Wild Years

by Jay S. Jacobs

  What finally pushed him over the edge was an incident that occurred at a little New Orleans club called Ballinjax. Waits was slated to appear there on a night that Bob Dylan was in town with his Rolling Thunder Revue (or, as Tom called it, Rolling Blunder Revue), a touring band made up of Dylan cronies. The revue featured one of Dylan’s ex-girlfriends, folksinger Joan Baez; the former lead singer of the Byrds, Roger McGuinn, whose cover of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” was a major hit; and novelist and singer Kinky (“The Texas Jewboy”) Friedman. Rolling Blunder trooped into Ballinjax on Waits’s gig night, settled in, and decided to hold an impromptu jam session. “They got up there for an hour just before I was supposed to begin my set,” Waits told David McGee of Rolling Stone . “Nobody even asked me. Before I knew it, fuckin’ Roger McGuinn was up there playing guitar and singing and Joan Baez and Kinky were singing. By the time I got onstage the audience was stoked. They were all lookin’ around the room and shit. I don’t need this crap — it was my show.”4

  Tom needed a total change of scene, so he asked Herb Cohen to set him up some shows in Europe — a kind of working holiday. The dates were set, and Waits headed across the pond to play Ronnie Scott’s, a famous London blues club. It was 1976, and as far as the British press was concerned, this new American phenomenon was a source of great interest. Here was the inheritor of the Beat tradition, a weather-beaten raconteur who’d been around. But, most importantly, Tom Waits gave great interviews. Punk was big in London, and the ladies and gentlemen of the press had already had their fill of interviewing sneering, uncommunicative punk-scene movers and shakers. And as pleased as these journalists were with Waits, Waits was delighted with them. They constituted a whole new audience for his stories. He’d joyfully spin yarns for them about all those seedy characters he hung out with back home — like this guy Chuck E. Weiss (or “Chalky Weiss,” as one British scribe recorded it), who’d sell you a rat’s ass as an engagement ring.5 Then Waits would start handing out advice, telling his interviewers where, in America, they could find a drink at any hour of the day; listing the worst places to stay in a variety of cities; and explaining how to find a reasonably priced pavement princess when you’re a stranger in town. The Brits loved Waits’s stories of cruising L.A. in a big old honker of a car, equipped with a six-pack of Miller High Life, singing along with Ray Charles testifying “What’d I Say?” or James Brown begging “Please, Please, Please.” They could just picture him tossing his empties out the window, driving everywhere, going nowhere. The appeal was obvious. To these Europeans, who were forced to contend with confined spaces and complex social hierarchies, Waits embodied a drive-all-night, be-yourself dream of freedom.

  Most of the European journalists who became so enthralled with Waits were unaware of the tradition he’d come out of. They were just too young. After all, Jack Kerouac and Lenny Bruce were already dead, Ken Kesey had entered the mainstream (the 1975 film adaption of his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest swept the Academy Awards), and Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs weren’t getting any younger. But what did it matter? Tom Waits, great American storyteller and spokesman for the (somewhat romanticized) denizens of the night, was here and now and happy to oblige. He loved Britain. The pubs, the people, the attention — it was just what he needed, and he returned home rejuvenated.

  By this time, Waits had pulled together enough material to make a new album, which he’d tentatively titled “Pasties and a G-String.” It represented a new direction for him, and that was evident to anyone who listened to the first few seconds of the finished product: “Wasted and wounded / It ain’t what the moon did / I got what I paid for now.” The lyrics of the new song collection, which was finally named Small Change, had a dark immediacy to them, a sense of hurting that Waits hadn’t really tapped before. Like his earlier recorded material, the Small Change songs were very well written and reflected their composer’s famous sense of humor, but their lyrics had more sting.

  Tom has always considered Small Change to be the high watermark of his early recording career. “There’s probably more songs off that record that I continue to play on the road, and that endured,” he told Barney Hoskyns. “Some songs you may write and record but you may never sing them again. Others you sing every night and try to figure out what they mean. ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues’ was certainly one of those songs I continued to sing, and, in fact, close my show with.”6

  “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)” is the album’s stunning opener, and it sets the tone for what follows. It tells the story of a man who finds himself stranded and penniless in a foreign land “where no one speaks English, and everything’s broken.” Traubert is etched as a sympathetic character, but it’s clear that he inhabits a hell of his own making. He’ll never make his way home again because any cash he gets his hands on he squanders on drink. The song’s chorus incorporates “Waltzing Matilda,” the classic Australian ballad of aimless travel. (“Matilda” is Aussie slang for “backpack,” and “waltzing matilda” means being on the road or hitchhiking.)

  Bones Howe distinctly remembers when Waits wrote “Tom Traubert’s Blues.” Howe’s phone rang in the middle of the night. It was Tom. Howe had long since become accustomed to the fact that being Tom’s friend meant receiving calls from him at all hours. “He said the most wonderful thing about writing that song,” Bones recalls. “He went down and hung around on skid row in L.A. because he wanted to get stimulated for writing this material. He called me up and said, ‘I went down to skid row . . . I bought a pint of rye. In a brown paper bag.’ I said, ‘Oh really?’” Waits replied to Howe, “Yeah — hunkered down, drank the pint of rye, went home, threw up, and wrote ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues.’” Howe was even more struck by what Waits said to him next: “Every guy down there . . . everyone I spoke to, a woman put him there.”

  Howe was amazed when he first heard the song, and he’s still astonished by it. “I do a lot of seminars,” he says. “Occasionally I’ll do something for songwriters. They all say the same thing to me. ‘All the great lyrics are done.’ And I say, ‘I’m going to give you a lyric that you never heard before.’” Howe then says to his aspiring songwriters, “A battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace / And a wound that will never heal.” This particular Tom Waits lyric Howe considers to be “brilliant.” It’s “the work of an extremely talented lyricist, poet, whatever you want to say. That is brilliant, brilliant work. And he never mentions the person, but you see the person.”

  Small Change explores a different mode with the next cut, “Step Right Up,” Waits’s jumpy and jivey indictment of advertising. The singer is a huckster who’s selling the ultimate product, but his description of that product is so vague and rambling that you can’t figure out exactly what it is — you just know you have to have it. Speaking to David McGee, Waits explained what he was up to: “I didn’t take things at face value like I used to. So I dispelled some things in these songs that I had substantiated before. I’m trying to show something to myself, plus get some things off my chest. ‘Step Right Up’ — all that jargon we hear in the music business is just like what you hear in the restaurant or casket business. So instead of spouting my views in Scientific American on the vulnerability of the American public to our product-oriented society, I wrote ‘Step Right Up.’”7

  To Waits, one of the special things about Small Change was that it gave him the opportunity to work with a jazz drummer who’d been pounding the skins since the early forties. Shelly Manne had worked with a host of jazz greats — Coleman Hawkins, Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, Raymond Scott, Stan Getz, Les Brown, Art Blakey. He’d also recorded many highly respected albums of his own. Waits had been telling interviewers for some time that he wanted to work with Manne, that he considered Manne’s backbeat on Peggy Lee’s “Fever” to be close to perfection.

  “The first time Tom worked with Shelly,” recalls Jerry Yester, “Tom invited me down because I was going to be doing strings and he wanted me to hear the alb
um and get into the atmosphere of it. I was there for the first take he did with Shelly Manne. And Shelly came out of the booth and said, ‘Who is this guy? This is the oldest young guy — or the youngest old guy — that I’ve ever met in my life!’ He was blown away by [Tom].”

  “Pasties and a G-String (At the Two O’Clock Club),” Tom’s tribute to the fine art of stripping, was Manne’s best Small Change showcase. Of course, because this was a Tom Waits song the tribute was to the old-time burlesque cabarets, not to the impersonal chrome-and-mirror “gentleman’s clubs” that prevail today. “Pasties and a G-String” honored the smoky old theaters where wild women with names like Chesty Morgan and Watermelon Rose delivered the bump and grind and twirled the tassels that dangled from their pasties to a tacky jazz backbeat, those darkened rooms where guys sat and watched, drank beer, and got “harder than Chinese algebra.” Atmospherically, “Pasties and a G-String” is pure Waits; musically, it’s Manne’s show — no other instrument intrudes on Waits’s voice and Manne’s swinging and crashing drums and cymbals.

  The album’s title track may be the best known, and it is an awesome achievement. “Small Change (Got Rained on with His Own .38)” condenses a hard-boiled Mickey Spillane novel into a five-minute morality play. A small-time gangster named Small Change eats in a quiet neighborhood diner before making his way to the track to bet on Blue Boots in the third. As he leaves the diner he gets his ticket punched with his own piece. Waits claims that the song is based on a shooting he witnessed on 23rd Street in New York City. It is a compendium of reactions and effects: the cops joke about hookers and the cabbies, and the workers swear they know nothing; even the fire hydrants plead the fifth; someone steals Small Change’s porkpie hat; no one bothers to close Small Change’s eyes as his life trickles onto the linoleum and runs under the jukebox.

  The listener is pulled into that dead-end diner, feeling the tension, the possibilities, the tragedy of the violent passing, the unmourned victim. Here, in the details, is everything that Waits had learned about telling a story with music. Unfortunately, a couple of those details had to be edited out. Tom was forced to change the lines, “The whores all smear on Revlon / And they look just like Jayne Meadows,” when the cosmetic giant threatened legal action. And Meadows — the wife of Steve Allen, who had performed on Waits’s favorite Jack Kerouac album — also had a problem with this vivid image. When the LP Small Change was reissued the offending passage was replaced with, “The whores all hike up their skirts / And fish for drug-store prophylactics.” On the cd version of the album Waits sings the compromise lines, but the printed lyrics read: “The whores all smear on _______ / And they look just like _______________.” Apparently Waits wasn’t willing to let Revlon and Meadows off the hook so easily after all.

  The moving ballad “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart (In Lowell)” is perhaps the album’s best indicator of the small changes that had taken place in Waits’s music and philosophy. Like “Tom Traubert’s Blues,” it explores the down side of the romantic image Waits had created for himself, but to even better effect. “I put a lot into ‘Bad Liver and a Broken Heart,’” he says. “I tried to resolve a few things as far as this cocktail-lounge, maudlin, crying-in-your-beer image that I have. There ain’t nothin’ funny about a drunk. You know I was really starting to believe that there was something amusing and wonderfully American about a drunk. I ended up telling myself to cut that shit out. On top of everything else, talking about boozing substantiates the rumors that people hear about you, and people hear that I’m a drunk. So I directed that song as much to the people that listen to me and think they know me as to myself.”8

  Bones Howe knew that the songs Waits was now bringing to him were as good as anything he had ever written, so he stepped back and allowed Waits to develop his vision. “My purpose was to make the best record that I could with Tom. Tom is, and has been from the very beginning, very strong about what he wants on his records. He was not a produced artist, ever. As Albert Grossman used to say, I just delivered the baby, you know? [Tom] was the creative engine. But I did make a lot of suggestions, I think, that helped him. Tom always said that with each record I held the bar a little higher for him to jump over.”

  And Small Change was a success — critically and commercially. The album far outsold any of Waits’s previous albums, particularly Nighthawks at the Diner . With it, Waits broke onto Billboard’s Top 100 Albums chart for the first time in his career. (He wouldn’t manage it again until 1999, with the release of Mule Variations .) Suddenly Tom Waits was everywhere. He was profiled in all the music publications. Interviewers from such magazines as Time, Newsweek, and even Vogue lined up to talk to him. Waits remarked that his mother had never been entirely sure that a career in music was right for her son until she saw him looking back at her from the pages of Vogue . This was as close as Waits had ever come to being a rock star, and, given the choice between being an obscure cult artist and a cult artist with a sizable following — well, that was a decision Waits didn’t need to mull over. He sat back and enjoyed what was happening to him.

  Waits had toured solo for years, but now, thanks to the money and prestige that Small Change had brought him, he was able to put together a regular band. He called it The Nocturnal Emissions, and it featured Frank Vicari on tenor sax, Fitzgerald Jenkins on bass, and Chip White on percussion and vibes. They toured the United States extensively, and a number of those tour shows were broadcast on radio. Then they headed for Europe, where Waits had wowed the critics and consumed a few pints of ale the year before. They performed in Germany, Holland, and then Japan.

  On Tom’s twenty-seventh birthday, he and The Nocturnal Emissions played the Agora Ballroom in Cleveland. While Tom was doing “Pasties and a G-String” a woman slipped onstage, walked up behind him, caught his eye, and started to dance. Waits got into it, assuming that she was an audience member acting on impulse, but his shock was apparent when she started to perform a slow, sensual striptease. Shimmying out of her dress, the woman revealed her very own pasties and G-string. Waits regained his equilibrium and sang along to the stripper’s bump and grind. As the song ended the woman disappeared back into the crowd and Waits joked, “Thank you, thank you. I haven’t seen my mother in years.”9

  Nocturnal Emissions drummer Chip White explained to a European radio interviewer how all of this actually came about. Tom didn’t know it, but that seemingly impromptu striptease was, in fact, a birthday surprise arranged for him by John Forscha, his road manager and old friend from L.A. It was an inspired gift: Waits enjoyed the spectacle so much that he had Forscha hire a local stripper at every remaining tour stop. Band members got to the point where they’d rate the girls. At the end of the tour, they tallied the points and named the Madison, Wisconsin stripper the hottest of the hot. While the band was playing in Japan, White recalls, Tom met a very nice woman. They got along well, but there must have been some sort of language-based misunderstanding, because the woman was somehow convinced that Waits had proposed marriage to her. Unaware of having entered into any such bargain, Tom returned to the States along with the band. They were scheduled to do a gig with Jimmy Witherspoon at the Roxy on Sunset Strip not long afterward, and, in the middle of their set, there was a car crash outside on the boulevard. The electricity went out and the Roxy was plunged into darkness.

  As club staff scrambled to get some candles lit, Tom’s Japanese friend showed up. She’d flown all the way to Los Angeles to see her new fiancé. It soon became clear that the power wasn’t about to be restored, and clubs up and down the strip emptied out onto the sidewalk. A huge block party ensued. Nightclubbers mingled with drinks in their hands, smoking and chatting. Among them stood Tom Waits, talking to his Japanese visitor, trying hard to explain that he just wasn’t looking to get married.

  Waits saw the Small Change album and tour as a turning point, not just in his music but also in his life. He told McGee, “I’m not money oriented, except to the point that I have bills to pay and I have to support
a trio. I want to be respected by my peers and I want my old man to think that what I’m doing is good. For me, it’s more of an internal thing. I’m just trying to do something that I think is viable, that I can be proud of, trying to create something that wasn’t there before. My wants and needs are small and limited. I’m not going into real estate or buying oil wells or becoming a slumlord . . .I’ve got to cinch something before we get out of the seventies. I’ve got a lot invested in this whole thing . . . in my development as a writer . . . I don’t want to be a has-been before I’ve even arrived. That would be hard to live with . . . I don’t want to think about it, man.Let’s go get a pizza.”

  On a number of fronts, Waits really was creating “something that wasn’t there before.” For example, in 1976, six years before the advent of mtv, Small Change spawned what many considered to be the first music video. The One That Got Away was a hand-painted animated short featuring Tom pursuing a scantily clad woman of questionable virtue down a neon-hued street. The film was directed by John Lamb, who would later win an Oscar for his animation; the character design was done by Keith Newton, who went on to become a top Disney animator; and head animator for the project was David Silberman, who became the chief character designer on the T.V. series The Simpsons . Not only did this clip spark a revolution in the music business, but it also broke new ground in the field of animation: it was the first cartoon to be filmed live and then animated, a technique that has since become widely used.