Wild Years

by Jay S. Jacobs

  They were still, however, lacking a vital component. One from the Heart ’s female voice had yet to be recruited. Midler wasn’t an option, so Waits and Howe put their heads together. They got nowhere. It was Kathleen who put forward the surprising suggestion of Crystal Gayle, the younger sister of country-music legend Loretta Lynn. Crystal Gayle herself had recently hit the country big time, and her songs “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” “Talking in Your Sleep,” and “Half the Way” had rocketed to the top of the pop and country charts. Her voice was undeniably gorgeous, but her polished, country-lite offerings were completely at odds with the jazzy urban squalor of Waits’s compositions, particularly the gin-soaked Vegas blues pieces he was coming up with for One from the Heart . This didn’t faze Kathleen. She’d recently heard Crystal’s rendition of the Julie London standard “Cry Me a River,” and she was impressed with the strength and purity of the young singer’s voice. During a meeting at Zoetrope, Bones and Tom were sweating the female-voice issue when Kathleen asked if they’d ever heard Crystal Gayle’s “Cry Me a River.” They hadn’t, so Bones sent an assistant out to buy a copy. “Tom and I listened to it, and it was a great suggestion,” Howe recalls. “I called down to William Morris in Nashville and got in touch with her manager, who was also her husband.” He learned that Crystal Gayle was going to be in Hollywood the very next week to appear on The Tonight Show . Over a large lunch served with wine at Coppola’s bungalow on the Zoetrope lot, Crystal Gayle, her husband, Howe, Waits, and Coppola discussed One from the Heart . Howe says that the two visitors from Nashville were totally seduced by the charismatic director. Crystal Gayle agreed to work on the soundtrack. Tom would send her songs to learn, and she’d travel to Hollywood periodically to record them. “She sang them exactly the way he wanted,” says Howe. “She never changed a word, changed a note, changed anything.”

  Tom told Zimmer that “Crystal Gayle had worked out real well. She was nice and easy to work with.”23 Although it was a challenge for Waits to write for a female voice, some of the songs that he penned for the film were heartbreakingly beautiful. “Once Upon a Town/The Wages of Love,” a smoky medley of Crystal Gayle/Tom Waits duets, sets everything in motion. It’s followed by “Is There Any Way Out of This Dream?” — a simply ravishing piano ballad in which the singer reflects upon the ways in which her life has fallen short of her expectations. Crystal Gayle’s honeyed vocals, through the medium of Tom’s music and lyrics, capture the vague discontent that suffuses the movie.

  “‘Is There Any Way Out of This Dream?’ and ‘Take Me Home’ were written for Crystal to sing,” Waits explains. “‘Old Boyfriends’ was originally for me, then for her, then it turned into a duet. [Crystal Gayle’s solo version was used on the soundtrack album.] ‘Picking Up After You’ and ‘This One’s from the Heart’ were written as duets. I found that it was hard writing for a woman. There are certain words they’re uncomfortable with. I can get away with a certain vernacular, while a woman singing it would have trouble. I had to change things around, put everything onto her words. It was tough. I felt like I was writing lines for an actress.”

  The film’s core story is set out in the duet “Picking Up After You,” which is as trenchant a breakup song as Waits has ever recorded. It is essentially a full-length musical argument. Each singer casts blame, identifies the other’s unbearable habits, vents anger, yet the melody all of this is couched in is so sweet and tender that the potential for healing seems to exist even as the rift widens.

  In “Old Boyfriends,” Crystal’s longing vocals make romantic disappointment palpable. The song is a reflection on former lovers who “look you up when they’re in town, to see if they can still cut you down.” Waits originally wrote it for himself, but sung by a woman it takes on more power. The songs that Waits did sing himself were just as redolent of emotional pain. “Broken Bicycles” uses busted-up bikes left outside to rust as a symbol for love grown cold. Tom has said that the tune “was an orphan for a while, until Francis shot a separate scene with Freddie [Forrest] in the junkyard, despondent. We tried that song against the scene; it worked and stayed in the film.”24

  Waits also sang “I Beg Your Pardon,” a humbled lover’s plea for reconciliation. Wearing his heart on his sleeve, he begs his woman to take him back, offering to give her “Boardwalk and Park Place and all of my hotels.” The pace of the ballad-heavy soundtrack then picks up with the jazzy “Little Boy Blue.” Waits sings this hopping tune on the album, though it was performed (half-spoken) in the film by Nastassja Kinski. “That was originally a song I was singing,” said Waits. “Just another song in the movie. Then they cut it, sliced it up, and adapted it for [Kinski] to sing.”25 “Little Boy Blue” was the only number in One from the Heart that wasn’t performed by Waits and/or Crystal Gayle, with the notable exception of “Used Carlotta.” Waits had been toying with the idea of doing a piece like this for several years — an instrumental suite for car horns and motors. It was used as part of a fantasy sequence in which Forrest shows Kinski around the salvage yard where he works. In a bid to impress her, he conducts an orchestra of smashed autos. It’s not surprising that this piece didn’t make it onto the soundtrack album.

  On the spooky, percussion-laden “You Can’t Unring a Bell,” Waits indulges his new infatuation with offbeat instrumentation. Next up is, arguably, Waits’s most beautiful love song ever: “This One’s from the Heart.” To a muted sax and piano accompaniment, Tom and Crystal muse on the splendor and the suffering their relationship encompasses; they know that without each other life is mundane and colorless and needs to be tempered by the occasional stiff drink. Tom and Crystal’s voices melded beautifully, sandpaper and honey, but that didn’t stop Tom from worrying. “Toward the end, Tom started getting cold feet,” says Howe. “Saying, ‘Well, you know, [Crystal’s] really vanilla and all.’ I said, ‘Tom, you know something? Everybody knows what great lyrics you write. But nobody knows the great melodies you write because you just don’t do them justice. You have somebody who really sings those melodies so you can hear them.’” Howe believes that Crystal Gayle’s “best contribution was that she sang those songs exactly the way Tom taught them to her. We would go into the studio and he would sit with her on the piano and work the songs out. She would learn them and he would tell her exactly how he wanted to phrase the words. Tom had total control of the way they were performed.”

  The last session Waits and Gayle had together was, in Howe’s estimation, the most incredible one of all. They posed for the album-cover photos, and then they performed two duets, the centerpieces of the score: one was the angry lover’s spat, “Picking Up After You”; and the other was “This One’s from the Heart.”

  Yet the perfect session came very close to being scuttled. While in L.A., Crystal learned that her mother had become gravely ill. She called Howe to say that she was too upset to come to the studio. “The rap on Crystal Gayle in those days was she had this beautiful voice but no soul,” Howe recalls. “I thought she sounded really vulnerable and figured if I could get her to the studio now, I might really get something.” He urged her to reconsider, saying that working might prove therapeutic for her — at the very least it would keep her mind off her mother’s condition, a situation she couldn’t control. “She came into the studio, and she and Tom sang those duets together that day. They sat at the piano together and sang those duets. It was such a wonderful, wonderful day in the studio.”

  During that final session, Crystal also recorded the redemption piece of the score, a beam of sunlight that penetrates the dark, smoky atmosphere. Said Waits, “Toward the end of shooting, Francis said, ‘Everything’s so sad, we need something with hope in it.’ That’s when ‘Take Me Home’ came about. The musical idea came early on, but the words were some of the last ones I wrote. I tried to sing it and it sounded real soppy, so I gave it to Crystal. I sat down at the piano, played it three or four times for her, then she cut it. I liked the way she did it.”26 The soothing “Take Me Home” is
a gentle call for reconciliation, an acknowledgment that no one is perfect and that only through the eyes of love do our flaws become invisible. In this touching moment the musical story comes full circle.

  Bones Howe had negotiated a one-off deal with CBS Records to release the One from the Heart soundtrack, but the idea didn’t sit well with Tom. Bones remembers that Tom called him and said, “‘I don’t want to give them the soundtrack album.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘I think it’s too commercial Hollywood. I think what I should do is I should just sit at the piano and just sing all those songs. The soundtrack album should just be me singing the songs from One from the Heart by myself at the piano.’ I said, ‘Well, Tom, that’s not what CBS bought.’ So Tom went to Francis, and Francis said, ‘No, I don’t think that’s what we should do. We should put all the sound effects into the soundtrack album from the place where they are in the movie. The soundtrack album should be like a little audio minimovie.’ So it turned into this huge brouhaha about all that, and finally CBS just kind of threw up their hands and said, ‘Well you guys just figure out what you’re going to do.’”

  Soon enough, though, the decision was made for them. Coppola had set up a New York preview screening for One from the Heart, and the critics in attendance gave it a big thumbs down. The word was that Francis Ford Coppola had followed up Apocalypse Now, a modern masterpiece, with a stinker. The love story was confusing, the characters were cyphers, and the happy ending felt tacked on. One from the Heart was rushed back to Zoetrope for some hasty surgery, but the damage was done. By the time it was released, One from the Heart was doomed to failure. Says Howe, “Then, of course, the guy from CBS called me and said I’m not going to put out a soundtrack album from a stiff movie. So there that soundtrack album sat for six or eight months.”

  During that interval, Elektra/Asylum released an odds-and-ends Tom Waits collection. Bounced Checks was an assortment of established songs —they couldn’t really be called hits — from earlier albums, among them “Tom Traubert’s Blues,” “Heartattack and Vine,” and “Burma Shave.” Mixed in with these were a few alternate versions and live recordings — of “Jersey Girl,” “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard,” and “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me).” A bluesy track called “Mr. Henry” was the only previously unreleased song on the album. Bounced Checks was, essentially, the product of a record company becoming impatient for new material.

  One from the Heart turned out to be a bomb of epic proportions and was soon being mentioned in the same sentence as the previous year’s epic failure — Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate . While Heaven’s Gate nearly sank Columbia Pictures, One from the Heart actually did torpedo American Zoetrope. Coppola was forced to give up the lot, thereby sacrificing his dream of presiding over a mecca for independent filmmaking. What made this defeat even more bitter was the fact that One from the Heart didn’t deserve such a blanket condemnation. The quirky romantic drama had a current of truth to it, a lived-in feel that so many Hollywood romances never even approach. Plus, the cinematography and the art direction combined to give the film a remarkable visual impact.

  While the film itself was almost universally panned, few had a bad word to say about the soundtrack. Many felt that what Waits had achieved was truly amazing. “Picking Up After You” and “This One’s from the Heart” were rightly heralded as small masterpieces. Critics and music execs alike praised the score — the only problem was that only those who bought a ticket to see the movie could hear it and few, apparently, were willing to go that far.

  About eight months after the film had fallen on its face, Bones Howe finally saw an opportunity to deliver the music directly to the people. When he discovered that One from the Heart was about to be released in Europe, he quickly got in touch with Coppola’s attorney, who had worked out the original contract with CBS, and said to him, “Francis Ford Coppola in Europe is like Truffaut is here. He’s a God. You call [CBS] and you tell them that [ One from the Heart ] is going to come out in Europe. If the foreign division of CBS finds out that there’s a soundtrack album in the can and they’re not going to release it, there’s going to be a lot of heat.”

  So the attorney put in a call to CBS and asked them if, given the circumstances, they were going to release the One from the Heart soundtrack in Europe. The answer was, “We don’t know,” so Howe announced that he would contact CBS in England and tell them all about it. “And it’s amazing,” he says. “It worked! You know, you just kind of dream these stupid things up and figure, well, if this is the show-business game, I’ll play the show-business game. But fear really works . . . They said, ‘Well, how do we do this?’ I said, ‘You have a Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle album. That in itself should be worth something to you.’ That’s what they did. They just flipped the covers, put the front on the back and the back on the front. Called it Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle Sing Music from One from the Heart .”

  The album came out, and when the 1982 Oscar nominees were announced, Waits was among them. “We lost [the Academy Award for best score] to Victor / Victoria, as I remember,” says Howe. Henry Mancini’s faux-jazz score for Blake Edwards’ cross-dressing comedy bagged the coveted statuette; but Waits had gotten some major exposure. Its effects, however, were short-lived. While the One from the Heart soundtrack was released on cd in 1989, it was never widely available for any length of time. It was a crying shame that such stellar work was allowed to sink so rapidly into obscurity. Finally in 2004 the soundtrack was returned to the stores, complete with a couple of never-released bonus tracks.

  Waits emerged from the extended One from the Heart adventure a little older, a little wiser, and very eager to move on. At times during that undertaking, he’d hit a wall. “I wasn’t used to concentrating on one project for so long,” he explained — “to the point where you start eating your own flesh.” Kathleen coaxed him through his periods of writer’s block, and he refreshed himself by doing a few shows back East and in Australia.27 He also accepted a cameo role in the big-budget 1981 horror flick The Wolfen ; Waits portrayed a drunk and distracted piano player who plows through a ragged rendition of “Jitterbug Boy.” And in 1982 he was thrilled to contribute to Poetry in Motion, a documentary on the Beats directed by Ron Mann and starring the likes of William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, John Cage, and Allen Ginsberg.

  Then Tom married Kathleen. The powerful Tom Waits sense of style dictated that the wedding take place in an all-night chapel that was listed in the Yellow Pages — Tom was pleased to discover that Marriage Chapels came right before Massage Parlors. Kitsch, of course, ruled the day. Waits told Elliott Murphy, “We got married in Watts, at the Always and Forever Wedding Chapel, twenty-four-hour service on Manchester Boulevard.” He then added, quite soberly, “She’s my true love.”28 (Love must have been in the air during the “Always and Forever” nuptials of Tom and Kathleen: bassist Greg Cohen met Kathleen’s sister Marguerite, an artist and a potter, at the ceremony, and they were wed a couple of years later.)29

  As a married man, Tom had a new set of responsibilities, and it was time to take a hard look at certain things he’d been taking for granted —personal finances, for one. Having pulled together and recorded a respectable body of work over the years, and having toured hard, Waits fully expected the figures to show that he was riding well within the comfort range. They didn’t. In fact, as Tom and Kathleen discovered, Tom barely had any money at all. Like so many other entertainers, Waits had become a victim of his own shortage of business savvy. The contract he’d signed, in all innocence, with manager Herb Cohen ten years earlier had bound him to earning much less than most other artists of his stature, and, even worse, it gave Cohen the rights to all of his songs. Not only did Waits receive no income from them, but he also had very little control over their commercial use. Tom and Kathleen knew what they had to do. They took over all of Tom’s business affairs, severing their ties with Cohen. Over the years, they’ve launched a series of lawsuits against Cohen in a bid to ensure that the Tom W
aits catalog is treated with respect.

  The next aspect of his life that Tom subjected to scrutiny was his approach to recording. He’d obtained a professional divorce from Cohen, and now he wanted to let go of Bones Howe for good. He was ready to produce his own work. Seven Tom Waits albums had been bolstered by Howe’s talents, and now Tom needed to find out if he could do it on his own. “When you’re working with the same producer,” he told Barney Hoskyns, “and you’re kind of collaborating on the records, it’s a little harder to go your own way. You kind of wanna take everybody with you. For me, eventually I just wanted to make a clean break. Those records [ Blue Valentine, Heartattack and Vine, and One from the Heart ] I did with Bones, and I was kind of rebelling against this established way of recording that I’d developed with him. I don’t know if I’d call it particularly unhappy, but I was at the end of a cycle there.”30

  Howe himself had seen the writing on the wall. He and Waits were clearly pulling in different directions. “After we did One from the Heart and the soundtrack album came out,” he recalls, “Tom and I sat down and had a glass of wine at Martoni’s. He said, ‘I’m trying to write the next record. The problem that I’m having is, I know you so well and everything that I write, I keep thinking to myself, I wonder if Bones is going to like this? Or, I can’t write this tune because I don’t think you’ll like it.’ I told him, ‘Tom, I shouldn’t have any influence on what you create. Yeah, we do know each other really well, and of course you know the things that I like.’ He said, ‘I really want to get away from composing on the piano, because I feel like I’m writing the same song over and over again.’”

  While assuring Tom that he was in no such rut, Bones did concede that if he truly felt that way, there was no “more rational reason for two people to stop working together than this. So, we sort of shook hands and said, ‘Okay, that’s it.’ I just told him, ‘Look, if you ever want to make another record with me, you know the kind of records I’ll make. Call me, and wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, I’ll stop it and make a record with you.’ Because that was really, really fun. I miss doing that with him. I’ve never found anybody I’ve enjoyed doing that with as much as Tom.”