Wild Years
Page 17
Waits’s first priority in recording Frank’s Wild Years was to ensure that the album worked as a piece of music and wasn’t just a recorded souvenir of the play. This wouldn’t be too difficult. In the studio he could give free rein to his imagination; the possibilities were limited in the theater setting for technical reasons and because it was imperative that the audience fully understood the songs, which moved the story forward.
So Waits entered the studio and pushed, pulled, sculpted, and battered his songs into shapes that more closely resembled the structures in his head. He sang several songs through a bullhorn. He used lots of “pawnshop instruments,” including a Farfisa organ and an accordion. He even asked his musicians, most of whom were multi-instrumentalists, to play instruments they weren’t used to. The drummer blew a horn, the guitarist played keyboards, and Waits perceived a new vigor and impulsiveness in their performances. Waits trusted the members of his band. Many of them had contributed to Rain Dogs and worked on the play, and he had faith that they could make the leap into the unknown with him.
For his entire career, Waits had issued his records on vinyl. Compact-disc technology had been making its imprint on the music world for about a year before Rain Dogs was released, but it hadn’t radically altered the landscape. In the two years after Rain Dogs came out, though, the compact disc had caught up to vinyl, both in sound quality and in popularity, and it was now squeezing the life out of the lp.
The CD was lauded for its pristine quality. Waits wasn’t particularly interested in pristine. He considered it uncomfortably close to sterile. He responded to music that felt lived in, that sounded like dirt was being shaken out of its grooves. In fact, many of Waits’s earlier albums sound better on vinyl — the occasional hissing and popping add a desirable grittiness to the musical tale. So why did he record Frank’s Wild Years on compact disc? Mainly because the new technology could do more to showcase the divergent instrumentation that he found so fascinating, and because, when it came right down to it, the new technology could boost the energy level of his sound.
The slightly woozy dreamworld of Frank’s Wild Years comes into sharp focus with the album’s first cut. “Hang On St. Christopher,” a driving rocker, is thrown off its axis by North African horn lines that intrude pointedly on the melody — they actually chase the melody like a police cruiser after a speeder, a beat behind. Waits’s already offbeat vocals have a tinny, echoing ring here; he’s singing through a police bullhorn. The melody swerves, careens, rushes on like a car with no brakes descending a mountain, like a frantic, lost traveler in need of St. Christopher’s intervention.
Waits was pleased with the distorting effect of the bullhorn, which he used on several other tunes, too. It lent a certain menace to his vocals and imbued the proceedings with a somewhat unnatural, dreamlike quality. “It was your MP5 Fanon transistorized bullhorn with the public address loudspeaker in it, available down there at Radio Shack,” Waits told the Morning Becomes Eclectic audience. “For about $29.95 you can pick one of those up. I’ve tried for a long time to get the same effect through other means — singing into cups and pipes and trumpet mutes and singing in my hands. Just trying to get my voice to sound like at the bottom of a pool. Just to tamper with the qualities it already has, to bend it a little bit, ’cause I get sick and tired of the way I sound.” He claimed that he was trying to make his voice “skinnier, so it would fit in the song. ’Cause I was going to plant all these things around it and sometimes it flattens out and it gets too thick and I can’t put anything else in there. So it changes the size of my voice so that I can put more in the song. That’s kind of the theory around it anyway. Biff Dawes, my engineer, got me a bullhorn for my birthday and I haven’t been without it since. And it’s real good around the house when you want to get somebody’s attention.”11
Waits’s falsetto gets a workout in “Temptation,” a percussive number that explores the weaknesses of the flesh — “A little Pagliacci” is the way that Waits himself describes it.12 In the play, the song is performed when a man on a billboard advertisement for Las Vegas comes to life and urges Frank to give Sin City a whirl. Removed from that context, the tune is still a wonderful admission of human frailty. Sex, alcohol, drugs, and money beckon; man responds; these forces build him up and they tear him down. He sees the error of his ways but he is powerless to stop himself.
The prettiest and certainly the most devastating song on Frank’s Wild Years is “Innocent When You Dream.” It actually appears twice on the album, once as a barroom ballad played on a pump organ, and again as a replica of a tune you might find on an old 78 recording, complete with crackles and pops. Waits says the song — a drinking-man’s anthem about life’s unfairness and the escape that only sleep can provide — is a tip of the hat to Irish tenor John McCormack, to whose music Waits had been introduced by Kathleen’s father.13
The other Frank’s Wild Years song that is presented in two radically different versions is “Straight to the Top.” There is a rumba version and a truly astounding Vegas version, in which Waits does an uncanny imitation of Frank Sinatra. “A friend of mine was in the car with his mother and he put on ‘Straight to the Top,’” remarks Waits. “She looked over at him and said, ‘I didn’t know that Sinatra had a new album out.’ And she was dead serious. I’m not bragging — just somehow she thought that was Frank, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s pretty good, I guess.’”14
Waits kept up the Ol’ Blue Eyes shtick with “I’ll Take New York.” “There is kind of a little Sinatra influence on this,” he explains. “Kind of the flip side of ‘New York, New York.’ This is when everything starts to melt. This is going down on the Titanic. I saw Frank Sinatra just a couple of nights ago at the Greek Theater. It was a good show, but this is — I don’t know how to describe it. Somebody told me I sound a little bit like Jerry Lewis. I didn’t know whether that was a compliment or not. This is kind of the darker side of Times Square.”15
“Way Down in the Hole” is a preacher’s spiel of a song. “Get behind me, Satan, get behind me!” Over a funky Ralph Carney sax break, Waits plots to keep his personal devil under control. “This is kind of a gospel number, I guess,” he admits. “It kind of happened in the studio real spontaneously. That doesn’t happen every time, but somehow it happened on this. We needed a gospel number, so this is all about fear of the Devil and all that — ghosts and the like. You know what they say . . . if a ghost ever starts to inhabit you, they tell you to pee your pants. It’s the most reliable way to deal with having a spirit.”16
The album hits a down note with the desolate duo “Cold Cold Ground” and “Train Song.” The first of these, in particular, dishes up a big helping of life’s disappointments and cruelties. No matter what we do, no matter how good or how sinful we have been, we will all end up in the same place. A sobering thought.
Waits spun two video clips out of Frank’s Wild Years . The video for “Temptation” is standard fare — Tom tricked out in a lounge-lizard outfit and pencil-thin mustache, lip-synching the lyrics as fireworks explode around him. The “Blow Wind Blow” clip is more arresting. In it, Waits sits with a woman made up to look like a mannequin. She appears to be singing the song. The director, Chris Blum, has explained that the mannequin idea evolved from Tom’s unwillingness to lip-synch this song. The clip is a hypnotic piece of filmmaking. It was shot in black and white, and a vivid touch of red is used in each shot to signal passion and pain. As Blum joked, it’s black and white and red all over.17
While speaking to O’Donohue on Morning Becomes Eclectic, Waits said of the “Blow Wind Blow” video, “Kathleen and I put together the ideas for it. It was done up there at the Chi Chi Club . . . in [San Francisco’s] North Beach. Miss Kiko’s Chi Chi Club right there on Broadway next to Big Al’s. I worked with a girl named Val Diamond, who played a doll. She drew eyeballs on the outside of her eyelids and wore a Spanish dress and I unscrewed one of her legs and pulled a bottle out of it. It’s got some entertainment value.”18
But this didn’t mean that Waits had become disenfranchised from the musical collective. He remained intrigued by the work of a number of his fellow musicians, even if their styles were vastly different from his own. The power punk of The Replacements — whose sound had developed from the raw, snotty, indie Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash (1981) to the more polished but no less powerful Pleased to Meet Me (1987) — got Waits going. He loved the sloppy energy of the band’s live show. Lead singer Paul Westerberg would regularly stop dead in the middle of a song, announce “That sucks!” and launch into a different one.
Waits also admired the range that The Replacements displayed: they could go from power pop, like “Alex Chilton” (a tribute to the former Big Star and Box Tops bandleader), to melancholy balladry, like “Swingin’ Party,” to exercises in sarcasm, like “Waitress in the Sky.” And “Here Comes a Regular,” their song about barflies, is as sad and touching as any tune that Waits had written on the subject. Waits often talked about The Replacements when being interviewed. It turned out that the members of the band were fans of his, too, and Waits recorded “Date to Church” with them. It became the B-side to The Replacements’ 1989 hit “I’ll Be You.”
Waits was also fond of The Pogues, a band that had successfully merged traditional Irish folk music with punk rock. Lead singer Shane MacGowan’s booze-ravaged voice bore a certain resemblance to Waits’s own. MacGowan was a pub crawler of Waitsian proportions and could often be found doffing a pint of Courage, his hair an electrified tangle and a nearly toothless grin on his face. The band’s original name was Pogue Mahone, which is Gaelic for “kiss my arse.” MacGowan and his crew demonstrated their innate understanding of the working man, and The Pogues had a penchant for telling short stories of the hard life in song, much like Waits.
Songs like “The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn” and “Turkish Song of the Damned” established The Pogues’ reputation as chroniclers of modern Irish life. The band had an international hit with “Fairytale of New York” (with Kirsty MacColl) — quite probably the most depressing Christmas song ever written — which tells the tale of an elderly couple who spend Christmas Eve in a New York City drunk tank. Waits once told Creem magazine that he loved Shane’s voice but thought that he really ought to get his teeth fixed.19
Waits’s attraction to The Pogues and The Replacements, circa 1987, made a certain amount of sense — the themes and the attitudes that vitalized their music overlapped here and there with his own. Another Waits favorite, however, was a much less likely candidate. “Prince is really state of the art and he still kicks my ass,” Waits told Musician ’s Mark Rowland. “Prince is rare, a rare exotic bird . . . To be that popular and that uncompromising, it’s like Superman walking through a wall.”20 Musically, Waits and the funky Prince may have been worlds apart, but Waits could still appreciate the intricate structures of Prince’s songs and the delicate balance of the religious and the profane in his lyrics. At that point in history, Prince may have ruled the music world, but he consistently refused to do what was expected of him. Prince was a leader, a pathfinder, a creator of new sounds who scorned the idea of imitating popular formulas. And he sold a lot of records.
On that score, Waits no longer had any illusions. He knew that he’d never achieve mass popularity the way Prince had done. He wasn’t even expecting to crack radio playlists with Frank’s Wild Years . Like Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs before it, Frank’s Wild Years was an embarrassment of riches waiting to be shared by anyone bold enough to pick it up. It contained eighteen songs, well over an hour of music. “More for your entertainment dollar!” Waits crowed to Rowland. “That’s what we say down at Waits and Associates. Go ahead. Shop around. Compare our prices. Come on back down.”21
With the release of Frank’s Wild Years, the Frank trilogy — three albums’ worth of tunes inspired by carnival music and German art songs — was complete. Waits was again ready to head off in a new direction. In his last three albums he had mined a rich vein of sound, but Waits was determined to prevent that sound from growing stale. The same impulse had prompted him to abandon his earlier lounge sound as soon as it lost its fresh edge. New musical challenges were on his agenda, although he had to admit that he wasn’t yet sure what they were. He mused that his next undertaking could be “a little more . . . hermaphroditic. But I’m a real procrastinator. I wait till something is impossible to ignore before I act on it.”22
Expanding on this theme to Playboy, Waits confessed that he was willing to kick start the process.
PLAYBOY: You’ve remarked that Frank’s Wild Years is the end of a musical period for you . . . Have you turned a corner? Is this album your last experimentation with the scavenger of songwriting?
WAITS: I don’t know if I turned a corner, but I opened a door. I kind of found a new scan. I threw rocks at the window. I’m not as frightened by technology maybe as I used to be. On the past three albums, I was exploring the hydrodynamics of my own peculiarities. I don’t know what the next one will be. Harder, maybe louder. Things are now a little more psychedelic for me, and they’re more ethnic. I’m looking toward that part of music that comes from my memories, hearing Los Tres Aces at the Continental Club with my dad when I was a kid.23
Waits backed up the release of Frank’s Wild Years with a tour. It was a chore. He was no longer a resilient kid who could play dive after dive and return home relatively unscathed. He had evolved into a family man who could be worn down by the perpetual motion and the daily scrutiny. On the road, when things were working smoothly it could be great, but when hassles arose it could suddenly be like serving a prison sentence. “It’s tedious. It’s loaded with problems,” Waits told Morning Becomes Eclectic listeners. “It’s tragic. It’s problematic from day to day. You try to work out the kinks along the way. It’s like diamond cutting in the back of a pickup truck. You never know what you’re gonna get. You’re dealing with a lot of variables that are constantly changing, which is both the thrill and the hell of it. It’s like a narcotic. It’s very time-consuming. It’s very expensive and it takes its toll, but I love it when I look back on it after it’s over.”24
Still, in the annual Rolling Stone Critics Poll, the Frank’s Wild Years tour was judged the best of 1987. Given Waits’s attitude, the honor was a tribute to his professionalism. His set list was drawn mainly from the previous three albums, though he also slid in a couple of older songs —“Ruby’s Arms” and “Red Shoes by the Drugstore.” A stage-set overhaul contributed to the dynamic. Waits informed the Morning Becomes Eclectic audience that the staging of his show was in transition. He was working on “lights and all that, trying to make it look good. It’s gonna be a little bit different. I’m trying to get it to look like a Cuban Chinese restaurant up there on stage. I’m working out the kinks now.”25
The Frank’s Wild Years tour was Waits’s most complex yet, both musically and technically. Props, masks, costume changes, pyrotechnics, special effects all came into play. Having mounted Frank’s Wild Years, the musical, Waits had an even greater appreciation of the theatricality of a concert. He’d stand on the stage, lean into his mike, and perform a jerky, knee-knocking stomp, something between a religious testimonial and an epileptic seizure. He’d use props and even characters to bring a song into focus. Particularly intriguing was a lounge-lizard character — complete with pencil-thin mustache
, white sports jacket, and killer shades — who’d sit at the piano cracking wise and spewing clichés — “you’re a great audience! Thank you!”
Even the tour lighting was bold, different. Some numbers were lit by a swinging mechanic’s lamp, which produced an eerie, unsettled atmosphere. For several other songs, Waits would hold that hook light in his hand, and it would be the only source of light on the stage. At one point, feathers would flutter down from above.
Waits rearranged the songs on the tour set list, as well, freely dissecting and reassembling them. Some tunes, like “Gun Street Girl” and “Telephone Call from Istanbul,” were almost unrecognizable from their studio versions. On occasion, Waits would also revisit his cover-band days and do a smoking version of James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” The Frank’s Wild Years tour was long, very successful, and, as far as Waits was concerned, enough. Reaching the end of that trek, he would drop out of the tour circuit for over a decade.
Over the years, Waits had grown very comfortable in the studio. He’d become adept at translating his private musical vision into a consumer product. But he’d never seriously entertained the idea of producing someone else. His style was too personal, too quirky for that. Then Marianne Faithfull came along. The British pop star of the sixties was best known for her chiming schoolgirl rendition of a song written by (then boyfriend) Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, “As Tears Go By.” It became a hit nearly a year before The Rolling Stones’ version did. But the times were fast and intense and Faithfull was caught up in the rush. By the late seventies, she was strung out on heroin and living on the streets of London. Then, in 1979, Chris Blackwell intervened, offering Faithfull the chance to record. To the surprise of many, she didn’t blow it. Instead, she delivered Broken English, a heartbreaking and brutally frank album that — together with Patti Smith’s Horses and Kate Bush’s The Kick Inside — signaled the advent of female alternative music. Of course, recovery is never that simple: Faithfull hadn’t completely conquered her demons, and when she traveled to New York to perform the album’s title track on Saturday Night Live, she freaked under the pressure and snorted some cocaine. It was a bad batch, and it wreaked havoc with her voice. One of the sadder moments in television history is Faithfull struggling to keep up with the band as her voice cracks and fades in and out. It took a few years for Faithfull to kick her habit once and for all, and then she was ready to record again.