Wild Years
Page 1
WILD YEARS
THE MUSIC AND MYTH OF TOM WAITS
WILD YEARS
THE MUSIC AND MYTH
OF TOM WAITS
Jay S. Jacobs
Copyright © ECW Press, 2000, 2006
Published by ECW Press
2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E IE2
416.694.3348 / info@ecwpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Jacobs, Jay S., 1962-
Wild years: the music and myth of Tom Waits / Jay S. Jacobs – Rev. and updated ed.
Includes bibliographic references, discography and index.
ISBN 978-1-55022-716-I
1. Waits, Tom, 1949- . 2. Singers – United States – Biography.
3. Actors – United States – Biography. I. Title.
ML420.W145J17 2005 782.42164’092 C2005-907235-0
Front cover photo: Jay Blakesberg
Back cover photo: Ebet Roberts / Redferns
Copy editors: Mary Williams and Crissy Boylan
Cover design: Guylaine Régimbald – SOLO DESIGN
Typesetting: Yolande Martel
Second printing: Transcontinental
This book is set in Minion and Univers
PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Permissions
Introduction: Little Trip to Heaven
1 Old Shoes and Picture Postcards
2 Asylum Years
3 Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night
4 Warm Beer and Cold Women
5 Foreign Affairs
6 This One’s from the Heart
7 Swordfishtrombones
8 Frank’s Wild Years
9 The Large Print Giveth, and the Small Print Taketh Away
10 Who Are You Now?
11 What’s He Building in There?
12 The Long Way Home
Discography
Notes
Photographs
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank all those people who played either small or large parts in the creation of this book. It would have been impossible without them.
To Leslie Diamond and Debbie Jacobs, thanks for always being there with advice, help, and the occasional kick in the backside when I needed it.
To Robert Lecker, Holly Potter, Emma McKay, Mary Williams, and the people of ECW Press, thank you for this wonderful opportunity and for having so much faith in me.
To Gary Tausch, thank you so much for your tireless assistance with my research, for sharing your encyclopedic knowledge with me, and for giving me access to your vast library. You were truly indispensable.
To Craig Morrison, I am very grateful for all of your editorial advice and suggestions. You have played a vital role in making this book what it is.
To Bones Howe, Jerry Yester, David Geffen, Mike Melvoin, Francis Ford Coppola, and everyone else who so generously shared their feelings about, and memories of, Tom Waits (both on and off the record), thank you. Also, to Barney Hoskyns, David Zimmer, Mark Rowland, and the good people at Rolling Stone and kcrw radio, thank you for allowing me to draw on your work.
To Lou Hirshorn, Mark and Marie Healy, Bob, Roni, and Colleen McGowan, Drew Bergman, Sam Bergman, John Ruback, Damian Childress, Phil Green, Ron Sklar, Mary Aloe, George Wagner, Ken and Terry Sharp, Lucille Falk, Frances Zucker, Wayne Diamond, Alan and Sandra Feroe, Dave Feroe, Kathy Feroe, Christina Feroe, Sheila Graham, Ron Merx, and so many others, thank you for taking me away from the computer for the occasional stiff drink (or whatever) and listening to me bitch on and on about things without telling me to shut up. It’s appreciated more than you know.
Lastly — and most importantly — to Tom Waits, thank you for being such an inspiration, both as an artist and a man, for so many years. I know that your next fifty years will be as fascinating as your last fifty have been.
PERMISSIONS
Diligent efforts have been made to contact copyright holders; please excuse any inadvertent errors or omissions, but if anyone has been unintentionally omitted, the publisher would be pleased to receive notification and to make acknowledgments in future printings.
Excerpts from “The Resurrection of Tom Waits,” by David Fricke from Rolling Stone, June 24, 1999, by Straight Arrow Publishers Company, L.P. 1999. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from “Tom Waits for His Next Album,” by Mikal Gilmore from Rolling Stone, September 7, 1978, by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1978. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from “Tom Waits Talks to Barney Hoskyns,” “Tom Waits – the mojo Interview,” and “The Marlowe of the Ivories,” by Barney Hoskyns reprinted by permission of the author. Excerpts from “Side Man,” by George Kanzler, used by permission of the Newark (nj) Star Ledger . Excerpts from kcrw-fm interviews with Dierdre O’Donohue, Chris Douridas, and Tom Schnobbel, reprinted by permission of kcrw-fm, Los Angeles. Excerpt from email sent by Don Roy King to Blue Valentines, the Italian Tom Waits fan club, reprinted by permission of the author. Excerpts from “Smelling Like a Brewery, Looking Like a Tramp,” by David McGee from Rolling Stone, January 27, 1977, by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1977. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from “Tom Waits: A Drifter Finds a Home,” by Elliott Murphy from Rolling Stone, January 30, 1986, by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1986. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from “20 Questions: Tom Waits,” Playboy magazine (March 1988). Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Excerpts from “Tom Waits on ‘One from the Heart,’” by Steve Pond from Rolling Stone, April 1, 1982, by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1982. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Quote from “Party 2000: Tom Waits,” by Tom Waits, from Rolling Stone, December 30, 1999–January 6, 2000, by Straight Arrow Publishers Company, L.P. 1999. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from “Tom Waits Is Flying Upside Down (On Purpose)” and “Tom Waits’ Wild Year,” by Mark Rowland, used by permission of the author. Quote from Rolling Stone Raves! What Your Rock & Roll Favorites Favor, compiled by Anthony Bozza and edited by Shawn Dahl and published by Rolling Stone Press, 1983, 1995. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from “Tom Waits and His Act,” by David Sheff from Rolling Stone, October 6, 1988, by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1988. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from “Tom Waits, All-Night Rambler,” by Rich Wiseman from Rolling Stone, January 30, 1975, by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1975. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from “Tom Waits Arrested in L.A.,” by Delores Ziebarth from Rolling Stone, July 14, 1977, by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1977. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from “Tom Waits’ Hollywood Confidential,” by Dave Zimmer, reprinted by permission of the author.
INTRODUCTION
Little Trip to Heaven
A seedy skid-row bar. A defective neon beer sign sputters and a television drones on, unwatched. A tired bartender with a hard face mops the bar top with a towel. A cocktail waitress, aged before her time, sits alone, occasionally casting glances at the joint’s only patron. He motions once in a while for a refill and continues to gaze at the battered, varnished wood of the bar and the little bubbles in his glass.
Such scenarios come to most people’s minds when they think of Tom Waits. A 2:00 a.m. world where the disenfranchised struggle to forget life’s little indignities. Here, love is a f
leeting ideal. Dreams never come true, but they are relentlessly manufactured, a comfort, a way to get through the night.
Tom Waits is the poet laureate of homesick sailors, down-on-their-luck traveling salesmen, dance-hall girls — anyone seeking refuge from life’s disappointments at the bottom of a glass. Waits’s vision is an American Gothic of three-time losers, lost souls, and carnival folk. Driving this vision is the artist’s understanding of such people. He refuses to look down on them. Some of his critics have said that he has sentimentalized them, but this is rarely true. Waits habitually respects his subjects because of — not despite — their faults and weaknesses. To him there has always been a shabby nobility about surviving in a hard, cold world. And sometimes the bravest thing a person can do is stay the course and hold on to his dreams and ideals.
In 1976, Waits told Newsweek, “There’s a common loneliness that just sprawls from coast to coast. It’s like a common disjointed identity crisis. It’s the dark, warm, narcotic American night.”1 This, more than anything else, is what intoxicates Tom Waits. Not alcohol, not drugs, not fame, not fortune . . . but maybe love. He’s inspired and challenged by the endless possibilities, the desperation, the hurried compromises made in order to survive and maybe even grab a little happiness.
The irony of Tom Waits’s career is that after he found happiness, love, and sobriety, his music became more and more experimental. Starting with Swordfishtrombones in 1983, his work became increasingly primitive and sensual. The melodic conventions and piano-based instrumentation of his earlier albums gave way to a much more radical sound.
Then, in 1999, the album Mule Variations brought Waits’s project full circle. The two extremes of his music — the jazzy saloon ballads and the weird Harry Partch–meets–Bertolt Brecht dance-hall music from hell —came together in a unified, breathtaking whole. Critical acclaim for his work intensified. In the meantime, Waits had abandoned his low-life urban hipster persona and been reborn as a nice, contented, slightly eccentric gentleman farmer, husband, and dad.
Still, as his music and his persona underwent these transformations, Waits’s focus on the common man never wavered. And the consistency of his themes signaled to some members of the record-buying public that little had changed. “I seem to have a wide reputation,” Waits admitted to writer Mark Rowland in 1993, “but my records don’t sell a lot. A lot of people seem to have bought one record or heard one record a long time ago and got me down, so they don’t have to check in anymore: ‘Oh, that guy. The one with the deep voice without a shave? Know him. Sings about eggs and sausages? Yeah, got it.’”2
Even Waits himself acknowledges that he has created such an overpowering legend for himself that it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish fact from fiction — real-life events from the elements of what he thought would make, at one time or another, a cool story. Waits is a very funny man and an entertainer at heart. When he does interviews, imparting the truth is not nearly as important as spinning a yarn. He’ll gladly tell an obvious fib if it makes the tale more interesting or sets up a joke. Sometimes he seems motivated by the desire to relieve the monotony of answering the same questions over and over again. Waits once told Gavin Martin of New Musical Express, “Music paper interviews, I hate to tell you but two days after they’re printed they’re lining the trash can. They’re not binding. They’re not locked away in a vault somewhere tying you to your word.”3
Of course Waits doesn’t simply tell stories to amuse himself and his audience; he also tells them to shield himself because, although he is a very forthright character, he is also an intensely private man. He has allowed few hard facts about his personal life to escape into the arena of public knowledge; those details of his past that he does — only occasionally —make mention of he downplays, tosses off. Minor bits of information, such as his mother’s first name (which is Alma) or where he went to school (Hilltop Junior and Senior High Schools in Chula Vista, California), have been unearthed — with difficulty, and despite Waits’s efforts to conceal them — but they provide little real insight. The stories that Waits has built up around himself as a protective device have done their job. And if you want to piss Tom Waits off, pry a little.
Then there is the rear guard: Waits’s friends are fiercely protective of him. Not one of them will utter a negative word about the man. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re all covering something up. Many will tell you that Waits is just a good man at heart and bears few people any ill will. Perhaps he’s just what he seems to be — a genial guy and a loyal friend. As Bones Howe, who produced seven albums with Waits, from The Heart of Saturday Night (1974) to the soundtrack to the film One from the Heart (1982), put it, “He’s the only artist I’ve worked with throughout this forty-three-year career that I miss being around and hanging out with. He’s my favorite.”
Waits does deserve a private life. So in this biography I have tried to respect the boundaries he has struggled to establish and to delve, instead, into his music and the dynamic legend that he has created for himself. I haven’t dragged any skeletons out of his closet or speculated about his sex life. This book is a celebration of a brilliant storyteller — a man who happily reinvented himself as a beatnik purveyor of squalid urban hip. And the process of reinvention continues. I have to acknowledge right off the bat that many of the things described in the coming chapters quite possibly never happened — except in the mind of a compelling self-mythologizer. But it’s important to realize that they are still vital pieces of the puzzle that is Tom Waits.
“I’ve got a personality that an audience likes,” Waits said in 1976. “I’m like the guy they knew — someone raggedy and irresponsible, who never really amounted to much but was always good for a few laughs. A victim, just a victim. But I don’t mind the image.”4 Because of all this, Waits has taken on a larger-than-life quality. Legend has it that Tom Waits has lived life to its fullest, stared down his demons, and awoken countless times not knowing where he was. Often, tales of his exploits have a strong basis in truth. And even when they don’t, they really should . . .
1
OLD SHOES AND PICTURE POSTCARDS
There are certain people in this world who are difficult to imagine as children. Tom Waits is certainly one of them. In fact, in the 1973 press-kit bio for his first album, Closing Time, Waits claimed that he was born in a taxicab with three day’s growth of beard. As soon as he popped out, he told the driver to head for Times Square on the double. In other interviews, he maintained that the driver wouldn’t let him out of the cab until he had come up with the fare — which was pretty tough since he didn’t have pockets.
This tall tale evolved into stage patter. At a show Waits gave in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 16, 1976, he treated the audience to the following version: “I was born at a very young age in the backseat of a yellow cab in the Murphy Hospital parking lot in Whittier, California. It’s not easy for a young boy growing up in Whittier. I had to make decisions very early. First thing I did was pay, like, a buck eighty-five on the meter. As soon as I got out of the cab I went out looking for a job. The only job I could land was as labor organizer at a maternity ward for a while. I got laid off, got a little disenchanted with labor.”1
Since then, the story that Tom Waits was born in a taxi outside a hospital has become official — the Gospel According to Saint Tom. Is it true? Quite possibly not, but the people who would know aren’t talking (even the County of Los Angeles seems to be in on the conspiracy, accepting payment for a copy of Waits’s birth certificate but failing to deliver it).
The taxi story didn’t make it into the brief birth announcement that appeared on the society page of the Pomona Progress-Bulletin on December 9, 1949: “WAITS — To Mr. and Mrs. Jesse F. Waits, 318 N. Pickering Street, Whittier, a son, Thomas Alan, 7 pounds, 10 ounces, born December 7 at Park Avenue Hospital.” But how else could that announcement read? “Born in a Tijuana taxi double-parked in a loading zone?” Not likely. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. The fa
ct is that even if Tom Waits wasn’t born in a taxi, the notion feels right. It’s the way it should have been.
So what do we know? He was born Thomas Alan Waits on December 7, 1949 at a hospital in the sleepy Los Angeles suburb of Pomona, not far from Whittier. Waits has often said in interviews — he did at the Princeton show — that he was born at the Murphy Hospital, and there is little reason to doubt it, despite the published birth announcement, which indicates he was born at the Park Avenue Hospital. The hospital-name discrepancy may be explained as a typo, a trick of memory, an institutional name change — it’s not that important.
Waits’s parents, Frank (after whom Tom named one of his most enduring musical characters) and Alma, were schoolteachers. They both taught for years, although in at least one television interview Waits claimed that his father was a bail bondsman and his mother was a fan dancer — his, he insisted, was a typical show-biz clan.2 Alma’s family was Norwegian; Frank was of Scottish and Irish descent. Frank was actually named Jesse, after his own father, Jesse Waits, but he always went by Frank, his middle name. Tom has said that the name Jesse Frank was a tribute to Old West outlaws Frank and Jesse James — the James Brothers; but as a young man Jesse Junior started using his middle name because he liked the cachet of having the same handle as the Chairman of the Board, Frank Sinatra. The bobby-soxers just wouldn’t fall so easily for a Jesse.
In concert, Tom Waits has claimed that he was “conceived one night in April 1949 at the Crossroads Motel in La Verne, California [northwest of Pomona], amidst the broken bottles of Four Roses, the smoldering Lucky Strike, half a tuna-salad sandwich, and the Old Spice.”3 Where could a couple of young parents go from there? As it turns out, the Waits family lived for most of Tom’s first ten years in Whittier, a town that is probably best known as the home of Richard Milhous Nixon.