Life on the road also seems to have undermined Waits’s love life. He was never in one place long enough to focus on it. He did meet women he liked from time to time, but nothing ever seemed to work out. Itinerant lifestyle aside, Tom attributed his lack of success with the ladies to a basic image problem. One of his most famous quotes from the seventies was, “I’ve never met anyone who made it with a chick because they owned a Tom Waits album. I’ve got all three, and it’s never helped me.”12
By late 1977, Chuck E. Weiss was making some extra bucks between gigs by working in the Troubadour kitchen. One night a guy named Ivan Ulz was playing the Troub, and he introduced Chuck E. to his companion, a local waitress named Rickie Lee Jones. Ivan had asked Rickie Lee to come by and do a couple of songs with him — an Ulz tune called “You Almost Look Chinese” and a song that Jones had penned herself called “Easy Money.” It had come to her as she was sitting in a Venice Beach coffeehouse called Suzanne’s (now long gone) during the summer of 1976. The song was the first, and at that point the only, thing she’d ever written. Rickie Lee and Chuck hit it off, and, another night at the Troubadour, Chuck introduced Rickie Lee to Tom. The three started hanging out together.13
Rickie Lee Jones had come to Hollywood to escape from home and find herself, as have countless other restless kids over the years. She had first run away in 1969, at the age of fourteen, with a girlfriend. The pair had stolen a Pontiac gto in their hometown of Phoenix, Arizona, and headed for San Diego. They were caught the next day, but Rickie Lee hit the road again later, eventually making her way to L.A. in 1973. Jones didn’t succumb to the young-girl-gets-devoured-by-wicked-city syndrome: she didn’t hit a wall; she didn’t get dragged into drugs or prostitution. Managing to keep her head slightly above water, she toiled as a waitress at a greasy spoon. Sometimes things got tough. Chuck E. said that at one point Rickie Lee was so broke that she had to sleep under the Hollywood sign. Rickie Lee herself recalled being fired from her job at a sleazy Italian restaurant near Echo Park, going home to find that the guitar player she was living with had split, taken the car, and skipped out on the rent.14
Waits told Timothy White of Billboard that the first time he saw Rickie Lee she reminded him of Jayne Mansfield. It’s not surprising. The fifties’ blond bombshell was a kind of low-rent Marilyn Monroe whose sex- kitten va-va-va-voom act had enticed legions of male moviegoers. But Mansfield was a tragic figure, too. As beautiful as Monroe and even bustier, but not as talented an actress, she was never taken seriously in Hollywood. Toward the end of her career Mansfield was reduced to taking small roles in such puerile fare as Las Vegas Hillbillies . Mansfield died in 1967, in a car accident. She was just thirty-four. The story goes that she was on her way to see a lover and that she was decapitated in the crash, but these are just mythical embellishments. With or without the mythic dimensions, Jayne Mansfield was an incarnation of the ideal so many Tom Waits heroines were striving for — that, or the fantasy lover of his cockeyed male dreamers. Waits’s table dancers or tragic whores would view the life of a Hollywood sex bomb as the absolute limit: what could beat getting paid for your beauty and adored for it, too? It’s a classic setup for crushing disappointments and even tragic outcomes.
Tom was instantly smitten with Rickie Lee, describing his initial reaction to her as “primitive.” They embarked on a rocky romance. Sometimes they were lovers. Sometimes they were bar buddies. Rickie Lee loved the shady nightspots and dark corners of Hollywood as much as Tom did; Tom liked “Easy Money” and encouraged Rickie Lee to pursue her singing and songwriting. He was also impressed by her performing style, telling Timothy White that she came across to the audience like a “sexy white spade” — a glowing compliment in Waits’s book.15
At the time, Waits would sometimes reduce the dynamic of their relationship to a very basic formula: she was drinking a lot then; he was, too; so they drank with each other. He’d add that one of the best ways to really get to know a woman is to get plastered with her. One of his favorite memories of their time together was the night that Rickie Lee showed up at his window and yelled to him, insisting that he come out and paint the town with her because she was wearing a brand-new pair of high-heeled shoes! He didn’t have to be asked twice. They eventually found themselves staggering along Santa Monica Boulevard, smashed, with Rickie Lee barely able to stay on top of her heels. Waits really respected that kind of behavior in a woman.16
Part of Rickie Lee’s powerful appeal was that she was always up for whatever Tom and Chuck could suggest. If they wanted to steal those cheesy ceramic jockeys from the lawns of Beverly Hills mansions, she was game. Rickie Lee was equally willing to hop a freight car. She had no fear. Once Waits invited Rickie Lee and Chuck E. to a high-powered music-industry party, and as soon as they entered Rickie Lee sat down with an avocado placed strategically between her legs. This embarrassed Tom a little, but he loved her moxie. When the trio finally realized that they were social outcasts at this soiree, they lathered their palms with chip dip and started shaking hands with people.17
Sometimes Tom’s fascination with Rickie Lee turned to fear for her well-being. She was so much more streetwise than he was. She’d been living on her own for years; she’d experimented freely with drugs and withstood many hard knocks. If she could sometimes seem like a wise old goddess surveying life on Earth, then on other occasions, to paraphrase the immortal words of Bob Dylan, she could break like a little girl. Chuck E. described her as, by turns, tough and soft, nurturing and playful.18
While he was still caught up in his adventure with Rickie Lee, Waits prepared to record his next album. His momentum still hadn’t abated: he’d record an album, tour on the strength of it, and then head right back into the studio to record another one. Waits told Mikal Gilmore of Rolling Stone that Blue Valentine was “contemporary urban blues, sort of like the music of Ray Charles or Jimmy Witherspoon.” What instigated the album was the realization that “you can get away with murder if you sing the blues. I heard a Roosevelt Sykes album not long ago that had a seven-minute song on it called, ‘I’m a Nut.’ For seven minutes, he sang, ‘I’m a nut . . . I’m a nut . . . I’m a nut.’ So I sat down and wrote a song called ‘The Lunchroom Closed Down, The Newsstand Folded Up and the Rib Joint’s Gone Out of Business.’ But I’ve got a lot of sophisticated stuff on there, too.”19
Unfortunately, that tune with the promising title never saw the light of day. Nor did another that Waits told Gilmore he’d written for the album. It was called “Conversation in a Car between Two Suspects After Having Knocked Over Yonkers Race Track with Three-and-a-Half Million Dollars, Riding in a ’62 Nova, Headed in the Direction of East St. Louis.” Explained Waits, “Titles can be very important. If you can turn one into your opening stanza, it can save you some work.”20 Even if evocatively titled tunes such as the two Waits mentioned didn’t make the final cut, Blue Valentine ’s song list is studded with gems like these: “A Sweet Little Bullet from a Pretty Blue Gun,” “Red Shoes by the Drugstore,” and “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis.”
Blue Valentine, Waits went on to remark, would display a tougher edge than his previous efforts had. “I’m playing the electric guitar for the first time, and shit, I know three chords, just like every other guitar player. But really, there’s more blood in this record, probably more detective-type stories. It just comes from living in Los Angeles, hanging out where I hang out. I kind of feel like a private eye sometimes. I’m just trying to give some dignity to some of the things I see, without being patronizing or maudlin about it.”21
There was blood, there was an infusion of the dignity Waits was so uniquely capable of perceiving in the battered and broken lives around him, and there was a new kind of energy fueled by Rickie Lee Jones. Blue Valentine reflected Waits’s relationship with Rickie Lee in several ways. There was the album’s artwork. Rickie Lee is the mysterious back-cover blond lying across the car parked outside the open-all-night gas station; her back is to the camera as Tom leans in for
a passionate kiss. And Blue Valentine opens with a tribute, of sorts, to Rickie Lee. Waits liked to serenade her when the mood struck with songs from West Side Story . Rickie Lee loved it, so Tom decided to include a tune from the Romeo and Juliet–themed tale of gang warfare in fifties’-era New York City on his latest release. He chose the showstopper “Somewhere,” the song Maria sings to Tony as he lies bleeding to death from a gunshot wound.
Waits’s version of the song — written by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim — is as powerful as those versions performed within the context of the tragic musical. His voice cracked and ravaged, he transforms the song into a prayer for absolution. Somewhere, “There’s a place for us / A time and a place for us . . .”
The next track, “Red Shoes by the Drugstore,” has a lustful, jittery jungle pulse to it. The song skitters through the listener’s consciousness. Frustration and neediness come welling out of the narrator, communicating through Waits’s sly vocals, as he watches a good-time gal waiting on her man at a soda counter, wondering where he is, unaware that he is fast becoming a statistic in a botched robbery. “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis,” constructed on Waits’s recital of a note from a prostitute to an old boyfriend named Charlie, follows. She insists that her life is coming together — she’s going to have a baby, and she’s finally got a nice place to live, on Ninth, above a dirty bookstore. She’s met a nice jazz musician who is gonna take care of her and her baby, even though it’s not his. She’s off the bottle. She’s off the dope. She’s finally happy. But she eventually has to confess to Charlie that this is all just wishful thinking. “I don’t have a husband / He don’t play trombone.” The hooker’s back in jail and needs money to pay for a lawyer.
“Kentucky Avenue” is a bittersweet childhood memoir in which Waits recalls his boyhood home and his old pal Kipper. Two dead-end boys, one of whom is stuck in a wheelchair, look for adventure in their hometown. They smoke Luckies, watch the fire truck going about its business, avoid mean old Mrs. Storm, and dream about the local fourth-grade hottie, Hilda (who plays strip poker and even lets Joey Navinski French-kiss her). The memories compound and Waits sings his longing to set his wheelchair-bound friend free so that they can ride the rails together to New Orleans. “All these things are real,” says Bones Howe. “‘Kentucky Avenue’ still brings tears to my eyes. I fought him for those cellos, by the way. In the end, he relented. He just said okay. Because I think there’s another version of him doing it just sitting at a piano. It doesn’t have the power. To me, it doesn’t have the emotional feel.”
“Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard” accelerates the beat, the bluesy, bragging rant of a hooligan who stumbles into town on a freight car and sticks around long enough to stir up a little ruckus and get into a fight before blowing out of town. The hooligan’s taunts are propelled outward in stutters and jerks, but he eventually concedes that his life’s a hard and lonely one. “Romeo Is Bleeding,” another of Waits’s clever, jazzy crime stories, rounds out the proceedings. A guy who sticks a shiv into the local sheriff is fatally shot in the chest — a familiar Waits image, with echoes of West Side Story — and he feels his lifeblood seeping into his shoes.
The album closes with the glum, subdued title track. A criminal has been forced to enter the witness-protection program and move far away from his Philadelphia home. It kills him that he has had to abandon the woman he loves. As he struggles to forget, to assume his new, manufactured identity, he receives a card from her. Out of the blue. He has no idea how she’s managed to find him — all he knows is that if he gives into temptation and contacts her, he’ll die. So he sits and drinks and tries to obliterate the memory of what he has sacrificed, but the bad dreams and the good recollections just won’t go away.
Intent on evolving musically and never falling back on established formulas, Waits made a momentous decision. After recording two Blue Valentine tracks — “Romeo Is Bleeding” and “Wrong Side of the Road” — he cut his ties with The Nocturnal Emissions and brought some strong collaborators into the project. One of them was former Mother of Invention and Jean-Luc Ponty keyboardist George Duke (who used the alias Da Willie Conga while working with Tom). Duke was about to become a well-known jazz/R&B performer and producer, scoring a big hit with the ballad “Sweet Baby” as part of a band he formed with bassist Stanley Clarke called The Clarke/Duke Project. As well, Waits put together a new touring band made up of veteran New Orleans musicians. He was stimulated by the prospect of working with old pros like Herbert Hardesty, Fats Domino’s longtime horn player; percussionist Big John Thomassie, who’d worked with Dr. John and Freddie King; and guitarist Arthur Richards.
Waits also took a chance on a young bassist named Greg Cohen, who would eventually become one of his closest collaborators and a pillar of his band for years to come. At twenty-five, Cohen was only a few years out of Sonoma College and the California School of the Arts. A mutual friend told Waits about him, and Waits called to offer him the chance to try out for the band. “Waits auditioned us all at once,” Cohen told journalist George Kanzler, “so he couldn’t really tell how well each of us played, individually. He ended up hiring the whole band. At the time, I was playing with a lounge band in Los Angeles, doing the schlocky pop tunes of the day, so Tom rescued me from all that.”22
When Kanzler asked Waits to describe what he saw in Cohen, the answer he received was predictably interesting and over the top. The truth is in here somewhere: “Greg plays everything from dinosaur music to dinner music, from steakhouse to Stravinsky. He is a Renaissance man and a road hog. He will always be the most indispensable member of the band. He is an irreplaceable obstetrician in the birthing room of the recording studio. He knows arranging, conducting, composing, bow-making and electricity.”23
With a new band standing solidly behind him, Waits was ready to spice up his live act. His stage presentation became much more theatrical as he combined sets, props, lighting, and special effects to achieve a heightened visceral thrill. The club circuit was rapidly becoming a memory. Waits had a lifelike gas-station set constructed — complete with gas pumps and spare tires — to give an even more spartan and urgent feel to “Burma Shave,” which he was doing live as a medley with George Gershwin’s “Summertime.” While performing the crime drama “Small Change,” Waits would stand beneath a streetlamp; as the number concluded a shower of glittering confetti would come down and Waits would open an umbrella. Reminisces Bones Howe, “That gig that he did at the James Doolittle Theater on Vine Street [in Hollywood] . . . Herb booked him in there for a week. That was when he had the umbrella and the sparkles came down and stuff like that. It was really, really wonderful. In the time I was with him, that was the best. That was the way he should have been shown. He should have been onstage, like a performer. Like a one-man show, in a way. That was really the best that I think he ever was . . . at least the best that I ever saw.”
Waits’s acting career was finally jump-started when he became friendly with a former Philadelphia boxer named Sylvester Stallone. Sly had been bouncing around Hollywood for years, waiting for that elusive big break, taking a series of bit parts in B movies and doing odd jobs to stay afloat. Early on, he’d even been desperate enough to do a porn film. When it became obvious that he was just spinning his wheels, he took charge of the situation and wrote a script with a starring role for himself. Rocky tells the story of a Philly club fighter who gets a shot at the big time when he becomes involved in a publicity stunt: the heavyweight champion of the world fights an unknown contender.
The script was a strong one, and it generated a lot of interest within the film industry, but Stallone refused all offers because none of the potential purchasers would allow him to play the title role. He ultimately sold the script to United Artists at a significantly reduced price with the studio’s assurances that he would star. Rocky was shot on a shoestring budget. The critics raved, moviegoers were moved and inspired by this timeless tale of an underdog who triumphs over the odds, and R
ocky won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1977. Riding high, Stallone got the green light to work on a new project, also based on a script he’d penned himself. Paradise Alley was about life and times in a tough Italian neighborhood, and it marked Stallone’s directing debut.
Bones Howe remembers that Sly and Tom “got to be friends somehow or other. Maybe Sly saw him at the Troubadour or met him through somebody. I have no idea. He was suddenly there. But it wasn’t unusual, because Tom had a way of accumulating people. Chuck E. Weiss. Rickie Lee Jones. People just sort of appeared all of a sudden.” Stallone offered Waits the small role of Mumbles and asked him to record some songs for the Paradise Alley soundtrack album. Tom jumped at the chance to act, and the part was perfect for testing his wings. Mumbles, a piano player at a neighborhood saloon, wasn’t exactly a stretch for him.
Howe recalls that in the end he and Tom only contributed a couple of songs to the film’s soundtrack — “Bill Conti was really upset because he wanted to do all the source music himself. He and Sly were very close, but Sly wanted Waits in that movie.” Conti, a jazz musician, had scored Rocky and he was thrilled when the movie’s rousing, horn-based theme rose to the top of the pop charts. Of the five tracks that Waits and Howe recorded for Paradise Alley, only two made it into the soundtrack: “(Meet Me In) Paradise Alley,” a pretty piano ballad in which one of Waits’s barfly lovers wards off desperation in the local taproom; and “Annie’s Back in Town,” a sad love tune with just a touch of West Side Story grit.
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