The album closes with another human beatbox experiment — an un-titled a capella track without actual lyrics except for the word chickaboom repeated constantly over an indecipherable backing vocal. “I was making sounds that weren’t words but once I listened back I could actually determine certain syllables,” Waits told Mojo . “It was like going back in time with the language where the sound came first and slowly shaped itself around items and experiences. I’m one of those people that if I don’t have my knees skinned and a cut on my hands, I don’t really feel like I’ve had much of a days work. That’s where the [album] title came from — the blues thing, like I’m really gone.”48
The album came out as promised, and when the day of reckoning came, for the first time since Nighthawks at the Diner, a Waits album was released to decidedly lukewarm reviews. Not bad ones, not good ones, just blah ones. “On Real Gone, Tom Waits walks a fraying tightrope,” Thom Jurek said in the All Music Guide and this seemed to be the general consensus.49 People tended to point out that Waits was a genius, but then give the proviso that it was not his strongest work. Seattle Weekly was impressed by Waits’s ability to “coax alien sounds out of acoustic instruments.”50 Splendid magazine suggested that his flirtation with hip-hop was “almost as if he’s daring people to call him a washed up old fogey, going further with this musical stunt than most of his diehard fans can stomach, probably just to make them uncomfortable.”51
This refusal to do what is expected from him, of course, is totally in keeping with Waits’s musical leanings and should be of little surprise. Perhaps the most accurate description of Real Gone ’s place in the Waits canon is Dean Truitt’s of One Way, “With the passage of time, Real Gone may not go down as the jewel in Tom Waits’ artistic crown.” And that was a good review.52 Waits took it all in stride, drolly telling the Los Angeles Times, “Kids love the record, little kids. They like songs about death.”53
Bones Howe thinks that the vast differences of opinions on the latest work may be attributed to a very simple fact. As Waits’s music has gotten more and more experimental, it has become harder for the casual listener to embrace. “I think that as time goes on, he gets tougher and tougher to just pick up on if you don’t have any history with him,” Howe admits. “It becomes more and more dissonant, more and more noisy. I think noisy is the best adjective. It’s noisy music now. I used to call it his junkyard music, but it’s noisy music now. There are some [terrific] songs on each album, like the Mule album; [but] there are too many songs on there. That’s where he could have used a producer, to say, ‘Hey, Tom …’ We used to leave stuff out of the other records. He didn’t leave anything out of that record. It would have been much better if a couple of those songs had been dropped.”
However, Bones recognizes that it is not in Waits’s nature to pander with his music. It goes back to the days when they were working together. Howe always felt that the door could be opened even wider if Waits would play the music biz game a little more. He respected Waits’s integrity, but “thought it was a shame that Tom never got any pop attention.” Howe acknowledges, “He didn’t want any pop attention. He wanted success his way, and as it turned out, he got his success his way. [But] I always thought that one record that got him on A.M. radio would really do what it did for Laura Nyro. But, Tom was always against that.”
However, “success his way” has continued to expand. Waits has been able to make a living doing what he wants for over thirty years. While he still has never had a smash hit, his influence and reputation are as strong as ever. He finally got a million-selling album (Mule Variations), but even that is not the real test of Tom Waits’s career. It is said of the first Velvet Underground lp that when it was released, it sold maybe a hundred copies, but at least eighty of those buyers went on to form a band. Waits, to this day, has that kind of power — the ability to influence listeners about the range of music and its possibilities. Not everyone is going to get it, but those who do will likely become converts. Maybe Waits describes his restless muse best: “Part of my compulsion is I’m unable to repeat myself in certain things. Other people are nervous when they have to digress or deviate from the scripts, and I’m compelled to change things all the time.”54
Sometimes Waits will return the favor, as well. When he finds a band he really likes, he will try to lend a hand. One big fan of Waits was singer/songwriter E (born Mark Oliver Everett) of the band the Eels. He’d heard through the grapevine that Waits was also a fan of his work, “but my low self-esteem refused to accept that,” E told ice. When Waits suggested a Shortlist Prize nomination for the Eels’ album Shootenanny!, E was “forced to believe the rumors.” Waits later called him and they chatted, and E asked if they could work together. Waits agreed, added some guttural vocals to the Eels song “Going Fetal” on the album Blinking Lights and Other Revelations. “It’s always nice when one of your heroes turns out to be a really great guy,” E said.55
Singer Rob Thomas of the hugely popular rock band Matchbox Twenty, who has worked with legendary performers like Carlos Santana and Willie Nelson, is another artist who counts Waits as an inspiration. In fact, Thomas says that one of the songs on his solo album Something to Be was an attempt to emulate Waits’s sound. “Paul [Matchbox Twenty drummer Doucette] and I are huge Tom Waits fans,” Thomas says enthusiastically. “One of the things about ‘Now Comes the Night’ that I loved was that when I listen to old Tom Waits albums, I love that you can hear his foot on the foot pedal. That was one of the reasons that I wanted to record that song live, because I wanted to have that feeling. I play it for my friends and I’m like, ‘Listen, listen, not to the music, listen to that bomp bomp, bomp bomp. That’s my foot on the pedal, man!’ It comes from that, when I listen to ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues’ or something like that, you know? I think he’s an American treasure.”
Singer Adam Cohen, who leads a band called Low Millions, also finds himself getting lost in the world of Waits music. “I love it,” he says unequivocally. “I’m inspired by it. [I’m] in awe of it. It’s so insular in its genius that I often forget it, because I’m incapable of mimicking it or incorporating it into my world. It’s so unique.” Cohen must know something about quality songwriting, because beyond his own good work, he’s learned just a bit about great lyrics from his father, Leonard Cohen, who recorded Tom Waits’s ninth favorite album.
Of course, it can go the other way around as well; Waits can get just as awestruck as the next guy. Singer Jakob Dylan, leader of the rock group the Wallflowers and son of Waits’s inspiration — folk and rock music god Bob Dylan — learned this first-hand when he was backstage at the encounter between Waits and his father. Jakob was rather shocked to find that meeting his father had rendered Waits nearly speechless. “I’d be like, ‘Come on, you’re Tom Waits, the coolest guy in the world … say something,’” Jakob Dylan said. “I know my dad is very charismatic and that can freak people out but he’s also a great guy if you deal with him right. So Tom Waits is going, ‘Mnnub, mnubbb,’ and I’m like, ‘Don’t fall apart on me, man, you’re my hero.’”56
However, this makes a certain amount of sense. Not necessarily in putting Waits in his place in the musical hierarchy, it’s just a reminder that long before he became an alt-rock figurehead, he was just a fan himself. He’s just a kid who pinned Dylan lyrics to his walls who is rather shocked that he has had the wonderful opportunity — and the talent — to make a career of his first true love. This fascination with, and passion for, art has touched his work for thirty years. It has inspired him to seek out his own muse and poke and prod the music that moved him. This depth and range of influences was pointed out, yet again, when Amazon.com invited him to pick his ten favorite albums and he came up with this eccentric list: Let the Buyer Beware by Lenny Bruce, In the Wee Small Hours by Frank Sinatra, The Abyssian Baptist Gospel Church Choir, Y Los Cubanos Postizos by his guitarist Mark Ribot, Purple Onion by the Les Claypool Frog Brigade, a side project by his friend and Primus leader, The Delivery Man by E
lvis Costello, Ompa Til du Dør by Kaizer’s Orchestra, Flying Saucer Tour by Bill Hicks, Masked Man by Charlie Patton, and The Specialty Sessions by Little Richard.57 A few months later, he came up with a different list of twenty for The Observer which had many of the same albums, but was also even deeper and quirkier.
Waits assimilates all of these sounds and more in his imagination and in the studio to try and reach others. Besides, as is his way, Waits likes to downplay all the talk about his music being so special or revolutionary, telling The San Francisco Chronicle simply, “I’m not original. I’m doing bad impersonations of other people. I like to sound like Ray Charles. Who wouldn’t? So, you’re hearing my poor, failed attempt at a Ray Charles imitation.”58
Of course, the imitation spreads well beyond the music. In the end, Waits has pumped up his music and myth for several reasons. Yes, the romantic stories and the off-the-wall interviews probably helped him to get noticed and made him unique. But they were also a tool of survival. “The fact is that everybody who starts doing this to a certain extent develops some kind of persona or image to survive,” Waits told Mick Brown of Word. “Otherwise it’s very dangerous to go out there. It’s much safer to approach this with some kind of persona, because if it’s not a ventriloquist act, if it’s just you, then it’s really scary… The whole thing’s an act . Nobody would ever show you who they are — nobody would ever dare to do that, and if they do, they change their minds after a while because it gets to a point where you don’t know what’s true any more. The dice is throwing the man, instead of the man throwing the dice.”59
So, whether it is the man, the music, or the self-made myth, Tom Waits soldiers on, periodically poking his head up from his hole to check the weather, release an album, or play a live show. He sometimes indulges his acting hobby, most recently taking a surreal supporting role in the big-budget adventure Domino, starring Keira Knightley, Christopher Walken, and Mickey Rourke.60 He can watch bemusedly as his musical The Black Rider is finally performed around the world by several different companies. And he can putter around on his long-rumored rarities box set Orphans, which Anti does acknowledge is on the way … someday. Waits has earned the right to take his career and his life at his own pace, so even if he’ll lay low for a few years between albums, he’s always there because the music is there. In fact, in this age of the Internet, it is available to more people in more ways than ever before. This can be a boon and a curse. It opens up his potential audience significantly. However, the Internet has also opened up the same old wound that Waits has tried to heal for years.
The legal wrangling with former manager Herb Cohen just keeps on keeping on. In June of 2005, a suit was filed against Warner Music claiming that Waits was getting underpaid for digital downloads of his Elektra/Asylum albums. A story on ABCNews.com explained: “According to the suit, under the terms of the two contracts, Waits was entitled to royalties of either 25% or 50% from revenues derived from third-party licenses. Third Story maintains that digital music downloads constitute a form of third-party license, and that Waits is entitled to payment at that level.”61 Despite the altruistic description being handed to the news organizations, the suit was placed by Cohen’s company Third Story Music, not by Waits. Add to this the fact that Cohen still gets the royalties for this music. Given their history, it seems unlikely that Cohen was just looking out for his old protégé in filing this suit. However, Bones Howe has been assured by his lawyers that this case will, indeed, be beneficial to all of them.
In late 2005 word came out that many years earlier Waits had done a commercial, despite his vocal disdain of the idea. While he did not sing or allow his music to be used, he did act as a voiceover performer in a 1981 ad for dog food. He decided to take the job around the time he was severing his ties with Herb Cohen. With Waits’s contract status what it was, his financial state was becoming highly precarious. He read the following copy in the commercial for Purina’s Butcher’s Blend Dog Food:
As dog travels through the unbeaten and often tempting world of man, there’s one thing, above all, that tempts him most — the taste of meat! And that is why Purina makes Butcher’s Blend. Butcher’s Blend is the first dry dog food with three tempting meaty tastes. Beef, liver ‘n’ bacon. All in one bag. So c’mon, deliver your dog from the world of temptation. The world of Butcher’s Blend. The first dry dog food with three meaty tastes.62
The commercial was well respected in the advertising industry; it won major industry awards in 1982 at the Clio Awards and the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.
While Waits had never exactly made a secret of this, it still came as a bit of a shock to fans. Not just that he had done a commercial after so many years of decrying them but that such a well-known one had flown under the radar for all these years. Waits had even made an offhand acknowledgement of it to writer Jonathan Valania of Magnet in 1999, “They always want me to do ads for underwear and cigarettes, but I never do them. I did one and I’ll never do it again.”63 Waits’s name is plainly mentioned in the credits listed for the Clio Award. Still, the ad was pretty much forgotten until the copywriter for the ad tried to sell the original masters of Waits’s voiceover, along with the signed Screen Actors Guild contract, on eBay. The sale was quickly withdrawn from the site, undoubtedly due to legal pressure, with the auction notice reading curtly, “The seller ended this listing early because the item is no longer available for sale.”64
Since Real Gone has made it into the stores, no word of a follow-up of new material has surfaced. But that is no cause for alarm. In fact, it has become par for the course. Waits is a notorious perfectionist, and he’s undoubtedly right now in a Northern California studio getting the kinks out (or putting the kinks into?) a new set of tunes. Or maybe he’s trying to channel the inspiration he found at the Salvador Dali exhibit in the Philadelphia Museum of Art with his family.65 He is choosing from amongst a voluminous catalogue of musical snippets and songs that he has birthed, hammering and ratcheting them into shape. Trying desperately to capture the sounds he hears in his mind. When it is as close as possible to the perfect aural junkyard that he imagines, he will share it with the rest of the world. Of this, you can be sure. You can also be pretty darned sure that it will be tonally interesting and lyrically stimulating.
No one knows what he’ll come up with next, but at least one thing is certain. Whatever it is will be stimulating and thought-provoking. Waits is an artist who can still surprise and challenge himself and his audience thirty years into his career. How many others can make a similar claim?
To a degree, Waits’s longevity can be attributed to the fact that he has never been a flavor of the month. And you can’t plunge from the heights if you’ve never scaled them. Waits is no superstar; he’s a craftsman and an artist. He fabricates good, functional, sturdy, eclectic art and then dares his audience to try it out. Some people can’t get beyond his raspy vocals, and that is a pity. They are missing something vital, something elemental, something that is at once both sexual and pure, violent and benign, profane and strangely spiritual. Tom Waits is a man with a highly original artistic vision that he has never allowed to become corrupted. Bones Howe recalls Waits saying to him, “The reason I got into music is so that I wouldn’t have to conform. And if I have to conform with my music, then I shouldn’t be in music anymore.”
Howe concludes, “I just think that [Tom Waits] has a lot of scope. He has a very wide vista to look from. I think that he’s an immense talent. He’s always looking. He’s always experimenting. He’s always trying to move from where he is. He doesn’t sit still. He doesn’t stay in one place. He wants to keep moving.”
As 1999 drew to a close, Rolling Stone asked a host of celebrities from different niches of the entertainment industry to articulate their thoughts about the new millennium. Waits was asked what he would say to the students of the class of 2000. “Run away and join the circus,” he told them. “Get a tattoo, hop a train. Plant a garden and save the seeds. Get married, h
ave kids, wear a hat. Get good with a bullwhip. Don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal. Everyone must put beans on the table. Be devoted to the unification of the diverse aspects of yourself. Remember, most of what is essential is invisible to the eye. The quality of time you spend with someone far outweighs the quantity. And, there’s a lot you can do with a wah-wah pedal and a bullet mike.”66
DISCOGRAPHY
ALBUMS
Closing Time
Elektra 5061 (1973)
1. Ol’ 55
2. I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You
3. Virginia Avenue
4. Old Shoes (And Picture Postcards)
5. Midnight Lullaby
6. Martha
7. Rosie
8. Lonely
9. Ice Cream Man
10. Little Trip to Heaven (On the Wings of Your Love)
11. Grapefruit Moon
12. Closing Time
All songs written by Tom Waits.
Produced by Jerry Yester for Third Story Productions.
The Heart of Saturday Night
Asylum 1015 (1974)
1. New Coat of Paint
2. San Diego Serenade
3. Semi Suite
Wild Years Page 27