Wild Years

by Jay S. Jacobs

  Bones Howe, who hadn’t seen Waits in almost a decade, finally hooked up with his old comrade during the filming of Coppola’s Dracula . Howe had tried to reconnect with Waits once a few years earlier, but nothing had come of his efforts. “One of the guys who had been a coproducer of Down by Law took a job in business affairs at Columbia. We were talking about Tom one day and I said, ‘Do you ever talk to him?’ He said, ‘Yeah . . . every now and then.’ [So I said], ‘Tell him I said hello. I’d love to see him.’ I ran into this guy [again] a couple of days later and he’d talked to Waits.” When Howe asked what Waits’s response had been, the man reported that Waits had said he wasn’t ready to talk just yet. “This was, like, ’87,” continues Howe. “It had been five or six years. I just went, ‘Okay. When Tom is ready to talk to me, he’ll talk to me.’ I had no idea what was going on with Kathleen and Herb and all this other stuff.”

  A few years later, Howe says, he was “working at Columbia TriStar, and they were shooting [Dracula ] on the lot. I had just given my resignation. I went down to the set and just told the publicity people, ‘Look, tell Tom I want to come by and see him on the set. If that’s cool with him, I’ll come down. If it isn’t, then that’s fine… I won’t bother him.’” The publicists urged Howe to visit the set because, “‘Francis would love to see you.’ So I went down and we all hung out between shots and talked about One from the Heart and The Outsiders and all the rest of that junk. And it was very friendly. It was like I hadn’t seen Tom since last Thursday, you know? He’s like, ‘You know, I moved to Northern California.’ [I said], ‘Yeah, I’ve heard that. Don’t get stuck behind a bus.’”

  Five years had elapsed since Waits’s last studio album. This time, Jim Jarmusch motivated his return to recording by asking him to score his latest episodic film, Night on Earth. One night on Earth, five cab drivers in five far-flung cities have memorable — yet, true to the Jarmusch aesthetic, low-key and offbeat — encounters with their passengers. In Los Angeles, young slacker Winona Ryder ferries talent agent Gena Rowlands. In New York, immigrant and former clown Armin Mueller-Stahl picks up a bickering couple played by Giancarlo Esposito and Rosie Perez. In Paris, militant Isaach de Bankole drives beautiful, blind Beatrice Dalle to her destination. In Rome, Waits’s Down by Law costar Roberto Benigni shocks his passenger, a priest, with an uproarious and increasingly frank account of his life. Finally, in Helsinki, a cabbie chauffeurs a group of drunks who have just lost their jobs.

  These episodes are slices of life, subtle little gems that resonate like short stories. Tom and Kathleen collaborated on all the songs, creating a mostly instrumental score that endeavors to capture the comedy and the tragedy, the American and European textures of the tales. They did an admirable job. At times their music has such presence, such a congruity with the visual and narrative component of the film, that it’s almost a character in itself. By turns jaunty and melancholy — whatever is called for — the score blends sounds and styles and feelings into a wonderful, adventurous suite. It is comprised of sixteen short tracks, three of which have lyrics; horns and accordion enrich the mix, and Kurt Weill’s strange influence is again felt. The film Night on Earth found its way onto cinema screens in 1992, and Waits released the soundtrack album in April of that year.

  Yet Night on Earth is not the type of album that most people would be moved to listen to over and over again. The tracks work well to set up and complement the shifting moods of the film, but few, if any, Waits fans would peg it as their favorite. Lacking two vital layers — Waits’s strong lyrics and distinctive singing — it feels incomplete. The time had surely come for Waits to make a “real” new album.

  10

  WHO ARE YOU NOW?

  It wouldn’t take long for Waits to come through. Hot on the heels of the Night on Earth soundtrack, in August 1992, came Bone Machine. Waits was working on Bram Stoker’s Dracula when he recorded it, and the spectre of death hangs over the album like a pall. Much like Lou Reed’s Magic and Loss, which had come out in January of the same year, it is an extended meditation on mortality. Even the songs that don’t deal directly with death exude a sepulchral quality, with their sparse arrangements and tortured vocals. Bone Machine is the type of album that sneaks up on the listener. Many of the songs, while not particularly melodic, compel you to return to them. Fascinating new aspects of these pieces reveal themselves with each listening.

  Some musicians place a high priority on employing studio techniques to smooth the rough edges of their work. While Waits, particularly since moving to Island Records, was not so inclined, Bone Machine tested the limits of this aesthetic approach more aggressively than ever. Even compared to the Frank trilogy, Bone Machine is almost all rough edges. Most of the tracks are dauntingly minimalist. The overall effect is to direct the listener’s attention to the basic structures of the songs. It was a daring thing to do, and only a very restless and committed artist would attempt it. In 1993, Waits said to Rowland, “You send [the songs] out there ’cause it’s true that things kind of land in your backyard like meteorites. Songs can have a real effect on you — songs have been known to save lives. Some of them are little paramedics. Or maybe some will be killers. Some will die on the windshield. And some of them will never leave home. You beat them but they never leave. Others can’t wait to get out of here, and will never write. They’re ungrateful little bastards. There’s only one reason to write more songs. It’s what Miles Davis said. Because you’re tired of the old ones.”1

  Advances in recording technology would now afford Waits the luxury of choosing the ideal environment in which to give birth to his compositions. With the advent of DAT (digital audio transfer), it had become easier than ever to record music virtually anywhere — in a car, in a bar, in a bathroom, in a field. These were crucial decisions for Waits; he believed that the choice of recording environment had an enormous impact on the finished product. He began by installing his band in a studio, but the space was all wrong. The vibe just wasn’t there. It was sterile. He had to find another locale. Somewhere more sensual, more in keeping with the music.

  “I was so disturbed; the studio we got was totally wrong,” Waits later explained to Rowland, still pained by the memory. “I was stomping around thinking, nothing will ever grow in this room. I’m more and more inclined toward texture, and you can’t get texture with this whole bioregenerator-flesh approach to recording. It gets a little too scientific for me … The room becomes a character. And, fortunately, we stumbled upon a storage room that sounded so good — plus it already had maps on the wall. So I said, ‘That’s it, we’re sold.’”2

  The storage room in question was in the studio building. It had a cement floor and a broken window; furthermore, it wasn’t soundproofed — if someone talked too loud in an adjoining room, if a car passed by, or if a plane passed over, it would become part of a song. In other words, the space had everything that Tom Waits would require. Additional features were a hot-water heater, a table, and a chair. And, of course, those maps. Tom and crew only had to haul out a stack of old crates and the “studio” was ready for business. Said Waits, “We invented a new place for it to happen.”3

  The music of Bone Machine was miles removed from Waits’s early neobeatnik sound. Upon the album’s release, he said that listening to those old songs again was sort of like looking at his baby pictures.4 They summon up feelings of fondness and familiarity, but they reflect little of the long strange journey you’ve been on ever since. Waits told the Morning Becomes Eclectic audience that what he was most partial to at this point was “songs with adventure in them. I think that’s what everybody’s looking for: songs with adventure, and acts of depravity and eroticism, and shipwrecks, murder.” With Bone Machine, he was trying to “make songs that felt a little more handmade. Experiments and expeditions into a world of sound and stories. I was more interested in percussion — in these Bermuda Triangles of percussion that you find and sometimes you drop off the edge of the world.”5

  To intens
ify that percussive clang, Waits exploited even more found sounds than usual. His favorite new instrument, created by a buddy of his, was called a conundrum. “It’s just a metal configuration, like a metal cross,” he explained. “It looks a little bit like a Chinese torture device. It’s a simple thing, but it gives you access to these alternative sound sources. Hit ’em with a hammer. Sounds like a jail door. Closing. Behind you. I like it. You end up with bloody knuckles when you play it. You just hit it with a hammer until you can’t hit it any more. It’s a great feeling to hit something like that. Really slam it as hard as you can with a hammer. It’s good and therapeutic.”6

  Bone Machine actually sounded scary. The effect wasn’t necessarily something that Waits had been striving for — it just seemed to happen. Certainly, the fact that he was playing Renfield while he was recording it contributed to the album’s macabre aura, but that didn’t fully account for Waits’s new direction. Waits himself didn’t offer much insight, remarking to Rowland, “It just came out of the ground like a potato.”7 The music of Bone Machine was more disturbing than anything Waits had ever written — and it was also some of the wildest and most intense.

  The album’s tracks were selected from a pool of about sixty songs and ideas that Tom and Kathleen had come up with. “You always throw out a lot of songs,” Waits remarked. “Not throw them out, but you cannibalize them. That’s part of the process. Frankenstein that number over there. Take the head off of him and sew it onto this guy, immediately. Keep him alive until the head has been severed. It’s part of song-building. Kathleen is great to work with. She’s a lapsed Catholic from Illinois. She’s loaded with mythology and [has a] great sense of melody. I spin the chamber and she fires it. It’s Russian roulette. Sometimes you get great things.”8

  From the opening chords of the album’s opening track, “Earth Died Screaming,” the listener knows that he or she is in for a rough and challenging ride. Waits borrowed the title from a fifties sci-fi movie that he’d never seen and created a song that is nothing less than a musical simulation of the apocalypse. Hellfire crackles in his vocals, which are punctuated by some very weird percussion. Les Claypool, leader of the rock band Primus, weaves in a queasy bass line (he was returning a favor — Waits had contributed vocals to Primus’s single “Tommy the Cat”). The strange clicking sound that carries the tune was achieved by Waits and his band members going outside and hitting on things with sticks.

  The next song, “Dirt in the Ground,” doesn’t revel in chaos and destruction like the preceding cut. It’s more of a dirge, a reflection on mortality. The great tenor saxophonist Teddy Edwards provided Waits with the title: Edwards used to say, “We’re all gonna be dirt in the ground” to the women he was trying to lure up to his hotel room. “Why worry, Sugar? It ain’t gonna matter in the long run.” The notion appealed to Waits, but rather than building on the line’s value as a seduction ploy he took it at face value.9 The resulting song is a low, mournful prayer that is brought into sharp focus by Ralph Carney’s plaintive horns. Next up is the rock-and-roll testimonial “Such a Scream.” Despite some disturbing lyrics — concerning a blood-red plow and the “dollhouse of her skull” — Waits has insisted that “Such a Scream” is actually a love song for Kathleen. Listen to the lyrics closely and you’ll see exactly what he means.10

  “Who Are You” is a gorgeous ballad of love and loss that could easily have fit onto one of Waits’s Elektra albums, though in an earlier version it would most likely have been played on piano with some strings blended in. The Bone Machine arrangement was built on Waits’s guitar and percussion and the upright bass of former Canned Heat member Larry Taylor. When Hoskyns asked Waits to explain what this cryptic little song is all about (“They’re lining up / To mad dog your tilta whirl”), Waits refused. “The stories behind most songs are less interesting than the songs themselves. So you say, ‘Hey, this is about Jackie Kennedy.’ And it’s, ‘Oh, wow.’ Then you say, ‘No, I was just kidding, it’s about Nancy Reagan.’ It’s a different song now. In fact, all my songs are about Nancy Reagan.”11

  “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me” is a musical suicide note. Its instrumentation is spooky and Waits’s voice is like that of a drowning man. He was inspired to write it after coming across a newspaper story accompanied by two photos — the first of a woman standing on a beach, and the second of the same woman a couple of hours later, a corpse washed up on the sand. Her living image had been captured by a passing photographer; when he came back that way again, she was dead. Gone in the blink of an eye, like the click of a shutter.12

  Tom’s daughter made her contribution to Bone Machine, as well. As her father remarked, “Everybody gets in. Everybody wants to get into the action.” Kellesimone provided a lyric for “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me.” Explained Waits, “My little girl has a word — ‘strangels.’ It’s a cross between strange and angels. Strange angels. Or you could have braingels … the strange angels that live in your head would be braingels. We just went around and around with it, and it wound up in ‘The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me.’ … Hey, kids write thousands of songs before they learn how to talk. They write better songs than anybody. You hope you can write something a kid would like. I got a fan letter from somebody in the Midwest. They said, ‘Well, my little girl is just coming around to your songs now. They scare her a little bit. She thinks you sound like a cross between a cherry bomb and a clown.’ I like that. You can’t fool kids. They either like ya or they don’t.”13

  “Jesus Gonna Be Here” is about a con man, the kind of tortured dreamer Waits had been etching so vividly for years. “A Little Rain” feels like something from an old Kurt Weill theatrical score. “Black Wings” bolsters Waits’s mounting reputation as a great modern poet and unfolds to a tune straight out of a spaghetti western.

  Like “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me,” “Murder in the Red Barn” is a creepy little tale with its roots in a local news story. For a long time, Waits has been scouring the papers for ideas, skimming over accounts of politics and war and digging out reports on small human tragedies. He has told Hoskyns that he buys the local papers every day, “and they are full of car wrecks. I guess it all depends on what it is in the paper that attracts you. I’m always drawn to these terrible stories. I don’t know why. Black Irish? You know … my wife is the same way. She comes from an Irish family and she’s drawn to the shadows and the darkness. ‘Murder in the Red Barn’ is just one of those stories, like an old Flannery O’Connor story. My favorite line is, ‘There’s always some killin’ / You got to do around the farm’ … It’s true.”14

  Waits cowrote “That Feel” with Keith Richards, and Richards played and sang on the track. “It’s great to have somebody to write with,” Waits confided to Rowland. “It’s still really a mystery why songs come around and then leave. Keith is always pondering these same questions; he’s extremely down-to-earth and very mystical at the same time.” In fact, Richards’ influence extended even further into Bone Machine — on “Such a Scream,” Waits lays down a scorching Stones-style guitar riff. Speaking to Rowland, he laughed, “You can’t help it if you’re around [Keith]. You start walking like him, and you know, it’s just impossible. He’s got arms like a fisherman. He’s physically very strong, and he can outlast you. You think you can stay up late? You can’t even come close. He can stay up for a week —on coffee and stories.”15

  So Bone Machine, like so many of Waits’s earlier projects, draws on a disparate web of sources to produce unexpected results. Tom has confessed that even he and Kathleen haven’t a clue how it all came together. It was like concocting a dish that you’d been longing to taste without benefit of a recipe. Waits said to Douridas, “When do you put the cinnamon in? Is it after the nutmeg? Or do you first put the scallions in and you dice? What, do you brûlé that? Sauté that? I dunno. Sometimes. Do you lift the lid, or do you not lift the lid?”16

  Of course, sometimes your best efforts will only produce an unappetizing mess. “Well, some [songs] never come to li
fe,” Waits continued, shifting metaphors. “Sometimes you have to be like a doctor. You have to look at them medically — ‘What’s wrong with this?’ You have to diagnose them. Some have maladies that are impossible to deal with. Some of them you can’t diagnose. Some songs, you work on them for months and they’ll never make the journey. They’ll be left behind, and someone has to break the news. We had a lot. We had one called ‘Filipino Box Spring Hog.’ It was a song about this old neighborhood ritual, and the song didn’t make it on the record. It broke my heart, but it just couldn’t come. It was good. Maybe it’ll come out on something else.”17 It did. The song eventually made its way onto the charity album Born to Choose and later onto Waits’s Mule Variations.

  Yet another aspect of Bone Machine’s creation was compromise. Waits’s mandate, beyond perfecting new modes of self-expression, was to communicate with others. To reach into the hearts and minds of his listeners. To avoid making them run for cover. “Well, you know, I always make compromises,” he told Douridas. “If I really put it down the way I really want to hear it, nobody else would want to listen to it but me. I clean everything up, within reason. ’Cause … I like to step on it. Step on the negative. Grind it into the gutter and put that through the projector.” Waits went on to say that Keith Richards called these stepped-on sounds the “hair in the gate.”18 The hair that somehow gets trapped inside a movie projector, abruptly drawing the audience’s attention away from the narrative that’s been unreeling before them. Suddenly, that small imperfection holds more fascination than the film itself, but then, as quickly as it has come, the hair vanishes. And for a moment the audience misses it.