Wild Years

by Jay S. Jacobs

  Not all collections of music from the past ended up quite so happily for Waits. A more distressing look backwards came when a European record label called Burning Airplane claimed that they had secured the rights to release an album from a live show that Waits had performed in the mid-seventies. While the company’s claims of contractual legitimacy seemed rather tenuous at best, they were able to officially release The Dime Store Novels (Volume 1) — Live at Ebbett’s Field in Europe, where some of the copyright laws were less stringent. The concert the label used for the album was an often-bootlegged bicentennial performance at the Denver club where Waits had originally befriended Chuck E. Weiss. Though it disturbed Waits to have an “official” boot reaching store shelves, his protests could not halt the cd. Waits may have been unable to stop the release of that first disk at the time, but four years later a promised Volume 2 has still never shown up.

  From the more recent past, Waits had wanted to record the music from Alice since it was originally staged in 1992. However, problems with his old record label Island slowed down the process, undoubtedly stemming back to the fact a similar project for The Black Rider had led to one of Waits’s more impenetrable and slowest-selling albums. So, even though the music from Alice was a lot more digestible, it was unavailable to Waits fans, except through low-quality bootlegs of the songs. The project got pushed back farther when Waits moved over to Anti/Epitaph. He wanted to immediately release his latest, freshest work with Mule Variations. Waits was pleased with the experience of working with the label and thought it may finally be the moment to officially record songs from the musical. “Well, you know, time is always a collaborator with music,” he explained to Time Out. “Invariably, you record things when they’re new, but it’s not necessarily the law.”1

  However, it made no sense to record these older songs when he had music from his more recent show, Woyzeck, which was also not yet available to fans. In a bold marketing move, Waits decided to record and release the soundtracks for the two plays at the same time. He did change the name of Woyzeck to the more fan-friendly album title Blood Money. It is rare for any artist to drop two records at the same time, and when it does happen, it is usually done by superstar acts like Bruce Springsteen (who released Human Touch and Lucky Town simultaneously in 1992) or Guns N’ Roses (Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II in 1991). Industry pundits questioned whether there were enough buyers out there to justify Waits’s simultaneous releases, even though he had a large cult following. “If it turns out to be a good idea, I’ll take credit for it. If not, I’ll blame it on someone else,” Waits joked to USA Today. “When you haven’t had a record out for seven years, people get upset. When you put two out at the same time, they get upset. It’s either ‘Why’ve you been away so long?’ or ‘Why are you here all the time?’”2

  Waits decided to make sure that the albums were respectful of their theatrical pasts, while at the same time stood alone as Tom Waits disks. He also continued his fascination with quirky instruments and disdain for the expected. In fact, only four of the songs on the two albums had that staple of modern composition, the electric guitar. Those four were “Everything You Can Think” from Alice, and “God’s Away On Business,” “Knife Chase,” and “Starving in the Belly of the Whale” from Blood Money. Only a few other songs, all on Blood Money, used acoustic guitars. “The electric guitar thing is so overused,” Waits explained to Time Out. “They show up on everything, it almost seems like it’s the guiding force of popular music. Without it I wonder what people’s music would sound like. It was like tying one hand behind your back just for the hell of it. See how you do. See if you can electrify some of these other instruments, or get them to be just as expressive. There’s a reason guitar is in everything — it’s portable, it’s powerful, it’s potent, and it comes in so many different forms, and it’s simple to play. I still love it, but we tried to omit it on these records to see what will happen.”3

  Of the two albums, Alice is the more immediately accessible — if any album with the quirky, thorny likes of “Kommienezuspadt,” “Table Top Joe,” and “We’re All Mad Here” could be labeled accessible. Alice has a gentleness, a poetic sense of woe, and a throbbing, beautiful suffering that is almost mournful. For the most part, the album eschews the more carnival-like musical atmosphere that Waits has been experimenting with since Swordfishtrombones for a more classical feel. Alice is a mix of Brechtian balladry, Dixieland jazz, and chamber music.“ Alice is kind of like taking a pill,” Waits said in an interview for the electronic press kit that was on Anti’s website for the albums. “It’s a little dreamier. It’s a little more …I don’t know …druggy I’d say, more kind of an opiate. And dreamy. More of a song cycle.”4

  The song cycle starts in with the delicate, jazzy title track. “Alice” is a sax-laden ballad that would feel at home on one of Waits’s Elektra albums. However, despite the refined musical backing, the lyrics catalogue a feeling of obsession. The words work in the framework of the musical about writer Lewis Carroll’s strange relationship with young Alice. It also resonates outside the structure of the story, showing how people can become fixated on another person, even when they know that it is not what is best for them. “I’m imagining a whole Victorian atmosphere and someone like [Carroll], who had this obsession and compulsion,” Waits told USA Today. “He was mystified by this peculiar, sparkling little girl. I’m trying to explore the nature of obsession, not just in his frame of mind but also as it applies to any love affair.”5

  There are other unbearably fragile songs like “Flower’s Grave,” “Lost in the Harbor,” and “No One Knows I’m Gone,” which bleed like an open wound. Ghosts of lost opportunities and squelched desires disappear into the quickly receding fog of life. Which is not to say that Alice is just a long group of lamentful ballads. “Kommienezuspadt” has Waits spouting guttural foreign-sounding words (and some occasional English ones) over a racing horn-laced calliope tune. “Actually there are a few words in there that have real meaning but the rest of it is just pure gibberish,” Waits admitted. “But, a lot of people when they hear it they say, ‘Gee, I didn’t know you spoke Romanian’ or ‘I didn’t know you spoke the odd dialect of Finland.’ I have been known to tell them that I do speak those languages, but truthfully I don’t.”6

  Alice continues Waits’s musical fascination with the deformed. “Table Top Joe” is an old-fashioned ragtime workout about a man who is born with just a head, no body. Instead of letting his deformity destroy him, Joe uses it to his advantage, putting together an act and becoming a vaudeville star. Not all of Waits’s freaks are so lucky, though. “Poor Edward” tells the tragic story of a man who was literally two-faced; he had the full face of a woman on the back of his head. She is Edward’s doppelganger, constantly belittling him and tempting him with evil thoughts. Eventually the face drives Edward to madness and suicide. These two songs are the opposite sides of a fever dream.

  This dichotomy of joy and pain comes naturally to Waits as a song-writer. “I’m an old softie,” Waits said. “Most songwriters are probably writing one or two songs over and over again in one way or another. Kathleen said that with me, it’s either Grand Weepers or Grim Reapers. Yeah, I run hot and cold. I like melody, and I like dissonance. I guess maybe it’s an alcoholic personality. I get mad, and I cry.”7

  Blood Money tends to be a darker, more acidic, yet less emotionally draining, listen. It also delves more into the tonal experimentation of Waits’s later music. This probably stems from the bleak storyline of the source material, the musical Woyzeck. “It’s a story that continues to surface in Europe,” Waits told USA Today. “[Producer Robert] Wilson told me about this lowly soldier who submitted to medical experiments and went slowly mad from taking medications and herbs. He finds out his wife is unfaithful. He slits her throat and throws his knife in the lake, goes in after it and drowns, and then his child is raised by the village idiot. I said, ‘ok, I’m in. You had me at “slit her throat.”’”8

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p; Musically as well as lyrically, Blood Money is more jagged, more screaming, more percussive. It has a playful black sense of humor behind the apocalyptic yowls of anger. “Misery is the River of the World” contradicts an enraged howl at the moon on the human conditions with a carnival oom-pah band backing. A subtle samba beat percolates underneath the resigned bitterness of “Everything Goes to Hell.” More stomping, clanging instrumentation reminiscent of Bone Machine appears on “God’s Away On Business” as Waits spits out every word with poisonous bile only experienced by the betrayed. A similar sense of mental instability crops up in the raging “Starving in the Belly of the Whale.” The instrumental “Knife Chase” weds a martial backbeat to a spy-film throb.

  “There’s certain sounds that I am attracted to,” Waits said. “I always like things that sound like they’re trying to reach you from far away, so I feel like I need to lean in and give them some help. I like clank and I like boom and I like steam. I thought that would be a good title for a record: ‘Clank, Boom and Steam.’ Clank, boom, pssssst! There’s something kind of locomotive about it, coal-driven.”9 It turns out that Waits would save that title for his next album, the song “Clang Boom Steam” would become one of the last tunes on the 2004 album Real Gone.

  Strangely, in the middle of all this dark experimentation, there are a couple of Waits’s more touchingly romantic songs. Over a soft old-fashioned bed of music, “Coney Island Baby” features a lead played on a chamberlain. Waits reserves his simplest lyrics of straightforward devotion for this song, calling his love a princess, a rose, a pearl. Much like the earlier “Johnsburg, Illinois” and “Jersey Girl,” this song celebrates the little, subtle moments in a relationship. The song closes out with a piano quote from “Innocent When You Dream.” The next song, “All the World is Green,” is a similarly lovely ballad about trying to remember the moments when romance is pure and possibilities are endless. There is also a sense of desperate romantic resignation on the charming tunes “Another Man’s Vine” and “The Part You Throw Away.”

  For a few weeks before the disks were released, Anti’s website previewed the two albums, allowing people to listen to the music online. Blood Money and Alice debuted on the Billboard album charts at #32 and #33 respectively. This made the albums Waits’s second and third best-charting albums ever, with only Mule Variations charting higher. As usual, the chart positions were not as important to Waits as was the fact that he was able to finally complete the long journey to get this music out into the world. “I just try to walk my own path,” he told the New York Times. “You have to believe in yourself and you have to ride out the seasons. Everybody wants it to be summer all the time, in relationships and with their career. And when the weather starts to turn, they think they better get out. So it takes a certain amount of persistence.”10

  While it was summertime for his music, the movie career was going through a cold spell. The Boom Boom Room movie project never got off the ground, and another film he acted in called Cadillac Tramps was never released. But Waits continued to work on movie projects that interested him, contributing original tunes to the films rather than acting in them. He and Kathleen composed the music to the Academy Award–winning Best Animated Short Film Bunny by Chris Wedge. Wedge had been working in film animation going back to the 1982 Disney computer thriller Tron, and had been chief animator for mtv’s cockroach film Joe’s Apartment and the fourth Alien movie, Alien Resurrection. Bunny was an odd, slightly whimsical computer-animated ten-minute film about a bunny making a cake. While she is stirring the batter a moth flies in the room. She kills the moth, but doesn’t realize that it has fallen into the cake batter. After she cooks the cake, she eats it and promptly dies. This brief description doesn’t explain the quirky allure, astonishing computer graphics, and thoughtful poetry of the film. The success of Bunny led to the opportunity for Wedge to direct the feature-length movies Ice Age and Robots. In fact, Bunny is included on the dvd for Ice Age.

  Waits also contributed the end-title tune “The World Keeps Turning” to Ed Harris’s critically acclaimed Pollock, the story of the life of revolutionary painter Jackson Pollock. “I asked Tom Waits, who I met some years back, if he’d write me a song for the end of the film,” Harris said in the director’s commentary of the dvd.11 Waits also did two new songs, “The Long Way Home” and “Jayne’s Blue Wish,” for Arliss Howard’s movie Big Bad Love.

  In May of 2001, Waits got together with fellow artists Randy Newman and Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart to file a $40 million lawsuit against the Internet file-sharing site MP3.com for copyright infringement. The singers all found their songs stored and available without permission on the company’s site as part of its My.MP3 service, including tracks from Waits’s album Mule Variations and Newman’s old singles “Short People” and “I Love L.A.” Their attorney, Bruce Van Dalsem of the law firm Gradstein, Luskin & Van Dalsem, explained, “This is a case of artists banding together to protect their most valuable assets — their songs. More successful song-writers of this caliber need to stand up against copyright infringement in order to protect their own rights and discourage the theft of music written by lesser-known artists who cannot afford to protect their smaller catalogs of work.” The My.MP3 program had been shut down earlier by a lawsuit by major record labels including Sony, Universal, BMG, Warners, and EMI. MP3.com had reached a licensing agreement with the labels and had re-launched in December of 2000. The suits differed by the fact that the labels had sued the company for unauthorized use of their master recordings, while the artists focused on the use of the compositions.12

  While Waits was still recording the two albums, the world was interrupted by tragedy. On September 11, 2001, the whole earth stood still with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, dc. As someone who had spent so much time (both good and bad) in Manhattan, the disaster touched Waits deeply, causing him to examine his life and his calling. “Artists are trying to figure out what they do that has value,” he told USA Today. “A lot of things have to happen before you turn on your record player. You want to be safe and warm and held. At times I think, ‘What am I doing? Making jewelry for the ears?’ The world’s on fire and we’re on a bus without a driver. We’re all very much awake now. It’s important for us to remain awake and not go back to sleepwalking in our pajamas, playing golf, and contemplating our navels. The rest of the world is tapping us on the shoulder with the oldest conflict of time: the haves and have-nots. It’s time for great men to step forward with wisdom and depth and compassion, and I don’t know who they are. We all feel impotent politically. I don’t know the answer. You have to start with self, family, and community.”13

  As has been a pattern throughout his career, a lot of respected artists continued to try to put their own individual stamp on Waits’s songs. On her 2001 cover album Strange Little Girls, acclaimed singer/songwriter Tori Amos recorded a series of songs that were very specifically from a male songwriter’s viewpoint and gave them a feminine twist. This led to some extremely radical rethinking of songs like Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence,” Slayer’s “Raining Blood,” Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays,” and Eminem’s “’97 Bonnie & Clyde.” The one song on the album that Amos was relatively faithful to the source material was a sparse, beautiful take of “Time” from Raindogs. “I thought about taking [it] to the organ, but I stripped it back,” Amos explained to ice magazine. “It’s from the point of view of Death, so I felt you need to feel like you are sitting on the piano stool. No masks, no effects, it’s right here, dry, with a little compression on the vocals.”14

  Waits contributed a tune to the first major record in over ten years for classic soul singer Solomon Burke. Burke had had many hits for Atlantic Records in the sixties such as “Cry To Me,” “Everybody Needs Somebody To Love,” and “Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Open Arms).” However, Burke was never the type to play the record label games. He didn’t like the songs
he was being asked to record and that he was getting paid the bare minimum for his shows and recordings. In fact, it was so bad that Burke would make the record companies pay him to cook for the band, and he would sell anything he felt he could get money for. Eventually, he stood up for his rights and left Atlantic in the late sixties. After that he floated from one label to another, but he never replicated his early success. As an artist he was left behind, forgotten by the labels and soon by listeners in general.

  In the years since, Burke has plied many trades, including undertaker, hot dog manufacturer, and currently an ordained minister in Los Angeles. He also had to spend a lot of time raising his family — he has twenty-one children and sixty-three grandchildren. Burke never stopped singing, though, he just stopped recording. He toured often through the eighties and nineties, and even did a little acting in movies like the 1986 Mickey Rourke–Robert DeNiro thriller Angel Heart. In 2002, when Andy Kaulkin, one of the heads of Epitaph Records, told Burke he was interested in making a new album, Burke considered it “divine intervention.” When he signed up with Fat Possum Records (another imprint of Epitaph) to do a comeback album at age sixty-three, many of the biggest names in music wanted to play a part in the project. Amazingly, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Brian Wilson, Van Morrison, Nick Lowe, Dan Penn, and Waits all gave Burke songs to record. Critically acclaimed singer/songwriter Joe Henry signed on to produce. Burke came in to sing the songs without having heard any of them. Still, the album Don’t Give Up on Me was recorded in four days. It became a surprise success, even netting Burke a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Blues album.

  The song Waits offered up was a tune he had written with his wife called “Diamond in Your Mind.” While Burke liked the song very much, there was some of Waits’s tough street language that Burke felt uncomfortable saying as a minister. Burke suggested that perhaps the words could be touched up a bit to make them more suitable for him. He was met with stunned silence. “When we started to change some of Tom’s lyrics, Andy came into the studio and said quietly, ‘Dr. Burke, no disrespect, but you just don’t change Tom Waits’s lyrics,’” Burke remembers. “They got Tom on the phone, and I don’t know what Andy said, but afterwards he came in and said, ‘You won’t believe this, but Tom said it’s okay!’”15