With “Singapore,” the first Rain Dogs cut, Waits cranked up the “mutant dwarf orchestra” sound he’d been working with on Swordfishtrombones . The song almost defies description: it’s a deranged sea-shanty road tune. “In the land of the blind / the one-eyed man is king . . .” Waits couldn’t remember who he’d lifted that line from — he thought it was George Orwell, but it could have been Mary Poppins . For all its dissonance and rough edges, “Singapore” is strangely compelling, a glimpse of a world few people will ever experience. So is “Cemetery Polka,” a peek at the family’s internal workings; or, as Waits described it to Mark Rowland, “The way we talk behind each other’s backs: ‘You know what happened to Uncle Vernon?’ The kind of wickedness nobody outside your family could say.”33
The German music-hall feel of such Rain Dogs tracks as “Singapore,” “Cemetery Polka,” and “Tango ’Til They’re Sore” prompted a lot of people to conclude that Waits had been influenced by Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill. “That macabre, dissonant style,” says Waits — “see, when I hear Weill I hear a lot of anger in those songs. I remember the first time that I heard that Peggy Lee tune ‘Is That All There Is?’ I identified with that. ‘Is that all there is? If that’s all there is, then let’s keep dancing.’ So you just find different things that you feel your voice is suited to. I didn’t really know that much about Kurt Weill until people started saying, ‘Hey, he must be listening to a lot of Kurt Weill.’ I thought, I better go find out who this guy is. I started listening to The Happy End, and Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny and all that really expressionistic music.”34 In fact, Waits became so fond of Weill’s work that he recorded a version of “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” for the Kurt Weill tribute album Lost in the Stars, which was produced by avant-gardist (and former Saturday Night Live musical director) Hal Willner.
After these three edgy songs, Rain Dogs shifts gears with “Jockey Full of Bourbon.” To a Tex-Mex swing-rumba beat, the song barrels through ranchero-jazz territory, evoking the tunes Waits’s father used to play on the car radio as they drove down to Mexico together. “Tango ’Til They’re Sore” is about a guy who falls out of a window at a New Year’s Eve party and is somehow saved by the fact that he has confetti in his hair. “Big Black Mariah,” which coasts along a rock-steady Keith Richards guitar line, is pure voodoo New Orleans as it tells a little tale involving a Black Mariah —a type of paddy wagon that is often used as a hearse.
And Rain Dogs is enriched by even more forms of musical exploration. The instrumental “Midtown” could easily pass as the theme for a fifties cop show. “Blind Love” was probably the first country song Waits had written since Closing Time . While he admitted that he wasn’t a great country- music fan, he did say that with “Blind Love” he was striving to reproduce the same roadhouse feel that fueled certain Merle Haggard classics. “Anywhere I Lay My Head” sounds like a New Orleans funeral march — the kind of piece that a Dixieland combo would offer up as it accompanied a casket to its burial site, winding its way through the narrow streets of the French Quarter.
More traditional Waits compositions find their place on Rain Dogs, too, including a couple of his most beautiful love songs. “Hang Down Your Head,” Tom and Kathleen’s first official songwriting collaboration, is a lovely, unaffected folk-rock ballad. “Time” might have been one of Waits’s most gorgeous piano ballads except that in his fever of instrumental experimentation he chose to play it on acoustic guitar, accordion, and bass.
The spoken-jazz piece “9th & Hennepin” was named for the Minneapolis street corner where Tom once stumbled onto a pimp war. It was a typical Tom Waits off-kilter and somewhat-out-of-sync-with-the-times experience: he was in a doughnut shop when three twelve-year-old pimps wearing fur coats pulled knives and other assorted pieces of silverware on each other. Although set in Minnesota, the song has an unmistakable New York feel.
“Downtown Train,” which became Rain Dogs’ first single, is an unusually accessible Waits composition, and it is fueled by some quirky guitar work by G. E. Smith. Video director Jean Baptiste Mondino (red hot at the time thanks to his moody take on Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer”), was hired to make the “Downtown Train” video, and boxer Jake LaMotta (subject of the Martin Scorsese film Raging Bull) was cast as Waits’s irate Italian neighbor. Despite its accessibility, the song features some of Waits’s best lyrics; and its array of offbeat touches reveal it to be the work of a cockeyed genius.
Rain Dogs shows Waits stretching and testing his art like never before, but it triggered the usual dynamic: critics loved it (Robert Palmer of the New York Times named it best album of 1985), but sales were poor. Waits, as ever, took it in stride. And he gave no sign of being tempted to compromise. “What do you mean by success?” he said to Mark Rowland. “My record sales have dropped off considerably in the United States [but] I do sell a lot of records in Europe. It’s hard to gauge something you don’t have real contact with. We have no real spiritual leadership, so we look to merchandising. The most deprived, underprivileged neighborhoods in the world understand business. Guns, ammo, narcotics . . . But yes, sales have dropped off considerably in the last few years . . . and I want to talk to somebody about it. I used to play Iowa. I haven’t been to Iowa in some time.”35
8
FRANK’S WILD YEARS
By 1986, Waits was ready to launch into Frank’s Wild Years, the musical. But before he submerged himself completely in that project he had another movie role to do. It was to be his biggest yet, and he planned to take full advantage of the opportunity. Since their first meeting, Tom and Jim Jarmusch had been talking about working on a project together, and now Jarmusch was offering Waits a starring role in his next film, a jailbreak drama called Down by Law . Jarmusch also wanted two of his songs, “Jockey Full of Bourbon” and “Tango ’Til They’re Sore,” for the film’s soundtrack.
Tom and Kathleen’s New York minute was coming to an end. Their initial attraction to the frenetic metropolis was wearing thin, and now it was becoming apparent to them that midtown Manhattan was not an ideal environment for child rearing. Jarmusch provided them with the impetus to leave it all behind by setting Down by Law in New Orleans and arranging for the film to be shot on location there. The Waits clan packed up and headed south.
In the film, Waits plays Zach, a New Orleans dj who gets drunk after losing his job and his girlfriend and agrees to deliver a car for a local con man. When a body is found in the car’s trunk, Zach is framed for murder. Joining Zach in jail is Jack, portrayed by Waits’s friend John Lurie, a sweet-tempered pimp who is himself framed when a local stool pigeon sets him up to meet a new girl — who turns out to be about twelve years old. Completing this trio of cell mates is an Italian tourist, played by comedian Roberto Benigni (who so ecstatically accepted the Best Actor Oscar in 1999 for Life Is Beautiful). Benigni’s character, Bob, barely speaks English (he insists to his cell mates, “I ham a good egg”), and he has actually committed the crime he is accused of — he killed a man to defend the honor of a woman.
“It was good working with those people,” Waits told radio interviewer Dierdre O’Donohue. “Bob Benigni, who’s a big comic in Italy . . . played Bob. Outside of the Pope, there’s nobody bigger in Italy than Bob Benigni. He really was a joy to work with . . . He made his name as an outsider. He would speak at rallies and say the unspeakable. He used to make jokes about the Pope and the Vatican and he got a big name. He referred to the Pope, the equivalent of calling him ‘Pope, babe.’ It created quite a stir in Vatican City.”1
After weeks of mutual distrust and fighting, the three convicts develop a grudging respect for each other. They start planning a breakout, and they finally pull it off, escaping into the Louisiana bayou. Down by Law is essentially an arty variation on an old film standard, but the rapport between the convicts along with mostly ad-libbed dialogue add layers of interest. Waits’s portrayal of Zach was a tour de force, and he clearly reveled in it. For the first time in his career, he met the challe
nge of creating a fully rounded, feature-length character, and he did it with skill and subtlety.
He based his character on a dj he’d listened to as a teen in National City. He was called Lonely Lee “Baby” Sims, and the station he worked for promoted his show by begging listeners to come and visit the man at work so he wouldn’t be so alone. Eventually, Lee “Baby” moved on, disappearing from Waits’s radio and entering his memory bank. When Waits took on the character of dj Zach, something stirred up that old memory, and he decided to give Zach the professional name of Lee “Baby” Sims.
The problem was that Waits had made a false assumption. He figured that Sims had vanished from the scene long ago, that he was no longer “real.” But, as Waits found out, “Lee ‘Baby’ Sims is one of the best-paid disc jockeys in the Western Hemisphere.” Tom told O’Donohue, “I think he lives in Hawaii. I think he was trying to sue us after Down by Law came out. He didn’t like being portrayed as a ne’er-do-well. There was no offense made or intended, honestly . . . I had no idea that since I’m a kid he became this big sensation and he’s a giant in the broadcasting world.” He added, “No offense, Lee ‘Baby’ — it’s all done with love and affection . . . Don’t sue me.”2
When Down by Law wrapped, Waits played a small role in a low-budget feature called Candy Mountain, directed by the innovative Robert Frank, who had revealed to the world the internal workings of The Rolling Stones with his astonishing documentary Cocksucker Blues . Candy Mountain featured an array of musicians in acting roles — aside from Waits there was Dr. John, Leon Redbone, David Johansen (aka Buster Poindexter), Rita MacNeil, and Joe Strummer. The film was well reviewed, but it was never widely distributed, and relatively few people saw it.
It was time for Tom and Kathleen to get back to their pet project, Frank’s Wild Years, a musical based on the Swordfishtrombones tale of the suburbanite who torches his split-level home. Kathleen would write most of the dialogue and Tom would write most of the music and lyrics. They would concoct the thing from scratch. But they were still lacking several crucial components. They needed money, a director, and a producer who could pull the whole thing together. So Tom and Kathleen entered the fray. It was difficult not to get discouraged. Schedules couldn’t be juggled and space couldn’t be secured. The mainstream New York theater world started to seem impenetrable. Its scions had lived so well so long off such crowd-pleasing fare as the old-fashioned roof-raiser musical (Oklahoma, My Fair Lady) and the theme-park-ride extravaganza (Cats, Miss Saigon, The Phantom of the Opera) that they tended to regard newcomers and their untested ideas with a cool eye. As Waits put it, “the ritual around it is very well established. When you come in here from some other place, there’s not always a place to sit down right away. So you wait for a table.”3
The wait seemed as though it might be indefinite. Frank’s Wild Years was one tough sell in this milieu. It featured no dancing girls, no big set pieces, no hummable showstoppers. Its musical numbers served to illuminate — Threepenny Opera –style — a gritty story involving thieves and murderers. Waits joked with Hoskyns about it, saying, “I would describe [the play] as a cross between Eraserhead and It’s a Wonderful Life — because it seems to carry both sides. It’s bent and misshapen and tawdry and warm. Something for the whole family.”4
But Waits would not let go of Frank. The character continued to intrigue him. He’d begun by envisioning Frank’s act of arson, encapsulating it in that one-minute-and-fifty-second piece of jazzspeak, and only then did he begin to wonder what had prompted it. What had driven Frank to light that fire? The more Waits pondered Frank, the more Frank took on a vivid life of his own. It occurred to Waits that Frank could embody an artistic breakthrough for him. Here was a character capable of encompassing a range of seminal Waits ideas and presenting them through music, storytelling, acting. With Frank, the sky was Waits’s limit.
Describing his play to Barney Hoskyns as early as 1985, Waits was clearly excited by it. His tenses shifted, his recounting of the story sequence was elliptical, but his creative energy was pumping: “There’s like five principal characters in it. Just to simplify the whole thing, it’s a story about failed dreams. It’s about an accordion player from a small town called Rainville, who goes off to seek his fame and fortune and ends up hoisted with his own petard, as they say . . . Frank’s been altered a little bit. He burns his house down and he leaves it all behind and he goes off to be an entertainer in Las Vegas. He becomes a spokesman for an all-night clothing store, after winning a talent contest. He won a lot of money at the crap tables. He got rolled by a cigarette girl, and he was despondent and penniless and found an accordion in the trash. One thing led to another and before you know it he’s on stage. And his parents ran a funeral parlor when he was a kid. He played the accordion. His mother did the hair and makeup for the ‘passengers’ and he played ‘Amazing Grace’ during the ceremonies. So he had already started a career in show business as a child so this is sort of a chance to get back in the business, back on the boards.”5
The whole thing actually unfolds like this. As Frank’s Wild Years opens, Frank lies, dejected and freezing, on a park bench in East St. Louis. It starts to snow. Thinking he’s going to die of the cold, he looks skyward and yells, “Remember me? I ordered the blond, the Firebird . . . Somebody’s made a terrible mistake.” This initiates a series of hallucinations and memories. Frank is seemingly rescued and taken to his favorite bar in Rainville, his hometown. He entertains with his story of traveling to Las Vegas to make it big in show business. For a single, white-hot moment, his song “Innocent When You Dream,” makes him famous. Then, tragically incapable of building on his good fortune, he gambles away most of his earnings and is relieved of the rest by a cheap floozy he meets. Eventually, he is reduced to hawking suits for a local clothing store. He turns his song into a jingle called “In a Suit of Your Dreams.” As the play ends, Frank huddles on the same East St. Louis park bench, buffetted by fate and by the elements, enduring another lost and lonely night.
Tom and Kathleen were still knocking on locked doors in New York City when something opened up in Chicago. The Steppenwolf Theater, a renowned actor’s studio, had got wind of the project. And Steppenwolf was very interested. “It was a long journey to get to where we finally put the whole thing on in Chicago with Steppenwolf,” says Waits. “We really landed in the right place after a lot of dead ends. I was really glad to be there . . . They’re a good theater group. Kind of garage-band-style theater . . . three chords, turn it up real loud. It worked.”6
Terry Kinney was set to direct Frank’s Wild Years, but just a few weeks before it was scheduled to open, Kinney resigned (or was fired) over creative differences with Waits. Steppenwolf’s head was actor Gary Sinise (who would later win an Oscar nomination for his supporting role in Forrest Gump and turn in strong performances in Apollo 13, Mission to Mars, Ransom, and Of Mice and Men). Sinise stepped into the breach and became Frank ’s director. There was some talk of retooling the production — building new stage sets — but by this point both time and money were in short supply. Waits remained calm. He told O’Donohue he felt that such turmoil was “normal. Sometimes the spark comes from a conflict of ideas. It’s just wood and lights and people walking around until you somehow bang up against something, and something breaks, and something sparks, and something catches and then it has a life. Until then it’s just on the page.”7
The cast included Steppenwolf regulars Gary Cole, Moira Harris, Vince Viverito, Randall Arney, and Tom Irwin. Waits’s touring band played Frank’s band, and Teller (of Penn and Teller) worked up some magic tricks for Frank to perform. Frank, of course, was played by his creator, and Waits carried the production solidly on his shoulders. But the play remained in a state of flux; they tinkered with it constantly, even during its run. The reviews were decent, but there were no raves. Frank’s Wild Years played Chicago’s Briar Street Theater for three months.
Looking back, Waits has mixed feelings about the undertaking. “We
ll, you have to be a little foolish to do something because a play takes a lot of energy — emotionally, financially,” he told Hoskyns in 1999. “And the other thing is that it only lives when you’re in it. But Steppenwolf was the right way to go.”8
When Frank’s Wild Years closed, the Waits family found themselves faced with another move. Now the itinerant lifestyle was getting old, and Tom and Kathleen were becoming very attracted to the notion of putting down roots someplace private. Privacy was integral to the kind of comfort and stability Tom and Kathleen were seeking for themselves and their kids. “Yeah, I’m private,” Waits said at about this time. “Someday I’ll be a lieutenant, but right now I’m just a private . . . Half of you is saying ‘Notice me.’ The other half is saying ‘Leave me alone.’ It’s a bit ambiguous. You want people to recognize what you do. At the same time you don’t want to have to do it all the time every day.”9
On the work front, however, Waits’s next order of business was to record his Frank’s Wild Years album, so that meant relocating to not-so-private Los Angeles, at least temporarily. Speaking to Mark Rowland, Waits could only speculate about future living arrangements. “I don’t know where I’m living. Citizen of the world. I live for adventure and to hear the lamentations of the women . . . I’ve uprooted a lot. It’s like being a traveling salesman. There’s a certain gypsy quality, and I’m used to it. I find it easy to write under difficult circumstances and I can capture what’s going on. I’m moving toward needing a compound, though. An estate. In the meantime I’m operating out of a storefront here in the Los Angeles area.”10
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