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Neil Young, in his introduction of Waits’ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, called him “indescribable” and then proceeded to try, calling him “a magician, spirit guide, changeling.”
Singer Dave Matthews, a big Waits fan, has said, “He’s almost like performance art on a recording. There’s something about his music that has so much character and so much playfulness that it’s sort of storylike. Black Rider is a perfect example: there’s so much comedy and so much melancholy, too.”
The music magazine Magnet in 2004 made a perceptive point about those who like Waits and those who don’t. “You can tell a lot about people from what they make of Tom Waits. His career is a musical Rorschach test: Some just see spilled ink, others see fantastic chimeras. He’s one of those love-‘em-or-hate-em artists.”
When Waits has talked about how he writes songs, he spoke about writing down people’s conversations he overheard around the bars he drank at. “I found some music hiding in there.” He also got inspiration from the words he saw in different cities. In New York, for instance, he’d get in a taxi and be driven around the city where he would “start writing down words you see, information that is in your normal view: dry cleaners, custom tailors, alterations, electrical installations, Dunlop safety center, lease, broker, sale…just start making a list of words that you see. And then you just kind of give yourself an assignment: to write a song using all these words. Or you can get in character, like in acting, and let the characters speak.”
But the words on billboards and the side of buildings began to get to him after a while, and when he returned to Los Angeles in the mid-eighties he found shocking that “every square inch of space that you can see from your windshield are words. Hundreds and hundreds of words. In places you never would imagine. I found myself unable to drive safely.”
With the money he got from the Frito Lay lawsuit, Waits decided to move his family to northern California, near the small town of Valley Ford in Sonoma County, a 90 minute drive above San Francisco, where he continued his collaboration with his wife Kathleen writing songs, tending to the garden, perusing junk yards, and raising three children (Kellesimone, Casey and Sullivan were born in 1983, ’85, and ’93. Kellesimone is now a painter, and his two sons play in their father’s band).
When Tom found Kathleen, she completed him. She took him out of the cheap motels and endless touring and taught him to hold on to what was most important: his family. He wrote a song about it called “Hold On” for Mule Variations that ends: “Well your old hometown is so far away/ but, inside your head there’s a record/ that’s playing, a song called/ Hold on, hold on/ You really got to hold on/ Take my hand, I’m standing right here/ and just hold on.”
“We’re all holding onto something,” Waits said. “None of us want to come out of the ground. I thought that was a real positive thing to say. It was an optimistic song about being in love.”
One of the things Waits holds on to is his integrity, and his refusal to allow any of his songs to be used in a commercial way. “Commercials are an unnatural use of my work,” he’s said. “It’s like having a cow’s udder sewn to the side of my face. Painful and humiliating. I get approached all the time, and they offer a whole lot of money. Unfortunately I don’t want to get on the bandwagon. You may need money but, I mean, rob a 7-Eleven! Do something with dignity and save us all the trouble of peeing on your grave. I really am against people who allow their music to be nothing more than a jingle for jeans or beer. I just hate it.”
What he doesn’t hate, though still feels unsure about, is acting. He’s appeared in 28 films and has worked with iconic directors like Francis Coppola (Rumble Fish, The Outsiders, The Cotton Club, and Dracula, where he got to play a the sinister bug-eating Renfield, “a masochist’s nirvana” Waits said of the role), Robert Altman (where he starred opposite Lily Tomlin as his wife in Short Cuts), Hector Babenco (At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Ironweed, where he worked with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Nicolson, he said, was a “badass. He lives in the ether, he walks like a spider. He knows about everything from beauty parlors to train guards.”), and Terry Gilliam (The Fisher King and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus). “With acting,” he’s said, “I usually get people who want to put me in for a short time. Or they have a really odd part that only has two pages of dialogue. Actors see what they do as conceptually as musicians. They regard the same bylaws. I can’t honestly say I’m accomplished as an actor. I have a lot of respect for those that are. But it’s not the life I want to have, wearing someone else’s clothes and saying someone else’s words.”
Our tour bus has taken us to an alleyway where Waits once shot a music video. We walk up this narrow path between apartment houses and continue talking about the man who has told us, in song after song, to “come on and dream.” Because dreams are an essential part of understanding Tom Waits.
“It’s what you don’t know that’s usually more interesting,” he’s said. “Things you wonder about, things you have yet to make up your mind about. There’s more to deal with than just your fundamental street wisdom. Dreams. Nightmares. I have very violent dreams. …I used to wake up alone, but now that I’m married there’s somebody to turn to before you forget. But I still have nightmares about the stage where everything goes wrong. The piano catches fire, the lighting comes crashing to the stage, the curtain tears. The audience throws tomatoes and overripe fruit…and my shoes can’t move. The nightmare that you will completely come unraveled.”
“Who knows what Rain Dogs mean?” David Smay asks about the album and song of that name.
“A wet bitch,” one from our group quips.
“Sort of,” Smay says. “What Tom has said is that ’Dogs in the rain lose their way back home…’Cause after it rains every place they peed on has been washed out.’”
“That’s the album that got him named Rolling Stone’s Songwriter of the Year,” Simon tells us. “Not a bad follow-up to Swordfishtrombone.”
“Those are my two favorites,” Martha says.
This remark leads to everyone pitching in on their own favorite Waits albums, and it seems that all of them get mentioned. That’s the wonder and beauty of the artist who, he has claimed, is better known at the junkyard than at any music store. “There’s something almost Shakespearean about the breadth of Tom Waits’ take on modern American life,” Simon Schama declared in the Guardian. Shakespearean, yes. And Joycean. Kerouacean. Dylanesque. And Kafkaesque. There’s a whole lot of Tom Waits to go around.
“I enjoy being puzzled and arriving at my own incorrect conclusions,” Waits has said. “What I’m trying to do,” he told Elvis Costello, “is get what comes and keep it alive. It’s like carrying water in your hands. I want to keep it all and sometimes by the time you get to the studio you have nothing.”
What would Tom Waits do if he didn’t have his music? He’d still grow his tomatoes, corn, eggplant, squash, beans and pumpkins in his backyard in Sonoma County. But that wouldn’t be enough, and it’s only fitting that he should have the last word: “I’d probably end up gluing bottlecaps onto a piece of plywood.”
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