“You got to have a manager,
That’s what it’s all about.”
(“Eyeball Kid,” 1999)
Herb Cohen is wedged behind a table at a restaurant on Beverly Boulevard, just around the corner from the office he retains despite having more or less retired from the music business. Imagine Dr. John crossed with the Jack Nicholson of The Departed, a Jewish Godfather with small bored eyes set in a round flat face that bears the remnants of a beard. His hair is greased back, and his stomach juts out from under a loose cabana shirt.
You can take the man out of the South Bronx but you can’t take the South Bronx out of the seventy-four-year-old Cohen, a living legend of the music business who first pitched up in southern California in the mid-1950s. You don’t mess with this ageing street heavyweight. There is not a sentimental bone in the man’s body, and any appeal to ordinary nostalgic impulses is quite futile. “Posterity?” Cohen says. “Kids on the street out there”—he waves a paw at the window—“they don’t even know who Stalin was, for chrissakes.”
Cohen’s only passions these days seem to involve food. He’s an avid consumer of cheeses and shows me his current stash, neatly wrapped in a plastic bag by his side. He’s also keen on confectionery, only agreeing to meet me on condition I brought him a tube of chocolate Bath Olivers from London—a tube whose wrapping he proceeds to pry open with a vicious-looking knife he produces from his pocket. “They ain’t how I remember them,” he says after sampling one, recalling the days when he’d buy the thickly-coated plain chocolate biscuits on business trips to England.
Though he’s seldom flatly rude, Cohen’s conversation always borders on the ill-tempered. “I don’t have time to be concerned with the reality of incidental bullshit,” he says. “Artists think they’re so important, but who really gives a fuck. People think Dylan changed the world, that he was a prophet. But he was just a reporter. The times would have been a-changin’ with or without him.”
I find myself feeling a begrudging admiration for Cohen’s all-is-vanity cynicism—there really isn’t any bullshit here—while remembering that said cynicism was what enabled him to help himself to money that technically belonged to the artists he represented. “People are obsessed with what goes on behind the scenes—the lives of artists, whether they fucked their mother or what have you,” he says. “There are things I could tell you about Tom Waits or any of my artists that nobody knows, but why should I care if people want to know what an artist is really like? I always told my artists to lie about their lives anyway. I said, ‘Who cares what the truth is? Feed the writers stuff that’ll make the records sell.’”
Whether Tom Waits took that advice to heart we’ll probably never know; what we do know is that Cohen was present at the Troubadour club on a Monday hoot night in June 1971, and that an unusual voice and style caught his ear from the stage. “I was on my way to the toilet when I heard Tom sing,” he recalled matter-of-factly “When I came out of the toilet I asked him what he was doing and he said, ‘Nothing.’ So I signed him up.” Waits remembered the encounter no less prosaically. “Herb came over to me, was very honest and upfront,” he said. “And the next day I had a songwriting contract and $300 in my pocket.” It was, Waits said wryly, “the big jump into showbiz” that he’d long hankered for.
Did Waits recognize the name of the stocky gentleman offering to make his Troubadour dreams come true? He might not have known that Cohen had opened the Unicorn, the first true coffeehouse in LA and a place dubbed “the headquarters of the Beat Generation” by banjo player Billy Faier. Nor, perhaps, would he have known of Cohen’s Cosmo’s Alley, which opened in 1957 and provided a regular stage for such cutting-edge comedians as Lord Buckley and Lenny Bruce. Waits probably wasn’t aware that, with the help of his lawyer brother Martin (aka “Mutt”), Cohen had ruled the Hollywood folk scene of the late fifties.
“Herbie was a lot scarier than people would think,” says Jerry Yester, one half of a fraternal folk duo that became the first act Cohen managed. “They’d think he was a kind of pudgy Jewish guy, but he was absolutely terrifying in conflict. I mean, he had a box of hand grenades in the trunk of his car.” When Cohen disappeared in the early 1960s, rumours circulated in LA that he was fighting as a mercenary in South America or running guns for Castro. When he finally returned to America, he was scarier than ever. “He just kind of arrived back one day and he was a wild man,” says Yester. “Mutt by contrast was very gentle and soft-spoken in comparison. He said he’d talk to Herbie, and Herbie did calm down a little.”
Cohen also built up his management roster. Following Jim and Jerry, he took on singer-comedienne Judy Henske—Yester’s future wife—and the Modern Folk Quartet. “A lot of managers were hitting on us,” says the MFQ’s Henry Diltz. “Herbie would say, ‘Nah, that guy’s fulla shit …’ So we said, ‘Well, why don’t you manage us?’ He had a way of looking after himself but he was a dear man. Whenever I see him I have to chuckle out loud. He cuts right to the point. Nobody to mess around with.”
“He was like an adventurer soldier of fortune,” says Joe Smith, then of Warner-Reprise Records. “For a little Jewish guy with a little beard, he was really something. I got a tremendous kick out of him. He was kind of shifty but he was a delightful rogue. And Mutt was a barracuda lawyer, so Herb could move through life doing his damage knowing he didn’t have any legal fees.”
Things got interesting when Cohen began managing a demented new act called the Mothers. A physically unprepossessing synthesis of theatre, satire, and avant-garde rock, the Mothers were led by maverick prankster Frank Zappa and had zero interest in becoming the new Beatles. It was Cohen—described by Zappa at the time as “a little Jewish man that nobody likes who always wears nylon shirts”—who persuaded producer Tom Wilson to catch a Mothers show at the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset. Impressed by the freaks coalescing around the group, Wilson convinced MGM Records that the Mothers were a blues band and set to work producing their radical 1996 double-album debut Freak Out!! Zappa loved to lampoon hippies, satirizing bandwagon-jumpers and the prevailing peace-and-love platitudes. 1967’s We’re Only in It for the Money was a prescient vision of the flower-power trip gone bad.
“I wanted a big bruiser …” Herb Cohen (right) with client Frank Zappa at MIDEM, Cannes, in 1970.
It was through Zappa that Cohen put together a stable of LA misfits which included Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart), super-groupies the GTOs (or Girls Together Outrageously), and the genuinely loopy Larry “Wild Man” Fischer. If there was also room on Cohen’s management roster for jazz-folk bard Tim Buckley and country-rock princess Linda Ronstadt, as a lineup it begged the question whether Cohen really was only in it for the money. He himself claims he simply had more fun managing Zappa, Beefheart, and co. than he’d have had massaging the coked-out egos of, say, Crosby, Stills, and Nash. “Herb, I have to say, attached himself to some real interesting people,” says Todd Everett. “You don’t sign Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart and Tim Buckley and Tom Waits because that’s where you’re going to become a multi-millionaire.”
Cohen’s taste in music didn’t count for much in Waits’ eyes. In April 1969, he’d seen the Mothers—or the Mothers of Invention, as they’d become—on a double bill with Country Joe and the Fish at San Diego’s Convention Hall and walked out. “I hated it,” he said in 1977. “I wasn’t a snob or anything—I just thought it was a waste of time.” For Waits, Cohen simply represented power and clout. “I wanted a big bruiser, the tough guy in the neighborhood,” he said in 1999. “And I got it.”1*
“Waits knew you needed management, like Bob Dylan needed management,” says Harvey Kubernik, LA correspondent for Melody Maker in the mid-seventies. “Guys like Dylan didn’t go to the Post Office, they didn’t go to Kinko’s to photocopy. They knew you must have a manager, an agent, and a major label. I remember Waits saying, ‘I’m in the Herb Cohen program now.’” For Cohen it was Waits’ songs, rather than his prospects as an artist, which made him attractive. While his roster of acts made it clear that he was partial to the Bizarre—the name of a label he launched with Zappa—his decision to offer Waits a publishing rather than a recording contract suggests he wasn’t convinced by the twenty-one-year-old’s chances as a singer-songwriter.
“They gave him a writing contract and he was getting some minimal amount,” says Bob LaBeau of the deal Waits made with Cohen’s Third Story company. “He had to turn in five songs a month or something like that, and they’d pay him a few hundred bucks. It wasn’t a lot of dough but it seemed like a lot at the time.”
The idea of being a writer-for-hire appealed to Waits, fascinated as he was by the great Tin Pan Alley writers and the classic Brill Building partnerships of the 1950s and 60s. Los Angeles had itself boasted stables of songwriters, many churning out disposable fluff for transient teen idols. One of Waits’ new influences, Randy Newman, had started his professional life as a staffer at Metric Music, the song-publishing arm of Liberty Records. “Newman was always like a Brill Building guy,” Waits said to me. “He was part of that whole tradition: you go sit down in a room and write songs all day. Then you get these runners and you get the songs out to Ray Charles or Dusty Springfield.” In 2002, Waits told NPR’s Terry Gross that he liked the concept of “writing at gunpoint,” relishing the idea of being cooped up in a stuffy cubicle on Broadway with a major artist waiting on him to deliver a hit.
Waits was aware that the perception of the songwriter in American pop culture was changing. Los Angeles itself was the seedbed of a new kind of artist. Bob Dylan, the first modern troubadour, had opened the gates to a swath of solo performers graduating from folk music to a more personal mode of emotional reportage. Key artefacts of the so-called “confessional” school were the early albums by Canadian expats Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, as well as James Taylor’s landmark second release Sweet Baby James (1970). “Taylor was immensely popular then,” says Bob Webb. “I think we heard ‘Sweet Baby James’ from someone or other during just about every open-mic night we had.”
“I caught that wave of songwriters garnering understanding, sympathy, and encouragement,” Waits acknowledged to me. “Up until that point, who cared who wrote the songs? Just, you know, kill me with it. Nobody made a distinction between a song Elvis sang and a song Elvis wrote. Did he write it? Does it matter? No. And then everybody kind of wore that around. For a while there, anybody who wrote and performed their own songs could get a deal. Anybody. So I came in on that.”
Back in San Diego, the news of Waits’ good fortune was received with a mixture of envy and hometown pride. “I was very proud when Herb Cohen asked if he could manage Tom,” says Bobi Thomas. “We’d all known that he was talented. We just never knew what the big people would think.” Adds Ray Bierl, “It was interesting to me that Herb was taking Tom under his wing— in my mind Herb was just associated with the commercial business aspect of it, but this was telling me that here was a guy who really saw something artistically in Tom that he was able to relate to.”
For the remainder of 1971, Waits focused on writing, commuting to LA to play the Troubadour hoot and using his slots there to air new songs. With his retainer coming in from Cohen, Waits finally quit the night shift at Napoleone’s. “I felt I’d snuck in the back way,” he said in 1981. “I had a songwriting contract. I’m sitting at a bus stop on Santa Monica Boulevard, it’s pouring with rain, and I’m scared to death.” Ray Bierl detected a new determination in Waits. “He said he was giving it all or nothing,” Bierl recalls. “He said that if he hadn’t gotten his foot on the ladder with that contract he probably would’ve gone nuts. Because he wasn’t leaving himself any fallback. He put all his eggs in that basket.” Waits confessed in 1976 that he was “as ambitious as hell.” “I wasn’t any good but I was ambitious. I thought I was better than anybody, and I sucked raw eggs. But you have to think that way. To let an audience intimidate you is musical suicide.”
Hooting at the Troub, spring 1973. (Kim Gottlieb-Walker/
www.lenswoman.com)
“One thing to learn from Tom is that he never bothered to play with anybody else,” says sometime Waits sideman Stephen Hodges. “He had the balls and the inclination and the songs and the drive to just do it on his own from the very start, and I think there’s a lot to be said for that whole spirit and the tack that he’s taken.”
For his new songs Waits drew as much on his memories as on his musical influences. With its echo of Ray Charles’ “Lonely Avenue,” the bluesy “Virginia Avenue” spoke of the smalltown ennui Waits felt in Chula Vista and National City, even if the song was putatively about Reno. The clubs have closed and the song’s hero, trudging the streets at 1:45 a.m., has seen all the town’s “highlights” anyway. It was also 1:45 a.m. in “Goin’ Down Slow,” a blithe hymn to cunnilingus that took us past “a quarter of three” and even “a quarter of four,” when Waits was still “begging for more.” In “I’m Your Late-Night Evening Prostitute,” Waits put himself in the shoes of a hooker, equating her life with that of a professional entertainer.
Tom the tender lover could be heard on “Midnight Lullaby” and “Little Trip to Heaven,” both written in the glow of love for Pam Bowles. If the first presaged the passing of time in a way unusual in such a young writer, Waits’ ability to imagine old age came out even more distinctively in “Martha,” wherein he presented himself as “old Tom Frost” telephoning the titular heroine, a girlfriend from forty years before. The song would become one of the standout tracks on Closing Time. “In early 1972, no one was doing stuff like that,” says Jerry Yester, the album’s producer. “Who the hell was doing songs like [‘Martha’], except maybe Dave Van Ronk? And the way Tom played the piano, it was like Hoagy Carmichael, for Christ’s sake.”
The ragtimey New Orleans feel of “When You Ain’t Got Nobody” betrayed the influence of Randy Newman’s first two albums—as did the stark and rather lovely “Lonely,” a kind of distillation of Newman’s “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today.” Apart from sharing a title with one of his songs, “I Want You” was reminiscent of the limpid Dylan of 1970’s Self-Portrait. With its dissonant piano figure, “Nobody” was a clear nod to the Great American Songbook as it drowsily evoked Cole Porter and company. “Grapefruit Moon” probed the synergy between music and heartbreak, the singer’s romantic wounds continually being reopened by “that melody.”
Waits gave vent to the influence of Beat writings and spoken-word jazz verse in an early version of “Diamonds on My Windshield” that he read at a poetry workshop in a little storefront on the main business street in Venice. “He showed up at a reading I was doing at the Beyond Baroque bookstore,” says Michael C Ford, who edited the infrequently published magazine Sunset Palms Hotel. “My first impression was that this was a guy who would never compromise his art. He had an integrity that was immovable.” When Waits came to Beyond Baroque to read “Diamonds,” Ford was not the only poet to be impressed. “They loved the time signature,” he says of such gurus of the Venice poetry scene as the gay mystery writer Joseph Hansen. “They said, ‘This guy’s coming out of the earth, he’s the real deal.’” Ford published “Diamonds” as a poem in Sunset Palms Hotel and became friendly with Waits.
Sunset Palms Hotel, with cover by Charles Bukowski and poem by Tom Waits. (Courtesy of Michael C Ford)
“Diamonds” was one of a number of songs and/or spoken-word pieces Waits recorded in demo form during the second half of 1971. Set up by Herb Cohen and using Tim Buckley’s road manager Robert Duffey as an engineer, the demos featured minimal accompaniment: generally Waits alone on guitar or piano, sometimes fleshed out by acoustic bass and drums.
By early 1972, Waits knew it was time to move to Los Angeles permanently. He found a small one-bedroom apartment in Silver Lake, southeast of Hollywood, and moved himself in with his piano and his books and jazz albums and posters. With its vibrant Hispanic street life and lack of pretension, Waits loved the neighbourhood. “Silver Lake was both cheap and bohemian,” says Jeff Walker, one of the first journalists to interview Waits. “You walked into Tom’s apartment and you saw a kindred soul. There were stacks of records on the floor and lots of books and there were posters on the wall. There was a little kitchen off to the side, but the bed was in the main room.”
At home in Silver Lake, spring 1973. (Kim Gottlieb-Walker/www.lenswoman.com)
“It’s a hovel,” Waits said of his pad. “My landlord is about ninety. He’s always coming over and asking if I live here. And my neighbor up front is a throwback to the fifties, an old harlot in pedal pushers and gold-flecked spiked heels and a big bouffant hairdo … and one of the worst mouths I’ve ever heard.” The description might have come from the pages of The Day of the Locust, the Nathanael West novella that captured the scuzzy underside of Hollywood. But this was precisely the Los Angeles that Waits liked, as opposed to some quaint Laurel Canyon cabin where he might have rubbed shoulders with sensitive navel-gazers in denim jeans.
“People rarely understand Los Angeles,” says Pat DiPuccio. “They focus on the West Side, but the San Gabriel Valley is where the city actually started, and the East Side is anything from east of downtown to the San Bernardino County Line. It’s a different and oftentimes artistic world.” Silver Lake was also close to where Frank Waits was living, having recently started teaching at Belmont High. “He stayed very tight with his father,” recalls Michael C Ford. “I thought that was unusual for that kind of personality.”
After a month of settling in, Waits began writing in earnest, setting off what he called a “chain reaction of tunes” with “Shiver Me Timbers,” a hymn to the ageless pull of the sea that he would save for his second album. Mostly he wrote at an old upright piano, but he also kept a trumpet at hand for simpler melody lines.
Joining Waits in Silver Lake was Bobi Thomas, whose friendship with her old Hilltop High contemporary and Heritage peer had blossomed into a love affair. “We’d been best friends already for a long time, so we just happened to fall into it,” she says. “It didn’t really take long before we were out of the love part, but we never got out of the very strong friendship. And that best friendship continued for quite a few years after that too.”
“The relationship between Tom and Bobi grew much more complex than dating,” says Bob Webb, who’d sold the Heritage and moved into his parents’ LA home with his wife Trudi. “They became something like comrades-in-arms, deep friends embarked on a quest to become successful songwriters and artists. They supported each other intellectually and emotionally.” Bob and Trudi often had Tom and Bobi over to dinner in Culver City.
Thomas says she and Waits rarely listened to music together in the Silver Lake apartment. More often they simply sat together and read books or watched old movies on TV. “Tom would stay up till five or six in the morning reading,” Thomas remembers. “He was voracious. He’d tell me how inspired he was by reading some short story or other, and I think that was the source of his muse. Some writers go to movies to get that emotional power, and then they write. I think Tom got a lot of it from books.”
Waits also continued to draw on conversation overheard in diners—especially the Copper Penny in Hollywood, where Thomas held down a part-time waitressing job. “He’d come down to the restaurant and sit on the counter,” Thomas recalls. “He’d have cup after cup of coffee and fill page after page of prose. He wrote a sheet of paper for me one day that ended ‘and she serves it up hot and steaming and with a smile that would fix a flat tire.’ He’d take the stories or the lines he heard, or just the mood or ambience of the place, and incorporate them into his writing.” When Thomas was out, Waits would “sit for hours at the old upright … trying to get the songs out.” On her return he’d continue playing but wouldn’t sing. “He didn’t usually do more than play the music until the words were done,” she says. “I think he was afraid that the magic of creation would be somehow broken if he played me an actual set of lyrics-in-progress.”
A song Thomas remembers well was inspired by a row that led to her storming out of the apartment. “That night at the restaurant they needed me to stay until 6 a.m. to cover somebody’s shift,” she recalls. “Instead of calling Tom to let him know I’d be a little late, I just didn’t call. I don’t think I even thought about how he might be worried—that’s how self-absorbed I was at the time.” Two days later, Waits was tinkering with a bluesy melody on the upright. He told Thomas he was writing a song for her—a classic lover’s-tiff plaint—but wouldn’t play it through for her. “Please Call Me, Baby” would be one of the last songs Waits demoed for Herb Cohen.
Waits for the most part kept to himself in this period. “He kept everything tightly under his slouch cap,” says Bob Webb. By mid-1972, however, the two men were friends again, regularly meeting to play pool and share their enduring love of Beat literature. “After we reconnected in LA he kept me more informed,” Webb says. “I would visit him, and on some afternoons he would drop by my house and he’d pick up my guitar and play something he’d just written.”
A new literary passion of Waits’ was Charles Bukowski, alcoholic chronicler of Californian low-life and a writer of prose that was not only brutally sad and madly funny but as tight and direct as Kerouac’s was florid and ramblingly expansive. Waits had discovered Bukowski through “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” his weekly column in the LA Free Press, and had instantly fallen for his piercing honesty. “I just thought this was remarkable,” Waits recalled. “[I thought], ‘This guy’s the writer of the century and he’s being published in this kind of street rag,’ which seemed kind of poetic and perfect … and of course you felt much more like you had discovered him as well—that he wasn’t being brought to you but you had to dig and find him”
With Bobi Thomas (front) and friends Doug Carnahan (left) and Bob Webb, Swenson’s icecream parlor, West Hollywood, September 1973. (Trudi Webb)
Waits liked the fact that Bukowski was an LA native, ignored by the East Coast literary mafia. Indeed, Buk’s upbringing in the city’s West Adams district seemed a more extreme version of Waits’ own background. Certainly Waits could relate to Bukowski as a kind of Californian aberration—a writer who shone a light on the less felicitous aspects of life in the Golden State. Many of his stories and poems were set in and around the area where Waits now lived. “An Alvarado Street bar,” Bukowski wrote, “is about as close to getting to Skid Row as you can get.”
“My dad spent a lot of time in the bars, so I was drawn to places like that—the dark places,” Waits reminisced, though what really “hooked” him was “the fact that [Bukowski] seemed to be a writer of the common people and street people, looking in the dark corners where no one seems to want to go—and certainly not write about. So it seemed like he was the writer for the dispossessed and the people who didn’t have a voice.”
Bukowski had begun writing at thirteen, compelled to express the pain of his childhood and adolescence in notebooks. After being routinely and methodically beaten by his father for five years, his torment was compounded by the appalling acne that covered his body. “When you get the shit kicked out of you long enough and long enough and long enough,” he said, “you will have a tendency to say what you really mean.”
In the early 1940s Bukowski roamed the length and breadth of the USA, living in flophouses and drinking suicidally, churning out stories that were invariably rejected. He returned to LA in the late forties and, in 1952, began a soul-destroying job in the US Post Office that put the “stink” of the city in his bones and later inspired his first novel. An habitué of bars and racetracks, Bukowski was an avowed enemy of the Disneyfied American dream, his stories stripping away all the conceits of bourgeois existence.
Though Bukowski was never a Beat writer, he was as much a literary figurehead to Waits as Kerouac had been. “I guess everybody, when you’re young and you enter the arts, you find father figures,” Waits said of him. “For me it was more profound because I had no father—no operating father—so I found other men that supplied all that for me. I was looking for those guys all the time.”2*
Other “forefather” writers Waits discovered were Nelson Algren (A Walk on the Wild Side), John Rechy (City of Night), and Hubert Selby Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn). Though Algren’s prose hasn’t aged well, A Walk on the Wild Side (1956) was a novel populated by a raft of characters he called “the broken men and breaking ones; wingies, dingies, zanies and lop-sided kukes; cokies and queers and threadbare whores”—the “lonesome monsters” of America. Rechy’s City of Night (1963), meanwhile, depicted an LA “nightworld” of fringe deviants who’d cut loose from the bright fantasyland of southern California. Selby’s 1964 novel smashed through social taboos in its raw depiction of drugs, violence, and homosexuality in blue-collar Brooklyn.
Waits had also become heavily smitten with Richard “Lord” Buckley (1906–60), a California-based comedian whose “hipsemantic” routines about “flipsters and finger-popping daddies” were beloved of the Beats. “He was someone that I listened to for several years,” Waits told a radio interviewer. “He was a real bebop prosody cat, certainly a real pioneer in the fifties along with Ken Nordine and Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso, all those cats.”
Waits was only ten when Lord Buckley was riffing and free-associating at Hollywood’s Ivar Theater—a performance from February 1959 later issued as So You Thought Hip Was New and featuring such classic routines as “The Nazz” and “The Bap Rapping of the Marquis de Sade.”
Throughout the first half of 1972, Waits continued to hoot at the Troubadour, honing the act he had developed in his San Diego shows. “Roger Perry, the hootmaster, would tell me about ‘this real weird guy,’” says Todd Everett, one of Waits’ earliest LA champions. “The idea was that Waits was really unlike anybody else. I mean, if you look at it another way he was like other people, but none of them was his age or showing up at hoot nights at the Troubadour. I was a little older than Tom but I was younger than Kerouac would have been, so here was this guy who was younger than me who was channeling all that stuff. I mean, he was never going to be the fourth member of Crosby, Stills and Nash.”
“I was surprised to see somebody like that in the situation at that time,” says Louie Lista, who worked as the Troubadour’s barman but sang blues and R&B. “What Tom was doing was mostly acoustic, but the energy was very much akin to what I was doing. And the humor started making me like him.”
“He really created a persona for himself on stage,” says Bobi Thomas. “He never really was a big drinker when we hung out, but the persona he created had a flask of whiskey in his pocket at all times. I think he intuitively knew that the element of ‘show’ was more than half of the game.”
Songs such as “Ol’ ’55,” “I Hope that I Don’t Fall in Love with You,” and “Grapefruit Moon” caught the attention of the Troubadour cognoscenti, not least because a five-track tape of Waits’ demos was busy making the rounds of the singer-songwriter community. Jerry Yester, who’d recently separated from Judy Henske after working with her in the short-lived Rosebud, heard about Waits from his old Lovin’ Spoonful comrade Joe Butler. “Joe was living in California and trying to get some recordings going,” Yester says. “He’d run into Waits and was doing one of his songs. It might have been ‘Martha’ or ‘Grapefruit Moon.’ Joe raved about ‘this great writer.’ He didn’t speak of him as a performer.”
Waits said Herb Cohen had “a lot of nips on the line” from interested record companies, though none bit. Almost a year on from the night Cohen had first heard him, another influential LA figure was stopped in his tracks by Waits at the Troubadour. Brooklyn-born David Geffen was the rising star of the West Coast music industry, cornering the market in singer-songwriters and denim-clad country rockers—first with his Geffen-Roberts management company and then with his recently launched Asylum label. The Troubadour was where Geffen and everybody else came to hear music and conduct business.
“I would check out the Troubadour relatively often,” Geffen says. “I was always down on Mondays at the bar, which was a great place to hang out. Sometimes somebody would come in and say, ‘Hey, there’s somebody really good on,’ and you’d go in and check them out.” Geffen was standing in line for the men’s room when he heard Waits’ grainy tenor voice singing “Grapefruit Moon.” “I thought, ‘Wow,’” he remembers. “He was exactly what I wanted on Asylum. He didn’t look like the kind of singer-songwriter performers of the day at all. He had his own voice, his own style, his own presentation, and his own seeming lack of interest in all of it, but I was blown away by the songs and I loved the way he sang.”
David Geffen (right) with the Eagles’ Don Henley and singer Rosemary Butler, Venice, April 1972. (Henry Diltz)
Geffen approached Waits as he came offstage. He said he was interested in signing him to Asylum, which had just launched with albums by Jackson Browne, David Blue, Judee Sill, and Jo Jo Gunne. When Waits said he was being managed by Herb Cohen, the young entrepreneur instantly backed off. “I said, ‘Oh well, Herbie has his own label and he’s a friend of mine, so please tell him I wasn’t trying to poach you.’”
The next morning Cohen phoned Geffen at his office on Sunset Boulevard, catching the younger man off his guard. Knowing Cohen’s reputation, Geffen apologized for the approach he’d made. “I said, ‘Listen, I didn’t know Tom was yours and I had no intention of doing anything wrong.’” Cohen reassured Geffen he hadn’t, and that if he wanted to make a record with Waits he could. “I said, ‘Herbie, what about your label?’” Geffen says. “And he said, ‘Well, I’m really more interested in his songs.’ I thought to myself at the time that if Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart were the people Herbie was recording, and Tom Waits wasn’t, I couldn’t figure out exactly what he was interested in.”
Had Geffen really never heard of—let alone actually heard— Tom Waits? According to Geffen’s former business partner Elliot Roberts, David Blue had gotten hold of the Waits demos and played them at the company’s offices. “David said, ‘You have to hear this, it’s unique,’” says Roberts. “At that point, unique was all we were looking for. Waits was so shy he would hardly look at you, but he took on a totally different persona on stage.” Roberts told me in 1993 that “there were a lot of good writers we felt should have the chance to record, even though we knew they weren’t going to be hugely successful.” Waits, he said, “was a little different, because he’d reinvented himself as a beatnik,” adding that he “had the luxury of doing that in LA because it was an empty white canvas.”
Though Geffen is adamant that Waits was unknown to him before his Troubadour epiphany, the subsequent bad blood between him and Roberts leads one to wonder. “The first time Elliot heard Waits was from me, not from David Blue,” he says tetchily. “Look, people’s memories of these things are often wrong even though they think they remember them right. When Tom King’s biography of me came out, there was something Elliot said in it and I said, ‘Elliot, that’s just not true.’ And he said to me, ‘Yes, it is.’ I said, ‘Elliot, let me remind you what happened with this particular thing,’ and he said, ‘Oh yeah, you’re right. I’ve been telling this story for so long that I actually thought it was the truth.’”
Waits duly took his place among the elite group of artists that Geffen and Roberts were nurturing on the label. “I think Herbie knew we loved Tom and that we’d do a good job for him,” Roberts says. “It was easier than to keep going to bed with the artists you managed.” Created initially to provide a home for Jackson Browne, poster boy for the new Laurel Canyon introspection, Asylum prided itself on being artist-friendly. Geffen and Roberts had shrewdly intuited a shift in sensibility, away from heavy electric rock towards more contemplative music, as exemplified by the songs of Browne, Blue, Sill, and John David Souther. Just to cover themselves, Geffen and Roberts had also signed Jo Jo Gunne, partly made up of former members of LA hippies Spirit, and were in the process of adding a young country rock band called ‘Eagles’ to the roster.
“David Geffen does a lot for his artists,” Waits said after he’d signed his deal. “He gets very excited about them. It’s not just signing somebody’s life away, he’s personally interested in them. In the record industry most labels have a huge amount of artists—each has their biggies and their hopefuls. But Asylum is still small. Each artist is treated like one.”
“The criterion at Asylum was artists of a unique nature,” says Ron Stone, who assisted Elliot Roberts on the management side. “The vision was to commit to an artist and develop that artist over a long period. Clearly Tom fit that. He was unique, singular, and as a songwriter quite extraordinary.” If Waits fitted the Asylum profile as an idiosyncratic voice, clearly he was at odds with the label’s prevailing aesthetic. “Tom and Jackson Browne were both incredibly creative songwriters but their expression was radically different,” says Stone. “Jackson was Prince Charming to Tom’s Shrek.”3*
Waits’ creative heart lay in the forties and fifties, not in the sixties and certainly not in the laid-back southern California of the early 1970s. For him, the James Taylor school of introspection was too effete. “Tom had the soul of a saloon singer, right from the ground up,” says Michael C Ford. “There was a persona there, and it could have been a way of protecting himself from that sort of James Taylor/Jackson Browne sensibility. The persona was a kind of camouflage. A lot of his insecurity or shyness was probably a defense mechanism.”
“I’m very glad I’m a departure for Asylum,” Waits soon stated for the record. “I’m getting pretty sick of the country music thing. I went through it, wrote a lot of country songs and thought it was the answer to everything. Anyway, so much of it is really Los Angeles country music, which just isn’t country, it’s Laurel Canyon … it’s very difficult to live a country frame of mind when you’re living in LA, so I just identify more with the sounds of the city.”
Waits had the Groucho Marx stance down pat: he wasn’t going to join any club that wanted him as a member. “They always try to create scenes, just making connections so that they can create a circuitry,” he told me with a hint of impatience. “It all has to do with demographics and who likes what: if you like that, you’ll like this. If you like hairdryers, you’ll like water-heaters.”
“Tom may have interacted with Don Henley and Glenn Frey and Jackson Browne and whoever, but frankly I don’t ever remember that happening,” says Jack Tempchin, who’d also fallen in with the Asylum crowd and was pitching a song (“Peaceful Easy Feeling”) to his friends the Eagles. “Tom was just on his own path, and he didn’t really need the scene or anything.”
“It wasn’t like I was adopted into a family and was going to be bathing with these people,” Waits told me. “The idea that you’re on a label doesn’t mean that we’re breaking bread together every morning, and David Geffen’s at the head of the table praying. I’m sure a lot of them were good friends, and if they weren’t they probably thought it was good to have it appear that they were good friends.” The latter insight is canny: Waits had sussed out that Asylum was all about marketing the incestuous community of the LA canyons, with strumming singer-songwriters who slept with each other, wrote songs about each other, and sat in on each other’s sessions. It wasn’t anything he wanted to be part of. In any case, the supposed cosiness of the Asylum “inner circle” was distinctly undermined by David Geffen’s decision to sell out to Warner-Reprise Records in late 1972. “Asylum was an artist-oriented label for about a minute, until the money showed up,” the Eagles’ Don Henley grouched. “Then my, how things changed.”
While Geffen and Roberts had been quick to hook their artists up with each other—David Crosby and Graham Nash singing backup on Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes,” for instance, or Nash producing Judee Sill’s “Jesus Was a Crossmaker” (about J. D. Souther)—they saw that Waits didn’t fit easily into Asylum’s extended family. In fact, Waits represented a unique link between Geffen’s LA and the very different southern Californian scene that was the Herbie Cohen/Frank Zappa cluster of “freaks.” Certainly he was more comfortable with the latter group. “Tom used to hang around our office at the Bizarre/Straight complex when he’d come see Herb,” recalled Mark Volman, who—with fellow Turtle Howard Kaylan—had been absorbed into the Mothers as the Phlorescent Leech and Eddie. “He would just come in and sit down and smoke cigarettes and we would just crack him up … we would all just sit and laugh for hours.”
Ultimately it made more sense for Waits to work with someone from Cohen’s rather than Geffen’s world. Jerry Yester, it turned out, was the right man at the right time. With the dissolution of Rosebud, the sometime producer of Tim Buckley was killing time and waiting for something good to happen. “There was a period of about six months where I didn’t really do much except write, get drunk, and not mow my lawn,” Yester says. “Rosebud broke up, literally on stage, in August of 1971. Shortly after that, Herbie called me about Waits.”
Yester hadn’t even had a chance to listen to the tape Cohen had mailed him when Waits showed up one afternoon on his Burbank doorstep. “We were right on the corner of Brighton and Clark Streets,” Yester remembers. “Across the street was a store called Otto’s Hungarian Imports. The phone rang and a voice said, Ah, Jerry, I’m lookin’ for your house, man … I’m, uh, in Otto’s Imports …’” A more fitting introduction to the goatee-sporting hipster in the slouch cap is hard to imagine. “He had longish hair down to his shoulders, but the first time you heard him talk or sing it was quaint because it really didn’t fit,” Yester recalls. “It didn’t not fit, it was just odd. I had no idea how old he was, though I was pretty sure he was younger than me. He seemed right out of the fifties Beat Generation.”
Jerry Yester, Hollywood Hills, circa 1971. (Henry Diltz)
Yester never forgot the “absolutely magical afternoon” that ensued. He still has the tape of Waits running through the songs in his repertoire, complete with grunted introductions. “My girlfriend Marlene was scrubbing the bathtub,” he recalls. “When she heard Tom she threw down her rag and came in and just sat and listened. I had a baby grand in the house and I just set up a microphone and he recorded everything he had.” Waits was equally enthused about Yester. “Jerry was a great producer,” he told me. “He was the first guy whose house I ever went to and found a pump organ.”
A meeting to discuss the approach to Waits’ first album was swiftly arranged. “We talked together about the instrumentation,” Yester says of the conflab in David Geffen’s office. “We wanted to keep it the same band and to keep it small. We wanted the musicians to have a versatile feel. And Tom made it absolutely clear he wanted a standup bass player.” Yester lacked jazz contacts but was able to round up the perfect group of musicians for Waits’ sessions. Drummer John Seiter had played with Spanky & Our Gang and the Turtles before joining Yester in Rosebud. Guitarist Peter Klimes was, says Yester, “just a wunderkind on the guitar, nineteen years old and absolutely phenomenal.” Trumpeter Tony Terran had worked with Yester on, of all things, a Monkees session. Shep Cooke, who contributed guitar to “I Hope that I Don’t Fall in Love with You” and the countrified “Old Shoes,” had played with Linda Ronstadt and knew Waits from his San Diego days.
“Shep told me that Tom was much folkier down in San Diego,” says Yester. “But the thing that Tom became really crystallized during and after the first album. The germ was there, and the stuff he was writing was so different from everybody, but it really crystallized afterward into the skid row character he became.”
Through Seiter and Terran, Waits and Yester found their bass player. Bill Plummer had worked with a range of jazz artists from George Shearing to Al Jarreau before forming his own part-time group the Plumline. He had also played on the Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main St, overdubbing acoustic bass parts on four tracks that included one of Waits’ all-time favourite tracks, the spaced-out-gospel track “I Just Wanna See His Face.”4*
Yester booked Sunset Sound, the same Hollywood studio the Stones had used for the Exile overdubs in the spring of 1972. The sessions were completed in about ten days. For Waits, the experience was fraught with fear. He’d never seen inside of a recording studio before, nor worked with a full backing group. “It was kind of frightening,” he admitted to Lou Curtiss. “You just realize how much you have at your disposal.”
“Tom was very quiet,” remembers Bill Plummer. “I later figured out that he was totally focused on what he was trying to do.” Plummer recalls the “little upright piano” being set up for Tom in the studio. “He wanted that funky bar-room sound,” he says. “It was nicely in tune but it had a flavor to it. I don’t know if he had it shipped in specially but he knew it well and was very comfortable with it.”
As the days went by, Waits became more assertive in his directions to the band. “He was absolutely communicative with all the musicians,” Jerry Yester recalls. “He didn’t talk to them a lot in musical terms, but he always got his point across and could tell them exactly what he wanted. He’d put things in terms of metaphors and they knew exactly what he was talking about.” Waits commanded instant respect. “He was just so calm and relaxed about everything,” Plummer says. “And he knew those songs backwards and forwards. There was a wonderful feeling that he was authentic about the whole thing. He had his cigarette there in the ashtray, and all that kind of stuff. Just his appearance and demeanor and everything felt very real.”
Key to the feel of Closing Time was the fact that Plummer had been playing with drummer Seiter for over six months. When it came time to record “Ol’ ’55,” Seiter so dug the song that he couldn’t resist singing over Waits’ voice in the chorus. Possessed of a strong tenor that Yester had already showcased with Rosebud, Seiter came up with a perfect harmony line that started faintly before the chorus even began.
The first sound heard on Closing Time was Waits counting “Ol’ ’55” in, followed by the song’s gentle slipnote piano chords. In a way the young voice was unremarkable, but it was importantly different from James Taylor or Jackson Browne or Glenn Frey— immediately older, more lived-in. The song was sincere and believable and charming, full of youthful magic.
Listening to “I Hope that I Don’t Fall in Love with You,” which switched from piano to acoustic guitar, one could almost mistake Waits for someone who’d made a couple of inoffensive early-seventies singer-songwriter albums and then faded away like a hundred other young California hopefuls of the age. One certainly can’t imagine him singing this quaint relic today.
“Virginia Avenue” was immediately bluesier. Waits’ piano was pure Randy Newman, an influence so obvious on Closing Time that one sometimes misses it. Waits’ voice was nothing like Newman’s, however: on this song it was almost declamatory, reminiscent of singers such as Tim Buckley or David Ackles. More Asylum-esque was “Old Shoes (and Picture Postcards),” a country-rock waltz that picked up from the feel of “Ol’ ’55” Waits must have heard so many songs like this at the Troubadour that they eventually rubbed off on him. The song’s voice belonged to a footloose young stud hitting the road and semi-sneering such cringey lines as “your tears cannot bind me anymore” and “my heart was not born to be tamed.”
The sleepy and fairly ordinary “Midnight Lullaby” was an early instance of Waits borrowing from nursery rhymes and lullabies, in this case “Sing a Song of Sixpence” and “Hush Little Baby.” Thus began a lifelong habit of assembling lyrics from fragments of oral tradition.
“Martha” only makes one realize how myopically narcissistic most singer-songwriters were in the early 1970s. Here was Waits, all of twenty-three, writing about an old man and the girl he’d loved forty years before. This was the kid who’d hung out with his friends’ dads because they had more interesting stories to tell. “Martha” was also the first time any kind of orchestral lushness was heard on a Tom Waits album.
“Rosie” wasn’t dissimilar to “Martha,” just less special. Following on from “Martha” might have made sense in the days when one had to turn over a vinyl LP; on CD it is overshadowed, though it does echo the country feel of “Ol’ ’55,” this time with a pedal steel thrown in. There was also another jejune line about “mell-oh-dee” to make the older Waits shudder.
The stark “Lonely” could have come from a musical—a poor man’s West Side Story, perhaps. Things livened up with “Ice Cream Man,” a more ribald version of John Brim’s 1953 song of the same name and a spoof of countless double-entendre R&B songs of ladies-man swagger. “Little Trip to Heaven” was an anodyne declaration of affection, a second cousin to “Midnight Lullaby” with muted trumpet and space-travel metaphors. Marginally less trite was “Grapefruit Moon,” which was very early-seventies “piano man” in feel. To say Waits hadn’t found his voice yet is an understatement.
Recorded almost as an afterthought for Closing Time was the beautiful instrumental coda that shared its title. Cut on a Sunday at Western Recorders, “Closing Time” blended Waits’ plangent piano chords with Tony Terran’s wistful trumpet and the warm cello lines of Jesse Erlich. Unable to locate Bill Plummer, Yester had to rely on somebody’s recommendation of Arni Egilsson, who tore himself away from a barbecue, threw his double bass in the car, and made it to the session just in time. “That was absolutely the most magical session I’ve ever been involved with,” says Yester. “At the end of it, no one spoke for what felt like five minutes, either in the booth or out in the room. No one budged. Nobody wanted the moment to end.”
“Closing Time” was “the capper of the experience” for Waits. Save for the string overdubs on “Martha” and “Grapefruit Moon,” the album was complete. “I told him I wanted to put a string quartet on ‘Grapefruit Moon,’” says Yester. “He said, Ah, I don’t know about that, man.’ I said, ‘Tell you what, let’s do it and if you don’t like it we won’t use it.’ We recorded it in the mixing studio at Wally Heider’s and he loved it. In fact, he used strings a lot after that because he liked it so much. But he wasn’t so crazy about the idea of Edgar Lustgarten playing cello on ‘Martha.’ He was very cautious about stuff.”
Long after the fact, Waits seemed to take issue with Yester’s production, perhaps because by then he’d so radically revised his view of his own musical persona. “We were pulling against each other,” he said a little churlishly in 1977. “If [Jerry] had had his way he would have made it a more folk-based album, whereas I wanted to hear upright bass and muted trumpet.” Had Waits really felt misgivings about Yester’s production, it’s unlikely he would have continued to hang out with him as frequently as he did after the album was finished. For the two men spent many hours together, often playing pool in cheap halls with Yester’s friend Randy Benson. “There was a place in Burbank that was fifty cents an hour for a nine-foot table covered with cigarette burns,” Yester recalled. “Tom really loved those kinds of places. It had that kind of funky atmosphere.”
Sometimes Waits preferred simply to shoot the breeze over a beer or three, seated in a new 1952 Buick that was swamped with newspapers and candy wrappers. “He liked to buy a six-pack of Coors and go park somewhere and just talk,” says Yester. “He’d talk about whatever was on his mind, and I’d talk about what was on my mind. I really liked that part of the relationship. He was real genuine, absolutely down to the nickel. He was the kind of person you felt you’d known for years.” Even a budding attraction between Waits and Marlene failed to taint the friendship. “When I saw them getting close, I was like, ‘Wait a minute,’” Jerry says. “It didn’t really injure our relationship with Tom but everybody stood back and said, ‘Oh, okay.’”
Those who come to early Waits via his post-Swordfishtrombones work may be nonplussed by Closing Time. “I think that first album could safely be called singer-songwriter and country-rock-ish,” says Jeff Walker. “In terms of Elektra and Asylum they had plenty of those, from the Paul Siebels to the Tim Buckleys, so it never occurred to me that he was divorced from that. He wasn’t that unusual, other than that here was this great singer-songwriter coming out of San Diego.” Looking at the cover of Closing Time, one would have been forgiven in 1973 for tarring Waits with the Asylum brush. The very name “Tom” sounded folksy and approachable, like Tom Rush or Tom Paxton or Tom Jans.
Flecked with trademark traits and mannerisms—above all on “Martha,” blueprint for so many of his lushly emotional ballads— Closing Time nonetheless sounded broadly in step with the singer-songwriter school of the early 1970s, reminding us that Waits was at least dwelling in the same musical hinterland as his labelmates. His singing on the album was reminiscent of David Ackles or even Billy Joel, who the following year would release an album with the Waitsian title Streetlife Serenade. Waits could even have been mistaken for one of the many “New Dylans” proliferating at the time. The strong Beat and jazz signatures of The Heart of Saturday Night and Nighthawks at the Diner were immanent in “Ice Cream Man” and “Closing Time” but not overt. “Tom stylized his voice a lot more in later years,” says Jerry Yester, “but one fondness I have for Closing Time is that it is that early Tom.”
Randy Hoffman, who’d crossed Waits’ path in San Diego, recalls Francis Thumm playing him an advance tape of Closing Time some time in late 1972. “Franny said to me, ‘Hey, this is Tom Waits, he’s hanging around the Troubadour now and he’s got this tape,’” Hoffman says. “So he gave it to me to listen to, and I wasn’t knocked out by it. At this point we’re sitting right squarely in the heyday of the singer-songwriter. A lot of San Diego people had gone to LA, and there was always this record deal that was imminent but never quite happened. So I thought, ‘Here’s another guy and it’s great but it’s probably never gonna happen.’”
When the album came out in March 1973, a few reviewers were hip enough to pick up on Waits’ pre-rock references. “His voice is self-mocking, bordering on self-pity, and most of his songs could be described as all-purpose lounge music,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden. For Holden, Waits’ style evoked “an aura of crushed cigarettes in seedy bars and Sinatra singing ‘One for My Baby,’” his songs and piano playing parodying “the lounge music sub-genre so perfectly that we wonder if he’s putting us on or if he’s for real.” For both Herb Cohen and Asylum Records, the challenge was how to sell Waits not simply to arena-boogie America but to people who liked their singer-songwriters a little smoother. Exactly who was going to fall for this hobo romantic with his heart in the past?
Thoughts turned to promoting Closing Time through live appearances—not easy, given that Waits had played only a handful of shows outside of the hoots at the Heritage and the Troubadour. Cohen was able to set up a number of support slots on the East Coast, with plans for Waits to be backed by a three-piece band. Trumpeter Rich Phelps was drafted in to play alongside guitarist John “Funky Fingers” Forscha, who doubled as tour manager. That left the vital role of standup bassist, with neither Bill Plummer nor Arni Egilsson able to free themselves of session commitments in LA.
Bob Webb, who’d been seeing a lot of him through the winter of 1972–3, was shooting pool with Waits one night when the subject of the tour came up. “He specifically wanted a jazz feel to his combo, which meant an acoustic stand-up bass, not an electric bass guitar,” Webb remembers. “I’d played the bass in high school but had given it up. So I said, pretty nonchalantly, ‘I play bass.’ Tom’s face lit up.”
At the beginning of April 1973, with Closing Time in the stores for less than a month, Waits and Webb flew east with Phelps and Forscha, just ahead of their first dates at the Cellar Door in Washington, DC. “Phelps I recall as a tall, somewhat temperamental musician with long blond curls,” says Webb. “He considered himself very handy with the girls and I suppose he was. In his defense, he played forcefully behind Tom’s piano-playing. Forscha served as our road manager. He had a good sense of humor, a level attitude, and played effective guitar too.”
The first week of April saw Waits and sidemen supporting Tom Rush at the Cellar Door, the club where Gram Parsons had first heard Emmylou Harris sing. The dates went well enough, giving Waits the opportunity to hone his patter while gelling with a band for the first time. Thrilled that his dream of “making it in music” was coming true, he was happier on the road than he would ever be again. “I was just happy to be […] away from home, riding through the American night, you know, out of my mind,” he reflected two decades later. “[I was] wild-eyed about everything.”
“Tom never assumed the mantle of star or boss,” Bob Webb says. “In fact, he tried to separate himself from the wrangles that inevitably attend getting four independent artists from one gig to another, one night to the next. He was an affable companion, understandably a little introverted.”
From DC, the band travelled up the east coast to Massachusetts, where for the week of 11–15 April they supported Danny O’Keefe at Passim. The Cambridge club was of especial interest to both Waits and Webb, since owner Bob Donlin had been a drinking crony of Jack Kerouac’s. (On one of the Passim nights, none other than Gregory Corso wandered into the club, Waits and Webb falling into conversation with him between sets.) When Donlin reminded them that Kerouac’s grave was located in nearby Lowell, the two men made plans to visit the Beat shrine.
“We got the okay from Rich and John to take the car for the day,” Webb says. “Lowell was an old dying mill town then, not the spruced-up urban national park it is today.” Though Webb and Waits located two of his former residences, their search for Kerouac’s grave was fruitless and they eventually gave up their quest. “Seeing Lowell and imagining Kerouac roaming the streets there was enough for both of us,” Webb claims. “We really got a feel for the town as it must have been when he lived there as a young man.”
Next stop was New York City, Waits’ first exposure to the Big Apple. For the week of 18–23 April he was the support act for Charlie Rich, the bluesy Arkansas singer then restyling himself as the MOR-country hitmaker of “Behind Closed Doors” and “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.” Waits was a fan of Rich’s blue-eyed soul baritone and thought he was “just cool as ice” at Max’s Kansas City. “There was quite a hullabaloo around Rich’s return to recording and performing,” remembers Bob Webb. “We were advised that high-powered executives were coming around to hear Charlie, and some would be there to hear Tom too. We were all a little on edge on opening night.”
The club itself was something of a shock to the Angelenos. Renowned for its Warholesque clientele, Max’s made the Troubadour look positively homely. “The bar at Max’s drew the strangest coterie I had ever seen,” says Bob Webb. “There were a lot of glitter types, cross-dressers, wannabe transsexuals well over six feet tall in stiletto heels—the entire range of New York City underlife.” In the event the flashbulbs were all on Rich, who played “Behind Closed Doors” alongside some of his older R&B material. “Some suits did take Tom aside,” says Webb, “but neither John nor Rich [Phelps] nor I was included in those conversations. As I recall, Herb Cohen caught up with us at Max’s. When anyone from the industry wanted to meet with Tom they took him aside, and Herb did likewise.”
Bob Webb frequently had to accept that Waits was first and foremost on the road to promote his album and therefore unavailable for the kinds of adventure they’d once enjoyed together. “We’d make plans to peel away from the crowd to ramble round bookstores and coffeehouses,” Webb says. “But his obligations often prevented him from doing that.”
One of the more bizarre billings Waits endured on this first stretch was supporting children’s entertainer “Buffalo Bob” Smith and his Howdy Doody revue at the Great South East Music Hall & Emporium, located in a shopping mall in Atlanta.5* “That was a strange gig,” Webb says. “Smith was doing a mixed-media retrospective of his career. It didn’t seem like a perfect match, but the audience seemed to accept the intellectual disparity between our shows.” For Waits, who’d watched Howdy Doody on TV as a kid, the experience was disturbing. “We did matinees at 10 a.m. for screaming children and women in curlers, and there was candy in the piano,” he told Francis Thumm. “Show business was starting to look like a nightmare.” Waits couldn’t abide Smith referring to him as Tommy. “I couldn’t stand it,” he told Thumm. “I told him, ‘Bob, please don’t make me hurt you. I have a breaking point.’”
Almost as inappropriate was Waits supporting fading Motown stars Martha Reeves and the Vandellas in a converted stables in East Lansing, Michigan. “There was a small little postage stamp of a stage and they said they provided a piano so they put it way in the back, in the back row,” Waits told Lou Curtiss. “They didn’t say anything about putting it on stage.”
If the week supporting John Hammond Jr. in San Francisco (29 May-3 June at the Boarding House) was a better fit—and the beginning of a lifelong friendship—it wasn’t much of an appeasement. In early June, Waits returned to LA feeling utterly demoralized. “It was the old case of the one-size-fits-all industry-push on a new songwriter,” he reflected four years on. “[They] throw you out there and see what you can do. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”
This early disillusion can’t have been helped by the sale of Asylum to Warner Brothers. And when, in August 1973, Asylum was merged with Elektra Records—with David Geffen at the helm— the cold wind of corporatism crept into the idyllic milieu of Laurel Canyon and its singer-songwriters. Interestingly, Herb Cohen persuaded Waits to attend a picnic held to celebrate the merger of the labels. Somewhat peevishly, Waits showed up, relaxing for long enough to participate in a softball game with Tim Buckley, who’d taken a shine to “Martha” and recorded it on his Sefronia album—the first significant cover of a Waits song.6* “It was a way for people from the company to meet Tom,” recalls writer Tom Nolan. “He seemed kind of subdued—not tentative but not an aggressive personality. He told this long funny story with a punchline about the Shah of Iran—‘That’s when the fit hit the shah,’ or something. That was his mode of fitting into the social occasion, telling a story.”7†
That summer, Waits was interviewed by Jeff Walker for the free magazine Music World. “He was so open,” Walker recalls. “We talked about music and jazz and Beat poetry. He picked up a trumpet and played a little riff on that. We loved him.” Waits, says Walker, was smarting from a tattoo he’d just had done in a downtown parlour. “Thursday afternoon, sober as a judge,” he said of the heart and flowers design. “And yes, it hurts.”
Cover star, Music World, June 1973. (Courtesy of Kim Gottlieb-Walker/www.lenswoman.com)
As Jeff and his photographer girlfriend Kim Gottlieb drove home to Laurel Canyon, they decided to make Waits the cover star of the June issue. “Because we were a free magazine, we didn’t have to put somebody well-known on the cover,” says Gottlieb. “We could afford to take somebody that not too many people knew and put them on the cover.” Adds Walker, “We went away and said to ourselves, ‘This is going to be an important record and this guy’s going to be an important artist.’ You felt really privileged to be meeting him.” Walker saw Waits’ boho-beatnik act as a conscious assertion of identity. “It seemed to me this was all very deliberate, pushing the boundaries and genres that he had come out of,” he says. “But he was fairly forthcoming. He wasn’t holding back or mysterious.”
Waits by now had broken up with Bobi Thomas. Tom Nolan recalls running into him at the Troubadour and hearing him mention it. “He was looking down and almost pawing the ground with his foot,” Nolan says. “He said, quoting Muddy Waters, ‘Ah, another mule kickin’ in my stall …’” Waits wasn’t heartbroken but he missed Thomas’ company and kept in touch with her by mail. Letters to Bobi updated her on his career in prose that was as ingenuous as it was vivid. He wrote of moving to a larger apartment at 1309 North Coronado Street in Echo Park, not far from his former “cave” and this time boasting “a good-sized bedroom.” He described his new neighbourhood as “Mexican-Oriental,” adding that he spent most of his free time at “the Food House and the Casino Club, the Mohawk … I play a lot of craps.”8*
1309 North Coronado Street, Echo Park. (Oscar Thompson)
In one letter Waits mentioned the possibility of upcoming studio dates for his second album. Determined to be truer to his vision of himself as a jazz-centric Beat poet, he was busy writing songs that depicted the American street life he’d absorbed from Kerouac and others. Pride of place went to “(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night,” a wistful slice of streetwise optimism born one Saturday afternoon as Waits and Bob Webb drove along Alvarado Street and then cruised Hollywood Boulevard in search of kicks and inspiration. The idea of “looking for the heart of Saturday night” came directly from Visions of Cody, in which Kerouac’s eponymous hero was “hurrying for the big-traffic, ever-more-exciting, all-of-it-pouring-into-town-Saturday night.” Waits claimed he’d written the song in five minutes.
“We struck on Kerouac’s concept of wanting to be at ‘the center of Saturday night in America,’” Bob Webb recalls. “We got caught up in that literary notion and decided that each of us would create something around the theme. I drove home and stayed up all night writing a short play about some denizens of a backstreet poolroom. Some time after I left, Tom picked up a guitar and wrote the lyrics and music for ‘Heart of Saturday Night.’ He had it the next day.” Waits also wrote “Depot, Depot,” a hymn to the downtown Los Angeles—and its Greyhound bus station—that he felt was neglected by the media and tourist fixation with the city’s west side. “Not many people go to downtown LA,” he said. “The Free Press did a big article called ‘Downtown LA, Who Needs It?’ I’ve been going there since I moved here. I live in Silver Lake so I’m about ten minutes from downtown. I go down there just to hang out.”
Waits continued to attend the Venice Poetry Workshop, trying out new lyrics there and revamping old ones. In a 22 September letter to Bobi Thomas, he mentioned that he and Webb had attended the Venice workshop the night before, and that he’d read “The Heart of Saturday Night,” “Semi Suite,” and “Diamonds on My Windshield.” He was now certain that a reworked “Diamonds on My Windshield” should feature on the next album, then taking shape in his mind as a sequence of songs about nightlife in America.
One night, Waits went for a ride with Jack Tempchin and talked of the new direction he wanted to take. He spoke about an album Jack Kerouac had made in 1959 with comedian-pianist Steve Allen, with the writer delivering his “beat prosody” over Allen’s jazz chords. Waits said it was the kind of thing he wanted to explore, and that he wanted to move away from the more orthodox singer-songwriter style of Closing Time.
“I remember we were both into Kerouac and we were sitting in the car and he told me about the Kerouac-Allen album,” Tempchin says. “He told me he was getting more and more into this Beat thing. I said I thought that was fabulous and he should go for it.”
First, however, Waits had to undergo a major rite of passage.
1* “A knee-breaker?” the interviewer asks, to which Waits replies: “You said that, not me. I gotta be careful what I say about Herbie. I’ll wind up in … court.”
2* Poignant in this context is Waits’ later musical setting of Kerouac’s “Home I’ll Never Be.” When he sings, “Father, father, where you been/I’ve been in this world since I was only ten,” it’s hard not to hear him calling out to his own errant pater.
3* Quoth Stone, “I’m sure that quote will turn up, and I’ll be sorry I said it.”
4* The other Exile tracks Plummer played on were “Rip this Joint,” “Turd on the Run,” and “All down the Line.”
5* Buffalo Bob, born Robert Schmidt on 27 November 1917, hosted one of the first American television shows for children. In 1947, NBC brought The Howdy Doody Show to television sets across the US. The show went off the air in 1960. From 1970 to 1976 Howdy Bob toured with his show and made hundreds of appearances across the US. Schmidt died in 1998 at the age of eighty.
6* Note, though, that the late Lee Hazlewood had first recorded “Martha”—as “Those Were Days of Roses (Martha)”—on his 1973 album Poet, Fool or Bum.
7† Nolan, who knew Herb Cohen from hanging out at Frank Zappa’s log cabin in Laurel Canyon, remembers that Cohen played well in the softball game. “He made a good catch and I think he got a good hit. I told him afterward that he was the MVP and he looked at me like I was trying to insult him.”
8* In a Los Angeles Times piece published in March 1976, interviewer Richard Cromelin describes Waits’ new cave as a “court cottage.” By that time the place was so crammed with detritus—mainly books and albums but also parking tickets, discarded socks, ashtrays overflowing with Old Gold butts, and a neon “Cocktails” sign that Waits had yanked off the front of a downtown bar—that Cromelin wittily nicknamed it “the Waits Towers.”
