He’d contributed a few songs to Stallone’s Paradise Alley ; Robert Altman had used some Tom Waits music in his 1978 film A Wedding ; in 1980 esteemed European director Nicolas Roeg had chosen an older Waits tune, “Invitation to the Blues,” for the soundtrack of his art-house flick Bad Timing (A Sensual Obsession). And not long before getting the Coppola offer Waits had agreed to write the theme song for an indie film called On the Nickel . (An alternate version of the theme showed up on Waits’s next studio album, Heartattack and Vine .) The film documented the experience of the bums who inhabit a skid-row area in downtown Los Angeles. Veteran character actor Ralph Waite (best known as Pa on the seventies T.V. family drama The Waltons) not only starred in the film, but also wrote and produced it. On the Nickel was Ralph Waite’s labor of love, and the story it told — of a street survivor who goes back into the trenches to save a gutter-bound friend — piqued Tom’s interest.5 But no matter how much pleasure Waits derived from contributing bits and pieces to all these projects, nothing could match One from the Heart — quite simply, because Coppola had put the entire score into Waits’s hands. As a bonus, Tom was given a cameo role in One from the Heart, as a street musician who plays trumpet out on the strip. (The way Bones Howe describes it is that “Tom wanted to be in the movie, so Francis [stuck] him in a cameo somewhere.”) Waits has since acted in four Coppola films, and the two men have become close friends (Waits even sang at the wedding of Coppola’s director daughter Sofia and fellow director Spike Jonze). Says Coppola, “I am extremely fond of Tom Waits . . . as a wonderful person and friend, and great composer and performer. He is truly one of a kind. The score he wrote for One from the Heart is as fresh and imaginative now as it was twenty years ago. Also, Tom is a fine actor and a pleasure to work with.” As “fresh and imaginative” as the finished product turned out to be, the score was a major undertaking for Tom. Poised to begin his score-writing odyssey, he knew that he would need a guide and a support. Bones Howe, who had an intimate understanding of Waits’s music and style of working, was obviously the man for the job. He was also willing to take it on.
With that settled, Waits and Howe embarked on the project. Waits became a nine-to-five worker. He trekked to American Zoetrope every day, and there he occupied a cluttered little office furnished with a couch, a piano, and a tape recorder. His window overlooked Santa Monica Boulevard and he had an inspiring view of a Gulf station — which he said made him feel like he was at the shore.6 Waits imagined his new existence was like that of the people who had toiled in the famous New York songwriting factories. “I’d always admired the Tin Pan Alley writers, guys writing in brick buildings and hearing stuff like, ‘Well, we need an opening song now, because we’ll be opening in Poughkeepsie in two weeks. Come on, write something, then we’ll run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes.’ That kind of writing routine always looked attractive to me. I don’t know how successful I was with it in One from the Heart, because it was new for me, and I had to strain and stretch.”7
Waits was successful with it. One from the Heart contains some of his most effective and affecting songs, but the stretching and straining involved was considerable. For a man who was accustomed to recording an album in about a week or two, the experience of working on a single project for an extended period was an eye-opener. Waits labored over the One from the Heart score for nearly two years.
Then there were the inevitable bumps in the road. The first was Bette Midler. The official word was that Midler would not participate in Coppola’s project due to “scheduling conflicts,” but that entertainment-industry catchphrase conveys only a grain of truth. When Bones Howe floated the suggestion to Midler’s people, he discovered that the Divine Miss M. had some serious reservations. She was working on a concert film called Divine Madness, and she’d recently acted in her first film, The Rose, in which she played a boozing, pill-popping, self-destructive rock diva, loosely based on Janis Joplin. It was an impressive debut, the film had been well received, and Midler also had a smash single with The Rose ’s title track. Her second film would be Jinxed, a failed attempt at pitch-black romantic comedy, costarring Ken Wahl and Rip Torn, that would effectively stop Midler’s acting career dead in its tracks for about four years. At this point, however, she sensed that she was riding her wave of success straight to the top, and she was a busy, focused woman.
“We went through all sorts of gyrations because [Coppola] wanted Bette to be there,” Howe maintains. “I called Bette’s manager and he said, ‘Bette doesn’t want to sing in a movie that she’s not acting in . . .’ [I said], ‘But she’s going to be the voice of the movie. The same voices are going to be through the whole movie. It’s a great opportunity for her. She’s going to be working with Francis Ford Coppola.’ He said, ‘She’s a bigger name in film than Francis is.’ I said, ‘Jerry, if you believe that, she shouldn’t do the movie.’ That was the end of it.”
In the meantime, Tom Waits had fallen in love. Her name was Kathleen Brennan, and Tom, intent on both protecting their privacy and spinning a good yarn, offered many riffs on how they’d met. Kathleen was living in a convent, planning to become a nun. Her superiors had allowed her to leave the sanctuary to attend a New Year’s Eve party, and there she met Waits. Kathleen gave up God for him. Other times, Tom suggested that Kathleen was an Irish freedom fighter who was enlisting him to the cause. He’d also hint that she’d been a member of the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus. The truth is that Kathleen Brennan was a script analyst in the Zoetrope story department. She and Waits had been introduced at a party thrown by Art Fein, a fixture in the L.A. music scene and a close friend of Chuck E. Weiss.
“We met on New Year’s Eve at a party in Hollywood,” said Waits, in a more down-to-earth moment, during a 1998 radio interview. “I was leaving the next day. I was moving to New York City and I was never coming back here to the Los Angeles area ever again. That was what I said. But I’d said that before. So we met on New Year’s and then I left. I was gone for about four months and then I got a call to do One from the Heart . I came back and I got a little office with a piano in it and I was writing songs and Kathleen was working at Zoetrope. She was a story analyst. Somebody told her to go down and knock on my door and she did and I opened the door and there she was and that was it. That was it for me. Love at first sight. Love at second sight.”8
Kathleen and Tom quickly became inseparable. She saw the genius in him and wanted to help him develop it. She also saw that he wasn’t taking care of himself. Soon Waits was looking better groomed; he also quit smoking and cut down on his alcohol consumption. (To one interviewer he announced that he now drank wine exclusively — Carlo Rossi was his personal favorite.9) Kathleen, it appeared, was the impetus Tom needed to clean up his act.
In the summer of 1980, Waits took a short hiatus from his One from the Heart job to record an album. “I took a break . . . and got in a humbug over my whole thing with the picture there,” he admits. “For a brief spell, I moved out of my office at Zoetrope and went and wrote a record.”10 Waits named the new album Heartattack and Vine, explaining that he came up with the title while sitting in a bar at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. In walked a middle-aged woman clad in a bedraggled fur. She had on far too much makeup, but Tom could still see that she was a bit flushed. He watched as she approached the barkeep and told him that she thought she was having a heart attack. He ordered her to take it outside — he didn’t want any trouble in his place. And out of this cold message an album title was born.11
Forsaking his view of the Gulf station over at Zoetrope, Waits moved into the RCA Building on Ivar and Sunset in Hollywood. He actually took up residence in a studio, and everyone began wondering if he’d taken leave of his senses, but he insisted that he needed the booth close at hand. It would push him to write fast. In Studio B of Filmways/Heider Sound at RCA, Waits bedded down on a couch and was relieved when it became clear that he wasn’t going to be hassled by the security guards or dusted by the janitors. He
was happy to soak up the vibe of the studio where The Rolling Stones and Ray Charles had once laid down tracks. (Not to mention, Tom liked to add, The Monkees.)
When the Heartattack and Vine marathon got up to speed, Waits would write a song at night, hand it off to Bones Howe the next morning, record it during a session that would begin at about two o’clock in the afternoon, and start working on his next composition. Tom’s mission was to complete a new song every night so that when the band arrived, there would be something for them to work on. He was highly energized. The music was pouring out of him. His relationship with the members of his band was rock solid. And his rapport with Bones Howe was stronger than ever, because Bones’s willingness to work against the deadlines Tom was imposing clearly demonstrated his commitment to Tom’s work. All in all, Tom felt that this was a great way to work, and he joked that next time it would be even better —he’d cage the band up with him.12
The album’s title track is the most blatantly funky song Waits had ever written. “Heartattack and Vine” is infectious. It has a wild cockiness to it, and its smart-ass lyrics contain some funny and yet surprisingly profound observations, like, “Well I bet she’s still a virgin / But it’s only twenty-five til nine”; “Don’t you know there ain’t / no devil, there’s just God when he’s drunk.”
“In Shades” is an old-fashioned-sounding R&B instrumental (initially named “Breakfast in Jail”) that evokes Harlem’s Cotton Club in its heyday or the establishment the singer frequents in “Pasties and a G-String.” The next song, “Saving All My Love for You,” is a vow of faithfulness that Tom had originally intended to include on Foreign Affairs . “Downtown,” a rollicking, bluesy barrelhouse romp, is one of those magical first takes. Tom and the band got it right on the first practice take; although they went ahead and tried a few more, those efforts lacked spontaneity. Waits was particularly taken with Ronnie Barron’s organ, which he described as “amphetamine.”13
The centerpiece of Heartattack and Vine is a subtle little love song for Kathleen. In “Jersey Girl” (Kathleen spent much of her childhood in New Jersey), a guy walks along on his way to see his baby. Waits thought it had a Drifters feel to it and laughed that he’d never imagined he was capable of pulling off a song with “sha-la-la” in it.14 Bruce Springsteen picked up on the song, and for years it was a staple of his concert repertoire, much to Tom’s amusement. The Boss and Waits actually performed the song together live in L.A. during the early eighties. “There are T-shirts with ‘Jersey Girl’ [on them],” Waits marveled when speaking to Elliott Murphy. “It always reminds me of a social group. Is this like a gang or what?”15
Waits has referred to “’Til the Money Runs Out” as an old-time mambo, but the song is something much more intriguing and subversive than that. It’s fueled by what is probably the most straightforward rock vibe that Waits had ever recorded, and it also features an early stab at the falsetto vocals that Waits would experiment with periodically in the coming years. The song rides on a jagged percussion track laid down by Big John Thomassie and a strange, squealing organ riff, courtesy of Ronnie Barron. Musically, it is both accessible and slightly disorienting. The listener is drawn into a dense narrative about Chinamen on Telegraph Canyon Road and hoodlums swinging from the rafters, before being dismissed with a taunting “Bye-bye baby, baby bye-bye.” “’Til the Money Runs Out” is not just another strong Tom Waits song; when it was first released it amounted to a musical declaration. Waits was on the move again and the evolution of his sound was accelerating.
Heartattack and Vine also contains the sad and delicate “On the Nickel”; then there’s “Mr. Siegel,” a sleazy blues romp Waits says was inspired by gangster Bugsy Siegel. The beautiful “Ruby’s Arms,” in which the singer slips away from his lover forever as the sun rises, closes the proceedings on a tender note.
Waits had invited Jerry Yester to arrange and conduct “Jersey Girl” and “Ruby’s Arms,” and he later remarked that Yester’s arrangement for the latter just blew him away — he loved the fact that the brass choir sounded so much like a Salvation Army band.16 It would be the last time Yester and Waits ever worked together. “Right after Heartattack and Vine — or like a year after — I moved to Hawaii,” Yester recalls. “And he moved up North. And I haven’t seen him since. I’ve talked to him on the phone, but I haven’t seen him since then — except in the movies . . .”
By now, the standard reaction to a new Tom Waits album was critical approval and public indifference. Heartattack and Vine didn’t disrupt the pattern. The critics trotted out their superlatives, but the album got little-to-no radio airplay and the sales figures were disappointing. It seemed as though Waits was diving into some challenging and perilous new waters, and even his staunchest supporters were, for the most part, reluctant to follow him there. Heartattack and Vine did fare better commercially than either Foreign Affairs or Blue Valentine, but that wasn’t saying much.
For the first time in his career Tom Waits did not hit the road after finishing an album. Instead, he went back to Zoetrope to fulfill his obligation to Coppola. Reinstalled in his little office, he quickly learned that such transitions can be tough. “When I resumed my work on One from the Heart, ” he said to Zimmer, “it was a little difficult for me to resume writing music that wasn’t a little gnarled and driving — the kind of stuff I was writing for Heartattack and Vine . But Francis wanted the ‘cocktail landscape.’ So for me, as a composer, it was like trying to be an actor and having to try on different gloves.”17
Furthermore, Howe confides, Tom “was a little befuddled by Francis, because [Tom] would call me up and say, ‘Aw, I’ve written this great song. It’s called ‘Pickin’ Up After You.’ I would go in . . . and sit down with him at the piano and he’d play and sing me this song. I’d say, ‘That’s great.’ We’d book a studio and record it. We’d take it to Francis and Francis would go, ‘Oh, okay, that’s nice. What else are you writing?’ Tom was constantly grinding out stuff. There’s tons of material that didn’t get used in the picture.”
So, on the one hand, Waits was under real pressure to produce, but on the other, he had the director’s trust. Coppola was convinced that Waits understood what he was trying to do with One from the Heart, and the guidelines he staked out for him were anything but strict. Waits actually quotes Coppola as saying, “Anything you write that deals with the subjects of love, romance, jealousy, breakups can find its way into the film.”18 Coppola even constructed certain scenes with a given song in mind, so that Waits’s music became integral to the project — it wasn’t merely background or atmospheric. The male and female singers would fill a crucial role, providing revealing commentary on the experiences of the film’s small community of characters.
“There was never any gospel script. There was a blueprint, a skeleton,” Waits continued. “And right out front, Francis explained that the story would be changing as the production unfolded. Before I started writing anything, I met Francis in Las Vegas. In a hotel room, he took down all the paintings from the walls and stretched up butcher paper like a mural. Then he sketched out sequences of events and would spot, in very cryptic notations, where he wanted music. It was helpful. I was able to get an idea of the film’s peaks and valleys.”19
Waits and Howe would have “musical summit meetings” with Coppola at the director’s Napa Valley home. As Waits hunkered down at the piano, Coppola would articulate his ideas, describing the series of little dramas that coalesced to form the whole story. The musical dialogue began to take shape, and the brainstorming continued. It was a cooperative exercise all the way through. Coppola had enough respect for Waits’s talent to avoid telling him what to do. He did, however, push him to be as prolific as possible — Coppola wanted a large pool of ideas to pick and choose from.20
Diligently filling that pool, Waits maintained the day-job rhythm he’d established for himself before the Heartattack and Vine hiatus. He seemed to enjoy the normalcy of it all. “I’d get up in the morning,” he later
remarked, “have a cup of coffee, read the paper, get in my station wagon and then drive to work along with millions of other Americans.” At Zoetrope, he’d get down to it in his spartan little office located in the story department. He’d launch into a stream of consciousness, taping or taking note of everything. He’d tinker with a melody, throw out some words, splice things together, blend ideas. “If one line didn’t work in a song, I might stick it in somewhere else,” he explains. “I never threw anything away. Because I never knew, when I was writing, what Francis might end up using. What, a year and a half ago, might have been a scratch track, could have conceivably been used in the final cut of the film.”21
Since Tom had begun scoring One from the Heart before shooting commenced, he was working at Zoetrope during the set-building stage. He claims that he liked to hear the distant racket of hammers and drills as he went about his business. It was an inspiration to him, but it was also a goad: the project was moving steadily forward. With progress being made on all fronts, a festive, carnival-like atmosphere developed — carpenters, designers, actors, composers met, mingled, interacted. Then, when shooting was about to begin, Coppola gathered together the entire cast and crew to listen to the songs Waits had written so far.22
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