Contemporary Musicians, September 1994 (Volume 12) by Iva Sipal

Personal Information

Born Thomas Alan Waits, December 7, 1949, in Whittier (one source says Pomona), CA; son of Jesse Frank Waits and Alma (Johnson) McMurray (both schoolteachers); married Kathleen Patricia Brennan (a script editor and playwright), August 10, 1980; children: Kelle-simone Wylder (daughter), Casey Xavier (son), one other child.

Career

Began performing professionally in nightclubs in Hollywood and Los Angeles, CA, late 1960s; received first record contract with Asylum, 1972; released debut album, Closing Time, 1973; made acting debut in Paradise Alley, 1978; composed film scores, beginning in 1980; coproduced and starred in the musical play Frank's Wild Years, 1986; collaborated on the musical play The Black Rider, 1993.

Awards:

Academy Award nomination for best original score, 1983, for One From the Heart; Rolling Stone Magazine Music Award--Critics' Picks for Best Songwriter, 1985; Grammy Award for best alternative album, 1992, for Bone Machine; awarded guitar by Club Tenco, Italy.

Addresses

Office--c/o Ellen Smith, 11 Eucalyptus Lane, San Rafael, CA 94901. Record company--Island Records, 400 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10003.

Tom Waits, the poet of the downtrodden, entertains listeners with his graveyard-growl voice, sophisticated lyrics and melodies, and haunting junkyard orchestration. Since his recording debut in 1973, Waits has cut over 15 albums, including Swordfishtrombones, Frank's Wild Years, and Bone Machine. A respected actor with more than 15 film credits, he has also become a successful playwright with his stage adaptation of Frank's Wild Years and his collaboration on the musical The Black Rider.

From the very beginning, Waits has been an original. Born to a middle-class family in Whittier, California, in 1949, Thomas Alan Waits made his entrance into the world in the back seat of a Yellow cab. Though both of his parents were schoolteachers, Waits considered high school a joke and dropped out to join the work force. "I listened to records and got into trouble," he told the Minneapolis Star. "Ya see, I was a bit of an insubordinate ... in academic situations. I wanted to own a gas station."

Mark Richard in Spin, however, related that Waits's father was in a mariachi band and taught him to play guitar on "low-end Mexican specials that cost $9 and lasted two weeks, bending so that the strings were three inches off the neck, and you had to play the things with welding gloves." Richard also noted that the elder Waits had been a radio technician in World War II and would help his son build Heathkit radios; he used the wireless sets to pick up Wolfman Jack and evangelist Brother Springer from Oklahoma City.

As a teenager Waits wasn't swept up into his generation's culture of flower power, free love, peace, drugs, and Woodstock. "I was a misfit," Waits told Newsweek. "I didn't have any Jimi Hendrix posters up on my wall. I didn't even have a black light." What made him tick was writing songs, playing an old guitar and piano, working the 6:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. shift at the pizza parlor, and listening to Ray Charles, George Gershwin, Frank Sinatra, and the blues as he cruised the open road.

But Waits also read a lot, and he discovered the works of Beat author Jack Kerouac. The Beat Generation was a name given to a group of American writers--including Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs--who through their poetry, novels, and jazz poetry albums rejected the middle-class values and commercialism of the 1950s. Kerouac's 1957 book On the Road is considered the masterpiece of the Beat Generation, and to this day it remains Waits's favorite book.

By his late teens, Waits was being drawn to the underbelly of Los Angeles. The lonely, burnt-out characters of the night and snatches of their conversations took root in his mind and became the source for his songs, as did much of his experience from these days of inhabiting fleabag motels, composing in greasy spoons and seedy bars, and hitching rides with truck drivers from gig to gig. In the late 1960s Waits became a doorman at a small club. "I listened to all kinds of music there," he told Rolling Stone, "from rock to jazz to folk to anything else that happened to walk in. One night I saw a local guy onstage playing his own material. I don't know why but at that moment I knew what I wanted to do: live or die on the strength of my own music."

By the time Tom Waits was "discovered" in 1969 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, California, he already had a cult following. Herb Cohen, manager for such artists as Frank Zappa and Linda Ronstadt, signed him on, and three years later Waits was picked up by Asylum Records and cut his first album. Closing Time won him an immediate audience and made fans out of contemporaries like Elton John, Joni Mitchell, Keith Richards, and Bonnie Raitt.

Under the Asylum label, Waits put out eight albums between 1973 and 1981. Several of Waits's songs from that period were made famous by other artists, including "Ol' 55," sung by the Eagles, Bette Midler's rendition of "Shiver Me Timbers," and Bruce Springsteen's "Jersey Girl." Waits used his stage persona--the thin, bent figure in a wrinkled secondhand suit, holding a cigarette butt in one hand and snapping his fingers with the other, while delivering whiskey-voiced scat into the spotlight microphone--to develop his skills as an actor. Waits began with a bit part in Paradise Alley with Sylvester Stallone in 1978 and subsequently acted in more than 15 films, including roles in Francis Copolla's The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, Ironweed, and The Cotton Club. Perhaps his finest work was in the 1986 film Down by the Law, directed by Jim Jarmusch. Waits also produced and starred in Big Time in 1988, a tale of a drifter who dreams of a successful music career. He has also written film scores, including On the Nickle, 1980; One From the Heart, 1983; Streetwise, 1985; and Jarmusch's Night on Earth, 1993.

Waits's music has continued to gain recognition. In the 1980s Waits himself produced the albums Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Frank's Wild Years, all released by Island Records. In his later music, such as the 1992 Grammy Award-winning album Bone Machine, Waits departed from his earlier tradition of sung jazz to search for raw sound with all the fluff stripped away. "To me," Waits explained in the New York Times, "everything is really music--words are music, every sound is music, it all depends on how it's organized."

The New York Times compared Bone Machine to the three earlier albums: "The dominant image over those three albums, both in lyrics and in the organ-grinder tilt of the music, was the carnival." This album is "what the carnival fairgrounds might look like after the carnival has left town. ... Instead of Waits's former snake-pit orchestra of swamp guitar, honking saxophone, wheezing accordion and pump organ, the songs here are constructed on a percussive skeleton of bangs and twonks." Waits recorded Bone Machine in a shed with musicians, friends, and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, banging on metal and wood with sticks. While his music has become more surreal, Waits's characters have taken on more substance. His earlier work was typically filled with a stream of forgotten drunks, prostitutes, tired waitresses, and two-bit hustlers with dreams of making it big. But the story of Frank, a character who first appeared in Swordfishtrombones, was developed into Frank's Wild Years, a stage musical by Waits and his wife that premiered in 1986 at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater. The musical presents the saga of Frank O'Brien, a down-and-out accordion player on a hallucinatory journey through his life as he sits freezing to death on a park bench. The record of the same name was released the following year.

In 1993, Waits collaborated with Robert Willson and William Burroughs, the Beat godfather, on a dark and satirical avant- garde version of Carl Maria von Weber's 1821 folk opera Der Freischutz. The Black Rider is based, like Weber's work, on a fable about a desperate man who makes a deal with the devil in order to win the right to marry his beloved. "The rich dizzying tunes," noted a reviewer in Rolling Stone, "incorporate graveyard fright noises, bizarre piano sounds and creepy sci-fi whistles into traditional, orchestrated 'Fiddler on the Roof'-style melodies." Spin's Richard related that the show was a hit in Europe and New York.

Waits, the self-titled "sound scavenger," was married in 1980 and has three children. His work has grown steadily stronger, more ambitious, and more commercially successful. Characterizing his unique creativity, a writer in the New York Times commented that Waits "honors the emotional lives of his humble characters. His lyrics ... express what might be described as a primal sentimentality. His heart bleeds for characters who cry out their needs and dreams in songs that sound like reassembled fragments of tunes learned as a child."

Compositions

On the Nickle, 1980. One From the Heart (film score), 1983. Streetwise (film score), 1985. Night on Earth (film score), 1993. (With wife, Kathleen Brennan) Frank's Wild Years (musical), first produced at the Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago, IL, 1986. (With Robert Willson and William S. Burroughs) The Black Rider (musical), 1993.

Selected Discography

On Elektra/Asylum Closing Time, 1973, reissued, 1993. The Heart of Saturday Night, 1974. Nighthawks at the Diner, 1975. Foreign Affairs, 1977. Small Change, 1977. Blue Valentine, 1978. Heart Attack and Vine, 1980. Asylum Years, 1984. Anthology, 1985. On CBS One From the Heart, 1982. On Island Swordfishtrombones, 1983. Rain Dogs, 1985. Frank's Wild Years, 1987. Big Time, 1988. Bone Machine, 1992. (With William S. Burroughs) Black Rider, 1993.

Sources

Books Humphries, Patrick, Small Change: A Life of Tom Waits, St. Martin's Press, 1989. Periodicals Audio, February 1984; December 1987. Down Beat, March 1986. High Fidelity, December 1985. Interview, October 1988. Minneapolis Star, December 22, 1975. National Observer, January 5, 1976. New Statesman, October 1985. Newsweek, April 23, 1976. New York Times, September 27, 1992; November 14, 1993; November 22, 1993; December 5, 1993. People, October 21, 1985; September 28, 1987. Playboy, March 1988. Rolling Stone, January 27, 1977; October 1988; October 29, 1992; March 3, 1994. Spin, June 1994. Stereo Review, September 1987.