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Once Waits started getting recognized, writers used their imagination trying to describe him. He “looks like a guest in a fleabag hotel,” wrote Newsweek in 1976; “like an urban scarecrow,” suggested the New Yorker. “Hanging out with him in public is like keeping company with a man pursued by assassins,” said the Los Angeles Times ten years later. Writer Kinky Friedman wrote that Waits “looks like he was put together by committee.” Musician magazine dubbed him “a combination thread of fifties beatnik, forties vaudevillian, thirties melodist.” Writer Barney Hoskins described Waits at 50 resembling “some weatherbeaten drifter out of [photographer] Richard Avedon’s In the American West.” And filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, who cast him in his 1986 movie Down By Law and looked upon Waits’ songs as “little films,” said of his friend, “There is no bullshit surrounding the man.”
The Crawling Down Cahuenga: Tom Waits’ Los Angeles Bus Tour
“Step Right Up!” says David Smay, mimicking Waits’ carnival barker voice from that song on Small Change. The same kind of imitation that Frito-Lay hired a singer to do in 1988 when introducing a new Doritos chips ad, which wound up costing them $2.6 million when Tom Waits sued for personality infringement and won . But Smay, who is the author of a book on Waits’ Swordfishtrombone album, isn’t worried about a lawsuit. He’s just having some fun with those of us who paid to ride the bus and listen to his esoteric knowledge of Waits in L.A. (Is it any wonder the tours are called Esotourica?) “If not completely satisfied mail back…for complete refund of price of purchase. Step right up! Don’t be fooled by cheap imitations.”
We who dig our Waits board the bus, and as Smay outlines where we are headed—from Waits’ apartment in Echo Park and the surrounding food joints he frequented to where the Tropicana Motor Hotel once stood on Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood, near the diner Dukes (no longer there) and the Troubadour where he played (still there), to Canter’s all-night deli on Fairfax Ave. where the rock crowd gathered at 3 a.m. to the Ivar Theater and the former Sewers of Paris club in Hollywood—we learn who is from L.A. (about half of us) and who from out of town (ten), and out of country (five).
As we drive to Silverlake, I ask the woman sitting next to me if she has ever seen Waits perform in person. Her name is Rita, she’s a photographer, and remembers back 25 years when she lived in Michigan.
“Tom was performing at the Royal Oak Theater, a small venue in one of the northern Detroit suburbs,” she tells me. “Actually, it was a former movie theater, to give you an idea of the small size. I was a fan, but most of the people there had never heard of him. I went to the show which was supposed to start at 8:00 p.m. By 8:15, people were starting to get restless, complaining about the delay. Then a bum from the audience got up and walked up on stage, and suddenly people realized it was him. And the show began.
“The story that went around was that he had tried to get in the stage door, and was refused. The stage crew didn’t know him, and thought he was a homeless person trying to get in. So rather than fight, Tom went to the box office and bought a ticket–there were still tickets available–and waited smugly until people were getting upset, then revealed himself.
“Tom really did enter the stage from the audience, because he was sitting a few rows ahead of me when he got up and made his ‘entrance.’ And he appeared unkempt, wearing an ill-fitting suit that very well could have been purchased at the Salvation Army. It was worn, it was too tight and the sleeves were a couple of inches too short. You could see his wrists. The tie was askew. In short, he did indeed look like a bum, and if I were the security at the stage door, I wouldn’t have let him in either. No way did he look like a star. Of course, his subsequent performance was phenomenal, and the ‘costume’ really enhanced his message. The only stage prop was a lamp post, and he frequently leaned on it as if drunk, and it was so real…. Who knows, maybe he really was in his cups!
“He is truly a strange duck. But nobody writes lyrics like that, his raspy vocal chords are unique, and I love him.”
“Strange?” the guy sitting in front of us pipes in. His name is Simon. “Let me tell you strange. Ever listen to his song “Cemetery Polka” from Rain Dogs? That’s Waits opening up about his weird family, talking behind their backs. Uncle Vernon, Uncle Phil, Uncle William, Aunt Mame—they’re all really his relatives. ‘Auntie Mame has gone insane.’ Uncle Vernon ‘a big shot at the slaughterhouse,’ who had the same gravelly voice Tom has. Uncle Bill and his wooden-legged Puerto Rican mistress. For a guy who’s spent most of his life trying to keep things private, he opened some doors in that one.”
“I read that Waits admitted that it was difficult for him to be honest about discussing his family in that way, and that he regretted that song,” Rita says “But he obviously wasn’t talking behind their backs if he was putting it out there.”
This sets off people talking about Waits as if they know him, which they don’t. They’ve just read about him, or saw him on one of his rare TV talk show appearances, or know someone who knows someone who once drank with him.
“Those ‘late-night evening prostitutes’ he sings about,” says Simon, “he dealt with them when he was working at the pizza place, Napoleone’s, in National City, as a teenager. He liked to play with the hookers, the pool hustlers, even the gangsters down there. That was his exposure to the seedy side. He grew up fast.”
“He started drinking as a teenager,” David Smay adds. “Began playing piano in a lounge at a golf club. Talked his way out of being drafted into the army, getting a psychiatrist to declare him unfit. That’s when he began playing Gershwin on the piano. He loved those guys: Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Igor Stravinsky. Of course he was putting Bob Dylan’s lyrics up on his wall, and he was singing The Doors and Mississippi John Hurt, reading Kerouac’s On the Road, driving a big old Buick. He was either reading, playing music, or driving his car, looking for the heart of Saturday night.”
Our tour guide fills in some of Waits’ background. How he first worked as a bouncer at the Heritage in San Diego before being allowed on stage. How he used to sing Dylan songs until someone suggested he sing his own, and that’s when he started to bloom, with “Ol’55,” which a British music historian named Simon Schama described as “the single most beautiful love song since Gershwin and Cole Porter shut their piano lids.” The Eagles would later make that song famous.
“You know how many acts Waits opened for before he had enough of a following to carry a show?” a young woman from Sweden asks.
“A lot,” Smay says. “Starting with Frank Zappa, whose audience didn’t appreciate Waits’ style. Then there was Bette Midler, who was his girlfriend for a while and who sung a duet with him, ‘I Never Talk to Strangers,’ from his Foreign Affairs album. And Blue Oyster Cult, Big Mama Thornton, Fishbone. He even opened for some comedians like Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx.”
“You’re leaving out Rickie Lee Jones,” Simon says.
“He never opened for her; she was just getting started when she hooked up with him at the Tropicana. But that only lasted a year, and she sang her heartbreak about him in her album Pirates.”
“I heard that he made more money from Rod Stewart’s cover of his song ‘Downtown Train’ than from all his previous albums put together,” I say.
“That’s true,” Smay agrees. “He’s done very well from all the singers who have sung his songs. Stewart did three. Bruce Springsteen, Marianne Faithfull, the Ramones, Solomon Burke, Johnny Cash, Ute Lemper, and Nora Jones all have sung his songs. And Scarlett Johansson turned singer to record a tribute Waits album called Anywhere I Lay My Head.”
“He wasn’t happy when his former manager put out an entire album of Tom’s early songs without his approval,” Simon says.
“That’s because he doesn’t own the rights to his Asylum-years songs. That’s why he rarely sings any of them in concerts anymore,” Smay tells us.
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