When Waits looks back on this era, he does so with amusement and a tinge of regret. In 1982 he told Dave Zimmer of Bam, “During that period, it was like going to a costume party and coming home without changing. I really became a character in my own story. I’d go out at night, get drunk, fall asleep underneath a car. Come home with leaves in my hair, grease on the side of my face, stumble into the kitchen, bang my head on the piano and somehow chronicle my own demise and the parade of horribles that lived next door.”9
Even though Waits was committed to witnessing and engaging in as many different experiences as he could, he wasn’t endlessly resilient, and he did suffer the occasional jolt. Yester says that one of his favorite memories of Tom came out of an incident that occurred early on while they were working on Closing Time . Yester was mixing the album at Wally Heider Recording, which was located right in the middle of one of Hollywood’s shabbier districts, a neighborhood that Waits had yet to explore. “We’d start working on the tunes and he didn’t like to hang around,” says Yester. “He didn’t want to hear it that many times. He was out just soaking up the atmosphere of Coyne and the Boulevard, which was hookers and all the strange population down in Hollywood at that time — God, it’s a hundred times weirder now! It was very colorful.” One day, Yester explains, “Tom was gone for an hour, and he came back in and he was like . . . white. And just shaking a little. I said, ‘Jesus, Tom, what’s the matter?’ And he’s, like, ‘I just came on to a guy.’” Laughs Yester, “He’s like, ‘This guy was one of the most beautiful women I ever saw in my life! We were going to go up to her place, and right before she said, “You know I’m a man?”’ That really shook [Tom’s] foundation.”
Waits took his show on the road, but when he wasn’t touring he was in Los Angeles working on Closing Time . He had a little one-bedroom house in the Silver Lake district of L.A., and he described his setup to Rich Wiseman of Rolling Stone like this: “I live in a predominately Mexican-American neighborhood and I get along fine there. My friends won’t come over. It’s a hovel. My landlord is about ninety. He’s always coming over and asking if I live here. And my neighbor up front is a throwback to the fifties, an old harlot. She wears these pedal pushers and gold-flecked spiked heels and has a big bouffant hairdo. She has one of the worst mouths I’ve ever heard. I wake up to that. I need a place that is cluttered so I can see the chaos. It’s like a visual thesaurus.”10
Chuck E. Weiss was also living in Silver Lake then, but he eventually moved into the Tropicana Motel, a funky little fleabag on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. The Tropicana was a rock-and-roll landmark. There, music-world banditos rubbed shoulders with groupies, rock-star wannabes, hard-luck cases, and drunken traveling salesmen. Record labels put up touring bands at the Tropicana. Andy Warhol filmed his cult movie Heat at this atmospheric locale, and Jim Morrison lived there for years during the glory days of The Doors — he was a Tropicana resident most of the time between 1966 and 1969, at which point he moved to the slightly more upscale Alta Cienega Motel on La Cienega Boulevard. Van Morrison wrote “T.B. Sheets” and several other songs while staying at the Tropicana. Fred Neil was registered there when he recorded “Everybody’s Talkin’.” Big Brother and the Holding Company, Rhinoceros, Bob Marley and the Wailers, and Alice Cooper all made the Tropicana their Hollywood base of operations at one time or another.
Rumors circulated that all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors — ranging from rampant drug use to deviant sex — were being committed at the Tropicana, but as long as you didn’t kill anyone and you paid the rent on time, the management couldn’t care less. Even the Hollywood cops didn’t want to know about it unless the mayhem started spilling out into the streets.
Music and film producer Mary Aloe lived at the Tropicana when she first moved to Los Angeles. “There was this divey hole called the Tropicana,” she recalls, “but it was in the heart of West Hollywood and I wanted to be in the heart of West Hollywood . . . It was like a Motel 6 with shag carpeting. Barely a good, working T.V. . . . old cigarette-butt holes burned in different things. There was a gold bedspread. Who knows if it had ever been washed? Met a lot of characters, mostly in the music business. Of course, I was some little debutante girl coming in with money. They tried to get me to invest in their projects.” Aloe says that some rooms had several people living in them; others were rented by those who needed some place “for a quickie — they’d picked up some trick in Hollywood.” At the Tropicana, she continues, you could mingle with “the famous and the infamous. Then you’d get your people who would stumble in there along the way and had no idea, like me.”
In October of 1970 Janis Joplin was found dead in a “suite” of a seedy Hollywood motel. Rumors spread quickly that it was the Tropicana, although some other stories have suggested that it might have been Landmark Motor Hotel in L.A. or the more upscale Chateau Marmont in Beverly Hills (where just over a decade later, comedian John Belushi would also die from an overdose). Tainted by the word of its part in the tragedy, the Tropicana fell on hard times for a while. It became a curiosity, a stop on the tour itinerary of morbid fans eager for a glimpse of the place where Janis supposedly drew her last breath. Actress Sylvia Miles, while starring in Warhol’s Heat, stayed in the room where the death was believed to have taken place, and she claimed that she was often awakened in the wee hours by thrill-seekers in pursuit of the ghost of Janis.11
But Chuck E. Weiss did not choose to become a Tropicana resident because of the motel’s storied past. The deciding factor for him was the little greasy spoon next door — Duke’s. Weiss fell in love with both the menu and the atmosphere. Duke’s became his favorite hangout. “I was driving from Silver Lake to there every day to eat,” explains Weiss, “and I thought, ‘I’ll just move in there.’ About seven, eight months later Tom moved in. There were a lot of different people there. Sam Shepard, the playwright, was living there. The Dead Boys were there. Levi and the Rockats were living there. Pretty soon, Blondie would stay there. I’m sure this was because of Tom. As soon as he moved in the place started to get an international reputation.”12
Waits further boosted the motel’s “international reputation” by mentioning the fact that he lived at the Tropicana in the liner notes of his 1976 album Small Change . This triggered one of the most persistent of all the Waits myths. Nearly every Waits fan has heard a variation of it: late one night, a friend of a friend of a friend, feeling drunk and melancholy, dials the number. A barely awake Waits answers, and the fan gushes on for a minute or two about the brilliance of Waits’s work and how Waits is the only one who truly understands the caller. Waits finally replies, irritably, “Yeah, well, that’s great, but I’m trying to sleep here,” and hangs up.
While this did, in fact, occur from time to time, if it happened as often as the mythmakers claimed, Waits wouldn’t have had a good night’s sleep through the late seventies. In a 1980 interview included in the press kit for his album Heartattack and Vine, Waits conceded that it had been a dumb idea to advertise his location. He added that lots of people with “clinical problems” had phoned, and he had no idea what he was supposed to have said to them.13
Tom’s rent at the Tropicana was nine dollars a night. He has said that in the nine years he lived there he was never provided with clean sheets or towels, but he never complained because he didn’t want to make waves.14
He brought in a piano, stuck it in the back room, and the Tropicana became a funky little homestead for him. That homestead soon became as spectacularly cluttered as the one at Silver Lake had been. Sheet music and beer cans and empty food containers and clothes and nudie mags and wine bottles and cigarette packages and records were all drawn into the vortex.
Acquiring a new cachet as the living quarters of Tom Waits, the Tropicana filled up with struggling musicians. A pre–Fleetwood Mac Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham holed up at the Tropicana when they came to Hollywood and got their first recording contract; their debut album, Buckingham-Nicks, was released in 1973. Punk and New Wav
e acts like The Dickies, The Dead Boys, The Ramones, and Blondie all stayed at the Tropicana when they were in town. Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers lived there, too, though Petty himself chose a little dive in East Hollywood called the Hollywood Premiere — which he describes as even less “luxurious” than the Tropicana.15 Somehow, the Tropicana had become the preferred address of the rock scene, and Tom Waits was the establishment’s unshaven figurehead.
By the time Waits’s debut album was delivered to Asylum, Geffen knew that he had something special on his hands. “I always thought that [Tom] would become an important artist,” says Geffen, “because his songs were so great — although his records tended to become slightly more esoteric, one after the other. There was never, I think, an album with quite the collection of commercial songs that were on his first album.”
Closing Time quickly started generating a buzz within the recording industry. Part of that buzz involved a linking of Waits with another singer/songwriter whose debut album had also just come out. The two new artists found themselves being heralded as nothing less than the future of rock and roll. In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine how such profoundly different musicians could have been lumped together in such a way: Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen? Closing Time and Greetings from Asbury Park NJ? Then everyone started trying to figure out which of the two would be the next rock superstar. Waits dismisses the whole thing. “They always try to create scenes — just making connections so that they can create a circuitry. It all has to do with demographics and who likes what. If you like that, you’ll like this. If you like hair dryers, you’ll like water heaters. Then you try to distinguish yourself in some way, which is essential — you find your little niche. When you make your first record, you think that’s all I’m gonna do is make a record. Then you make a record and you realize now I’m one of a hundred thousand people who have records out. Okay, now what? Maybe I oughta shave my head.”16
Closing Time’s producer didn’t buy into the hype, either. Yester was convinced that they’d created a great album — “I knew that for an absolute fact” — and that’s all that mattered. He didn’t have to be told by the cultural pundits that Tom Waits was here to stay: “I knew it the first time that I met him and he was in my living room, playing the stuff. You’d have to be a dummy to miss it. All I had to do was keep out of the way. That was the whole point of the thing. That’s what I try and do with an artist. With Tom and Tim Buckley — it was the same kind of case. The talent is so big that it’s really easy to keep out of the way. I just feel very fortunate that I was there. I [only] feel that way about a couple of albums. [ Closing Time is] definitely one, and Goodbye & Hello by Tim Buckley.”
Neither Closing Time nor Greetings from Asbury Park enjoyed immediate commercial success, but both turned out to be sleepers, selling steadily for years. Springsteen, of course, did evolve into the icon the media had predicted he would become, in the process filling stadiums worldwide, selling millions of albums, and spawning countless imitations. Waits has always been quite comfortable with the way things worked out: “I saw Bruce in Philadelphia when I was about twenty-five, and he killed me — just killed me. I don’t know, no one sits down to write a hit record. I got to a point where I became more eccentric — my songs and my worldview . . . Everybody’s on their own road, and I don’t know where it’s going.”17
It’s evident, however, that commercial success is no barometer of influence. The list of artists who cite Waits as an inspiration is long and impressive. To name a few, there are grunge leader Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, hip-hop folkie Beck, Les Claypool and the alternative pop-rock funk-metal band Primus, Paul Westerberg of the pioneering Minneapolis band The Replacements, and punk-Irish traditionalists Shane McGowan and The Pogues. Also identifying Waits as one of the best singer/songwriters around are rock experimentalists Sparklehorse, country singer/songwriter and producer Rodney Crowell, alternative chanteuse P. J. Harvey, rapper Everlast of House of Pain, and even actor/singer Mandy Patinkin.
Multiplatinum Canadian singer/songwriter Sarah McLachlan, founder of the all-woman Lilith Fair tour, says that Closing Time touched her deeply when she was growing up, and it still has a hold on her imagination. “I don’t get an opportunity to listen to music too much,” she admits, “so when I feel the need to listen to music, I put on my old faithful [albums] that I know are going to work for me. I have ten cds I’ve had for years and years . . . like Tom Waits’s Closing Time . I’ll never, ever tire of that record. It’s timeless.” McLachlan covered “Ol’ 55” on her EP The Freedom Sessions .
David Geffen envisioned building Waits’s reputation by offering his songs to other artists. Creating exposure for a fledgling artist by inviting more established acts to record his or her material was a strategy that Geffen had implemented for years, dating back to the days when he managed Laura Nyro. Pop songstress Nyro had, like Waits, been adored by the critics from the outset of her career, but she’d had trouble accessing a broad audience, so Geffen went to work convincing some big-name acts to record her songs. As a result, Laura Nyro songs became hits for such luminaries as The Fifth Dimension (“Blowin’ Away,” “Wedding Bell Blues,” and “Stoned Soul Picnic”), Three Dog Night (“Eli’s Comin’”), Blood, Sweat and Tears (“And When I Die”), and Barbra Streisand (“Stoney End”).
Now it was Tom Waits’s turn, and Geffen flexed his networking muscles. “I turned Bette Midler on to his music. And a lot of other people. I put The Eagles together with his music. I tried to get Rod Stewart to record one of his songs.” Geffen suggested to The Eagles that they record “Ol’ 55.” In a Hollywood bar one night, Tom ran into an Eagle who told him that the band had heard the song and was thinking of recording it. Waits was flattered. Shortly afterward, he hit the road for about three months. He didn’t hear another thing about it until “Ol’ 55” showed up on The Eagles’ 1974 album On the Border . The band also released “Ol’ 55” as a single (the flip side was a tribute to actor James Dean).
The Eagles’ version of “Ol’ 55” was solid, well recorded, but it was characterized by the band’s Southern California country-rock vibe, and it didn’t approach the depths of Waits’s own recording. For The Eagles, “Ol’ 55” was just a car, but for Waits it was a lifeline. An unimpressed Waits called the On the Border version of his ode to the automobile “antiseptic” and then remarked that the only good thing he could think of to say about your average Eagles album was that it kept the dust off the turntable. Soon afterward, Fairport Convention and Matthews Southern Comfort alumnus Ian Matthews gave “Ol’ 55” a shot, as did folk singer Eric Andersen. Tom finally concluded that he much preferred his own version.18
In the meantime, Herb Cohen had employed the Geffen strategy and talked Tim Buckley into trying his hand at recording a Tom Waits song. Buckley was himself a respected songwriter with several acclaimed albums under his belt — Happy Sad (1969), Starsailor (1970) — and a cult following to boot, so some industry insiders were surprised at his decision to include a version of Waits’s “Martha” on his 1974 album Sefronia . But the decision turned out to be a wise one. Buckley added his own twist to this gentle, wistful tune without sabotaging Waits’s intentions.
As his old songs, for better or for worse, took on new life, Waits was moving ahead. He’d taken his act on the road, winning new fans by delivering the goods in person. He’d been writing some new songs. Closing Time was launched, and now it was time to record a new album.
3
LOOKING FOR THE HEART OF SATURDAY NIGHT
In the summer of 1974, Waits hunkered down to work on his follow-up album. It’s conventional wisdom in the music industry that if an artist’s first album is a hit then the second will disappoint; after all, he’s had years to work on the first album but the countdown’s on for the second (in publishing, it’s called the second-novel syndrome). Waits was well aware of this, and he resolved not to fall victim to the sophomore jinx.
David Geffen wanted to hook Waits up with a new producer and
immediately thought of Dayton Burr “Bones” Howe, who had engineered or produced a string of acts, ranging from Elvis Presley to The Association. The tall, gangly Bones — who’d been given his nickname as a schoolboy — was probably best known for shaping the pop-soul sound of The Fifth Dimension. Geffen and Howe had worked together for years, ever since Geffen, highly impressed with The Association’s sound, had offered to manage that band for free. Geffen felt that Howe and Waits would be a good match, “because Bones had a background in jazz. I thought that he was a perfect mix of jazz and pop for Tom.”
Howe recalls Geffen’s approach: “He said, ‘I want you to produce an artist that’s just strictly an album artist. The guy’s never going to have a hit single, so you just concentrate on making great albums with him.’” Waits was in the studio at the time working on demos for his new album, so Geffen urged Howe to listen to a few of them and see what he thought. If Howe liked what he heard, Geffen would set up a meeting with Tom.
“He sent me the demo tape, and I listened,” says Howe. “I heard all this Jack Kerouac in there. This is something I really know about. In my engineering days, when I was engineering mostly jazz records, sitting in a motel room in Miami, just going on into the tape recorder, I had put together an album of about four hours of Kerouac. I had gone through all that material and put an album together for him. It was called The Beat Generation . . . I was really familiar with Kerouac’s work, so David set up the meeting with Tom.”
Geffen had also filled Waits in on Howe, describing his larger projects — the work he’d done with The Association, The Turtles, and The Fifth Dimension — but Waits wasn’t very excited by Howe’s credentials. They sounded a lot like Jerry Yester’s, and the plan had been to attempt something new in the recording process. Still, Tom did agree to meet with Bones. “I started talking to him about Jack Kerouac,” Howe reminisces. “Then I told him I’d engineered all these jazz records. I guess David had told him the other things I’d done. But that was really the cement. The glue with Tom and me was jazz and Kerouac. He said, ‘Do you know that Kerouac once made a record with Steve Allen?’ I didn’t. And he said, ‘Well, I have a tape of it somewhere and I’ll get it.’”
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