Like Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, or even Hunter S. Thompson, Waits soaked up the country. He explored America from the inside, shunning the tourist traps and seeking out the places where, he was convinced, real life was unfolding — a taproom in the Bowery or a Mexican restaurant in South Central. He thrived on urban action. He wanted to immerse himself in life and walk close to death. He loved the fact that if he really needed a Johnny Walker Red at 4:00 in the morning he could always find a place to buy one.
But because the world Waits was perpetually searching for was, very consciously, the substance of his art, a certain amount of idealization was unavoidable. The film-noir existence that he created for himself could never be as squalid as the real thing. Despite his best intentions, Waits was a tourist in that late-night world of vagabonds and cheap diners and flop sweat. The fact that he had never been imprisoned by poverty and failure and mental instability made all the difference. Anytime he wanted to he could hop back into his Ol’ 55 and drive himself out of there. His music was primarily inspired by a fifties black-and-white dream of skid row, a social underbelly that reflected Raymond Chandler’s sensibility more accurately than his own experience.
The inhabitants of Waits’s romanticized underclass tended to be white and to wear retro gear like fishnet stockings and battered Stetson hats. The trappings of urban poverty and crime circa 1974 — the food stamps, the drug paraphernalia — were foreign to them. But Waits was able to bring these existences into stark, often brilliant focus. Through them he could present a poetic truth, not necessarily a slice of life.
When it came right down to it, though, as long as that night world Waits was roaming around in — however idealized, anachronistic, limited — served as a conduit for poetic truth, that’s where Waits would be found. He would continue to make statements like, “I’ll always be a night owl,” or, “The moon beats the hell out of the sun.” And he would continue to listen, not just to the stories but to the sounds: “The night is music. I couldn’t sleep on 23rd Street in New York — it was a musical traffic jam session. You can hear a melody, a horn session . . . broken glass jig jag clack whack shuffle shuffle. And a radiator with all those little Doc Severinsens playing. There’s food for thought at our fingertips, and it begs to be dealt with.”16
4
WARM BEER AND COLD WOMEN
Waits’s manager, Herb Cohen, suggested that he do a live album. One that would showcase the compelling Waits stage persona. Everyone involved was determined to avoid rehashing the first two albums, though, so they decided to use only the new ideas and songs that Tom was coming up with. Few precedents existed for them to follow, because while a concert album entirely made up of new material was no rarity in jazz, it was in rock. There were only a scattering of exceptions, like the mc5’s 1969 debut album Kick Out the Jams, but most had come about for economic reasons as opposed to artistic ones.
Waits himself had some reservations about embarking on the live-album project, but he eventually agreed to do it. Bones Howe was enthusiastic from the outset, and he knew just how the job should be done. “I said I didn’t want to go into a club. I’d seen Tom live and we could make a much better record if . . . we made a recording studio into a club. There was a room at the back of the Record Plant. It’s a big recording studio, almost a soundstage. We put a little stage over in the corner. There was a booth with glass, so we didn’t need to be in the room.” Howe scheduled the Record Plant shows for the last two days of July 1975, and everyone got to work creating the appropriate ambiance.
“We put tables in the room and we had a guest list,” says Howe. “We had beer and wine and potato chips on the tables. And we sold out four shows . . . two nights in a row. Tom got this stripper named Dwana to be the opening act.” Dwana was an old-time burlesque queen whom Tom had met on one of his jaunts to the Hollywood underworld. She warmed up the crowd — which was largely made up of friends and acquaintances of Waits and crew — and everyone was primed for a drunken voyage into an Edward Hopper painting or a Charles Bukowski poem. Waits didn’t plan on disappointing them.
Bones had put together a live band from the session musicians who had worked on The Heart of Saturday Night . Mike Melvoin served as bandleader and also covered keyboards. Pete Christlieb blew tenor sax, Jim Hughart hauled the upright bass, and Bill Goodwin played drums. Melvoin recalls the scene: “Candles on the tables . . . A room full of people. The show started with a stripper, who was the classic old tassle-twirler. It was wonderful. The ambiance was great. The band was sensational. The interaction between the band and Tom was wonderful — between the band and Tom and the audience. It was great chemistry, and I have to hand it to Bones for putting that together.”
The shows did sizzle. Tom bantered fluently with members of the audience (the song intros are as prominent on the album as the tunes). He was the hep-cat master of ceremonies, and he regaled everyone with long, off-color stories about his experiences in a series of seedy Hollywood haunts. His connection with the audience was genuine and strong. With his tales he bridged the gap between Beat poetry and vaudeville comedy, peppering his monologue with racy puns, like, “I’ve been so goddamned horny, the crack of dawn ain’t safe around me,” and tossing out politically incorrect jokes, like, “I’ve been busier than a set of jumper cables in a Puerto Rican wedding.” These days, Waits dismisses all that hipster speak, insisting that he sounded like a cranky old drunk back them. Maybe he did sometimes, but for every groaner there were several turns of phrase that could take your breath away. When Waits was on, nobody did it better.
Later on, says Howe, when the time came to mix the album, he and Tom “just went out and hid in a recording studio. We took the best of each of the four shows, put an album together out of it and then mixed it. We had a really, really good time doing it. The album shows that.” The album’s working title had been “Nighthawk Postcards from Easy Street,” but they shortened it to Nighthawks at the Diner . Listening to the finished product, it’s evident that the sessions it documents were a hoot for everyone involved, but, as often happens with live albums, fun in concert didn’t quite translate onto vinyl.
Essentially, the problem was the songs. While Nighthawks does boast some solid tunes, few of them are as clever as their spoken-word intros. Too many tracks are slight, not fleshed out well enough. Too many resemble other album cuts or older Waits songs. Such shortcomings hadn’t marred Waits’s earlier efforts, and Nighthawks at the Diner became the first Tom Waits album to fail across the board. It sold poorly, the critics were uniformly unimpressed, and even Tom’s loyal fan base considered it to be a strange misstep.
Of the handful of pearls strewn across the album’s messy terrain, the best is probably “Better Off Without a Wife,” an aging bachelor’s recital of rationalizations for staying single. Other memorable cuts are “Warm Beer and Cold Women,” the touching lament of a loser who “just don’t fit in,” and the moody “On a Foggy Night,” a leftover from the Heart of Saturday Night sessions. Waits once explained that “Foggy Night” was the soundtrack to a film-noir thriller he caught on the late show one night. According to Waits, George Raft and Fred McMurray fight each other to win the heart of Rosalind Russell. The film ends as McMurray drives a big old Plymouth along a foggy road with Raft stowed in the trunk and this song playing on the radio.1
Also included on the album was the first Tom Waits/Chuck E. Weiss collaboration; titled “Spare Parts I (A Nocturnal Emission),” it was also the first Weiss song ever to be recorded. “Big Joe and Phantom 309” was Waits’s first recorded cover, a remake of a 1967 release (called “Phantom 309”) by Red Sovine, a country singer who had been recording since the 1930s. Sovine was nicknamed “The Old Syrup Sopper” when he did an early radio series sponsored by Johnny Fair Syrup. The moniker was apt in more ways than one: Sovine’s songs themselves were rather syrupy. His specialty was tunes about truckers — their lonely lives on the road, far from their homes and hearths and good women. Sovine died at the age of sixty-t
wo in 1980, a few years after scoring his biggest hit with “Teddy Bear.” His greatest-hits album was flogged on late-night T.V. mail-order commercials for the rest of the decade. “Phantom 309” was an odd choice for inclusion on a Tom Waits album, but Waits, of course, never shied away from the offbeat, and he did a decent job with the song.
“Eggs and Sausage (In a Cadillac with Susan Michelson)” was released as a single. It’s a good contribution to the album but ultimately too reminiscent of better Waits late-night diner songs, like “The Ghosts of Saturday Night.” At this point in his career, Tom’s stories were becoming as vital a part of his presentation as his songs. His vivid accounts of life on the road and on the town served to complement his songs, not merely to introduce them. For example, he made his way into “Eggs and Sausage” during his 1976 show at the Boston Music Hall by saying, “I was in a little place called Stanfield, Arizona. I was only there one night. It was one of those kind of places — I spent a whole year there one night. I’ll tell you about this little diner. Walked inside, elbowed up to the counter with every other loser in town and ordered me up some Eggs Overwhelming and the Chicken Catastrophe. The waitress was wearing them little rhinestone cat glasses with the little pearl thing that clips on the sweater, so I knew I’d come to the right place.”2
Another fun but slight Nighthawks cut was “Emotional Weather Report,” in which Tom describes his mental health in terms of the evening forecast. This and a number of other songs included on the album worked beautifully in the concert setting, but they didn’t quite make the grade on your home stereo. “The idea of singing the weather report was just a silly idea that came up in the middle of hanging around in the studio while we were doing . . . The Heart of Saturday Night, ” Howe concludes. “I don’t think that so much fore-shadowed Small Change and Foreign Affairs as much as [it reflected] some of the things that are buried down in The Heart of Saturday Night . I think that Nighthawks is just like a playful little interlude in the middle of all that.”
As had become his habit, Waits hit the road as soon as he was released from the studio. There were venues to play, towns to visit, bars to check out, hovels to sleep in. Over the three years he’d been touring, he’d established a club circuit for himself: start off in Los Angeles; hop a plane to Denver; continue on to Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, dc, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, San Diego; head back to Los Angeles. Six shows a week — two a night, three nights a week — a day of travel between each stop. Waits would often remark to his concert audiences at around this time that he enjoyed arriving home after a tour and finding the food he’d left in the fridge transformed into some petri-dish science experiment.
It hadn’t taken Waits long to realize that he’d rather headline at a small venue than open for another act in an arena. Still, some of those little clubs could be a drag. He once spent a week playing a Toronto steak house where the patrons clearly had a deeper interest in their porterhouses or rib eyes than in the entertainer before them. Such washouts were balanced by the great places, like the Cellar Door in Washington, dc, where the audience truly came to listen. There were even little cards on the tables that read “Quiet please.” Night after night, club after club, Tom was honing his act, perfecting his Nighthawks monologues, scatting and jiving like a hipster stand-up. He was developing some highly stylized (and somewhat exaggerated) riffs on the Life and Times of Tom Waits. It was part Charles Bukowski, part Milton Berle. Witness this rap he did at the 1976 Boston Music Hall show: “It had all started one night in a place called Bloomington, Illinois, you know. I was hangin’ around a little place called the Wilmont Hotel, staring at the animated wall-paper and the color-television test pattern. I stumbled down to a little place called the Four Corner Bar. Walked inside, passing out wolf tickets, decked out in full regalia — looking slicker than deer guts on a doorknob. I pulled up next to a shapely little miss . . . I’m talkin’ about hubba hubba and ding ding ding . . . I elbowed up next to her. She took one look at me and she said, ‘Lookit here. In the first place, you’re so ugly you can probably make a freight train take a dirt road.’ I didn’t let it get me down, though. She said, ‘You might as well hang it up, I’m a lesbian anyhow.’ Shit . . . ‘I don’t mind if you’re a lesbian. I know there’s a whole lot of that shit goin’ round nowadays. It don’t bother me . . . Shit, I got relatives out in Beirut.
We oughta get along real well.’”3 Waits’s reputation as a top-quality live act was mounting. Here was an artist who could paint word pictures, and his music simmered. This led to Waits being offered his first serious television gig: he was invited to perform live on the pbs show Soundstage . Heightening the thrill factor for Waits was the knowledge that he would be sharing the bill with his longtime idol Mose Allison. The segment’s highlight is the opening number, Waits’s dramatic a capella performance of “Eggs and Sausage.” Wearing a ratty black sports coat, a loose tie, and a brown beret, he sits at the counter of a real diner, cigarette in hand. Around him we glimpse tired waitresses, bored patrons, sizzling burgers. His only musical accompaniment is the snapping of his fingers and the slapping of his leg. Finishing the tune, he turns to a waitress and asks for another cup of coffee.
Big Daddy Graham, stand-up comedian and Philadelphia radio personality, remembers seeing Waits during the Nighthawks tour in a small Philly club. “We were going to the late show. There used to be a bar across the street from the Main Point, where I saw him countless times. We already had our tickets, but the line was so long outside we figured let’s go grab a drink. When we sat down, I sat directly next to Waits, who was drinking at the bar.” Big Daddy laughs.
“He ran over there for a drink in between shows. Never happened to me before and never since . . . where you sit and drink with the guy you’re going to see. It was pretty cool. I gave him a long set list of stuff I wanted him to do. And he pretty much did everything I asked. During the show he did ‘Phantom 309’ and he dedicated it to ‘my new friend at the bar.’”
There is a tale dating from about this time that has made its way into Philadelphia music lore. Whether it’s the gospel truth, an exaggeration, or pure fiction, Big Daddy isn’t prepared to say, “But it’s a great story.” It also revolves around the Main Point. Nearby there was a watering hole and restaurant called H. A. Winston’s, an early incarnation of the chain bar —potted ferns, bulk-purchased antiques, and cute memorabilia strewn about. Everyone who played the Main Point — James Taylor, Pink Floyd —would stop in after their gig. The Winston’s management was quite proud of this, but they could never get Waits to pay them a visit. Big Daddy explains why: “Because Waits conceived it as an un-Waits-like type of place. Which it was. It was really a thorn in their side that they couldn’t get Waits up there.”
Working as a dishwasher at Winston’s was a guy named Artie, who had once been in a band. In the Winston’s pecking order, you started out as a dishwasher, you were promoted to busboy, and, if all went well, you finally became a waiter. When the time came for Artie to hang up his dishrag, he balked. He wanted to stay in the back washing dishes. Dealing with the public didn’t appeal to him. Artie had played a gig with Tom Waits somewhere along the line, and somehow Waits found out that Artie had ended up at Winston’s. He decided to drop by and see Artie after one of his shows at the Main Point.
“The management and everyone goes nuts that Waits has finally showed up,” says Big Daddy. “But he’s not there to eat. He just wants to see Artie. And they don’t like Artie. They’re, like, ‘Artie is in the back washing dishes.’ And Waits goes back and washes dishes with Artie for, like, an hour, while Artie tells him his story. They had those glass portholes that look [through to] the back of the restaurant. People kept peeking in. What I always remember was, according to Artie, Waits came back and went, ‘Hey, I see you have a Hobart there.’ Hobart is the company that makes a particular kind of dishwasher. I always liked that line — ‘Hey, I see you have a Hobart.’ Waits apparently was
familiar with the workings of a Hobart.”
At about this time, Waits found himself looking down an intriguing new career path. Director Hal Ashby was making Bound for Glory, a film based on the autobiography of Woody Guthrie, the socialist songwriter and folksinger who, in the 1940s, penned such standards as “This Land Is Your Land” and “I Ain’t Got No Home.” Guthrie saw America: he rode the rails, crossed the prairies, climbed the mountains, and sang for his supper during the Great Depression. In 1952, when he was just forty, Guthrie was diagnosed with Huntington’s chorea, a degenerative neurological disease, and he died in hospital fifteen years later.
Ashby entered Waits’s name on the list of actors he would like to see portray Woody Guthrie — along with nearly every other folk-ish singer of note, from Bob Dylan to Loudon Wainwright iii (“Dead Skunk”) to Tim Hardin (“If I Were a Carpenter”) to Guthrie’s son Arlo (“Alice’s Restaurant”). Somehow the part ended up going to a nonsinger, actor David Carradine, who was a hot property at the time due to his starring role in the martial-arts T.V. Western Kung Fu . Although Waits had been shut out in this instance, the notion that he could be an actor had taken root.
And he was fed up with touring. The daily grind was getting to him. Wake up in a new town, stumble out of the motel, try to find a decent cup of coffee, do a sound check, meet with some local interviewers, poke around town a bit, do a couple of shows, have a few drinks, sleep, head out to the airport — and on it went. It was getting kind of old. Add to that the fact that Waits was suddenly experiencing writer’s block. It seemed inevitable. He had no time to himself. Someone was always there, pulling at his sleeve. He no longer had much opportunity to pull a stool up to the piano and let his ideas flow.
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