like the hair in the gate. You know when you used to go to the movies and a big hair would get stuck in the projector, and you would sit there and watch that piece of hair? You would lose the whole plot for a while.”

Success snowballed. He was named songwriter of the year by Rolling Stone, acted alongside Roberto Benigni in Jarmusch’s Down by Law, then in Ironweed with Jack Nicholson and in Coppola’s Dracula. Together with William Burroughs they wrote The Black Rider, which was staged by Robert Wilson and won a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Performance. Waits teased reporters with a quote from Bob Dylan:

When I asked him why he dressed With twenty pounds of headlines Stapled to his chest.

Suddenly he quit drinking, moved from LA to New York and then to a remote farm, now with three kids to bring up. It’s a place where they still paint barns red to match the blood of slaughtered cattle, grow eggplants and corn in case the Last Days are near, and hang chickens upside down on the porch to repel the evil eye. There are empty houses overgrown with weeds, and a big guy is standing in the middle of the road and crying to make your heart break…

The children are playing at the end of the day Strangers are singing on our lawn It’s got to be more than flesh and bone All that you’ve loved is all you own I’m gonna take it with me when I go. (Take it with me/ Mule Variations)

Waits hasn’t lost his mojo. His latest album, Real Gone, mentions the Tyburn Jig – the dance that hanged men did at the end of the rope – in a sideswipe at “civilized” execution by lethal injection.

There’s a bunch of soldier songs, a letter from a Rockford kid who died in Iraq, with a paraphrase from the glib ads for the Army that have the rock ‘n’ roll turned up full-blast:

I’m not fighting for justice I am not fighting for freedom I am fighting for my life and another day in the world here. (Day After Tomorrow)

“I think we are all going into the crapper, waiting to be flushed,” he told Magnet in 2004. “But I also believe that when you do something really good, it goes into an account and other folks can write checks against it.”

As he sings in Make it rain, “I want to believe in the mercy of the world again.”