Waits recorded at least twenty-four tracks for Cohen and Zappa’s Bizarre/Straight label. Against Tom’s wishes, Cohen released these tracks as the two-volume set The Early Years in 1991 and 1992, but they weren’t originally intended for release. They were essentially two-track demos through which Tom could work out his various kinks and learned about the recording process; Cohen used them to shop Waits’s material around to the record labels and to other artists. Several of the songs that would appear on Waits’s first two albums came from these sessions, including “Ol’ 55,” “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You,” “Ice Cream Man,” and “Shiver Me Timbers.” In their crude, original form, these songs are undoubtedly interesting to listen to, but their later, more refined incarnations are better examples of Waits’s art.
A number of those first recordings were never officially released. “Mockin’ Bird” is a stunning synthesis of Waits’s Tin Pan Alley jones and the popular folk rock of the time. “Looks Like I’m Up Shit Creek Again,” despite its unfortunate title (which seems to bear the Zappa influence), is actually quite a beautiful and moving Hank Williams–esque country weeper. “I’m Your Late Night Evening Prostitute” is a beautiful preview of Waits’s future forays into folk and jazz. Some of the songs probably deserved to fade into obscurity though: “Had Me a Girl,” for example, is one of the few songs Waits ever wrote with painfully awkward lyrics — “Had me a girl in L.A. / I knew she could not stay”; “Had me a girl in Tallahassee / Boy she was a foxy lassie”; “Had me a girl from Mississippi / She sure was kippy.” But even this song is almost redeemed by its bluesy chorus — “Doctor says it’s gonna be all right / But I’m feelin’ blue.”
The Bizarre/Straight recordings served their purpose well in the end. Making them was excellent training for Waits — training he’d soon be drawing on. Big things were in store for Tom Waits. In 1972 he was signed to Asylum Records.
2
ASYLUM YEARS
Tom had become a Troubadour regular by 1972. He often made his way onto the club’s tiny stage, wearing ratty black jeans, a crumpled jacket, and shoes with holes in them. He’d flick the ashes of his Viceroy onto the floor as he regaled the assembled L.A. nightlifers with his tales of triumph and woe. Waits fit right in — his image meshed with that of the venue. Despite — or maybe because of — its run-down aspects, the Troubadour had a certain disheveled trendiness, and being invited to play there was quite a break for an unsigned artist.
Waits says, “They’d put a big picture of you in the window. In those days, if you sold out the Troubadour, that was it. People weren’t playing in sports facilities. They announced your name and picked you up with a spotlight at the cigarette machine and they’d walk you to the stage with the light. It was the coolest thing . . . like Ed Sullivan, without Ed. Anyone could get up. It got very thrilling, because you would find people who’d hitchhiked to this spot for their twenty minutes.”1
One night, while Tom was participating in a Troubadour hootenanny, David Geffen happened by. The boy-wonder music exec had discovered Laura Nyro, The Eagles, and Joni Mitchell (who was so fond of her mentor that she immortalized him in her song “Free Man in Paris”). Geffen began his career as an agent for William Morris, and his nose for talent had propelled him to the top of the heap. From there he ventured off on his own, establishing an artist-management company with partner Elliott Roberts. The two were a powerful combination — they constituted a yinyang of rock-and-roll promotion. Roberts was the slightly scruffy former hippie who felt most comfortable when he was among musicians, drinking, hanging out, and staging impromptu gigs. Geffen was the savvy businessman with a remarkable ability to sell his well-chosen stable of artists to the masses. Geffen was also more attracted to deal making than engaging in the day-in, day-out business of recording.
Eventually Geffen and Roberts were recruited to run Asylum Records. Asylum and its sister label, Elektra, had a reputation for discovering and nurturing esoteric talent. The acts that had sprouted up under the Elektra/Asylum banner reflected a range of musical styles — from The Doors to The Eagles to Iggy Pop and The Stooges to Joni Mitchell. Geffen would go on to form his own prestigious label, Geffen Records, for which he’d sign up such acts as Guns N’ Roses and Beck. In the late nineties, Geffen made yet another major career move, joining forces with movie moguls Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg to form the superstudio Dreamworks SKG.
Geffen wasn’t planning on staying long when he dropped by the Troubadour that night in 1972, but he quickly changed his mind. Commanding the stage was a guy who looked more like a vagabond than a rock musician. But Geffen had barely taken his seat before Waits’s seductive aura had encompassed him. “He was singing a song called ‘Grapefruit Moon’ when I heard him,” Geffen recalled recently. “I thought it was a terrific song, so I listened to the set.” He watched, he listened, and the wheels started turning. Here was an artist who could make some intriguing records. “After [the show], I said that I was interested in him. He said, ‘Well, I’ll have my manager, Herb Cohen, call you.’”
Geffen left the Troubadour thinking that since Cohen had his own record company, this would be “the end of it.” But, to his surprise, Cohen did finally call: “He was interested in making a deal with me for Tom . . . Herb had said that he didn’t really think that it was right for him to make the record. My making the record would help him with the publishing. So I made a deal for [Tom]. And he made a great first record.”
Geffen got Elliot Roberts involved in signing Waits to Asylum. Roberts, who is now Neil Young’s manager, was happy to facilitate the process. “Waits was different than any act out there,” he told Hoskyns — “he’d reinvented himself as a beatnik.”2
Once Tom had been signed to Elektra/Asylum, Herb Cohen contacted Jerry Yester. Cohen had been impressed with Yester’s production work, and he felt that Yester could bring out the best in his young protégé. Not knowing what to expect, Yester agreed to meet with Tom and asked Cohen to send the young musician to his home.
Yester still remembers the occasion clearly. “He came over and I said, ‘Let’s hear your songs.’ He started playing. Marlene [Yester’s wife] was in the bathroom, washing the tub or something. She heard this guy playing and just threw the sponge down, astonished. It was amazing. The songs were just undeniable, just absolutely wonderful. So I knew it was going to be a terrific project.” Waits himself mentioned the same meeting to Barney Hoskyns, concluding, “Jerry Yester was a great producer. The first guy whose house I ever went to and found a pump organ.”3
Yester maintains that he was unfazed by Tom’s beatnik-jazzbo-hipster-bohemian image. “Nothing surprised me in ’72 because it was in the new decade. We’d gone through the sixties and got through so much weird shit that nothing really surprised me. [Waits] just looked like a nice young fellow, which he was. During the album, he started going to the skid-row image. And he cultivated that for an album or two . . . until it started to catch hold. [Then] he just looked at it and snapped right out of it. He recognized that it was destructive. It was amazing to see. He just said, ‘Okay, that’s enough of that.’ And on he went to something else. Because it definitely was a character, it wasn’t him. But his characters are so good and he draws on them with such faith.”
Closing Time, which was released the year after Waits signed his recording contract, included many standards from his live sets. The album is probably his most accessible, and some hardened Waits fans find it too slick, but Closing Time is, in fact, a uniformly strong collection of songs and a very impressive recording debut. The voice hasn’t yet reached the degree of gruffness it will later achieve, but the songwriting chops are there in abundance. “I was just blown away by the material,” says Yester.
In fact, the entire Closing Time project seemed blessed from the outset. Strong material was the starting point; then, as the recording sessions got under way, it became clear that the chemistry was right, too. “Tom’s real easy to work with,” Yester remarks. “We h
ad a real good relationship. I really wasn’t interested in telling him what to do. I just wanted to get the music out of him. That was the important thing. So, we talked about how he wanted to do it and I would make suggestions. There was a very good relationship between all of the band members. That album was absolutely the easiest one I’ve ever done in my life. It was done in, like, a week and a half . . . in the studio at Sunset Sound. One reason it was good, I think, was we couldn’t get the nighttime hours that I was looking for. We had to come in from ten to five every day. It took two days to get used to it, but once we did it was great. We were even awake when we got there, and it was like a job. Everybody was real alert and into it. We took our lunch breaks, came back and worked again. And we had the evening to do something with. It was like being human, you know?”
The Closing Time cut that seemed to attract the most attention was “Ol’ 55,” a subtle ode to that most American of infatuations, the car, and to the freedom it represents. On a VH1 Storytellers segment taped in 1999, Waits shed some light on what had inspired him to write “Ol’ 55.” He got the idea from a buddy of his named Larry Beezer. The two had hooked up at the Tropicana Motel, where Waits had lived for several years. Beezer knocked on Waits’s door in the middle of the night. He was on a date with a very young girl, he had to get her home to her parents, and he was out of gas. Beezer wanted Waits to lend him some gas money. In exchange, he promised, he’d supply Waits with some jokes for his act. Waits, of course, agreed. Beezer’s car, Waits then explained, was a ’55 Caddy, and it could only go in reverse. So Beezer drove his seventeen-year-old date home backwards along the Pasadena freeway.4
Waits’s passion for cars was enormous. By the early seventies, many Americans had become much more conservative in their gasoline consumption, and suddenly little foreign cars were everywhere. But Waits’s taste in automobiles remained stubbornly traditional. He was always in the market for an American classic, a big old boat that got two miles per gallon and could house a small family. Or, as he himself put it during a 1976 concert at Boston Music Hall, “Climb aboard that Oldsmobile and let it take you for a ride. No, thank you, on the economy car. I don’t like to ride around in the fetal position all night. I like the large one that’s about a half a block long.”5 The kind of car that Frank Waits would have dreamed of owning when it was the latest thing to hit the showroom floor. Now it was just a few blocks ahead of the tow truck. Bald tires, broken turn signals, several shades of primer — these Tom regarded as assets. Somehow it all made sense, given his worldview. He was attracted to cars — and to people — that had once been beautiful and full of promise but had fallen on hard times.
In a 1975 radio interview, Waits outlined his approach to car ownership. For one thing, the idea of forking over more than $150 or $200 for a car violated his principles. He’d rather pick up a twenty-five-dollar special and drive the thing until it cried uncle.6 Jerry Yester went with Waits on one of his car-hunting expeditions. “I helped him buy his ’52 Cadillac,” he laughs. “It was like a work of art and he trashed it on purpose. There were newspapers in it and old paper plates and plastic forks. Beer cans. It was a mess. Kind of an Andy Warhol thing.”
The most Tom ever spent for a car was $150. That bought him a 1955 Buick Roadmaster on National City’s Mile of Cars. He claimed that he “got snookered” on the purchase price, but he was in love with that Roadmaster and he had to have it. He kept it for three years, traveling a few miles here and there between breakdowns. During that time he poured $3,500 into repairs. One day, when the Roadmaster was parked in front of the local dry cleaner’s, its brakes finished, a stack of unpaid parking tickets jammed into its glove box, Waits knew that he’d had enough. He sold the thing to Ace Wrecking for twelve bucks.7
Despite Tom’s VH1 Storytellers yarn about Beezer, many people have insisted that the Roadmaster was the real inspiration behind “Ol’ 55.” Yester says, “I just love that song.” Recalling the Closing Time sessions, he explains, “we could sink our teeth into ‘Ol’ 55’ and get our pop rocks off. We were sitting around listening to the first take of it and Johnny [Seiter, who also drummed on the track] started singing harmonies to it. To hear Johnny’s voice singing with it, it was like, ‘Oh, jeez, get out there in front of a mike.’ Tom loved it and they sounded so great together.”
Waits has referred to his songs as short stories, and Closing Time is rife with tales of lost love and dashed dreams. “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You” is an evocation of pure loneliness. A barfly contemplates a woman sitting by herself farther down the bar. He begins to imagine the possibilities. Could she be interested in him? How should he approach her? Could they become lovers? Would he break her heart? Would she break his? He hunches over his glass of stout, failing to make his move. Finally the woman goes off alone into the night. “That’s one of those great story songs,” comments Yester. “I loved the way [Tom] played the guitar, because it was so unusual . . . It was always a surprise, even though I knew he was going to do it.”
Another one of Closing Time’s musical short stories was more of an imaginative stretch for Waits. “Martha” is about an elderly man who looks up his first sweetheart fifty years after their breakup. The narrative has an undeniable nostalgic charm, and Waits — despite his age — is convincing in his portrayal of a man who surveys his life and comes to a sad realization. Although he’s had a good ride, something has eluded him. Waits also wears his heart on his sleeve in the gorgeous “Grapefruit Moon.” It’s a simple tale of a man trying desperately to forget the woman he has lost; every time he comes close to succeeding, however, he hears their favorite song and he is wrecked anew. But love doesn’t always evade Waits’s dreamers: “Little Trip to Heaven (On the Wings of Your Love)” is a serene hymn of love and devotion. Then Waits gets frisky and playful, dishing up some funky blues laced with sexual innuendo in “Ice Cream Man.”
Closing Time fades out on the title track, a delicate instrumental suite that came dangerously close to not being recorded. Waits and Yester were working on a tune that just wasn’t coming together. Says Yester, “Then we said, ‘Well, what about “Closing Time?” I just started making phone calls. It was a Sunday evening or a late afternoon and [the problem] was just finding who was available. I found Jesse Ehrlich to play cello, and Jesse said, ‘Well, I got a young guy [Arni Egilsson] plays bass. He’s just wonderful. Here’s his number.’ I called him and he was in the middle of an afternoon barbecue and he’d had a few beers. He was feeling — he wasn’t drunk, but he was just really laid back. He came down, and Tony Terran was on trumpet.”
Yester describes what transpired as “one of those magical sessions that happens once in a great while where no one wants to leave once it’s over. Because it was so good and it happened so quickly. There wasn’t any pain, any strain at all. It just flowed out of everybody.” Yester continues: “Richie Moore recorded it live to track. We listened . . . and it was great. We just kept listening to it. I think we stayed for like three hours after we recorded the song.”
The songs that make up Closing Time are, in Yester’s estimation, still revolutionary. And he has never been able to pick a favorite. “Truthfully, all of them,” he smiles. He points out that “in early ’72, no one was doing stuff like that. ‘Virginia Avenue,’ give me a break. And ‘Ice Cream Man,’ and great stuff like that. And ‘Martha’ — who the hell was doing songs like that, except maybe Dave Van Ronk? Nobody was writing them. Tom was. His writing gift was huge. Obviously huge. And the way he played the piano, it was like Hoagy Carmichael, for Christ’s sake . . .”
One night while Waits was in Denver, Colorado, playing a little blues club called Ebbett’s Field, he had a brief conversation with a member of the house band. Guitarist Chuck E. Weiss had been hanging out at the club since he was a teenager, and he’d been lucky enough to play with veteran bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins. Hopkins became Weiss’s mentor, and he took the skinny young guitarist with him on tour. Soon Weiss was playing with blues royalt
y — Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Dr. John — not to mention established rockers like Spencer Davis. In a 1999 interview broadcast on Colorado’s kbco Radio, Waits recalled that Weiss had initially caught his eye because he was dressed in a chinchilla coat and towering platform shoes. They were outside the club, it was icy, and the shoes were like skates. Weiss was scrambling to stay on his feet.8 Intrigued, Waits struck up a conversation with Weiss, and he was impressed when he learned of the Hopkins connection. At sixteen, Waits had seen the blues legend perform live. Waits and Weiss met up with one another again soon afterward, when Weiss moved to Hollywood, and the two became fast friends.
During the interval between signing with Elektra/Asylum and releasing Closing Time, Waits’s involvement in the nightlife intensified. He wanted to live the marginal Charles Bukowski barfly lifestyle to its fullest. He wanted to frequent tough, smoky joints, shoot pool, mourn lost loves and opportunities. He wanted to search out beauty in squalor. On many nights, he could be found in some one-horse taproom where Budweiser was a sissy drink and if a woman wasn’t mistreating you, it just meant you couldn’t find one. Only in these havens for hard drinkers could he mix with the kind of people he felt compelled to write about. He was feeding his understanding of them.
“We used to go play pool a lot. We used to go drinking a lot — when drinking was fun instead of suicidal,” Yester laughs. “There was a place in Burbank that was fifty cents an hour for a nine-foot table covered with cigarette burns. And cheap beer, cheap Coors. Tom really loved those kinds of places. It had that kind of funkin’ atmosphere.”
Wild Years Page 4