Wild Years

by Jay S. Jacobs

  The other tracks that Waits and Howe had laid down for Stallone were a new version of the Small Change song “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart” (which incorporated the old standard “As Time Goes By” into its intro and outro) and two different versions of a song called “With a Suitcase.” Neither version of the latter song was ever released. One was done with a rhythm section. The other — the “street” band version in which, says Howe, “we were banging on bass drums and all that kind of stuff” — reflected Waits’s growing interest in experimental tones and instrumentation.

  Paradise Alley was released to scathing reviews, and it flopped at the box office. Tom, however, didn’t experience the acute disappointment that Stallone must have felt. After all, the project had allowed him to become an actor, and he’d thoroughly enjoyed himself. And soon another interesting opportunity presented itself. Tom was asked to write the text for Vegas, a book of art reproductions featuring the paintings of Guy Peellaert, who had recently published another art book called Rock Dreams . Excited about this new undertaking, Waits told Rolling Stone ’s Mikal Gilmore all about it. He described Vegas as, “a set of emotional profiles and portraits of old heroes, like Marlene Dietrich, Jimmy Durante, Bugsy Siegel, Milton Berle, and Lenny Bruce.” Waits dabbled happily in his various projects and remained convinced that none of this was interfering with his song-writing. “Well, y’know, ya have to keep busy,” he remarked. “After all, a dog never pissed on a moving car, know what I mean?”24

  With Tom’s encouragement, Rickie Lee Jones had begun performing from time to time. One night in 1978, she played a gig at a little club in Hollywood, and in the audience was Lowell George, leader of the Southern rock ensemble Little Feat.

  George had founded Little Feat in 1969 and now, nearly ten years later, he was bored with the enterprise. He wanted to do some solo work. Stifled by band life, by Little Feat’s improvisational-jazz leanings, by his own towering reputation, by audiences that just wanted to hear retreads of “Dixie Chicken,” George was determined to break out of his old musical groove and try his hand at some different genres and styles. He hadn’t actually disbanded Little Feat yet, but all signs pointed in that direction. George didn’t seem in any hurry to head back into the recording studio with his bandmates.25

  In fact, George had been plugging away at a solo album, Thanks I’ll Eat It Here . He’d wanted to use this title for an earlier Little Feat album, but his suggestion was vetoed and the safer, more blurb-friendly Sailin’ Shoes had been selected instead. On Thanks I’ll Eat It Here George planned to concentrate more intensely on his singing and create something that sounded completely unlike anything he had done with Little Feat.

  There were, however, two problems inhibiting Lowell George’s solo project. One was that George was a perfectionist. He’d record a song over and over again in his quest to achieve just the right feel. Tracks were tweaked, instrumental parts were trashed, and vocals were redone. The second problem was cocaine. George, and many of the people he hired to work with him on the album, had frittered away most of the recording budget, and quantities of George’s own cash, on Bolivian marching powder. With a hopped-up perfectionist at the helm, the album’s release date receded into the mists of the future. George had been working on Thanks I’ll Eat It Here since 1976, and the end still wasn’t in sight.

  Watching Rickie Lee that night in 1978, George was captivated by “Easy Money,” her hipster story ballad. He had to have it on his album. It was to be one of the two Thanks I’ll Eat It Here songs that George didn’t write — the other was a remake of soul siren Ann Peebles’ 1973 hit “I Can’t Stand the Rain.” George told Lenny Waronker, an executive and producer at his label, Warner Brothers, about Rickie Lee Jones. Waronker, who knew a good thing when he saw it, checked her out and signed her to a recording contract. At the same time, permission for Lowell George to record “Easy Money” was obtained, and George got down to work. He committed “Easy Money” to tape with uncharacteristic speed and efficiency because he was worried that Rickie Lee would release her own version before his album came out.

  Jones won that race hands down. She made her debut album, Rickie Lee Jones, and Warner Brothers released it in March of 1979. It was a resounding success. By the time Thanks I’ll Eat It Here was released, later that year, George’s health was failing. He was a heavy man with drug and alcohol addictions, and he’d been hospitalized with hepatitis and extreme back pain. Just weeks after his labor-of-love solo album hit the record stores, the thirty-four-year-old guitarist/songwriter/singer died of a massive heart attack while on a press tour.26

  Witnessing Rickie Lee Jones become a smash hit, many music-industry insiders shook their shaggy heads in disbelief. This was the late seventies. The music scene was littered with arena rock bands like Toto and Styx, pissed-off punks like The Sex Pistols and The Clash, and disco units like Chic and (at this point, anyway) The Bee Gees. Rickie Lee’s debut was a jazzy, delicate, funky-bebop symphony, and it stood out on the Billboard charts like a sore thumb.

  What had actually propelled Rickie Lee Jones to the top of those charts was an earthy tribute to good friend Chuck E. Weiss, called “Chuck E.’s in Love,” inspired by a remark that Waits had once made. One night Jones was with Waits in his room at the Tropicana when the phone rang. It was Chuck E. calling from Denver to say that he’d just met a distant cousin and was quite taken with her. Tom and Chuck talked for a while, and when Tom hung up he looked over at Rickie Lee and said, “Chuck E.’s in love.”27 The line caught Rickie Lee’s fancy and she constructed a song out of it. It wasn’t the first song ever written about Chuck E. Weiss; Waits had sung about his buddy in the Nighthawks at the Diner tune “Nighthawk Postcards (From Easy Street),” and Chuck E. was also mentioned in two Small Change songs — “Jitterbug Boy (Sharing a Curbstone with Chuck E. Weiss, Robert Marchese, Paul Body and the Mug and Artie)” and “I Wish I Was in New Orleans (In the Ninth Ward).”

  The single “Chuck E.’s in Love” was a good-time finger-popper about the boho nightlife to be found in pool halls, diners, and clubs. It was unlike anything else in radio rotation at the time, and it became one of the biggest hits of the year. Tom didn’t contribute directly to Rickie Lee Jones, but the album bore many traces of the trademark Tom Waits musical sensibility, and the delicate musical photographs “On Saturday Afternoons in 1963” and “The Last Chance Texaco” featured the type of hard-luck romanticism that was so dear to Tom’s heart. The jazzy swing of “Danny’s All-Star Joint” and “Young Blood” further enlivened the collection.

  Rickie Lee’s sudden success meant a packed schedule and increased strain on her already-tenuous relationship with Tom. The two finally admitted that they wanted different things from life and stopped seeing each other. Since the breakup, Rickie Lee has generally been reluctant to discuss their relationship. Still, in one interview with Timothy White of Billboard, she did tarnish the carefully constructed Waits persona to some extent by insisting that in the long run what Tom really wanted was to lead a normal suburban existence with all the standard features — loving wife, kids, pets, Little League games, PTA meetings. Her remarks would prove prophetic.

  When Waits finally became fed up with the fact that the Tropicana Hotel had become an amusement park for rock stars, he pulled up stakes and moved out. He said that the last straw was when they painted the swimming pool black.28 “When I started making albums and touring,” he told Dave Zimmer of Bam in 1982, “certain things started happening. People started sending me letters, telling me I was top drawer. And when I put my address and telephone number on the back of [ Small Change ], strangers started looking for my place and calling me on the phone. So while I gained a certain amount of professional success, my personal life began to shrink to the point that I became like a kind of geek.” At the Tropicana he’d begun to feel imprisoned. “When you can’t go back and live in the world you come from, and you can’t live in the world you’re in, you get in your little sports car and drive ninety miles an hour
down a dead-end street. There was always the danger of getting sucked down …I felt I’d painted myself in a corner. I’d fallen in with a bad crowd and needed a new landscape, a new story.”29

  So Waits went off into a new landscape and didn’t tell many people where he was going. He became very hard to find. He moved into a little house on Crenshaw Street in Los Angeles — and Crenshaw, as Waits pointed out, is one very long street. The Tropicana was finally torn down and replaced with a huge art-deco gay hotel, which producer Mary Aloe describes as “a Dr. Seuss version of a Ramada. You go there and it looks like Whoville.” The motel’s neighbor, Duke’s Coffee Shop, moved up into the heart of Sunset Strip.

  When reminiscing about the old Tropicana, Waits betrays a certain nostalgia. He told the listening audience of the Los Angeles radio show Morning Becomes Eclectic : “It wasn’t that bad. It doesn’t seem that long ago. I guess my life’s different now. When I moved into the Tropicana it was nine dollars a night, and it was one of those out-of-the-way places — about a block away from the Alta Cienega, which is another one of those ‘murder motels’ — but it’s changed a lot. That bowling alley that used to be there changed hands four or five times and I think they’re selling slacks there now. If you live in Los Angeles, things change so rapidly. Places that you used to go … if you leave town for two or three months, chances are they’ll tear down the gas station or the donut shop or the cleaners where you go. The hotel is gone, so I guess it kind of stimulates your imagination about it once you tear down the place where it all happened. The stories get taller as the building gets shorter.”30

  Waits continued to tour with his new, theatrical show, and it met with raves. He even arranged his props and backdrops on the set of the pbs concert series Austin City Limits, much to the delight of the live studio audience. But for the first time since the inauguration of his recording career Waits let a year go by without releasing an album; 1979 came and went with no sign of a Tom Waits record. Blue Valentine had gone over well with the critics, but it hadn’t sold well in the United States. Neither had his previous album. It now seemed that Waits’s popularity as a major recording artist was on the wane — at home, at least; he could take solace in the fact that he was getting bigger internationally. During his 1979 tour he traveled to Australia for the very first time.

  Through it all, however, Waits’s confusion over his work, and his life in general, was deepening. His retreat to the little house on Crenshaw had helped in the short term, but what he needed, he soon realized, was a dramatic change of scenery. In order to begin the process of recharging he was going to have to put some serious distance between himself and his familiar California milieu. So Tom Waits decided to move to New York City. Manhattan would challenge him, wake him up, shake him up. Tom, of course, put a lighter spin on the decision. He told everyone that New York was a great town for shoes — that’s why he was going, dammit! And it had a whole new set of bars for him to experience. So off he went, checking into the legendary Chelsea Hotel on arrival.

  On VH1 Storytellers, Waits recalled sitting alone in his room at the Chelsea one night, trying to watch The Ox-Bow Incident . When the movie was less than half over the door opened and a strange couple, engaged in an argument, came in and sat down. Waits perched on the bed, watching them fight and missing his movie. It turned out that the two had stayed in the room before and had kept the key so they could get back in. Waits pointed out that they couldn’t stay and that they were interrupting his evening’s entertainment. It became apparent that the only way to get rid of the pair was to give them money for another room, so Tom slipped the guy a fifty-dollar bill. He was taken aback when the man came back with the change.31 Soon afterward, Tom left the Chelsea and moved into a small flat he’d rented nearby. He even became a member of the McBurney ymca because he wanted to get himself into good physical shape. His life as a New Yorker had begun.

  Bones Howe believes that the real reason Tom chose Manhattan as his new base of operations had nothing to do with scenery changes or shoes or a quest for fresh watering holes. He admits, “You know, Tom did go to New York and try to work with another producer. I was aware of that. He did some demos and stuff. He came back and we talked a lot about what he wanted to do. It was between Blue Valentine and Heartattack and Vine .” While in New York, Waits attempted to come to a meeting of the minds with Jack Nitzche and several other producers, but it just wasn’t happening for him. None of it — neither the producers nor the city itself. New York, New York may be a wonderful town, where the Bronx is up and the Battery down, but Tom Waits was feeling a little lost.

  He realized that it was time to give it up the day he found himself running through Chelsea trying not to spill his drink on his way to a workout at the Y. In fact, he more than once compared his time in the Big Apple to a prison term. “It was thirty below,” he told Dave Zimmer. “I was paying six hundred dollars a month for a miserable little apartment and I spent three hundred on locks for my doors, because I was constantly worried about burglars. One of my neighbors was this Yugoslavian lady who wore black pajamas and sticks on her back. I was rescued from this situation by Francis.”32

  6

  THIS ONE’S FROM THE HEART

  In the spring of 1980, Waits’s New York City adventure was terminated when he learned that director Francis Ford Coppola wanted him to score his latest film. It was to be the first movie Coppola had made since releasing Apocalypse Now, in which he’d taken Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad’s voyage into the Belgian Congo and the dark recesses of the human soul — and transformed it into a stunning, surreal take on the Vietnam War. Coppola was by now powerful enough within the industry (he also had The Godfather and The Conversation on his résumé) to be heading up his own studio, American Zoetrope Pictures, which had recently taken over the premises of historic Hollywood General Studios. Coppola was a player.

  Apocalypse Now came out in 1979. It had been a hellish picture to make. Shot on location in the Philippines, the production was plagued by a ballooning budget, schedule overruns, and the mega-tantrums thrown by Marlon Brando, who was being paid millions for a cameo role. Things got so taxing, physically and mentally, that star Martin Sheen suffered both a heart attack and a nervous breakdown. (Coming to terms with the ordeal that nearly broke her husband, Eleanor Coppola made a fascinating documentary based on the project called Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Journey, which was released in 1992.)

  Emerging from the pressure cooker that was Apocalypse Now, Coppola was ready to plunge into something a little simpler and lighter. Also, despite the fact that Apocalypse Now had rocked the film community and won critical raves, it was not an immediate commercial success. The costs of making the film had been staggering, and this coupled with the relatively poor box-office revenues it was generating amounted to a significant financial blow for Coppola. He needed a commercial hit in order to refill the coffers of Zoetrope, his fledgling dream factory.

  Coppola was banking on One from the Heart, a romantic trifle about Hank (Frederic Forrest) and Frannie (Teri Garr), a couple whose relationship has run out of steam. They drift apart and wind up in the arms of exotic new partners (played by Nastassja Kinski and Raul Julia). This lover’s waltz is set against the frenetic, glowing backdrop of the Las Vegas Strip. Coppola, yet another notorious perfectionist, resolved to recreate Las Vegas on a studio soundstage — the hotels, the shops, the streets, the cityscape ablaze with a million twinkling lights were all constructed, at a horrendous cost, on-site at Zoetrope, and the results were astonishing.

  Shortly after, he’d discovered Waits’s music for himself. Coppola was given a copy of the Bette Midler/Tom Waits duet “I Never Talk to Strangers” from Foreign Affairs . “He liked the relationship between the singers,” Waits told Dave Zimmer. “That was the impetus for him contacting me and asking me if I was interested in writing music for his film.”1

  Coppola did not conceive of One from the Heart as a traditional Hollywood musical; none of the film’s
stars would actually sing (except for Kinski, who performed the tune “Little Boy Blue” in a fantasy sequence). But Coppola strongly believed that his movie should have a kind of running lyrical explanation — almost like a Greek chorus — to move the story forward. It would be interesting, he thought, if Waits could write songs that expressed the feelings of Forrest’s character and for Midler to sing the inner voice of Garr. “I Never Talk to Strangers,” Waits told Steve Pond of Rolling Stone, provided Coppola with “the thread of what he wanted for this score, which was a lounge operetta: piano, bass, drums and musical commentary.”2

  This idea captured Waits’s interest, though looking back he acknowledges that the timing was off. He had already begun to tire of the cocktail-lounge dimension of his music, and he was eager to experiment with a new set of sounds. The piano and strings that had sweetened so many of his songs was now getting on his nerves — he claimed he was starting to sound like Perry Como. He wanted his songs to have a more earthy, visceral, lived-in sound. So in his contributions to One from the Heart he combined the best of the two approaches, blending the old-school melancholy of “Old Boyfriends” and “Broken Bicycles” with the stark experimental impulse that had driven “You Can’t Unring a Bell.” “When we were working on One from the Heart there was a lot of banging on tire irons,” Bones Howe recalls. “What I call Tom’s junkyard music was really coming.” “I think by the time Francis called and asked me to write those songs, I had really decided I was gonna move away from the whole lounge thing,” says Waits. “He said he wanted a lounge operetta, and I was thinking, well, you’re about a couple of years too late. All that was coming to a close for me. So I had to go and kind of bring all that back. It was like growing up and hitting the roof. I kept growing and kept banging into the roof. Because you have this image that other people have of you, based on what you’ve put out there so far and how they define you and what they want from you. It’s difficult when you try to make some kind of turn or change in the weather for yourself. You also have to bring with you the perceptions of your audience.”3 Zoetrope sent out feelers, Coppola and Waits came to terms creatively, and soon Waits was saying farewell to New York and catching a flight back to Hollywood. Waits’s own version of how he hooked up with Coppola goes like this: “I met him in a bar. I gave him a ride home. He started borrowing money from me. And I said, ‘Look, I’ll see what I can do to help you.’”4 Seriously though, Waits had always been intrigued by the medium of film and, despite his reservations about revisiting familiar musical sites, he jumped at the chance to score an entire movie.