"No, not really. I've got to cinch something before we get out of the Seventies. I've got a lot invested in this whole thing - just in confidence - in my development as a writer and all that. I don't want to be a has-been before I've even arrived. That would be hard to live with. Yeah...hard to live with. I don't want to think about it, man. Let's go get a pizza." **************************************************************************************************************************************************** Time Magazine Article, November 28, 1977

Tom Waits: Barroom Balladeer

A street-smart scuffler busts out of the back alleys

Tom Waits was growling. In a few hours he would be on a campus stage singing his songs and spieling his narrative jazz poetry to an audience of college kids. It was atrip he had made before. "I'd rather play a club with vomit all around me," he rasped, "than a clean little college with sassy little girls and guys with razor-cut hair and coke spoons around their necks. "

Now on tour to promote Foreign Affairs, his fifth album, Waits is playing fewer of the seedy nightclubs that have long been his backdrop as a performer and his inspiration as an artist. At 27, he is a street-smart scuffler who writes knowingly of dingy bars, all-night diners and down-and-outers on the make. Says he: "Life is picking up a girl with bad teeth, or getting to know one of those wild-eyed rummies down on Sixth Avenue."

To open his off-campus shows on the current tour, he has been hiring local strippers at each of his stops. They are a perfect prelude for the act that follows. When Waits finally takes the stage, an air of crushed cigarettes and damp napkins clings to him like lint. Beat-up pointed shoes, a greasy tie and baggy socks go just fine with his Salvation Army suit.

With a jazz trio providing his backup, he begins stitching together the blue collar bromides, raunchy puns and gritty street lingo that characterize his verse. "It's cold out there/ colder than a ticket taker's smile/ at the Ivar Theatre, on a Saturday night," he chants in a voice that sounds like a bad exhaust. The Ivar Theatre is a two-bit Hollywood burlesque house where he has spent more than a few evenings.

Waits' specialty is the narrative tale. While a tenor sax begins some bluesy background, he lurches toward his microphone and growls his way into the urban back alleys. "Small Change got rained on with his own .38/ and his headstone's/ a gumball machine," he sings, recalling a shooting he once witnessed on New York's 23rd Street.

no more chewing gum

or baseball cards or

overcoats or dreams and

someone is hosing down the sidewalk

and he's only in his teens

In jack & neal, he shifts gears to tell of a cross-country drive to California in the company of a nurse. It has all the gusty exhilaration of Kerouac's On the Road:

a redhead in a uniform will always

get you horny

with her hairnet and those white

shoes and a name tag and a hat

she drove like Andy Granatelli and

knew how to fix a flat

Waits' own street schooling began early. Born in Pomona, he was brought up in several Southern California cities after his parents, both teachers, were divorced. At 14, he began working the graveyard shift at a pizza house in National City, a San Diego suburb. "It was a tiny community," he likes to recall, "The main drag was a transvestite and the average age was deceased." Nightwork hampered his high school studies, but not his education. "I encountered a whole different element = people a lot older than me, pool hustlers and Mafioso types. I grew up real fast."

After dropping out of high school, he skipped through a series of jobs and eventually found work as a nightclub doorman. A self-described "private investigator" of the night, he began transcribing the common-man conversations he overheard, hoping to "forge it all into something meaningful and give it dignity."

By then he had started to read Charles Bukowski, the roustabout bard, and poet Delmore Schwartz, who died in a rundown hotel for transients in 1966. Waits has developed his own artistry beneath a muscatel exterior. "I have an image that has been cultivated, derived from the way I am, " he says. "I just try to steer a course between the pomp and the piss."

Critical acclaim, and there has been plenty, has not yet made him rich and famous. He still parks his brontosaurian 1954 Caddy behind West Hollywood's Tropicana motel, a seedy tryst stop used as a setting for Andy Warhol's Heat. He keeps his piano in the kitchen. "I don't use the refrigerator," he wheezes, "and the stove is just a large cigarette lighter." His nocturnal meanderings have led to three "driving while intoxicated" arrests, and he was once nabbed while pinching cigarettes from parked cars. "Yeah, I've spent a couple of nights in the barbed wire hotel," he concedes, "All dressed up and no place to go."

If Waits' voice is a bit ragged for radio air play, his songs are not; the Eagles, Bette Midler and Jerry Jeff Walker have recorded his material. In January he will begin work on a Sylvester Stallone movie titled Paradise Alley. Waits will play a barfly named Mumbles and will compose original music for the film. Although he has given up staying in flophouses while on the road (his current band members, he explains, "aren't keen on my taste in accommodations"), success is not likely to change his style too much. "It's nice to have your own niche," he allows, "I got a signature now: I have my own turf." ****************************************************************************************************************************************************** Newsweek, June 14, 1976

Sweet and Sour
An inebriated good evening to you all, Welcome to Raphael's Silver Cloud Lounge
Slip me a little crimson, Jimson
Gimme the lowdown, Brown
I want some scoop, Betty Boop
I'm on my way into town ...
Tom Waits is on a darkened stage. A single spotlight illuminates his seemingly wasted body. The cigarette he is smoking has burned down to his fingers while Waits scats his way through his jive repertoire. Wearing a baggy suit, a tattered wollen cap and yesterday's stubble, he looks more like a guest in a fleabag hotel than a rising new singer with three popular albums.

In a way, Waits isn't a singer at all: he talks a syncopated, stream-of-consciousness tour of the seamy side streets of America, backed by a soulful jazz quartet. All this has already won him a cult following in the music industry, and he has recently been playing to SRO audiences around the country and is currently attracting capacity crowds on his first European tour. "I've got a personality that an audience likes," he suggests, "I'm like the guy they knew - someone raggedy and irresponsible - who never really amounted to much but was always good for a few laughs. A victim, just a victim. But I don't mind the image."

Day Sleeper: Waits' sweet-and-sour serenades about eggs-over-easy and the lost American dream place him well beyond his 26 years. He is a middle class southern California kid who dropped out of the hippie generation: "The '60's weren't particularly exciting for me," says Waits, "I wasn't into sand castles and I didn't have any Jimi Hendrix posters on my wall. I didn't even have a black light." After high school in San Diego, he worked as a janitor, dishwasher and cook. "I would stay out all night," he remembers, "I loved it. I became a day sleeper."

At 19, Waits got hip to day sleepers' music - jazz. That's where he discovered Dizzy Gillespie, Mose Allison, the Beat poets and a broken-down piano that played only the black keys. "I soon taught myself to play everything in F sharp, and little by little I got to be all right." In 1972, Waits took his bluesy, boozy act to amateur night at Los Angeles' Troubadour Club and within a year he had gathered an impressive following, including Elton John, Bette Midler, and Joni Mitchell. When Bonnie Raitt went out on tour last year, she took Waits and his act along - but he went out of his way to spend his nights in seedy flophouses. :Tom's a real original," says Raitt, "He's a window on a scene we never got close to. He's able to make all the double knits both tragic and romantic at the same time."

Naugahyde Booths:
Waits' behaviour on the stage is just as anti-social. He ignores the audience, shuffles anxiously about, glares at the floor and lights up one cigarette after another.. Once the music starts, his right hand starts snapping while his left foot taps out the beat. Waits' word-clogged monologues about Naugahyde booths, truck stops and platinum blondes stumble from his lips almost unintelligibly. He whips up stories like a short order cook and laces them with a dash of adolescent humour and a sprinkling of word games ("I am a rumour in my own mind, a legend in my own time, a tumour in my own mind"). He flips open a beer, takes a few sips and slips the can into his jacket pocket. The foam dribbles down his leg onto the floor among the countless cigarette butts and crumpled pieces of paper.

This self-conscious, bowery bum persona only works to hide Waits' talent as an original writer with a unique mixture of blues and jazz in his music. Critics call his style affected and his poetry puerile ("A yellow biscuit of a buttery cueball moon rollin' maverick across an obsidian sky"). But Waits sees himself as the voice of everyman. "There's a common loneliness that just sprawls from coast to coast," he says, "It's like a common disjointed identity crisis. It's the dark, warm narcotic American night. I just hope I'm able to touch that feeling before I find myself one of these days double-parked on easy street." Right now, Waits is still on the way into town.

- Betsy Carter with Peter S. Greenberg in Los Angeles ************************************************************************************************************************************************** Interview from 1980 Heartattack And Vine US promo pack: TOM WAITS The interview that follows took place Thursday afternoon, September 4, 1980, in Tom Waits' two-room office on the old Hollywood General movie lot, now part of Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope empire. Waits was ensconsed there while working on original songs for "One From The Heart", a film Coppola is directing. He wanted to talk briefly about his seventh album for Asylum, Heartattack And Vine.

Notwithstanding his image as participant in and chronicler of urban America's seamy underbelly, Waits is apparently a changed man in a lot of ways, both inwardly and outwardly, as an artist and as a person.

We met in a Zoetrope hallway a bit less than an hour after the interview was set to begin, and he apologized for being late as he walked to his car - a dusty Monte Carlo - so he could get the key's to his office. He was wearing a skinny-brimmed black hat, white shirt, black pants and black pointed roach-impalers.

Inside his office, through an anteroom where an uncased guitar and a 4'x4' painting of a butterfly leaned up against separate walls, Waits cleared his inner-office couch of assorted papers, joking about the panelled room's "David Niven feel" and then sitting down in a chair near one end of the couch.

Opposite our seats, under the shaded windows looking out on a Gulf station that fronts on Santa Monica Boulevard ("makes me feel like I'm at the beach"), a low coffee table was loaded down with a pre-amp, amp, turntable and cassette deck, and speakers were on the floor on either side. In the corner was a grand piano, and a mike and stand were set up in front of the ivories.

The floor was littered only ankle-deep with papers, notebooks, cassettes and album jackets, and over against one wall leaned a battered, splitting-at-the-seams leather briefcase with old Waits albums spilling out of it. On the back of his inner-office door (which he used only once during the interview, to bolt across the hall to the men's washroom) was a bulletin board sporting various-sized pieces of paper on which lyrics and song fragments were hand-written.

During the interview, one thing emerged as a probable cause for Waits' improved spirits and more presentable appearance; it had to do with his forsaking his usual post-album tour to work on the film project with Coppola; it's a challenge, and one Waits feels compelled to rise to. And he was just as determined to limit his comments about the collaboration until it's more fully baked.

-- Stephen Peeples * * * * *

TW: (apparently checking to see if his interviewer had done his research): What do you like about the new album?

SP: For one thing, your voice sounds like it was in better shape for Heartattack And Vine than it was for your last LP (Blue Valentine, October '78).

TW: I quit smoking during the recording of the new one. Maybe that had something to do with it. I tried to arrive at some level of personal hygiene. I thought the record deserved that. I just tried to clean myself up a little. I think it helped, you know.

SP: What bout your drinking habits?

TW: I just drink wine now. My favorite is Carlo Rossi. Have you tried Carlo Rossi chablis?

SP: No. You have any around?

TW: Ah, no, not right now. But it's a remarkable beverage!

SP: Let's talk about music now that we've got the tobacco and wine end covered. Last year, a writer quoted you as saying you'd reached a crossroads, musically speaking. Could you amplify that a bit?

TW: You just go through seasons as a writer. At this point, I'm trying to learn how to write faster. I just used to brood over songs for months and months. The writing for Heartattack And Vine was more spontaneous. And I let a drummer use sticks for the first time, instead of brushes (laughs). I mean I used to hear everything with upright bass, muted trumpet or tenor sax. I just had a sort of limited musical scope, so I wanted to try to stretch out a little bit on the new one. I think I've accomplished that to a degree. It's all part of an ongoing process.

SP: Another writer quoted you as saying you wanted to make more rock 'n' roll than most of your past albums.

TW: (officious tone): The subject matter that I was dealing with was caustic enough to require an ensemble that perhaps sounded a little more jagged, so I considered musicians and selected the band with that in mind. It's not Mahogany Rush, but it's the best I can do.

SP: After working with Bones Howe on every album since your first, I'd heard you were thinking about connecting with Jack Nitzsche for this one.

TW: Yeah, I had some plans to explore new producers. I'd moved to New York for about five-six months, wanting to challenge myself with an entirely new environment. But my relationship with Bones has been a very close and personal one. That for me is more important than anything when you're in the studio - to have somebody you can trust and who knows you, knows who you are and doesn't let you get away with anything. I didn't really want to disturb that relationship. But at the time I thought I wanted to change everything. Then I decided that the change was something that had to take place inside of me and with my own musical growth. I wanted to take some dangerous chances, and I felt Bones could best accomodate me.

SP: The press really made a big deal out of your move to New York. Why'd you return to L.A. so fast?

TW: Being there was more like a prison sentence (laughs). Hard time. When I moved there I stayed at the Chelsea and then got an appartment nearby and joined the McBurney Y.M.C.A....actually, I just went to New York to have a drink. It was a very expensive drink.

SP: A long one, too, evidently...

TW: Yeah, it was a tall one (laughs).

SP: So what prompted your return? Did they give you your release papers?

TW: Yeah, I'm on parole. I came to work on the film for Francis (Coppola) and to do this album. I'm now living in the Greater Los Angeles area.

SP: How did you put the Heartattack And Vine band together?

TW: I used my drummer from the road, "Big John" Thomassie, who's from New Orleans. He used to play with Freddie King, Dr. John and Bonnie Bramlett. He's been with me on the road for two years now, and this is the first record he's done with me. Then there's Ronnie Baron on piano, who's also from New Orleans and is someone I've admired for many years. It was a real pleasure working with him. He played (Hammond) B-3 (organ) and piano. Larry Taylor, who's from Canned Heat, is on bass. On guitar we had Roland Bautista, who grew up on Slauson Avenue (in Los Angeles), and that was good enough for me. But he's played with George Duke and the Crusaders before and does a lot of session work in L.A. In addition to the quartet, I had Jerry Yester (producer of Waits' first LP, Closing Time, in '73 and frequent string arranger on subsequent albums) write two arrangements, and had Bob Alcivar do another two. Bob worked on Foreign Affairs (9-'77) and wrote "Potter's Field" with me. He's done some other arrangements and things for me, too. He's also working as orchestrator and arranger on the Coppola project. He's had experience as a film composer himself.

SP: So once you had Bones and the player's lined up, it's my understanding you moved into the studio for the duration of the sessions.

TW: Yeah, we worked in the RCA building on Ivar and Sunset, and I moved in there and lived there while we recorded. Everybody thought I was crazy (chuckles in a "so what else is new?" tone of voice), but it seemed to help me a lot.

SP: I understand also that little if any material was written until you went into the studio. I wonder whether you had the band there all the time so that when you hit on an idea, you'd all be able to get it on tape quickly...

TW: No, it wasn't like that. Our recording schedule was to begin about two every afternoon. I just wanted to stay there because I was writing about one tune ahead of Bones every day. I was writing each night and every day so when the band got there, I'd have something new for everybody. So it was valuable for me to be writing in the same environment I was recording in. I'd never tried to do it that way before. It's a lot of work, it's not a party. I don't invite anyone that's not directly involved in the sessions. I sweat bullets for a month and a half, but my relationship with Bones was very healthy during the whole procedure. He had a lot of faith in me, that I'd be able to work under those conditions. It would make a lot of producers very nervous to be working against a deadline like that with all that gold riding on it.

SP: Forgetting deadlines for a moment, would you do another album the same way?

TW: Yeah, I think so. I'd like to try it again maybe on the next record. Maybe force the entire ensemble to stay in the studio. Chain 'em up like dogs! (laughs).

SP: Were there any particularly funny moments during your stay at the studio, like did the night maintenance man whack your boot soles with his broomstick while you were racked out on the couch?

TW: No, the funniest thing was that that didn't happen (laughs).

SP: Okay, let's talk about the tunes, starting with the title track. How'd that one come about?

TW: I was in a bar one night on Hollywood Boulevard near Vine Street, and this lady came in with a dead animal over her arm, looking like she'd obviously been sleeping outdoors. She walked up to the bartender and said, "I'm gonna have a heart attack," and he says, "Yeah, right, you can have it outside." I thought that was pretty chilly. So I re-named Hollywood Blvd. "heartattack."

SP: On to "In shades."

TW: I always wanted to put out just a little straight R&B instrumental. Originally, it was titled "Breakfast In Jail." But we changed it.

SP: How about "Saving All My Love For You?"

TW: That's an old song, about four years old. It was scratched off of another album, I think Foreign Affairs.

SP: There's a line in that tune about a prostitute with too much makeup and a broken shoe. On your last LP, Blue Valentine, the tune "$29.00" talks about another lady of the night who had a broken shoe...

TW: (laughs) Same girl!

SP: Then we go "Downtown"...

TW: That's a first take. I was just running it down to the band just to learn it, but it became the record. We tried several other versions of it but this take seemed to be the one that took. I love Ronnie's organ solo. It's real amphetamine. The tune's just a fast story, like a fast news update.

SP: Who is Montclaire de Havelin?

TW: It's a name I came up with when I was on the road. I used to check into hotels and use my real name on the registration form. I had some unfortunate experiences because of that (clears throat and smiles), so I decided to change my name, at least on the road, so I wouldn't have people I didn't want to associate with trying to get in touch with me.

SP: And Side One closes with "Jersey Girl"...

TW: I never thought I would catch myself saying "sha la la" in a song. This is my first experiment with "sha la la." It has one of them kinda Drifters feels. I didn't wanna say "muscular dystrophy" in it or anything, 'cause I didn't think it fit in with the feel of the number. So lyrically I tried to do it straight ahead, a guy walking down the street to see his girl. SP: Flipping over to Side Two, you open with "'Til The Money Runs Out"...

TW: It's an old mambo-type beat.

SP: Do you know any of the Chinamen on Telegraph Road?

TW: It's just a line about some Chinamen on Telegraph Road. Got outta that one pretty good, huh?

SP: Okay. Just curious. Then comes "On The Nickel"...

TW: That was written for the Ralph Waites motion picture of the same name. I don't think it's still showing anywhere. It was released about the time I got back from New York, in April sometime. It was a wonderful picture, I mean it, but it didn't make it. It wasn't no "Towering Inferno," just a small picture with a lot of feeling. It was set on skid row in Los Angeles, Fifth Street, downtown. The locals call it "the nickel." The film was about a couple of old friends who were reunited after some years. One had cleaned up and moved off the nickel and the other was still there, and dying from it. The one who'd cleaned up went back to find his old pal. It's a wonderful story.

SP: What happened at the end?

TW: You'll have to see it.

SP: Is the subject of the next tune titled "Mr. Siegal," anyone in particular?

TW: I'm trying to kind of refer to Bugsy Siegal.

SP: Several people who've heard this tune already think the line "how do the angels get to sleep/when the devil leaves his porch light on" was pretty good.

TW: I like it too.

SP: And the album closes with "Ruby's Arms"...

TW: I love Jerry's arrangement on it. He used a brass choir and made it sound like a Salvation Army band at the top of the tune. It really got me. It's a little bit like that Matt Monro thing, "I Will Leave You Softly" (sings a verse). I was trying to visualize this guy getting up in the morning before dawn and leaving on the train, with the clothesline outside. I just closed my eyes and saw this scene and wrote about it.

SP: I found it extremely touching, if you'll pardon the expression.

TW: Thank you.

SP: The room you recorded in, Filmway/Heider' Studio B there in the RCA building, has a pretty healthy rock 'n' roll reputation. Did you know or find out anything about past sessions there?

TW: I dunno, to be honest. Yeah, the Stones worked there. I heard The Monkees did, too (laughs). Oh, yeah, Ray Charles and Cleo Laine recorded an album in that room with Frank de Vol. They did excerpts from "Porgy And Bess" about '75-'76. Martin Mull cut his last Elektra LP, the live one, there, too.

SP: Previously, when you've finished an album, you've hit the road. How about this year?

TW: I came right off of the album back into this office. This is a whole other world for me. Up until this point I've done an album and gone out of the studio and put together a band and rehearsed for three or four weeks and hit the road for four months. It's just an old hustle that I've done for the last seven years.

SP: It get old, doesn't it?

TW: Yeah, it does. So I came off the record and into a whole other project, writing for somebody else's approval rather than my own. It's important, I think, to be able to write that way.

SP: You were billing your last tour, late last year through earlier this year, as your "break-even tour." Did you?

TW: Just barely. But this year I'm doing this project for Coppola.

SP: How'd that one come about?

TW: I was still living in New York and he arranged a meeting with me. Later, I went to Zoetrope and discussed it further with him and made a commitment to begin work on it. So he gave me this office and piano. I took a month and a half off to write and record the album.

SP: One more question about the album. On the front cover, at the top right, the name "David 'Doc' Feuer" is printed along with a New York phone number. Whoever he is, he's going to get a lot of phone calls...

TW: That's not his real number. I'll give you his real one if you need it. He's a psychiatrist who needs the work. Actually, I put my phone number on the back of a record once and got lots of phone calls from people with real clinical problems. I never really knew what to say to them. So I told Doc I'd put his number on there and he could handle 'em.

SP: Are you getting any kind of kickback from those referrals?

TW: Well, not really (laughs). But he's a frustrated musician and actually I've been considering a possible career in medicine. So we're gonna trade skills instead of money. It'll give me something to fall back on... ************************************************************************************************************************************************* New Musical Express - October 19, 1985

Hard Rain

On the Lower West Side, Tom Waits thinksabout a beer and exclaims ... it's been a great year for shoes! On the other side of the table, Gavin Martin trades dress tips and quotes with the old rain dog who, on the whole, would rather be in Kansas!

"So they tell me the shows we're doing in London are sold out already. I can hardly believe that."
Well, Swordfishtrombones had quite a big impact, Tom.

"Mmm, but there's the other side of that, it doesn't last too long. Everything is temporary - they pump you up for a little while, dye your hair, see you in a different shape. It goes around for a while and comes back down again. It's not something you can really build on."

Are you nervous about coming to London?

"I am, I'm scared to death, Jesus, I'll need a bullet-proof vest, I need a new hat, a new suit - I can't go over there in a raincoat. I've told the band to smarten up, too. They're more attuned to the stuff I'm doing now but they're also capable of doing some pre-Swordfish stuff but I hope with a different slant to it. So I think it will be OK. I will have to talk to my sax player, Ralph Carney, about his white socks, the white socks and the navy uniform, I'm not sure about that.

Ralph, I haven't been able to confront you about this face to face so I'm using this opportunity to talk to you through the press - we must do something about the white socks."

The only time I've seen Tom Waits live was in London, the Victoria Apollo in 1981. The appearance came just after the release of Heartattack and Vine, notable for its move into bone-crushing electric blues, Waits' ability to rework the sleazy nightclub setting had already been proven by the double live album Nighthawks At The Diner. but in this large auditorium his stand-up bass, drum and piano setup couldn't really carry. I left before the end.

"It's kinda hard to do that on a big stage, the basic economics of touring kept me in tow there."
How did you overcome that problem?

"The new band is all midgets, they share a room, they don't want to be paid for their work. They all have a basic persecution complex and they want me to punish them for things that have happened in their past life and I have agreed - I've just signed something."

Your generosity is quite touching.
"No, they're all good chaps, most of them have never been in jail, though I'm not sure about Ralph Carney."

It wasn't the best time to interview Tom Waits; he was in the middle of arranging to shoot a video for either Singapore or Cemetery Polka off the new Rain Dogs album, he was rehearsing a live band, finalising details for his first major film role (to be shot in New Orleans later in the year), arranging the staging of the musical Franks Wild Years (to open in Chicago after Christmas), and he'd just become a father for the third time.

We meet in a diner on New York's Lower West Side. Waits arrives a little late, wearing an old '40's burberry, heavy-duty denims and unbuckled motorcycle boots. The face is grey, the features weasel-like and his hair bears red traces of Henna dye. He looks haggard and a little shy at first, eying us cautiously as we exchange handshakes. Today is Sunday and the Waits family are observing tradition - the interview is squeezed between babysitting and a visit from the in-laws. His wife, Kathleen Brennan, is the girl eulogized on Swordfishtrombones' Johnsburg, Illinois and a script writer at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope studios.

"We've got three children now- Ajax, Edith and Montgomery - I must get them enrolled in military school immediately. I see it like Tobacco Road, the old hillbilly movie, we'll all be heading down that long path together.

A Tom Waits interview is not a place to come looking for serious analysis. Waits has sung of the displaced, the dime-store loser, and the hobo for so long that he seems to have taken on a composite persona, drawn from his crazy cast of characters. Although kind and respectful, he can't resist turning the conversation around with an enigmatic metaphor or some brazen bullshitting. Whenever necessary he'll substitute an entertaining lie for a boring truth.

"Music paper interviews, I hate to tell ya but two days after they're printed they're lining the trashcan. They're not binding, they're not locked away in a vault somewhere tying you to your word."

The Waits case history is necessarily littered with truths, half-truths and downright lies. He used to tell writers he was born in the back of a truck travelling through South L.A. on December 7, 1949. In high school he played in a soul group but dropped out to play accordian in a polka band. He drifted through a variety of jobs - "a jack-off of all trades" - and was working in a Hollywood diner when he met West Coast manager Herb Cohen at the turn of the '70's.

He signed for Asylum, then a small independent rather than a branch of WEA. After releasing a few promising albums he found his true artistry on 'Small Change' and the essential 'Foreign Affairs' and 'Blue Valentine'. As an arranger and tunesmith working the cool blue jazz sphere Waits was peerless, but his unique power came from contrasting those talents with his coarse gut-bucket growl and mesmerizing wordplay. Waits mined the post-war fault line of Kerouac and the Beats, focusing on the loners and losers that littered America's highways and byways. 'Foreign Affairs' had 'Potters Field', its epic atmospherics - all deathly strings and orchestral cadences - straight out of Sam Fuller's classic noir B movie Pick Up On South Street, and 'I Never Talk To Stranger', a divine duet with Bette Midler, recreating an idiom everyone thought died with Tin Pan Alley. He would later revisit this terrirtory with Crystal Gayle on the 'One From The Heart' soundtrack.

"I guess I did borrow a lot to do stuff like that. But it's good to borrow, borrowing implies that you're going to give back. That's the way music works - you take a little something from here, you bring it over there and pretty soon it finds its way back."

'Blue Valentine' has the Waits song I keep coming back to. 'Kentucky Avenue' starts as fanciful childhood reminiscence and bulds to a climax that is at once absurd and heartbreaking,

"Childhood is very important to me as a writer, I think the things that happen then, the way you perceive them and remember them in later life, have a very big effect on what you do later on."

"That one came over a little dramatic. a little puffed up, but when I was 10 my best friend was called Kipper, he had polio and was in a wheelchair - we used to race each other to the bus stop."

His relationship with WEA turned sour when he tried to release 'Swordfishtrombones' as the follow up to 'Heartattack and Vine'.
"They heard it but they didn't recognize it, so amidst all the broken glass and barbed wire I crawled out between the legs of the presidents. It was the big shakedown at Gimble's, business I guess."
It closed a chapter in Waits' life - he moved out of Hollywood's infamous Tropicana Motel, split with Cohen and his girlfriend Rickie Lee Jones and signed to Island. The 70's hadn't been an altogether easy ride for Waits - constantly on the road, often as a stadium support to an incongruous Frank Zappa, it's rumoured he employed a $250-a-week stooge to bawl at backstage and came close to being ruined by the lifestyle he drew on. Certainly his business was not always conducted wisely; publishing rights for some of his greatest compositions fell into other hands.

"Maybe that's why I write so many songs now, the songs I write now belong to me, not someone in the Bronx. I did not stay abreast of what was happening to me. I'm happier to be on a small label, Blackwell is artistic, a philanthropist. You can sit and talk with him and you don't feel you're at Texaco or Heineken or Budweiser. There's something operating here that has a brain, curiosity and imagination."

'Swordfishtombones' intoduced a demented, exotic parade band to deal with the musical junk lying in American attics and basements. 'Rain Dogs' continues where it left off and though Waits is writing about the same sort of characters he has for the past 15 years, the situations he places them in differ wildly - maybe they've been transplanted to a dusty Western ghost town where the saloon bar pianist never stops, or cast adrift on the titanic while the band play mariachi tangos and crazy polkas. He can still play it straight, too - dig the country blue bitters of 'Blind Love', the lonesome lullabye 'Hang Down Your Head' - but in general the reassembling of musical influences is perfectly in keeping with the new images and rhythms of his own language.

'Rain Dogs' is the first Waits LP made entirely in New York, the bleakness and claustrophobia never far from the surface bear this out. He's lived in nine different places since moving here - at the moment he resides between the New York State Armoury and National Guard recruiting centre and The Salvation Army Headquarters.

NME - Why did you come here?

TW - I came here for the shoes, it's a real good town for shoes. It amazes me, I think it's a good time for music when it's a good time for shoes. You look in the shoe store and you see them trimmed down with the points just so - they thrill me, really.

NME - When was the last time shoes were so good?

TW - You wait 15 years, it's a long wait. In the meantime you go where you have to - Fairfax, 36th and Downing, 9th and Hennepin in Minneapolis."

NME - When you're putting together your group is a sense of humour important?

TW - That's how you audition them, you tell them a joke and if they don't laugh then it's hit the bricks, pal

NME - You used to be noted for a "professional drunk" image - has that changed?

TW - Sincerely, I don't want to romanticise liquor to the point of ridiculousness.

NME - Would you like a drink now?

TW - Maybe I should have a beer, what do you think? I mean, what time is it here? I'll have a Becks.

NME - You have got your younger listeners to think of, you've got to set an example.

TW - Yah, setting an example. Well I don't think there's anything wrong with a little sherry before retiring, read a little Balzac and then lay out. I don't drink and drive, I enjoy a little cocktail before supper, who doesn't?

NME - America seems to be swamped with heroes like never before - bulky, bull-headed killing machines like Stallone, Norris and Schwarzenegger are packing them in in the movie theatres on Times Square. It's a complete contrast to the characters you create on 'Rain Dogs'.

TW - A hero ain't nothing but a sandwich. It's tough on the heroes, all they really want to do is strip you of your name, rank and serial number. It's like a hanging, a burlesque. it's spooky. They have you all dressed up with a hat on, make upand a stick that goes up the back of your neck. Then they take a 12-gauge shotgun and blow your head off.

NME - You worked with Sylvester Stallone once in the movie 'Paradise Alley'. Have you seen 'Rambo'?

TW - No I haven't. I don't want to get drawn into something here just because I did some work once because I needed the bread. America has been looking for somewhere to put the vietnam war for so long. We're making movies to help us forget. You hear the budget for the film was so many millions of bucks and here's this guy with all his muscles and a big machine gun. But the veterans were treated like dogmeat, the film budget was so many millions of dollars and they get $100 a month.

NME -How did you avoid the draft during the 60's?

TW - I was in Israel on a kibbutz. No I wasn't, that's a lie, I was in Washington, sir. I was in the White House as an aide. I got excused, the way anyone would get a note from school:'Dear Mr President, Tom is sick today and won't be able to come along'.

NME - Can you remember why you became a musician in the first place?

TW - I couldn't get into medical school, the administration at the time made it difficult for me.

NME - I heard you wanted to do neuro-surgery.

TW - I wanted to help out, I wanted to combine yardwork and medicine. When I was young I wanted to be a policeman. I liked the uniform, I wanted a bit of authority but that changed too.

NME - The influence and approach of the late Harry Partch (a sometime hobo and creator of a new musical notation played on his own range of instruments) is evident on 'Swordfishtrombones'. What about his work appealed to you?

TW - I have a friend called Francis Thumm who played the Partch chromelodeon. He lives down by the beach in a place called Leisure World. He drinks the Ballantines, loves the Scotch, the 12-year-old single malt. He drinks plenty of it and it's gotten him into plenty of trouble.
Anyway, he showed me Partch had an instrument called the blowboy, it sounded like a train whistle, it was a train whistle only it was his train whistle. It blew from out of bellows, reeds and organ pipes, he could play it with his foot like a pump organ and go 'hooway, hooway' - swear it was a sound that would break your heart. They said in a little documentary that the instruments he made were so beautiful, they looked like skeletons.
I guess I'm just more curious, I was getting lazy. I'm just trying to find different ways of saying the same thing. I used to hear everything with a tenor saxophone, I had a very particular musical wardrobe. I've opened up a bit more.

NME - Do you think you can tell a lot about a country from the things that it discards?

TW - I guess you can, I don't know. Everything in the United States is made so that - I vaant eet and I vaant eet all now. People just don't have the time, what do you do? They want things fast but it's like an aquarium - you sit waiting and it all comes by again. I like to mix it, you can learn something from everything.

NME - Your writing seems to follow a similar path - you're neither a curator nor a documentor, the world you create jumbles memory, reality and imagination to make its own reality. How the listener applies that to their reality is up to them.

TW - I think a lot of that comes from being in New York, everything is heightened, you're looking through that into this, beyond this into that. You get picked up by a Chinese cab driver in the Jewish district, go to a Spanish restaurant where you listen to a Japanese tango band and eat Brazilian food. It's all blended.
New York's been settled by people that are separate in a way. They retain their own culture, its rules, religions and customs. You know when you pass over the border from one into the other.

NME - For you as a musician is it all up for grabs?

TW - Not so much to be used, I just try to enjoy. There's a place where Nigeria will lapse into Louisiana, there's things about music that happen spontaneously and you move into places that would otherwise have no connection. If you play a certain rhythm and move it a little, it becomes something else, move it back and it becomes a Carpathian waltz, move it further and you have a Gamelan trajectory coming in. It creates its own geography.
I overdub now, I'm more paranoid. When I was working on two-track I did everything straight. Or maybe that means I'm less paranoid now because I'm not afraid to use it. But you can't get any ideas from machinery.

NME - Rain Dogs was written at the same time as the Frank's Wild Years musical. Did they overlap?

TW - I tried to keep them separate, 'Rain Dogs' is like, well, I don't want to sound too dramatic but I wanted there to be a connection between the tracks. I was going to call it 'Beautiful Train Wrecks' or 'Evening Train Wrecks'. Sometimes I close my eyes real hard and I see a picture of what I want, thet song 'Singapore' started like that, Richard Burton with a bottle of festival brandy preparing to go on board ship. I tried to make my voice like his - "In the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king" - I took that from Orwell I think.

NME - Which book?

TW - Mary Poppins, one of the big ones.

NME - Films and childhood seem important to your work. Where did you first see films when you were a kid?

TW - It was called the Globe Theatre and they had some unusual double bills. I saw 'The Pawnbroker' on the same bill as '101 Dalmations' when I was 11. I didn't understand it and now I think the programme director must have been mentally disturbed or had a sick sense of humour.
I liked going to movies but I didn't get lost in them. Some people would rather spend time in the movies than anywhere else. On certain days, I would watch ten movies, spend all day from ten in the morning to midnight going from movie to movie. But then it's the world outside that becomes the film, the time in between takes on a very weird arrangement, that's what you watch, not the movies.

NME - A lot of the songs on 'Rain Dogs' seem to be about death.

TW - "Cemetery Polka" is a family album, a lot of my relatives are farmers, they're eccentric, aren't everyone's relatives?
Maybe it was stupid to put them on the album because now I get irate calls saying, Tom how can you talk about your Aunt Maime and your Uncle Biltmore like that? But Mum, I say, they did make a million during World War Two and you'll never see any of it. It's time someone exposed them.

NME - How did Keith Richards come to be on the album?

TW - We're relatives, I didn't realise it. We met in a women's lingerie shop, we were buying brassieres for our wives. They had a little place at the back there where you could have a drink, two cups at a time.
No, he's been borrowing money from me for so long that I had to put a stop to it. He's a gentleman, he came into the studio and took his hat off and all these birds flew out.

NME - 'Union Square' is great, it sounds like the Stones haven't been able to in years

TW - I was going to throw that song out. I said call the dustman, this one's chewing on the dead. But somebody said, there's something there. Hell I said, there isn't. Then he came in - on the clock he stands with his head at 3 and his arm at 10. I said how can a man stand like that without falling over, unless he has 200 lb test fishing line suspending him from the ceiling? It was like something out of 'Arthur', he comes in with his guitar valet and it's 'Oh Keef, shall we try the rickenbacker?'

NME - How did Frank's Wild Years turn into a musical?

TW - The song was like a fortune cookie, after I wrote it I thought what happened to this guy. Everybody knows guys like that, people you haven't seen in a long time, what happens to these people? What happened to John Chrisswicky? Oh Jesus, John's second wife left him and he went to work in a slaughterhouse for a while. Then he was in a rendering unit, of course his dad was always in the wine business - that didn't interest John, I hear he ended up as a mercenary soldier.
People go through these pernutations in different stages of their life, perceived by someone else it can look strange. I imagined Frank along those lines. Y'see my folks split up when I was kid and ... hey, look, let me give yo $100 and I'll lie down on the couch over there, you take notes and see if we can't get to the bottom of this.

NME - How does it feel getting older and seeing your influence spread? The Pogues write about 'Rain Dogs' in London; I'm sure they'd acknowledge you as an inspiration.

TW - Well, that's great, that's what it's all about. You break a little trail, you come through to here and you leave some things behind.
The Pogues I like, they're ragged and full of it. They seem to come on traditional and eccentric. They shout, I like the shouting. I like Agnes Bernelle, Falling James and The Leaving Trains, Jack Drake and the Black Ducks, they play a drunken reverie, no instruments, they just bang on things. I like some of that metal music, making music out of things that come to hand.

NME - Any advice for would-be musicians?

TW - Champagne for your real friends, real pain for you sham friends. I tell them it's good to write on instruments you don't understand.

NME - No jolly-ups around the old Joanna?

TW - It's firewood as far as I'm concerned. Slowly I've started peeling the boards off until there's nothing left but metal, strings and ivory.

NME - Many of your prime influences were self-destructive. Do you feel a sense of duty not to get ensnared in that myth?

TW - I think it's better to burn hard than to rot, I think that's right. I don't really feel any sense of duty, I'm not in the army. Things that you write about have been written about before so I don't feel I'm breaking new ground or anything.
All you can do is listen to the things that are of value to you and try to find a place for yourself. I don't want to sound too serious here, but it's like when you're together with people for a long time and talking about the things only you know. That must be the very sad thing about getting very old and all your friends die and you're talking to some guy and he's saying yeah, yeah, yeah and you're thinking, yeah, but he doesn't really know.

NME - How would you like to be remembered?

TW - Jesus Christ, I'm 19 years old and you're asking me how I want to be remembered. On my gravestone I want it to say 'I told you I was sick'. Achievement is for the senators and scholars. At one time I had ambitions but I had them removed by a doctor in Buffalo. It started as a cyst, it grew under my arm and I had to have new shirts made, it was awful. But I have them in a jar at home now.

Sometime later we're driving around New York looking for a suitable photo location. Down towards the river the apartment blocks get more dilapidated, the wind howls and we watch a bum foraging in a litter bin. "There's that guy, I haven't seen him in ages, I wonder where he's been, " says Tom, like he'd just seen an old friend. He tells me he thought Paul Young's version of 'Soldiers Things' was a little puffed up, but "it's always nice when someone covers your songs, some of them are orphans, they need a home." He talks about leaving New York. "As you get older, the things it was once important to have around you become less so, especially with children. New York is like a weapon, you live with all these contradictions and it's intense, sometimes unbearable. It's a place where you think you should be doing more about what you see around you, a place where the deadline to get the picture of the bum outside your apartment becomes more important than his deadline to get a crust or a place to sleep, which is a real deadline. You see things like the $400 shoe followed by the $500 ballgown stepping into the pool of blood from the bum that was killed the night before. That's what I was trying to get in that song 'Clap Hands' - "You can always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal" because millionaires like to go places that are downbeat, that aren't so chi chi. NME - Where would you like to live, Tom?

TW - Kansas, it's a good place to dream. You wake up in the morning, look out the window and don't see anything, you make it all up. I'd have a porch, a mean dog and a 12-gauge shotgun. You wouldn't throw your baseball into my yard buddy, you'd never see it again."

************************************************************************************************************************************************ Interview from The Face, November 1985

LOWER EAST SIDE STORY

AUTHOR OF BOHEMIAN RHAPSODIES, NOT LONG ENSCONSCED IN NEW YORK, AND NOT FAR FROM BROADWAY, TO WHICH HE SENDS HIS REGARDS, TOM WAITS IS A LEGEND IN HIS OWN LUNCHTIME. Text ELISSA VAN POZNAK. Photographs STEVE TYNAN

TOM WAITS ORDERS HIS LUNCH
TOM WAITS (To waiter): I think I'll have the fresh homemade hard boiled egg, the cheeselox and the chickenfish. Could I have the broiled chicken fish?
LUIGI: Chicken or fish, it's gotta be chicken or fish.
WAITS: Oh, I thought maybe you had the Famous Reuben's chickenfish. How about some smoked Springsteen?
LUIGI: Maybe you want the salmon: what about the peppersteak?
WAITS: How about the Western cheeseliver, still got the Western cheeseliver?
LUIGI: Sold out.
WAITS: That's only on Thursdays, I'm early.
LUIGI: No; you late. You want some horse salad?
WAITS: Is the horse salad good today? Yes, the horse salad as usual and a Bob, Lorenzo & Tate-BLT. That's a law firm. Make it with the horsebacon, okay? And tell Raoul there to fix it nice.

STRAIGHT FROM THE horseliver's mouth, this is how Tom Waits orders a sandwich. Waits says he came to New York (from LA, three years ago) for the shoes but personally I think it's the choice of cuisine. Why, on West 14th Street alone there's the Babalu Bar and Grill, the Ricky Ricardo Lounge and the Salvation Army Diner and more, much more. But it's the el dorado swank of Courmey's restaurant that Waits chooses, something to do with its spic and span cleanliness ("a rare thing on this street"), its proximity to Waits' own dwelling around the corner in Little Spain, plus the airconditioning and the conspicuous absence of "those little black things" (cockroaches).

Huddled in a too-big coat, Waits enters the place looking like a refugee from a bad off-Broadway Beckett production or at the very least that famous Yiddisher burlesque, "Sam, You Made The Pants Too Long". He certainly isn't doing anything to throw off his received image which would demand, as a matter of protocol, exactly this kind of bohoesque get-up. After some small slapstick involving finding the right booth, beers are ordered.

On closer inspection, he's toting two fully-packed valises under each red-rimmed eye. Tom is expecting his second child at any moment (to be named Senator if it's a boy because "we need a Senator in the family") and throughout our meeting it's a toss-up whether the baby or the sandwich will arrive first. In the event the sandwich wins with the baby crossing the homestretch a full five days later (hail Senator!). Talk about service, it didn't even come with a pickle.

Stroking his grizzled goatee, porkpie hat left on a piano somewhere, a ripe tattoo peeking out from under a shirt of such monstrous implausibility it elicits a harrowing confession (the nearest Waits gets to one, since he believes in saving the heartache for home), Waits grips the counter with his triple jointed knuckles.

At first, he sits at a far-fetched angle as if expecting a water cannon to be trained on him and deflects straight questions at every turn with a stream of deadpan adlibs worthy of the late, great Rufus T. Firefly. Eventually he relaxes into his usual discomfort with the interview process though, as anyone who's ever quizzed Waits will doubtless tell. you, red herrings remain the basic item on the menu.

EVP: Why New York?

TW: I came for the shoes, it's one of the best times in American history for footgear. New York's unbelievable, it's thrilling what's going on in the shoe world and I've been waiting for this so long. Actually, I came for a part in a picture called They Wept Their Faces Off For Him, the story of three nuns whose commitment was just a little too much to take. And another film, All Dressed Up In Rags starring Ernest Borgnine and Adam Clayton Powell, a Cuban film. I play a Haitian priest. The money was just too much to turn down so we had a family meeting then all jumped in the station wagon, Lucifer, Wilhelm, Monarch, Sheila and I.
That's what I miss most about LA: driving. My father-in-law gave me a Cadillac. Jesus, I was towed three or four times, just crazy. $1500 worth of tickets. I had New Jersey plates, I was treated like dogmeat in this town. New York, it's like an emergency ward, a magnet, a narcotic, it's like a language that's spoken only here. New York's serious. First of all the weather's serious, you need a warm coat, new shoes and a place to live in. In LA you create your own seasons, you have other ways to mark time, relationships. People confront people in New York. I like that but I'm also trying to get out. It's really a tough town on a family.

Oh, where are you headed?

Kansas. It's flat, I'll be the tallest thing on the horizon. They'll put a roof on my head. I can deal with tornados.

WAITS-WATCHERS TAKE five, you'll already know that for some years now Tom Waits. raconteur. conjurer. escapologist and singer/songwriter of near mythical stature has been one of the taller things on the contemporary American music horizon, if not the tallest. Usually, however, he's immersed so low in the anecdotal gutter that he can't be seen for the endless stream of schmoozers, losers, lovers and two-bit hobo hustlers.

The Orson Welles of lyrical epithets, Waits can be heard right enough; that potent voice, gentler in closeup, an unholy concoction three parts barking dog., all of them in desperate need of a shave. It can be heard on a particularly hirsute and evocative collection of albums, each wildly idiosyncratic: "Nighthawks At The Dinner", "Small Change", "Blue Valentine", "Heart Attack And Vine" and his first acknowledged classic, 1974's "The Heart Of Saturday Night", his second album.

Was Tom Waits (born Dec 7, 1949 to standard issue teacher parents, later divorced) also born to laugh at tornados? Who can say?
But in a recording career spanning twelve years and nine albums (ten if one includes the Academy Award nominated "One From The Heart" soundtrack) Waits has often been buffeted by the warm winds of critical praise, if not downright torrential appreciation, dwarfing those members of the West Coast possee with whom he once rode - Captain Beefheart, the late Tim Buckley, Wildman Fisher and Frank Zappa whose shows Waits used to open. However, it's not a competition and he's genuinely amazed to be selling out eight consecutive nights at London's Dominion Theatre on his current European tour. "I have no sense . . . Jesus, I'm pretty anonymous here, People recognise me sometimes but it's no big thing."

Since 1973 and his debut album "Closing Time", Waits has been located on or around the bar-room piano, sometimes bucolic, most times melancholic and well versed in jazzy sax and standing bass.

More recently he's been crossing idioms with an alarming alacrity -- R'n'B, rags, shuffles, polkas, bebop, dyed-in-the-wool folk, Tin Pan Alley, the spoken song. He's like Running Bear with a papoose of junkyard instruments, found objects, bow-saws, harmoniums, calliopes, marimbas, accordians, banjos, everything but the proverbial wax paper and comb harmonica and that's probably coming soon, all strapped to his back. Waits even boasts Keith Richards on his new album, "Rain Dogs", which while not as immediately impressive as "Swordfishtrombones" nor as totally right, is still a uniquely disturbing grab-bag of Weill-inspired nonsensical Ogden Nash madness, rancid rhumbas, strange strolls and children's nursery rhymes seen through a bourbon glass very darkly plus some old blues shuffles carried on from The Stones' "Exile On Main Street". One track in particular, the utterly nightmarish "9th And Hennepin' plants Captain Willard in an urban Apocalypse Now. "And the rooms all smell like diesel and you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept here." It is major, major stuff.

As he says of Beat-progenitor Alan Ginsberg, spotted occasionally in the subway, Waits is "curator of his own museum, an American man of letters, an archive, a memory, a library." No, that sounds too dead. But a poet Waits is, though he's not quite ready for the English students.

"That's like putting pennies on your eyes and a blanket over your face. Jesus, kick the drum and lower me down."

TOM WAITS SAYS he finds Island Records boss Chris Blackwell "very artistic, supportive, not a classic businessman". "Rain Dogs" is his second for the label, but his first since moving out of his East LA barrio digs and completing the disconcertingly brilliant "Swordfishtrombones", an album that should be considered an integral part of any dreamhome and can't be recommended highly enough.

That album, like ,Rain Dogs", is dedicated to Waits' wife Kathleen Brennan, a former Zoetrope scriptreader who co-wrote "Rain Dogs" winsome lullabye "Hang Down Your Head". Waits says his wife of four years drives him "insane when I'm working and insane when I'm not". She may have actually worked for the Ringling Brothers Circus at one time.
"She can lie down on nails, stick a knitting needle through her lips and drink coffee, so I knew she was the girl for me," claims Waits, though it's doubtful whether she "jumped the Grand Canyon with Evil Knievel and had seven kids from a previous marriage."

She is, however, also collaborating with her husband on a stage extrapolation of his hilarious "Swordfish" monologue "Frank's Wild Years" which Waits facetiously describes as a "kabuki burlesque . . . the story of one heart beating in a digital world as he searched for meaning along the American landscape." That's pencilled in for May '86, to be directed by Terry Kinney and Waits in the role of Frank.

And, ironically, since leaving movietown, Waits has stepped up his cinematic involvement -- he's already had parts in Rumblefish, The Cotton Club, Paradise Alley and The Stone Boy (as a pertrifled geek!). He has committed himself to a major part in Jim (Stranger Than Paradise) Jarmusch's Down By Law also starring Lounge Lizard and "Rain Dogs" guest John Lurie. "All I know is that it's Louisiana in the winter, it's a prison picture and John, Roberto Bennini and myself are three guys running through the swamps with dogs." And then there is There Ain't No Candy Mountain, to be directed by subterranean Robert Frank (Cocksucker Blues and Pull My Daisy), and penned by Rudy Wurlitzer. Of which he knows even less.

A longtime admirer of Kurt Weill's theatre songs, an influence particularly evident on new songs like "Singapore" and "Cemetery Polka", Waits is contributing "What Keeps Mankind Alive" from the Brecht/Weill Threepenny Opera to an all-star tribute being put together by Saturday Night Live music editor Hal Wilner, a producer who "lets things happen and knows when to back off ". Rumours that Captain Beefheart might be producing Waits ("who said that?") are sadly unfounded - though it is true that Waits asked him, and benefitted from his musical alumni - while plans for Waits to produce The'The's Matt Johnson have been temporarily shelved though Johnson came over, shot a little pool with Waits and gassed.

"He seems real urgent, alive and we wanted to blend technology, the old upright bass and harmonica with drum machines. Find a place where the two overlap."

Ever thought Waits' own work eschews modern gadgetry?
"Gimme the basics," he says, I'm overwhelmed by technology."

Contrary to popular belief, Waits watches MTV. "I don't live in a vault but you can't really go there for ideas," he grumbles. Interestingly, Jean-Baptiste Mondino, the video auteur who swept the MTV awards with his black and white protoo for Don Henley/ Glenn Frey's "Boys Of Summer" (like Bruce Weber in motion) will direct the video for Waits' forthcoming single "Downtown Trains".

With its talk of "Brooklyn girls trying to break oat of their little worlds, and its slick, guitarlick rockism (courtesy of Hall and Oates G.E. Smith), it's the nearest Tom Waits gets to a Bruce Springsalmon opus. Nothing to be ashamed of but I wonder what Waits thinks of it now. He admits that recording is "so permanent it drives me crazy, just makes me insane. That's the hardest thing, making decisions about something that's gonna dry and be there like a tattoo." To lessen the strain, he's looking tbr a stand-in, "just like the days when Fats Domino or The Coasters could be on the road in California and on live TV in Indiana. All you need is a deep voice and a bad haircut. Think about it, 125 dollars a week, vacation, severance pay."

While you're thinking it over, consider these thoughts of Chairman Waits and bear in mind that, after he allowed me to pick up the seven buck tab, I pondered the meaning of it all the way down West 14th Street, down into the piss-stinking subway at Union Square and all the way past the tiny nun sitting on a camp stool, straw basket in her lap, panhandling. It was that kind of a sandwich.

What do you wish for your children?

Military school immediately before they're old enough to fight me on it. I've enrolled them already.

Would you be very disappointed if they grew up to be bankers?

No, 1 think we need a banker and lawyer in the family because Dad's just impossible. He needs somebody to look after him.

Why do you always write about life's suckers?

I don't know ... certain things you feel compelled to dream on.

Do you have a social conscience?

Nah, it's just where my eyes go.

And raindogs, what are they?

It's a kind of word I made up for people who sleep in doorways..I mean, New York when it rains, all the peelings and cigarette butts, float to the surface like in Taxi Driver when he says, "someday a real raids gonna come along and wash all the scum off the street". Looks better in the rain, like it's been lacquered.

What's the first song you recall?

"Molly Mahme". I was tiny (starts singing). "In Dublin's Fair city where the girls are so pretty . . .

Ever thought of running your own nightclub?

I don't have the discipline, I'm not organised enough and you have to be at the register all night long. I don't have leadership qualities.

You lead a band don't you?

That's different.

How do you construct a song?

I put on a skirt, drink a bottle of Harvey's Bristol Cream sherry, go out and stand on 8th Avenue with an umbrella and start reciting from the back of a parking ticket at full volume. It's raining songs. I can't find enough things to catch them in. And words, in New York there's words everywhere just throwing themselves at you so you never have to worry about words.

Do you keep a notepad by the bed just in case?

I don't wake up in the middle of the night unless somebody's trying to break in.

You've never been burgled by an idea?

I've never had an idea strong enough to wake me up but when I do I'Il certainly pay attention cause when I sleep, I'm gone.

Is it easier to write than not write?

Well, I'm trying to get more on schedule . . . when you work you suspend all logic, the world becomes an aquarium, things are tumbling and floating by and you ordain them to have new meaning. Certain things float to the top including you but then you have to drain the pool and answer the phone and fill out applications and go to the post office. I kind of vacillate back and forth between the two states. lt's like being on medication, a balancing act, and a lot of time for me goes into getting ready to do this whole thing. It has its own drama, what it does to your life because all of a sudden things that are part of your scope and you never noticed will figure in.. . going to the shoeshine, the Port Authority, the steam coming out of the manhole, the guy on the horse, the news. You drag these things home from your day and put them somewhere and you have three weeks to make something out of it. I give myself deadlines, if you don't it's just life, life going on.
So you say, okay, use red, yellow and black. You get involved in the ritual, shave your head, put on two pairs of trousers. For me it's very basic like I'm making it out of wood but technology, being in the studio, is very abstract. It's a battle. Keith Richards was talking about that. He said you have to go in there with a stick, a drum and something you heard in a bar. You have to carry the idea with you. Like getting a haircut. You tell the guy, "Well I want just a little bit off the top, not too much, just shave it, no block it. Jeez I'd cut it myself but I can't see in back: say maybe we could do that with water, hey don't do the sides too short, maybe bring the thing down in front. That looks awful. Can you make it a little longer? Jesus, why didn't you tell me you were going to cut it. I thought you were going to water it down and make it look shorter". It's hard, it's really hard.

Does Tom Waits have a favourite band?

Yeah. The Salvation Army. They play across the street every Sunday. They just kill me.

********************************************************************************************************************************************** VOGUE , March 1987 Tom Waits

by Mick Brown

"Remember me...?" Slumped on a park bench, at the bottom of the social heap, the drunken derelict turns his eyes to the heavens as the first flakes of snow begin to fall. "Remember me? I ordered the blonde, the Firebird... Somebody's made a terrible mistake."
Nobody loves, or understands, a loser quite as much as Tom Waits. In the last twelve years, he has built up a unique body of work. His songs catalogue the ill-starred dreams and fleeting consolations of life in that part of town dissected by the bus station, the bloodbank and the tattoo parlour, describing his gallery of pimps, drunks and small town girls ensnared by vice in a voice bruised by nicotine and alcohol and a musical style ranging from lounge jazz to vaudevillian polka. Now America's most original storyteller, once described by Francis Ford Coppola as "the prince of melancholy", he has turned his attention to the stage. Frank's Wild Years, a theatrical production based on a bar-stool soliloquy from Waits' 1983 album Swordfishtrombones, has already played in Chicago under the aegis of the celebrated Steppenwolf Theater Company, and plans are afoot to bring it to London later this year. In the meantime a soundtrack album is released this month.

Described by Waits as "a cross between Jacqueline Suzanne's Love Machine and the Bible", Frank's Wild Years proceeds from the nowy park bench to juggle the improbable elements of a failed and despondent accordion player, the "used piece of jet trash" that is his wife, and a chihuahua called Carlos into a poignant parable of broken dreams and personal revenge.

For ages a closely guarded secret - a musician whose records gave the appearance less of being released, than of having escaped - Waits' singular career has blossomed in the last three years. Not only has he added commercial success to long-standing critical acclaim with his last two albums, Swordfishtrombones and 1985's Raindogs. He has also side-stepped deftly into movies, providing an Oscar-nominated score - melancholia, in excelsis - for Coppola's One from the Heart, and carrying his repertoire of mumbles and mannerisms onto film in Rumblefish, The Cotton Club and most recently Down By Law, in which Waits plays a disc-jockey behind bars in a New Orleans jail. Jarmusch's film is achingly referential in its evocation of film noir and the hipster's out-of-it cool; Waits' criterion for this, as for any project, is simply that they "let Waits be Waits."

The inference that he is a character role in himself is not misplaced. Born thirty-six years ago, as his own legend has it, "in the back of a yellow cab in Murphy Hospital parking lot, at a very young age", Waits' propensity for self-mythology - his rumpled demeanour, thrift-shop suits and cockroach-impaler shoes - has sometimes threatened to obscure the grist of his craft.

Some have read Waits' world-weary barfly persona as simply the schtick of another tiresome drunk. More profoundly, Waits has trafficked in a particularly American kind of sadness, using his vignettes as platforms for wry and truthful observations about the cavity of desperation and disillusionment beneath the bravura of American life, where visions of happiness and redemption are subservient to the prosaic reality of simply making do. In his faithful and penetrating dissection of the "small change" of American working-class life, Waits has achieved in popular music what Raymond Carver has captured in the medium of the short story.

If there was once the strong suggestion that Waits was living out his own mythology too faithfully - a life of self-elected squalor almost killed him - he has now artfully distanced himself from the persona, emerging as an artist fully in control of his creation.

Nor does the prospect of escalating fame after years of semi-obscurity threaten to disturb the equilibrium. "To be honest," he says, "I've always been afraid that I was gonna spend years and years tapping the world on the shoulder, and then everybody was gonna turn round and look and I'd forget what it was I had to say. I always thought fame was a great big balloon - with a bunch of little kids with hat-pins underneath you."

******************************************************************************************************************************************* GQ Magazine, November, 1987 By Stephen Fried The Da Vinci of Downtown

What is this thing called Tom Waits? Is he a musician? A poet? Is he an actor playing a part? Is he a part playing an actor? Is he an inside joke? An acquired taste? Is he Art?

After eleven albums, seven movies and a play, the answers seem no more obvious than they were in 1973, when Waits growled onto the music scene with a record called Closing Time. If anything, the issue seems more clouded than ever. A recent anthology of tunes from his earlier years shows that, at one time, Waits was doing his best to assimilate his ambitions into the real world. Most of his songs, no matter how subversive and dwarf-ridden, at least sounded like what any guy on the street would recognize as songs.

His last two albums, however - Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs - sounded more like soundtracks to avant-garde musicals that were never (thank God) written or produced or cast. Full of powerfully weird images, transmuted vocals and improbable instrumentation - a "junkyard orchestra", Waits called it - the two discs forced Waits to move from folkie, mainstream Elektra Records to smaller, risk-taking Island Records. His new record for Island, Franks Wild Years, is the soundtrack to a musical play that was written (by Waits and his wife, playwright Kathleen Brennan), produced (last summer, by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre) and cast (with Waits playing Frank), but it will probably be a long time before most people see the stage version. And perhaps "musical play" is too tame a description, because Franks Wild Years, like Waits himself, doesn't fit easily into any genre.

"I hate musical theatre ," Waitsw barks and coughs, as he does throughout the intervirew," White people standing onstage and singing about cornfields and covered wagons. I hate it. We called it this "un operachi romantico". That's just sometbing Kathleen and I came up with. But it's not like I'm studying opera or anything,. This is just one of my own demented adaptations of things I've seen and heard and remembered. Actually, what I like most about the old recordings of opera is the scratches as much as the music."

"Does this make me an opera singer? Can a dog really sing opera? I don't know. But most of the comparisons with Caruso, I think, are unfair."

Unfair, but maybe apt. Because the music Waits is creating these days makes the most sense when thought of as some new, bastard form of opera. The pieces can no longer be mistaken for pop songs at all. And while Waits' voice has certainly been ravaged by his 37 years (especially the ones he spent living in the notorious Tropicana Motor Hotel in West Hollywood), his recent vocal experimentations may very well lay the groundwork for the next innovations in singing. It's not that many singers will ever cop his technique of crooning through a police bullhorn as he does on Franks Wild Years.But Waits has been pushing and bending his vocal instrument the same way that the computer chip and MIDI (an electronic-instrument "language") have allowed musicians to reinvent "playing".

"I've tried singing through pipes and trumpet mutes, singing into drinking glasses, cupping your hands, things that have been done before," Waits explains, "You can call up a lot of these sounds through technology, but I'm discovering that if I find something myself and nail it to the wall, then it's mine."

"But I don't really think of the music as all that risky. I'm not going to commit musical suicide. But maybe I've got one eye closed. Maybe I don't see the rock coming through the window."

Waits laughs and coughs. "You think maybe I should record with a security guard?" he says, lowering his voice to describe the scene as it might come across on a police-band radio: "Well, he's doing risky music...the band is heavily armed and they've bolted the door and they're in there working with harmonium and bass saxophone...Send the SWAT teams in with tear gas and get them out of there...."

Waits, of course, sees himself as too mainstream. "I think I don't take enough chances," he says, suddenly quite serious. "I'm too much of a sissy. I'd like to go out there and live out there...wherever out there is. You know, a little 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume.' "

But what about the public's perception that he has always been "out there"?

"Well," he says, "The grass is always, uh, browner on the other side of the fireplace."

The suggestion, of course, is that the drunken Beat persona Waits created for himself during his "wild years" - back when he dated Beatress Rickie Lee Jones and closed a lot of bars and diners that he wrote about in songs like "The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)" - is now just one of the characters he's created. Though Waits doesn't much like to talk about his private life, he has been married for seven years and has two children, a daughter named Kellesimone and a son named Casey. While his improved family life may deserve part of the credit (or blame) for his recent musical departures, Waits' experience in film acting may have had more of an impact on his musical and poetic output.

"In some way, acting and working in films has helped me in terms of being able to write and record and play different characters in songs without feeling like it compromises my own personality or whatever. Before, I felt like this song is me, and I have to be in the song. I'm trying to get away from feeling that way, and to let the songs have their own anatomy, their own itinerary, their own outfits," Waits said in an unusual seventeen page interview, instead of the standard three-page biography, that was released to reviewers of his new album. (This is a new trend in the record business; especially risky ventures are now often mailed to reviewers with lengthy "explanations" by the artist. When A&M released Joe Jackson's instrumental Will Power, the record company sent out a Q & A press release and followed it up with a transcript of a speech Jackson had given about the record at a school.)

Waits' movie career began as a strictly musical venture. He wrote the title song for the Ralph Waite film On The Nickel (the track also appeared on his 1980 album Heartattack and Vine, along with his now-revered tune "Jersey Girl"), and he appeared in both Paradise Alley and Wolfen as a piano player. In 1980, he also got involved in Francis Coppola's infamous One From the Heart. Waits worked on that film's score, which Coppola referred to as a "lounge operetta," for eighteen months. Rescued from the piano he kept in his kitchen at the Tropicana, Waits was given space at Coppola's Zoetrope Studios. "That was like being at a university," Waits remembers. He had an office, with a piano, that he came to every day. He got memos. For quite a while, his life was very structured. The movie, of course, bombed, but Waits got an Academy Award nomination for his sound track.

The association with Coppola landed Waits two more film roles, the pool hall proprietor in Rumble Fish and the manager of Coppola's Cotton Club. (He claims that the title of one of the most haunting tunes on Franks Wild Years, "Yesterday Is Here" - "...today is grey skies/tomorrow is tears/you'll have to wait till yesterday is here" - was given to him by Fred Gwynne during a break in Cotton Club's filming.) Last year, he had his first starring role, playing against John Lurie in Jim Jarmusch's cult hit Down By Law. Jarmusch also used one of the tunes from Waits' album Rain Dogs, the driving "Jockey Full of Bourbon", as the picture's title track.

Next month, however, Waits will be seen in his first major role in a mainstream film. He'll play Rudy in the screen adaptation of William Kennedy's Ironweed, which also happens to star Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Waits co-wrote a song for the film - "I wrote the music to a little thing William Kennedy saw scrawled on the side of a bridge twenty years ago in Albany." But, in a way, Ironweed is the first time he's ever played a role in a film, rather than just played himself.

"I was kinda a dark horse for the part," he says, his tone turning much more reverential when the topic of acting comes up. "I had to fly to New York and try out for it. The character is Nicholson's sidekick, an important character. I had to read and all that. But Nicholson was great. During the audition he came up to me and said, "Boy, I hope you don't know your lines, because I sure don't know mine."

Waits took the role seriously and didn't presume that real screen acting would come easily to him. "I have somebody that helps me out privately a little bit (with the acting)," he admits, "Y'know, I was very nervous about it, and I thought I needed a shot in the arm."

Waits is unclear about what he'll do after the film's Christmas release. "I want to try and do something with a much harder edge, something with more abandon," he says, "I may possibly employ more technology. I still like bangin' on trash cans and all that, but I may try something else. I do like a lot of this rap stuff. Maybe even something with big amps, I don't know."

Besides another record of his own, Waits also has a collaboration in the works with avant-garde playwright and director Robert Wilson, who worked two years ago with David Byrne on the critically acclaimed piece The Knee Plays. "I've been talking to Robert Wilson about sort of a cowboy opera of some kind that he's designing in his mind, to be done in Munich," Waits says, "He lives somewhere between Waco and Berlin in his head, and he has a tremendous following in Germany. He's like Da Vinci over there."

This month, Waits and the band that played on Franks Wild Years will be touring the United States. They'll perform restructured versions of the pieces on the record - "You kind of have to surgically implant the play inside the songs" - as well as material from all the older albums. (If you don't own any Tom Waits records, I'd suggest you start with the Elektra anthology and Rain Dogs.) In concert, Waits is much looser than on record, and his agony and ecstacy often give way to sheer hilarity. On his last tour, he showed up more than an hour late for a New York concert and offered as an apology, "I was shampooing my dog...and he likes to have a moisturizer too. Once you start with the toiletries, there's no end in sight."

Since Waits appears to be cleaning up his act somewhat, not to mention his dog, perhaps his fans could use a makeover themselves. "I think I'm gonna have a dress code for the audience," he says, "Boy, they come looking so terrible sometimes. They embarass the hell out of me, you know. I'd like to talk to each one of them about it individually, sweaters and that type of thing. I think they need some fashion consulting. We're gonna come up with something - maybe a different fashion idea on each ticket. We'll get Eldridge Cleaver to come up with something."

Stephen Fried is a senior editor at Philadelphia Magazine and GQ's music columnist

************************************************************************************************************** Playboy Magazine 2 0 Q U E S T I 0 N S

TOM WAITS

Most people know singer-songwriter Tom Waits as the poet of late-night metropolitan areas, the bard of smoky lounges and cue-ball moons. But lately, Waits has been experimenting, both on his past three albums, which have included songs nailed together from pieces of 'found sound"--deafening jackhammers, sirens, strains of an Irish jig--and as an actor ("The Cotton Club," "Down by Law," ' "Ironweed"). Writer Steve OBey showed up at a favorite Waits hangout, a seedy caff on the fringes of downtown L.A. "Waits, now 37, arrived looking wild-haired and mystic eyed and dressed in a parson's black suit and tie," he reports. "He was insistent upon talking into a tape recorder for fear of being misquoted, but he began the conversation with the warning, 'I'm going to pull your string from time to time.'" 1.

PLAYBOY: In spite of the fact that your albums have won you a loyal following, your work is rarely heard on the radio. What kind of payola do you think it would take to get disc jockeys in Des Moines to play a few cuts from Franks Wild Years?

WAITS: Send them some frozen Cornish game hens. That would probably do the trick. Or maybe some Spencer steaks. The people who succeed today essentially write jingles. It's an epidemic. Even worse are artists aligning themselves with various products, everything from Chrysler-Plymouth to Pepsi. I don't support it. I hate it. So there.

2.

PLAYBOY: Early in your career, some of your songs--for instance, Ol' '55, which the Eagles covered--became hits, and almost all of them, no matter how unconventional, relied upon pretty melodies. But lately--especially on your past three albums -- you've moved from hummable tunes to what you call "organized noise." Why?

WAITS: I was cutting off a very small piece of what I wanted to do. I wasn't getting down the things I was really hearing and experiencing. Music with a lot of strings gets like Perry Como after a while. It's why I don't really work with the piano much anymore. Like, anybody who plays the piano would thrill at seeing and hearing one thrown off a 12-story building, watching it hit the sidewalk and being there to hear that thump. It's like school. You want to watch it burn.

3.

PLAYBOY: To create a marketable pop song, do you have to sell out?

WAITS: Popular music is like a big party, and it's a thrill sneaking in rather than being invited. Every once in a while, a guy with his shirt on inside out, wearing lipstick and a pillbox hat, gets a chance to speak. I've always been afraid I was going to tap the world on the shoulder for 20 years and when it finally turned around, I was going to forget what I had to say. I was always afraid I was going to do something in the studio and hate it, put it out, and it was going to become a hit. So I'm neurotic about it.

4.

PLAYBOY: Who was Harry Partch, and what did he mean to you?

WAITS: He was an innovator. He built all his own instruments and kind of took the American hobo experience and designed instruments from ideas he gathered trayelirig around the United States in the Thirties and Forties. He used a pump organ and industrial water bottles, created enormous marimbas. He died in the early Seventies, but the .Harry Partch Ensemble still performs at festivals. It's a little arrogant to say I see a relationship between his stuff and mine. I'm very crude, but I use things we hear around us all the time, built and found instruments-things that aren't normally considered instruments: dragging a chair across the floor or hitting the side of a locker real hard with a two-by-four, a freedom bell, a brake drum with a major imperfection, a police bullhorn. h's more interesting. You know, I don't like straight lines. The problem is that most instruments are square and music is always round.

5.

PLAYBOY: Considering your predispositions, which modern artists do you like to listen to?

WAITS: Prince. He's out there. He's uncompromising. He's a real fountainhead. Takes dangerous chances. He's androgynous, wicked, voodoo. The Replacements have a great stance. They like distortion. Their concerts are like insect rituals. I like a lot of rap stuff, because it's real, immediate. Generally, I like things as they begin, because the industry tears at you. Most artists come out the other side like a dead carp.

6.

PLAYBOY: What do you think of when you hear the name Barry Manilow?

WAITS: Expensive furniture and clothes that you don't feel good in.

7.

PLAYBOY: In your musical career, you've tried to retain maximum creative control; yet within the past few years, you've become more and more involved in the most collaborative of all media, theater and film. What's the attraction?

WAITS: It's thrilling to see the insanity of all these people brought together like this life-support system to create something that's really made out of smoke. The same thing draws me to it that draws me to making records--you fashion these things and ideas into your own monster.It's making dreams. I like that.

8.

PLAYBOY: In Ironweed, you worked with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. What did you learn from them?

WAITS: Nicholson's a consummate storyteller. He's like a great bard. He says he knows about beauty parlors and trainyards and everything in between. You can learn a lot from just watching him open a window or tie his shoes. It's great to be privy to those things. I watched everything-watched them build characters from pieces of things in people they have known. It's like they build a doll from Grandmother's mouth and Aunt Betty's walk and Ethel Merman's posture, then they push their own truthful feelings through that exterior. They're great at it.

9.

PLAYBOY: Have there been musical benefits from involvement in theater and film?

WAITS: Just that I'm more comfortable stepping into characters in songs. On Franks Wild Years, I did it in I'll Take New York and Straight to the Top. I've learned how to be different musical characters without feeling like I'm eclipsing myself. On the contrary, you discover a whole family living inside you.

10.

PLAYBOY: Three years ago, you made much ado about leaving Los Angeles for Manhattan. You praised New York as "a great town for shoes," but now you're back in California. What happened?

WAITS: I was developing tourette syndrome. I was blurting out obscenities in the middle of Eighth Avenue. I turned into an eraserhead. But it's been arrested. With research, there is hope.

11.

PLAYBOY: If you were to give a tour of L.A., what sights would you include?

WAITS: Let's see. For chicken, I suggest the Red Wing Hatchery near Tweedy Lane in south central L.A. We're talking both fryers and ritual chickens. Hang one over the door to keep out evil spirits; the other goes on your plate with paprika. For your other shopping needs, try B.C.D. Market on Temple. Best produce in town; also good pig knuckles, always important in your dining plans. Ask for Bruce. Below the Earth, on Hill Street, is the best Spot for female impersonators; then you're going to want to be looking into those pickled eggs at the Frolic Room, by the bus station. Guy behind the bar has the same birthday as me, and his name is Tom. Finally, you have to take in Bongo Bean, who plays the sax on the sidewalk in front of the Hotel Figueroa. We're talking Pennies from Heaven time. Bongo is tall, good-looking, there most every night. Accept no substitutes.

12.

PLAYBOY: While L.A. may be your stomping grounds, your other great love is the wee-hours world of America's big cities. From all your travels, what have been your favorite dives?

WAITS: The Sterling Hotel, in Cleveland. Great lobby. Good place to sit with the old men and watch Rock Hudson movies. Then there's the Wilmont Hotel, in Chicago. The woman behind the desk, her son's the Marlboro man. There's the Alamo Hotel, in Austin, Texas, where I rode in an elevator one night with Sam Houston Johnson. He spit tobacco juice into a cup while we talked. Let's see: The Swiss American Hotel is San Francisco's insane asylum. The Paradise Motel, right here on Sunset in L.A. It's nice in the summer when there's a carnival across the street. And, oh, the Taft. I think they're a chain. You can probably get off a train in just about any town, get into a taxi and say, "Take me to the Taft Hotel" and wind up somewhere unsavory. Yeah, say, "Take me to the Taft, and step on it."

13.

PLAYBOY: Despite your reputation and songs that glorify hard living-and carousing, you've been married seven years and have two children. How do you balance your domestic and creative lives?

WAITS: My wife's been great. I've learned a lot from her. She's Irish Catholic. She's got the whole dark forest living inside of her. She pushes me into areas I would not go, and I 'd say that a lot of the things I'm trying to do now, she's encouraged. And the kids? Creatively, they're astonishing. The way they draw, you know? Right off the page and onto the wall. It's like you wish you could be that open.

14.

PLAYBOY: Do you do all-American-dad things, such as go to Disneyland?

WAIT: Disneyland is Vegas for children. When I went with the kids, I just about had a stroke. It's the opposite of what they say it is. It's not a place to nurture the imagination. It's just a big clearance sale for useless items. I'm not going back, and the kids won't be allowed to return until they're 18, out of the house. And even then, I would block their decision.

15.

PLAYBOY: Your songwriting technique is very unusual. Instead of sitting down at a piano or synthesizer, you hole up alone somewhere with nothing but a tape recorder. Why do you work that way?

WAITS: I don't want to sound spiritual, but I try to make an antenna out of myself, a lightning rod out of myself, so whatever is out there can come in. It happens in different places, in hotels, in the car--when someone else is driving. I bang on things, slap the wall, break things--what-ever is in the room. There are all these things in the practical world that you deal with on a practical level, and you don't notice them as anything but what you need them to be. But when I'm writing, all these things turn into something else, and I see them differently~almost like I've taken a narcotic. Somebody once said I'm not a musician but a tonal engineer. I like that. It's kind of clinical and primitive at the same time.

16.

PLAYBOY: While you may strive for musical crudity, lyrically you're quite sophisticated~interior rhymes, classical allusions and your hallmark, a great ear for the vernacular. In a sense, you're the William Safire of street patois, rescuing such phrases as walking Spanish--inebriated saunter--and even coining some pretty good lingo of your own, such as rain dogs: stray people who, like animals after a shower, can't find their markings and wander aimlessly. What are some of your other favorite bits of slang, phrases you'd like to see get more everyday use?

WAITS: For starters, I'd like to see the term wooden kimono return to the lexicon. Means coffin. Think it originated in New Orleans, but I'm not certain. Another one I like is wolf tickets, which means bad news, as in someone who is bad news or generally insubordinate. In a sentence, you'd say, "Don't fuck with me, I'm passing out wolf tickets." Think it's either Baltimore Negro or turn-of-the-century railroadese. There's one more. Don't know where it came from, but I like it: Saturdaynightitis. Now, it's what happens to your arm when you hang it around a chair all night at the movies or in some bar, trying to make points with a pretty girl. When your arm goes dead from that sort of action, you've got Saturdaynightitis.

17.

PLAYBOY: You have said that you'd rather hear music over a crackly AM car radio than over the best sound system. What's the matter with a good CD player?

WAITS: I like to take music out of the environment it was grown in. I guess I'm always aware of the atmosphere that I'm listening to something in as much as I am of what I'm listening to. It can influence the music. It's like listening to Mahalia Jackson as you drive across Texas. That's different from hearing her in church. It's like taking a Victrola into the jungle, you know? The music then has an entirely different quality. You integrate it into your world and it doesn't become the focus of it but a condiment. It becomes the sound track for the film that you're living.

18.

PLAYBOY: Your score for One from the Heart was nominated for an Oscar. Did you enjoy writing it enough to try another?

WAITS: Working on One from the Heart was almost a Brill Building approach to song-writing--sitting at a piano in an office, writing songs like jokes. I had always had that fantasy, so I jumped at the chance to do it. I've been offerred other films, but I've turned 'em down. The director comes to you and says, "Here, I've got this thing here, this broken toy." And in some cases, he says, "Can you fix it?" Or maybe he just wants interior decorating or a haircut. So you have to be sure you're the right man for the job. Sort of like being a doctor. Rest in bed; get plenty of fluids.

19.

PLAYBOY: You've remarked that Franks' Wild Years is the end of a musical period for you, the last part of a trilogy of albums that began with Swordfishtrombones. Have you turned a corner? Is this album your last experimentation with the scavenger school of songwriting?

WAITS: I don't know if I turned a corner, but I opened a door. I kind of found a new seam. 1 threw rocks at the window. l'm not as frightened by technology maybe as I used to be. On the past three albums, l was exploring the hydrodynamics of my own peculiarities. I don't know what the next one will be. Harder, maybe louder. Things are now a little more psychedelic for me, and they're more ethnic. I'm looking toward that part of music that comes from my memories, hearing Los Tres Aces at the Continental Club with my dad when I was a kid.

20.

PLAYBOY: How far would you go to avoid getting a star on Hollywood Boulevard?

WAITS: I don't think it works that way. It's pretty much that you pay for it. I'm not big on awards. They're just a lot of headlights stapled to your chest, as Bob Dylan said. I've gotten only one award in my life, from a place called Club Tenco in Italy. They gave me a guitar made out of tiger-eye. Club Tenco was created as an alternative to the big San Remo Festival they have every year. It's to commemorate the death of a big singer whose name was Tenco and who shot himself in the heart because he'd lost at the San Remo Festival. For a while, it was popular iu Italy for singers to shoot themselves in the heart. That's my award.

*********************************************************************************************************************************************** Interview: Mixed Bag, WNEW New York, October 1988

[Disk Jockey] ...Back at WNEW FM with my very special guest, this morning, Tom Waits.

[Song: Yesterday is Here (Live)]
[Tom Waits accompanying himself on guitar]
(hums during intro)

If you want money in your pocket,
and a top hat on your head,
a hot meal on your table,
and a blanket on your bed-
well today is grey skies
tomorrow is tears,
you'll have to wait til yesterday is here.

Well I'm-a going to New York City,
I'll be leaving on a train,
and if you want to wait behind
'til I come back again,
well today is grey skies
tomorrow is tears,
you'll have to wait til yesterday is here.

Now, if you wanna go
where the rainbows end
you'll have to say goodbye.
All our dreams come true
baby, up ahead
and it's out where your memories lie.
Now the road is out before me
and the moon is shining bright;
what I want you to remember
as I disappear tonight:
that today is grey skies
and tomorrow is tears,
you'll have to wait til yesterday is here.

Now, if you wanna go
where the rainbows end,
you will have, have to say goodbye.
All our dreams come true
baby, (all-)up ahead
and it's out where your memories lie.
Now the road is out before me
and the moon is shining bright.
What I want you to remember
as I disappear tonight:
that today is grey skies
and tomorrow is tears,
you'll have to wait til yesterday is here,
you will have to wait till yester day is here,
well you will have wait till yesterday is here.

[DJ] All right. And today is here, a day that we have been waiting for, literally, for years, Tom Waits. [TW groans, strums] to have you as a guest with us on Mixed Bag. Thank you for coming.

[TW] uuuhhh. Okay great, thanks for having me.

[DJ] The voice is cooperating. I appreciate that. You are here, largely I guess, because you have not only a new record but a movie that you're involved in-

[TW] Oh, yeah, Christ...

[DJ] both of which have the title, Big Time

[TW] Yeah, Big Time, yeah (mumbles)

[DJ] So uh, welcome to the big time, WNEW FM

[TW] Yeah, right. Yeah, we're uh... Prizes, prizes, prizes, you know...

[DJ] Step right up?

[TW] Yeah, we're leafletting and we got the blimp going, and everything, you know.

[DJ] Do you have forked out the spectra-color thing in Times Square? That seems appropriate.

[TW] Yeah (laughs)

[DJ] Both the, um, the movie [TW off-mike "Mmm-hmmm"] and the previous album, "Frank's Wild Years" [TW on-mike "Mmm-hmm"] have the subtitle, "Un Operachi Romantico." [TW grunts] Was that a good, decent pronunciation? [TW grunts louder] Close enough for rock'n'roll?

[TW] Hey, yeah, I guess that's all right. That's like just a... one a those expressions. [DJ attempts to speak, stops] My wife came up with it. It's kind of a mutant combination of "Opera" and "Mariachi." Whatever that means. You know, it's just ah... That's what I love about the English language: it's always reinventing itself. So...

[DJ] So, it's an opera in the sense that it's kind of related songs, but we shouldn't take it too seriously.

[TW] Aayyy, yeah well, I wouldn't call it an opera, I mean per se. Well, you can call it an opera if you want. I mean ah... y'know, I mean I think most of, uh... I mean, y'know, Caruso, Rigoletto, all that, you know. It's in there, somewhere.

[DJ] Pavarotti and Waits in the same breath?

[TW laughing] Yeah, right.

[DJ] Can we handle that?

[TW] They're always comparing me to him. Frankly, I'm sick of it.

[DJ] Are you? Huh. Well, you're better-looking, so, what can I tell you?

[TW] Well, thank you, thank you.

[DJ] The movie, which has just opened in New York and I guess at theaters around the United States...

[TW] About fifteen cities.

[DJ] .. is not a concert film in the usual sense, although most of the footage was shot at a concert, right?

[TW] Yeah, well, I think you could say it's a concert film because it was all shot in one day for about a hundred bucks and on-stage, with a band. I mean there's some other footage in there. The famous "shower scene."

[DJ] Right. The scene on top of the theater with the-

[TW] the burning umbrella

[DJ] ... the burning umbrella, which-

[TW] I'm traipsing around on the rooftop in black pajamas with a pencil-thin moustache and all that, so. Basically, I would say that it's a concert film. Most of the footage is concert. You know, concert.

[DJ] If anybody saw your shows last year on Broadway, just about a year ago, [TW "mm-hm"] most of what they saw would probably be in the movie, right?

[TW] Uh, yeah, most of it in there, uh. All the scenes with Faye Dunaway were cut out [DJ laughs]. But it's, you know... All the cruise ship sequences are intact, tribute to Frank Sinatra in New York is in there.

[DJ] Actually, there is some Sinatra-esque kind of stuff in there, isn't there? What is it, uh "Straight to the Top," and "Make It Big in New York?"

[TW] "I'll Take New York"

[DJ] "I'll Take New York"

[TW] My tribute to New York, and uh... It's good to be back in New York.

[DJ] How do you like New York, by the way?

[TW] Yeah, I love it, yeah. [clears throat] I was here for about three years, went by the old apartment, y'know...

[DJ] What lured you to New York in the first place?

[TW] I came here for the weather, you know. Marvellous weather. And the golf.

[DJ] Lots a golf courses.

[TW] Wanted to have my own pool.

[DJ] There you go.

[TW] Somebody said "New York."

[DJ] I knew I shouldn't have asked that question straight.

[TW] And the parking. [DJ laughs] I think for what I used to pay to park here I now rent an apartment in Los Angeles.

[DJ] Are you living in a higher-rent district than you were before your recording [TW "Bel Air"] took off?

[TW] Bel Air [DJ "yeah?"] Maybe you've heard of it.

[DJ] I've heard of it. [TW chokes a laugh] That's at least one step up from the Tropicana Hotel, right?

[TW] Yeah, well I think one step. Exactly one step.

[DJ] Were you in fact living out of your car, though, for a while before your career was launched?

[TW] You know it's amazing what they have now. You can get CD players that actually plug into the cigarette lighter [DJ "This is true"] uh, in your car. Uh, hot plates, that type of thing. I mean the technology has just taken off, and it's made living in your car a lot more relaxing and enjoyable than it used to be, so.

[DJ] Getting back briefly, to the Big Time, as we were. The music that is on the Big Time album, and this gets a little confusing, because, many of the songs that are on the movie are not in the album and vice versa.

[TW] Yeah, gosh, I'm sorry about that.

[DJ] Why'd you do that, just to confuse people?

[TW] Well, [clears throat] there's some bonus cuts on there, there's some surprises...

[DJ] Actually, there's and interesting song on there that features Richie Hayward and Larry Taylor and Fred Tackett...

[TW] Oh yeah, "Falling Down." That was cut in the studio. That's kind of.. Song I was doing on the road but we never got a good take of it. So, I got home, rather than bring a band out from New York to Los Angales, I worked with people who were already there: Larry Taylor and Fred Tackett, and Richie Hayworth, so it... We put that on there, too, so, you know, you can get a subscription to Playboy if you send in $5 and eh, I'll send you some Spencer steaks, we're having a contest...

[DJ] Well, what do you say as a special bonus at no extra charge, we'll play "Falling Down" for the audience right now...

[TW] Yeah, that's a good idea.

[DJ] ...and they can hear it right here on Mixed Bag on WNEW FM.

[TW] Okay... Okay.

[Song: Falling Down (commercial version, Big Time)]

[DJ] That's "Falling -

[TW] "Falling Down, right"

[DJ] (laughs) We're literally falling down in the studio. Tom Waits on WNEW FM from Big Time. Tom, you once in one of the interviews you've done in the past, one of the rare interviews you've done in the past, described your songs as "little dramas."

[TW] Oh, that's a good one.

[DJ] You like that? Actually something that I read I think is very interesting, and I don't know whether you still feel it to be true, that you say, "It's one thing to be commenting on a character, and another to go into the story, to dissolve into it, rather than standing on the edge describing it." Is that, in fact, a pretty accurate way of how you go about writing your songs these days?

[TW] Yeah, I think I write 'em a lot faster now. Y'know, foxtrots, cha-chas, beguines, tangos.

[DJ] I mean literally, there is a, a dance beat to a lot of what you're doing, too, right?

[TW] Yeah, I was terrified of drums for a long time and now I'm less frightened of percussion than I used to be.

[DJ] But you do seem to have a sense, without trying to put too fine a point on it, of creating songs that are from a character's point of view, I mean isn't that kind of what you're writing is now?

[TW] Well even though if a song starts with "I," you know, "I fell from my chair," it's not necessarily me falling from my chair. It's somebody in there falling from their chair, you know, I mean this... Stories, you know about people and things I've seen and places I've gone.

[DJ] Aahhhh. MMMmmm. Well having become a veteran of the screen these days, has that affected the way you're writing?

[TW] Well, I wouldn't call myself a veteran, come on, I -

[DJ under TW's answer] Well, you've done five or six movies -

[TW] I done a [breaks into a Brooklyn accent] couple a pictchas. Bout tree or fower pictchas, ya know. [then normal voice] But I wanna do otha pictchas. I guess it's affected my writing, I don't feel so confined to myself as a character, I feel like I can speak about other things, from other points of view, adopt other personalities without ah, you know, compromising myself and I can... I'm learning how to do that.

[DJ] Well, the offers are in fact, do keep on coming, don't they?

[TW] The phone's still ringing, so yeah, I dunno, I'm doing a little bit more of it, but I'd like to branch out a little bit, maybe play a father, female impersonator, y'know, cop. So I'm doing a little bit more of it.

[DJ] I mean are you gonna get to the point where there will be a screen play by Tom Waits? Perhaps starring Tom Waits?

[TW] Gee, I don't know.

[DJ] You must have thought about this.

[TW] Mmm-Hhmmm [swallows liquid] I dunno, maybe some day.

[DJ] So many of your songs have been covered by an amazing array of people, I mean obviously the Eagles and Bette Midler to Dion and Marianne Faithfull -

[TW] Jesus!

[DJ] Uhh, do you have any particular favorite cover versions of your songs?

[TW] Hmmmmm? I dunno, uh, I had a uh... There was a Danish version of "In the Neighborhood" that was very amusing. [Imitates Danish] "Ach nich nush naf naif neffuf." Ah, it was very funny, and I liked that a lot.

[DJ] When you wrote "Jersey Girl," [TW "mmm"] did you have Bruce Springsteen in the back of your mind? I know you've been asked this.

[TW] No, well I wrote it for my wife, she's from Jersey, well she's originally from Illinois, she moved to New Jersey, and she grew up there, Morristown, New Jersey, and so I wrote it for her when we met, and eh, so.. eh.

[DJ] Were you flattered by Bruce Springsteen doing it?

[TW] Yeah! I like it, I like that version. I got up on stage and sang it with him one night in Los Angeles in front of about ten million people, and it scared the hell outa me. Um, Yeah I do like it. With the little glockenspiel in there, an a...

[DJ] It's seems somehow very natural for him to do it, seemed like it sort of fit into his style well.

[TW] Well, I've done all I can to help him, you know. He's been in such a jam, financially so uh, y'know...

[DJ] I'm sure he appreciated that a lot..

[TW] No, iss.... I really liked that version.

[Song: Jersey Girl, recorded live performance by Bruce Springsteen] [All the women scream when he sings "Jersey."]

[DJ] We'll be back to talk more with our special guest, Tom Waits, on Mixed Bag, right after these messages.

[DJ] ...special guest this morning, Tom Waits. Listen Tom, your voice is certainly one of the more idiosyncratic instruments in music. I've seen it described as everything from the sound of a terminal tobacco fiend to ah, Louis Armstrong and Ethel Merman meeting in hell.

[TW] Watch it, pal. [DJ laughs] You're on the fightin' side of me.

[DJ] What's your favorite description of your voice?

[TW] I never heard that one: "Ethel Merman and and -

[DJ] "-Louis Armstrong meeting in hell."

[TW] "Meeting in hell." That's pretty good.

[DJ] I can show you where it's from at some point.

[TW] Oh yeah, people say I sound, you know, like a barking dog, or that I gargle with various cleaning products, that type of thing. But umm, I'm trying to do more with it. Get out more.

[DJ] I mean, seriously, you also have been praised for your voice. These are not necessarily put-downs, I mean they're colorful descriptions...

[TW] Oh yeah, I take that as a compliment.

[DJ] I mean, for instance, just say Louis Armstrong, whose voice was very gravelly, is revered by Frank Sinatra and people who themselves are superstars.

[TW] You always hear him smiling in his songs. I heard that the biggest disappointment for him was that he was never asked to sing the National Anthem at the opening game of the World Series. It was his big dream, and they never asked him.

[DJ] Now let me ask you a question that I hope is not pointed, cause I don't mean it that way. But if you take the fact that a lot of your songs are about people who are down and out [TW "umm?"]... Well that's fair enough, isn't it?

[TW] Well, [swallows liquid] I dunno, I write about a variety of things, you know. I guess most of the songs on the last three records are jail poems, field hollars, spirituals, waltzes, some Caribbean influence in there. Um, some jump tunes.

[DJ] There was such a drastic change in direction, though, from the older albums, which were on Asylum, to the new ones on Island. Was there something that caused that?

[TW] Ah, well, you know, I got married, um... The earlier albums for me, all the strings on there. I really don't like all those strings on there. They feel like eh... They remind me of sweaters, somehow. I don't wear sweaters.

[DJ] There's the classic, "Nighthawks at the Diner," though, with you and basically a jazz combo.

[TW] Yeah, I sound like an old drunk, when I listen to that stuff off that album, and...

[DJ] Were you in fact a young drunk at the time?

[TW] I dunno. I was trying. I was working at it. Yeah, I sound a bit forced.

[Song: Better Off Without a Wife. Commercial Version: Nighthawks at the Diner.]

[DJ] Do you think you would have been on the road to ruin, as it were, if you hadn't ended up with this particular wife in this particular, ah...

[TW] Hey, I don't know where I was headed. When I got married, I had about $27 in the bank; I thought I was a millionaire. [Laughs deeply] And so I think my wife is really the brains behind pa, as they say. And it's had great influence on my music and my life as well so. She opened my eyes to a lot of things, and my ears. You know, opera, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, John McCormick, gypsy music, makeup secrets, that type of thing. Kathleen's a writer, and we collaborate on some songs, stories, a lot of things, children, heh. So, we met, I been married eight years. And I got three kids, and I'm uh... Things are going okay.

[DJ] What does this do for your image now, I mean, the guy who's living in the gutter, uh, living in his car. I mean to turn around and find out that you're a father of three, married for years..

[TW] Hey, it's a happy ending. To a terrible story.

[DJ] I mean sometimes I think people aren't prepared for the reality. We had Leon Redbone as a guest, who has always had this kind of mysterious image [TW "mmm. MMMm"] and he showed up with his wife and his two daughters.

[TW] Yeah, right.

[DJ] So I guess it's comforting to know that people who may in fact be eccentric in their music can still be somewhat normal in their lifestyles.

[TW] Yeah, well, living with kids is like living with a bunch of drunks. You know you really have to be on your toes all the time. You know, things are falling over and breaking and spilling and, you know. If you live on the second story, you really have to keep the windows shut all the time.

[DJ] Do they have a clue as to what daddy does?

[TW] Yeah, they just think I play.

[DJ] That's pretty neat.

[TW] They don't think I have a job. They think I'm just like them.

[DJ] And are you?

[TW laughing hard] [They think I] Just get up in the morning and you know, fall down on the floor and roll around and yell and laugh.

[DJ] Well I hate to disillusion people who are at home right now listening who would probably think of you as having a two or three day stubble or looking like an unmade bed. You look very healthy.

[TW] Hey, thank you. Very much.

[DJ] Are you happy to be told that?

[TW] I work at my appearance.

[DJ] Nothing's safe. Somebody, somewhere, said, "Thing about Tom Waits is, there's nothing safe about the music." Do you think that's a fair description?

[TW] You mean it's - Dangerous Music.

[DJ] Subversive, perhaps?

[TW] Ah, I don't know. Well that's a compliment.

[DJ] I would think so.

[TW] Cause I don't want an air-conditioned taxidermist in the studio with me. So, I'd like to think that the songs are still alive.

[DJ] Well, they're unpredictable. [TW "mm-hm"] There's always the unexpected that comes out, and I somehow have the sense that maybe you're pushing, as they used to say about the astronauts, the edge of the envelope a little bit, in the way you arrange them and write them.

[TW] The envelope please. As they say.

[DJ] Well, listen, you're here with your guitar, and if I can impose on you to do maybe one final, stripped-down simple living-room treatment of a Tom Waits song...

[TW] Well, this is real homey here, real folksy.

[Song: Time (Live)]

[TW accompanying himself on guitar. Chair creaks rhythmically throughout song.]

Well the smart money's on Harlow and the moon is in the street
And the shadow boys are breaking all the laws
And you're east of East Saint Louis and the wind is making speeches
And the rain sounds like a round of applause
And Napoleon is weeping in his carnival saloon
His invisible fiancee's in the mirror
And the band is going home, it's raining hammers, it's raining nails
And it's true there's nothing left for him down here

And it's time time time, and it's time time time
And it's time time time that you love
And it's time time time

And they all pretend they're orphans and their memory's like a train
You can see 'em getting smaller as they pass away
And the things you can't remember tell the things you can't forget
That history puts a saint in every dream
Oh(hh) she said she'd stick around until the bandages came off
But these mama's boys just don't know when to quit
And Mathilda asks the sailors, "Are those dreams or are those prayers?"
Close your eyes, son, this won't hurt a bit

And it's time time time, and it is time time time
And it's time time time that you love
And it's time time time

Things are pretty lousy for a calendar girls
The boys just dive right off the cars and splash into the street
And when she's on a roll she pulls a razor from her boot
And a thousand pigeons fall around her feet
So put a candle in the window and a kiss upon my lips
As the dish outside the window fills with rain
Just like a stranger with the weeds in your heart
And pay the fiddler off 'til I come back again

And it's time time time, and it is time time time
And it's time time time that you love
And it's time time time

And it's time time time, and it is time time time
And it's time time time that you love
And it's time time time

[DJ] Mister Waits, thanks for spending some time with us. [TW "whoah"]. And speaking of time, we get in one last plug for Big Time -

[TW] Oh, right.

[DJ] - which is the movie playing, unfortunately not at a theater near you unless you live in the Village, but..

[TW] Coming soon to a slaughterhouse near you, as they say...

[DJ] But worth seeing at the Bleeker Street Cinemas, I believe in New York City.

[TW] Yeah, yeah. Bleeker.

[DJ] And also, uh, an album entitled Big Time, some of which is the soundtrack of the movie and some of which isn't, and all of which is worth hearing. Tom, thank you so much for being our guest on Mixed Bag.

[TW] Okay, Right. Okay.

*************************************************************************************************************************************************** Conversation with Roberto Benigni and Tom Waits

"The funniest man in Italy" it says in yellow on the cover and in the contents page, under the heading "FRIENDS", Roberto Benigni by Tom Waits / A great clown meets an old pal with a gravelly voice"

"I ham a good egg," Roberto Binigni claimed in Jim Jarmusch's "Down By Law" - and, as if there were any doubt, the Tuscan Toto went on to prove it as the sheep-loving taxi driver in Jarmusch's "Night On Earth". In between, he acted in Fellini's "The Voice Of The Moon" and directed and starred in "The Little Devil" and last fall's "Johnny Stecchino", the most successful Italian film of all time; this spring, he appears as Inspector Clouseau's bungling offspring in "Son Of The Pink Panther", a casting director's dream.

When this good egg was recently in Hollywood, we put him next to a sizzling piece of bacon, Tom Waits, who had shared a cell with Benigni (and John Lurie) in "Down By Law". Waits follows last year's "Bone Machine" album with "The Black Rider" (Island) in April and his role in "Bram Stoker's Dracula with one in Robert Altman's upcoming "Short Cuts". Samuel Beckett didn't write the dialogue of his conversation with Benigni, but 'Godot' was definitely in the details.

TOM WAITS: The one thing that makes you such a gifted comedian and actor is that you have a sense of music about everything you do. That's what I love, when you hit your boot and knee and your chest...

ROBERTO BENIGNI: Yes, yes.

TW: When you're directing, how do you keep the humor and keep the life? How do you keep the wings on all the birds?

RB: That is a very good question. So you think to direct is to fly? To move legs from the ground?

TW: To leave the ground and to soar. I don't know how you do it, because in films you deal with a machine. My theory about songs is that most of them don't like to be recorded, they like to be wild. And I think very human moments in film sometimes don't like to be captured by the camera. The camera is like a butterfly net. You have to capture the butterfly without hurting it.

RB: Yes. I think this is a very good sensation you have about the movies. I feel exactly the same. Because when I am shooting it, the romantic thing about a movie is it's the opposite of theater: You can't control it. You never know when it's good or not. Because the movie is choosing what is beautiful. When you are acting, if the crew is laughing very much, this doesn't mean that you are doing it right. For a movie, a laughing crew is very dangerous.

TW: So, ideally, the camera is laughing and the crew is silent?

RB: Right! A lot of the time on "Johnny Stecchino" I remember the crew didn't laugh. But then the audience rioted. I was really flabbergasted. Very discombobulated. And always the movie is choosing you. You can't say, "I am a good actor for a movie." Only the screen can say "This is good actor - I like him." I never go with my director of photography to watch rushes, because a movie must be undisturbed until the end. Like a watermelon. You open it - "Oh, it's red. Hah! It's red. It's red!" Heh-hah!

TW: They say that if you tap on a watermelon and it has a certain sound, it's a red watermelon.

RB: Hah! I tap the camera. This sounds very good, yes.

TW:Yeah, it's red. But not always. Sometimes it's rotten. With insects living inside of it.

RB: Revolting.

TW: I think that's a good metaphor, the watermelon.

RB: There it is - it's fresh, it's sweet, it's very red and good. But it's true, about a movie choosing you. It happens a lot of times that very bad actors become big. They not good actors. They are just in a good movie, a good watermelon.

TW: Just light flicking through a machine.

RB: And your metaphor with the music is good, because the music is like a free jail. It you read the script of Bach, you see music is like mathematic, but when you hear it, it seems like something completely free, improvisation. Like in your songs. My favourite musicians, Bach and Waits.

TW: My thing is the best songs come out of the ground, just like a potato. You plan and plan, and then you wait for the potato - and watermelon, same.

RB: Your potato is for music, watermelon is for film. So when you are doing a soundtrack, you are doing a potato for a watermelon.

TW: And the tape machine is like the camera. There are things that go into the machine that are improved, and there are other things that go into the machine that are lost. It's not like a science. It's like a mystery. More coffee?

RB: Yes. I like coffee. Black coffee. I have a wonderful jet lag, yes.

TW: You like jet lag?

RB: I love it. Jet lag is one of my favourite things in the world. Yes. I woke up this morning, and it was 4:30, and I felt so good, but I didn't know what time it was. I thought it was the sun that was very dark. I couldn't understand what happened.

TW: It's good to be lost.

RB: Yes. Lost with yourself.

TW: Because film and music are expeditions and sometimes you have no map. You just go drifting, and you go many days without water or food. When I am making music, I don't change my clothes for two full months.

RB: You know who did this, too?Michelangelo. He painted the Sistine Chapel. He never washed himself, he never changed clothes, especially shoes and socks.

TW: Yeah?

RB: Michelangelo tried to take the socks off and skin came off with the socks. He never changed his clothes until he was finished, and was completely revolting.

TW: Sometimes when you finish, you take the clothes and you put them in a pile, and you burn them. You make a fire of all your clothes. Sometimes to be a leader you must be a child, you must be a stinking idiot.

RB: Absolutely. You must be a stinking idiot.

TW: You know what I mean? The courage of a child to say, "I smell nothing," and to go into it with eyes open. But more important than liking movies, it's important for the movies to like you.

RB: Right! I like watermelons. But it's more important that the watermelons like me. We started with this theory - the movies choose you. Movies decide if you are a great actor.

TW: Yeah. We've come full circle.

RB: This is it. This is like Bach's music.

TW: Exactly.

RB: Correct. Very good. Without meaning to, we finish where we started.

****************************************************************************************************************************** KCRW Interview Rebroadcast 02 JAN 1998

[Song: Shore Leave]

[Commercial version: Swordfishtrombones]

[Chris Douritas:] That's from 1983's Swordfishtrombones. Tom Waits, his first release on Island Records. I'm Chris Douritas, you're listening to Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW and joining us is Tom Waits. It's- it's really great to meet you, finally.

[Tom Waits:] Ay, good to meet you, Chris. [clears throat]

[CD] Um, Swordfishtrombones, it marked a new direction in your work, it seemed to, it's almost like you suddenly took the bull by the horns and you began producing projects yourself and seemed as though you kinda began a whole new adventure that we're still hearing chapters from now even with your new work, Bone Machine.

[TW] Oh yeah. Well I like songs with adventure in them. I think that's what everybody's looking for: songs with adventure and, you know, acts of depravity and eroticism, and shipwrecks, murder...

[CD] laughs

[TW] Uh, I dunno, that was for me, I think up until that point I had been, uhh, I don't think I was done yet, I think at that point I tried to make songs that felt a little more hand-made. Um, experiments and expeditions into a world of sound and stories, so I mean, particularly with percussion, 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, and [clears throat].

[CD] Did that new need that you were having, did that warrent the label change?

[TW] Actually, no the album was made for EA [Elektra/Asylum], and Joe Smith heard it; he didn't know what to do with it. He looked at me like I was nuts. At first he said, "Produce your own record, go ahead, make your own record, you should be producing your own record." So I said, "Okay, good." I made about three or four things and brought 'em in and he heard 'em and he said, "Well, I dunno, eh..." Then [I] made a whole record, and played it for him, and he said, "I dunno if we can put this thing out or not." So Chris Blackwell heard it, and I left EA through a loophole in my contract and I snuck out. Chris Blackwell loved the album, said "We'll put it out." [pause] So that's what happened. He was very in tune with it. Blackwell has great ears [CD laughs] you know. Because he like what I did, so I guess that means he has great ears, you know.

[CD] That also was the beginning of the appearance of Frank, who stuck with your work for a good while. Where did Frank come from? Where's he from?

[TW] Oh gee, I dunno. It's like a ventriloquist act, I dunno Frank's Wild Years, was just a little story about a guy who, well, from a small town who went away to try and make something out of himself, I don't know where it came from, it's just a- Frank's Wild Years, the little story that was on Swordfishtrombones was just a, just a oddball short story.

[CD] Obviously, he kept you a little interested because it kept getting tinkered with and expanded, and turned into a stage [production] you had taken on tour.

[TW] A good butcher uses every part of the cow.

[Song: Frank's Wild Years]

[Commercial version: Swordfishtrombones]

[TW laughs]

[CD] I dunno if it's just coinicidental, but after Frank started lurking around, you began to get involved with film work. The acting side of your life started to grow and expand and I guess that came first through your contacts with Frances Ford Coppola.

[TW] begins to talk with a cup in his mouth, clears throat] Well, I dunno, let's see, I done couple films before I worked with Frances. My first project with Frances was One From the Heart. I was living in New York, and he longed to do a lounge operetta, that's what he called it. It was kind of a step backwards for me a little bit cause I had already tried to break out of my mortuary piano and cocktail hairdos in the songs, I was really trying to shut the door on that whole obsession with these- with liquor, and my own perverted enjoyment of all that. And so he wanted cocktail songs and I so I came back to L.A. from New York and started writing in an office. I'd never really written in an office before with wood panelling and all that. It was good, it was very satisfying to work with him, and since we've done other things together. You meet people along the way you have a rapport with, that's really great.

[CD] What of the acting work, so far, what are you most happy with?

[TW takes a drink] I like Ironweed. [clears throat] I had a part also in this Robert Altman film which isn't out yet [Short Cuts]. I played Earl Piggins, a limo driver who drinks, and I was married to Lily Tomlin. [clears throat] And Robert Altman was great to work with. And he's like a good sheriff in a bad town. I was in Dracula; that's coming out pretty soon. That was great; I had a really, really great time doing that.

[CD] Now you're playing Renfield in Dracula which is just an incredible opportunity, I would think to just let it ...

[TW] Just go crazy.

[CD ]"yeah" while laughing]

[TW] Well, you see a lotta people think that I ate these insects and I wanted to really set the record straight on that cause I didn't actually eat the insects cause, you know, I put 'em in my mouth like I gave 'em a carnival ride like a funhouse. I put 'em in the funhouse and I let them move around in my mouth and then I brought 'em back out again. You know, I didn't actually murder them with my teeth.

[CD] Eating them is too easy.

[TW] [breathless] yeah. But I had a good time, I was, I had some frightening moments, when I was both frightened and exhilerated. Being hosed down in and insane asaylum, dressed like a moth. I also had to wear these hand restraints that were really painful. They were designed, uh- they were based on a design they had for piano players actually in Italy, to keep your hands straight. They were metal braces, and they corrected anything that your fingers may want to do that's un-piano-like. They were like, uh, I dunno, it was like having a corset for your fingers. It kept them perfectly, like this [demonstrates?] And it was all metal, and then [it had] these caps that went over your fingers and [it was] really painful to your cuticles and it looked really scary. That was the idea.

[CD] Yeah, I was gonna say, why would they have those on Renfield, I guess it must just look very bizarre to begin with.

[TW] Yeah, it looks funny.

[CD] In the film though, don't we see more of the history of Renfield?

[TW] I don't know, I haven't seen the movie, I don't know how much of Renfield that we get to see.

[CD] So never before do you see, um, Renfield before he got to the... [asylum?]

[TW] Yeah. There's a photograph of him in the hat and suit before he started to lose it.

[CD] I guess he was a businessman.

[TW] Yeah. Solicitor. For a real estate outfit.

[CD] He made house calls. It must be kind of strange for you. When you work on the music side of things, you're completely in control, producing it, every inch of it is you, [Tom: "yeah, yeah"] and when you're working in film, it's almost like you're back to the Asylum years or something.

[TW] Yeah. [clears throat] I dunno. Yeah, film is difficult sometimes, because, well you know, they don't pay you to act, they pay you to wait. And you do a lot of waiting, so I dunno. Somebody told me, well acting makes a woman more of a woman and a man less of a man. I said, "Oh God, so that's what's been bothering me. Thank you." [CD laughs] [TW clears throat] Fussin' around with your hair, you know, gettin' up six in the morning and having to, you know, all these people fussin' all around. [laughs a little]

[CD] That's a good point. That's a good point.

[TW] But ah, I like it when I can actually leave the ground; that's rare in film. It's more common in a play where you can actually experience flight. [CD "yeah"] Film is so broken up, it's a mosaics. But in working with good people it's always enriching and always satisfying. So, but some films are like you boght the last ticket on a death ship. [sinister voice] And you'll never come home.

[CD] Do you think that you ever might take more of an in-control role in filmwork, maybe do some directing?

[TW] Gee, I don't know. [pauses] You gotta know a lot about a lot of things to do that. I'm not a- I wouldn't want to be a what do you call it. I dunno, it's a lot to do. There's para-ventricular prosthetic titanium adapters and thermal decapitators and bio-flesh regenerators, that type of thing. You have to know a lot, and I'm not really at that point in my career. It's like you gotta be like Tesla.

[Song: Going Out West]

[Commercial version: Bone Machine]

[CD] You're listening to Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW, I'm Chris Douritas, and we have with us Tom Waits. That's music from the new release, Bone Machine. Going Out West. It's actually the first single that has an accompanying video, which is a knockout. What first strikes you about this new release, or it struck me, was the heavy percussive feel, and the raw and gritty textures that are so much a part of it. And um. Lot of violence...

[TW] Mm. Uh. Well. Uhhhh. Always good material for songs.

[CD] Really. Seems theres more of a, more of a home-based project for you too. Closer to home.

[TW] Hhhhmm. Well, you know, it was all done in a little room at the studio, it was not a rooom that was designed to be used as a recording studio, so I think that's what helped us. [It was] just a room that sounded great. Cement floor, wasn't sound-proofed, broken window, you know, s'great. It was just a room, a storage room.

[CD] This is, what, a shed on your property?

[TW] No, it was at the studio. They had other rooms; we worked at it for a couple days in a real studio, and I was really upset, just depressed. This room sounds awful, and I said, "No music will ever grow in this room." I was furious. I was so, I was so... I was down. But, so I went 'round looking around the place, and I said, "What about this room over here, I bet this room sounds good," and everybody laughed. I said, "No, really, what's wrong with this room here? Feels better. Hot water heater, a door, a window, table a chair some maps on the wall. Get all these crates outta here, and let's do it right here, just run the wires down the hill." It was rainy season. Everybody said, "Oh, sure." And they did, and we got in there, and everything started to come together, so it was good, was good the project had a flat tire on the first day, cause outta that we invented a new place for it to happen.

[CD] Well, you had lugged into there a lot of instruments that, have that kind of found quality to them. There's actually a new instrument on the album, that um-

[TW] Oh, a canondrum.

[CD] Yeah.

[TW] Yeah, Serge built that, a friend of mine. It was, it's really... It's just a metal configuration, like a metal cross. It looks a little bit like a Chinese torture device. It's a simple thing, but it makes... It give 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, you hit it with a hammer until you just, you can't hit it any more. It's a great feeling to hit something like that. Really just, slam it as hard as you can with a hammer. It's good therapeutic, and all that.

[Song: In the Colisseum]

[Commercial version: Bone Machine]

[CD] You're listening to KCRW. Morning Becomes Eclectic is the show. I'm Chris Douritas and we have with us Tom Waits. Um. Do you try a lot of different things when you're working out a song? The way I understand it is that you, and your wife, Kathleen [Brennan] had come up with about sixty different ideas for this album, and after whittling them down, you came up with what you have left on the album-

[TW] You always throw out a lotta songs. Not throw 'em out, but you cannibalize 'em. That's part of the process. Frankenstien that number over there, take the head offa him and put it, sew it onto this guy, immediately. Keep him alive until the head has been severed. And 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 great sense of melody, and I spin the chamber and she fires it. It's Russian roulette. Sometimes you get great things. [laughs] But eh, the collaboration is geat, with her, and we did have a lot of songs that were discarded, but that's part of the process.

[CD] Your kids actually contributed some to the record as well.

[TW] Oh yeah. Well, phuh . . .

[CD] How does this come up, is this like breakfast table conversation?

[TW] Oh, you know how- Everybody gets in [like Jimmy Durante] "Everybody wants a get inta the action." Eh, my little girl said- she has a word called, the word is "strangels." It's a cross between "strange" and "angels." Strange angels. Strangels. They're called "strangels." Or I said, or you could have "braingels." Those are 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 Today." [clears throat] That little suicide note on the album. Yeah, kids. Great for the... Hey, kids write thousands of songs before they learn how to talk. They write better songs than anybody. So, you hope you can write something a kid would like.

[CD] Toughest audience.

[TW] Ah, I got a fan letter from somebody in the Midwest. They said, "Well, my little girl is just coming around to your songs now, she-. They scare her a little bit. She thinks you sound like cross between a cherry bomb and a clown." I like that. Yeah, kids. You can't fool kids. They either like ya, or they don't.

[Song: The Ocean Doesn't Want Me Today]

[Commercial version: Bone Machine]

[CD] The Ocean Doesn't Want Me Today. That's a song from Bone Machine, it's the new release from Tom Waits. It's on Island Records. You're listening to Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW and we're happy to have with us, Tom Waits. When you finally get the songs down to where you want them to be, lyrically and musically, and you've got the band there, as you're trying things out do you have the tape rolling or do you wait til you've got it, you rehearse it, and then you get the tape going, or is it-

[TW] Do you stir the milk in before you add the batter, do ya, do ya add the eggs before you put- When do you put the cinnamon in? [CD laughs] Is it after the nutmeg? Or do you first put the scallions in and you dice- What, do you bruleé that? Sauteé that? I dunno. Sometimes. Do you lift the lid, or do you not lift the lid?

[CD] How do you know when a song is dead? When it's just not gonna come to life?

[TW] Well, some of 'em are, yeah, never come to life, some of 'em- It's like being, sometimes you have to be like aamm, 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 'em 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 Philipino 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. It was a song about a, kinda like jumbalaya, you know. Jumbalaya. Crawfish pie. Filet Gumbo.

[CD] So it goes back in the scrap heap if you don't use it. [TW "yeah"] Back in the compost?

[TW] Mmmm.

[CD] Are you a particularly religious person?

[TW] No, I wouldn't say- No, I'm not religious.

[CD] Brought up religious at all?

[TW] Oh, I had church when I was a kid, yeah. My mom heard the title of the album and she didn't like it. Bone Machine. She says, "Why must we always degrade?" [CD laughs] She says, "Remember, the devil hates nothing more than a singing Christian." So.. I went to church when I was a kid, and one Sunday morning, I finally decided I wasn't gonna go any more. So, I stopped. I dunno what's out there or up there, or... Little office, maybe a little office, like when your car gets towed in New York and you have to go down to Pier 74, and it's like four in the morning and there's a plexiglass shield, it's like three inches thick with bullet holes in it and an old woman with bifocals, sitting there at a typewriter, and you realize that your car... is... You can see it, along, y'know, chain-ganged to hundreds of other cars over there, and your car looks ashamed and embarrassed. And you realize she, she's got the whole... She's got your destiny in her hands. So it's probably something like that. I mean, after you die. People think it's gonna be simple, but, I mean, please. It's gonna be an organizational nightmare after you die. All these spirits, who-where-wha-whe, you know, what did you do? And where's- Do you have your number? It's gonna be hell. So. You're gonna have to be really.. And to be able to find somebody after you've died is really gonna be hard, cause there gonna be people that can't identify their loved ones cause they're just little lights blinking. It's gonna be rough. So... [sighs]

[Song: Jesus Gonna Be Here]

[Commercial version: Bone Machine]

[CD] Tom Waits. That's from Bone Machine. Your'e listening to KCRW, Morning Becomes Eclectic. I'm Chris Douritas and we have Tom Waits with us. What must your upbringing have been like? I mean were your parents musical at all? Were they funny people?

[TW] Funny people?

[CD] When you were growing up? (laughs)

[TW] My dad was very musical, my mother also. They both sang. [CD "really?"] We had music in the house. We had Bing Crosby. We had Harry Belafonte. We had Marty Robbins.

[CD] So they sang along with the records, and...

[TW] Uh, A lot of Mariachi music. My dad loved, and still loves. He's a Spanish teacher, so that's what we listened to more than anything else, really. I wasn't allowed to listen to any of that hot rod music. So, I don't know where your musical education usually comes from, a little bit you heard when you were a kid, and then you're off on your own expedition, and what you do with it is up to you, how you integrate it. I have always felt like I'd find things that have fallen off a truck. Like the sound of this, I'll find some way to integrate it. I go at it like the eyeball kid. I try to sorta annex this, change this, I don't know how it all comes together, but once you have musical confidence, and that usually comes from being naive enough to explore without feeling self-conscious, cause you really do want songs to like you as much as you want to like them, and there are things about music that...
There are places in music that you can only go if you're an idiot. That's the only way you can get in. You know, ther's high music, there's low music. We put an orchestra together in Hamberg [Germany] that was half guys in the train station and half were all orchestral guys, and they- Nobody got along. You think, "Oh, great. Every one'll teach everyone how to..." You know, there were some places where it did come together great, but. I don't know, music is a living thing, and so it can be... You can hurt it, you can bruise it, you can bruise the gin if you're not careful.
So I dunno, I love to... Songs are strange, they're very simple, they come quickly. If you don't take them, they'll move on. They'll go to somebody else. Someone else will write it down. Don't worry about it.

[Song: Who Are You]

[Commercial version: Bone Machine]

[CD] Tom Waits, from Bone Machine. Tom Waits is with us. I'm Chris Douritas, this is Morning Becomes Eclectic. Tom, have you realized the music the way you've heard it in your head?

[TW] Well, you know, I always make compromises. If I really put it down the way I really want to hear it, nobody else would wanna listen to it but me.

[CD] Really?

[TW] Yeah.

[CD] So you mean the way you-

[TW] I clean everything up. Within reason. Cause I'm getting more and more, like I like to step on it. Step on the negative. Grind it into the gutter and put that through the projector. I always love it, it's what Kieth Richards calls the "hair in the gate" at a movie. You know when everybody's watching a movie and all of a sudden a piece of hair catches in the projector and everyone's going, "Wow, look at that hair." And then Whooooh! and it flies out. And that's like, that was the most exciting moment in the film. It's like orchestras tuning up, sometimes,are the most interesting point in the evening's performance. "You know when you guys were tuning up, you really, well you had something there. And when you started to play, the music left."

[Song: That Feel]

[Commercial Version: Bone Machine]

[Song: Black Wings]

[Commercial version: Bone Machine] [Under CD voiceover]

[CD] Our guest has been Tom Waits on Morning Becomes Eclectic on 89.9 FM KCRW.

[Announcer] You've been listening to music and conversation with Tom Waits.

************************************************************************************************************************************** Thrasher Magazine, 1992

TOM WAITS

Interview by Brian Brannon

No matter what they may claim, few performers let it go all the way Tom Waits does. Screaming, moaning, smashing the ivories and smacking the strings, he speaks in tongues and plays with abandon, painting bizarre patterns and unraveling tangled memories. His latest works include a skull crakin' CD of primitive clarity that rocks dem bones called Bone Machine. Waits also contributed an eerie, earthy soundtrack to Night on Earth, a film by Jim Jarmusch.

What do you like to hit the most when you're mad?

I got a bass drum that's about 59 inches across. It's enormous, it's like hitting a dumpster with a sledge hammer. It'll free ya.

Do you ever notice some things feel like they'd be good to throw?

Yeah, I like to do that with family heirlooms, things that have value to others.

I see you have Les Claypool playing bass on this new album.

He came up and played on "The Earth Died Screaming." He was in between fishing trips at the time. He's great, he's got such an elastic approach to the instrument: a fretless, spastic, elastic, rubberized plasticene approach. He's like a fun house mirror. He can take and elongate his face. He's a real awnshop weasel, endlessly in pawnshops. I think that's why he tours.

Didn't you do the voice of Tommy the Cat on Primus' "Sailing The Seas of Cheese?"

Yeah, he sent me a tape with him doing it where it sounds like an auctioneer on helium. I said, "Man I can't talk that fast." It was rough.

On that song "The Earth Died Screaming," do you think the Earth is dying and we're just living in our own little dreams and ignoring it?

I guess, but I think the world is going to be here a whole lot longer after we're gone. I'm just waiting for the whole world to open up and swallow us all in, scrape us all off its back. I think the world is a living organism. When you stick a shovel in the ground, have you ever heard the earth go "Uhhgm?" And we're living on the decomposed remains of our ancestors, both animal, mineral and vegetable. So it is a living thing. I don't think it's going to die screaming, I think we're going to die screaming, in the swamp of time.

So I heard that you moved to the country and there's a lot of roadkill out there?

Yeah, roadkill, gun racks, collapsing chicken coops and organized vultures.

And there's always some killing?

There's always some killing you've got to do around the farm. Barns are painted red because that's where all the slaughtering is done. Originally barns were painted with the blood of dead animals. Before they had paint, there was blood.

A lot of your songs have a certain melancholy, what's that from?

Too much wine. Half of me, I feel like a jack hammer, I love to holler and stomp my feet and throw rocks. But there's another side of me that's like an old man in the corner that's had too much wine. I'm probably too sentimental for my own good sometimes.

What would you say to people who don't know where you're coming from?

I try to nail a lot of different things together. I'm more and more getting interested in rhythm. I like to really kick it hard. I like to play the drums until my knuckles bleed, until I pee my pants. Throw myself against the wall. They think I'm a crazy old man probably, "Check this guy out."

Aren't you using less symphony instruments?

Yeah, I'm getting away from that. Trying to do things with just the essential elements of music. It's like making ashtrays: just put three grooves in it and call it an ashtray. I found a great room to work in, it's just a cement floor and a hot water heater. "Okay, we'll do it here." It's got some good echo.

So going crazy making music goes back forever, right?

I guess so, yeah. Concerts are very tribal and I guess it's the same as an insect ritual, and mating rituals. We all have a drum in our chest from the moment we're born. I think music where the tempo is faster than the heartbeat excites you and music that is slower than the heartbeat calms you down. We all have a constant rhythmic beat going on, whether or not you hear it, it's continuing. You feel it all the time whether you acknowledge it or not.

Did you ever skate?

I used to make skateboards out of plywood and go down to a roller rink called Skate Ranch and buy just the wheels. We used to skate down this hill called Robert Avenue and it was a great curve and you dug up a lot of speed. It went by our neighbor Mr. Stitcha. He lived in the beauty of the curve, where all the momentum culminated in a beautiful slough of cement. It took you right past his house but as close as you could get to his porch. Mr. Stitcha drank to excess. This was common knowledge in the neighborhood. He had the thick glasses and the red face and the red wine stains down the front of his t-shirt. That's like I look now. Anyway it was the only place to get that kind of speed and thrill, so the front of his house became sort of a festival for all the skateboarders in the whole area. On Halloween he had a heart attack and died on his front porch and we were all told he died because we skated by his house and that each and everyone of us killed him in our own way. And we were all left with the memory that we all had a hand in his murder. It was like a Shakespeare thing, everybody had their hand on the knife. So I carry this with me, but I just want to say here and now, in Thrasher Magazine, that I did not kill Mr. Stitcha. It took a lot of therapy and it took a lot of liquor. Mr. Stitcha rest in peace.

************************************************************************************************************************************************** Buzz Magazine, 1993 The title of the article is "Tom Foolery- Swapping stories with inimitable Tom Waits" and it contains typical Waitsian humor. As the opening intro paragraph quotes Tom:

"These are things that have actually happened to me," says Waits, "or I've heard or read about. In any case they're all true."
We'll leave it up to you to decide.

EARLY MUSICAL INFLUENCES (PART I)

VOICE:
There's no one really in show business in my family but there were two relatives who had an effect on me very young and shaped me in some way. They were Uncle Vernon and Uncle Robert. I always hated the sound of my voice when I was a kid. I always wanted to sound more like my Uncle Vernon, who had a raspy, gravelly voice. Everything Uncle Vernon said sounded important, and you always got it the first time because you wouldn't dare ask him to repeat it.

Eventually, I learned that Uncle Vernon had had a throat operation as a kid and the doctors had left behind a small pair of scissors and gauze when they closed him up. Years later at Christmas dinner, Uncle Vernon started to choke while trying to dislodge an errant string bean, and he coughed up the gauze and the scissors. That's how Uncle Vernon got his voice, and that's how I got mine- from trying to sound just like him.

On Sundays, we'd always visit Uncle Robert, who was the organist at a methodist church in La Verne, California. Uncle Robert had a pipe organ in his house that went right through the roof. When he would play he would smear all the notes together like hot melted crayons and the whole house would shake.

I remember his house was a complete mess; his clothes were everywhere, his bed was never made. "Now this is show business," I thought to myself. I asked my mom why I couldn't keep my room like Uncle Robert's, and she said, "Tom, your Uncle Robert is blind."

GUITAR:
I have learned a great deal about music from other musicians, and from listening to the world around me. But when I was a kid growing up in Whittier, there was a red-headed boy named Billy Swed who lived with his mom in a trailer by the railroad tracks. Billy is the one who taught me how to play in a minor key.

Billy didn't go to school. He was already smoking and drinking at the age of 12, and he lived with his mom at the edge of a hobo jungle on a mud rain lake with tires sticking up out of it. There was blue smoke, dead carp, and gourds as big as lamp shades. You could get lost trying to find their place--through overgrown dogwood and pyrancantha bushes, through a culvert under a freeway, and through canyons littered with mattresses and empy paint cans.

While Billy taught me how to play, I noticed that he liked to draw on his jeans with a pen. Every inch was covered with these strange forbidden hieroglyphic tattoos that I was constantly trying to decipher. I was certain it was his own musical notation and that he had hundreds of songs written on his pants.

Billy's mother was enormous. I would look at her and then at the door to the trailer, and then back to her, and faced my first real math problem.
How could Mrs. Swed ever get through that door? As an eight-year-old, I remember thinking that Mrs. Swed was like a ship in a bottle and she would never be able to leave.
Somehow the trailer, the swamp, and Mrs. Swed all came out of Billy's guitar in a minor key.
It was New Year's Day after a week of heavy rain when I went back to their spot to see them again, but Billy and his mom were gone. But the secret knowledge of the chords he taught me was to outweigh all I learned in school and give me a foundation for all music.

SONGS:
I've always loved songs of adventure, murder ballads, songs about shipwrecks and terrible acts of depravity and heroism. Erotic tales of seductions, songs of romance, wild courage, and mystery. Everyone has tried at one time or another to live inside a song. Songs where people die for love. Songs of people on the run. Songs of ghost ships or bank robberies. I've always wanted to live inside songs and never come back. Songs that are recipes for supersitution or unexplained disappearances.

"They Call the Wind Mariah,"
"Teen Angel,"
"Bonnie Bonnie Bedlam,"
"Pretty Boy Floyd,"
"Springhill Mining Disaster,"
"Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol,"
"Winken, Blinken, and Nod,"
"The Sinking of the Titantc,"
"Three Ravens,"
"Zaz Turned Blue,"
"Pretty Polly,"
"Streets of Laredo,"
"Raglan Road,"
"John Henry,"
"Stagger Lee,"
"Ode to Billie Joe,"
"Frankie and Johnny,"
"Brother Can You Spare A Dime?"
"Volga Boatman,"
"In the Hall of the Mountain King,"
"Goodnight Loving Trail,"
"Strange Fruit,"
"Jacob's Ladder,"
"Spanish Is the Loving Tongue,"
"Lost in the Stars,"
"Sympathy for the Devil,"
"Auld Lang Syne,"
"Jesus's Blood Never Fails Me."
These are a few of my favorites.

EARLY MUSICAL INFLUENCES (PART II)

BLUES:
On the southside of Chicago, at the Checkerboard Lounge, the last great bluesman, Hound Dog Taylor, was performing before a rowdy audience and getting heckled by a drunk in the first row. Hound Dog pulled out a .38-caliber revolver, shot the drunk in the foot, put the gun back in his pants, and finished the song. I've thought of doing this many times but never had the courage.

SHOW BIZ:
I saw Monti Rock III in 1969 on the Sunset Strip at a place called Filthy McNasty's with six people in the audience. He was crawling through a bitter and distracted version of "Tennesee Waltz" when he suddenly stopped the band (the members of which were all wearing matching pink jumpsuits). The room screamed with feedback as he threw his drink against the wall and stabbed an amplifier with a mike stand, telling the six business suits in the audience they were all bloodsuckers. He laughed nervously as he sweated in the spotlight and delivered a purely psychotic confession that resembled a cross between an execution and a striptease.
In a style somewhere between a pimp and a preacher, he told stories of being a hairdresser in Puerto Rico and wanting to make it in Hollywood someday. He then lit up and sang "I Who Have Nothing" a cappella. I was there, and I knew that I wanted to get into show business as soon as possible.

HEAVY METAL:
It was Christmas Eve 1975 in Hollywood, California. I was visiting friends and drinking holiday beverage when we all agreed that the neighbor's stereo was up too loud-- Mahogany Rush up on ten. Fueled with liquid courage, I volunteered for the confrontation and staggered up two flights of outdoor stairs and banged on the door with a piece of firewood.
A giant came to the door. He was nine feet tall and his head was as big as a horse's. He said something in German and picked me up by the neck like a stuffed animal and tried to throw me off the balcony. I grabbed hold of him just as the banister gave way, and we both fell two stories into the alley, landing on a variety of bicylces.
He had picked me up by the belt like a suitcase and was preparing to try and fit my face into a faucet when I started laughing. And before I knew it, he was laughing with me. There we were, me and the giant, rolling around on the ground laughing, with Mahogany Rush going full blast and a stuffed Santa and a blinking electric reindeer laughing with us. This was my first real heavy-metal moment.

ELVIS:
I was in Memphis recently for a wedding and I couldn't resist going to Graceland. I especially liked the bullet holes in the swing set and the red faced uniformed teen usherettes and their memorized text delivered while gesturing at the rusted play structure. "Elivs and the boys were just having a little too much fun one night and came out for a some target practice." They also mentioned that Elvis had picked out all the furniture for the Jungle Room in just thirty minutes.

ADVENTURES IN SOUTH AMERICA

SUNKEN SHIP:
When I was a boy, I used to dive for pearls in the warm waters off the coast of Guaymas and San Felipe, where I discovered a sunken ship near San Blas.
I dove down murky corridors, pulling myself along the railings as I made my way toward the galley and the dining room. I pulled on a jammed hatch, looked inside, and saw one hundred skeletons--all sitting at tables and wearing tuxedos--suddenly stand up and raise their arms over their heads and start waving at me. Their bodies were decomposed, but their tuxedos were perfect.

HERMISILLO:
In Hermosillo, I had a midget prostitute climb up my bar stool and sit in my lap and order a double suicide and tell me how she murdered her pimp in cold blood at the Bali-Hai in Tijuana. It had been ten years and she had since become a born-again Christian and wanted me to help her raise enought money to get to Fatima.

MEXICAN CARNIVAL:
I remember when I was ten years old and I went to a Mexican carnival in San Vicente. I saw a woman with a tail, fourteen inches long, covered with hair. It was real. She let me squeeze it, and she smiled at me with a rotting grin. The accordion was ear-bleeding loud with yellow-teeth polkas, and I ate nothing but churros all night until the fair was just a smear of light. With sugar around my mouth, my head spinning and my ears ringing, we rode back to the ranch in a pickup truck loaded with thirty kids, pitch dark, everyone shouting in Spanish.
I was so sick the next day that they put me in one of the out buildings far from the main house. I was certain I'd been put out there to die, so I accepted it as a peaceful kindness. Every day, a little Mexican girl would come and visit me, and I would lick Kool-Aid out of her hand. And the doctor looked like Charles Boyer standing over me with a giant syringe, talking in Portuguese, squirting the yellow serum into the air.

THE NAKED CITY

PIMP WAR:
An all night donut shop at Ninth and Hennepin in Minneapolis. Chuck Weiss and I are having coffee at the counter, late, caught in the middle of a pimp war between two 13-year-old kids. One outside on the street, firing live ammunition, the other running into the cafi, diving behind the counter, unarmed, and screaming, "Leon you're a dead man!" A toothpick dispenser hurls toward the street, the beater of a blender, a spatula, and a handful of forks. Bullets hit the stove, a framed dollar bill, a china dog. Chuck and I drop to the floor while the jukebox pounds out "Our Day Will Come" by Dinah Washington. Each bullet changes the selection on the Wurlitzer to a different song, each more poignant than the one before.

IMPOUND:
Manhattan, middle of the night. Impound. Pier 74. Car towed and chain-ganged to hundreds of others in a hellishly dark garage. The woman behind the bulletproof Plexiglas turns and faces you. You can just make out the shotgun on her lap and the metal chain being hoisted in and out of her cleavage by a twenty-eight-inch neck. She stands between you and the rest of your life. One hundred twenty-five dollars and they could double it just `cuz they could. And your car looks ashamed and beaten. But you and your car will be much closer after tonight.

FAMILY FUN:
Something we have always done as a family is what we call "going for a spin." On a dark, rainy night, we take the old Caddy out on a stretch of treacherous, curving road and get it up to about ninety and slam on the brakes. The kids scream with glee because we always end up in a different place. It's better than the Cyclone or the Tilt-A-Whirl, and best of all, we do it as a family.

THE ANIMAL KINGDOM

VULTURES:
As a boy, we used to play a game of death where we would lie down in the desert and cover ourselves up to our necks in sand and wait for the vultures to come. One by one, they would appear--circling over our heads. And then the bravest would land and make the slow creep toward the eyes, and we could smell the rotting flesh and hear their squawk, low and rusty. And just when we could feel the wind from their wings and watch their necks curl into a question mark, we would jump out of the sand screaming, grab them by the necks, and swing them over our head like black lariats.

HAGFISH:
You want science fiction? Don't look too far. Take the Pacific Hagfish. Their only teeth are in their tongue. They eat other fish from the inside out. They bore into them, leaving a mere bag of skin and bones. They live off the coast of Mexico. They don't have a stomach, just an intestinal tube, but they have four hearts, one near the tail. They eat enthusiastically, but they have a low metabolism so they can go for months in capativicty without food. They are popular as a barbecue item in certain parts of Asia, and their skin is used for wallets, hats, shoes, and purses. They don't have any hard bones. They don't have any jaws or eyes, just some light-sensitive patches around their heads.
Perhaps the hagfish was the inspiration for the Cincinnati instructment builder Qubias Reed Ghazala's "photonclarinet"-- a photosensitive synthesizer that modulates pitch frequency and volume from two light sensitive-patches, offering a wide variety of tone-bent intervals. This allows the musician to create music from a beam of light that sounds like a lobster in a campfire.

BEES:
Scientists have now perfected a method of transplanting the memories of adult bees into bee embryos. Shortly after birth, the bees that received the transplant were able to find their way back to their donors' hives. With a microsyringe, scientists take proteins and molecules from the brain's memory center and inject them into the bee embyos. Steven Ray, who has devoted five years to this research, has revealed that the CIA is now doing the same experiments on humans and using its discoveries in the world of espionage. It seems that the only thing that will not say intact during the memory transplants are people's songs. This is the subject of a new film collaboration between myself and Jim Jarmusch entitled _They All Died Singing_.

CROOKED AND STRAIGHT: My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day. I told them this story:
In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me; I'm tall and I'm straight and I'm handsome. Look at you; you're all crooked and bend over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper.
And the crooked treee is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.

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