“The road ain’t what it used to be, kid … bad
food and everything looks the same.”
(Waits as Al Silk in Candy Mountain, 1987)
Suffering from a bad cold, Rickie Lee Jones sits in a darkened suite in London’s plush Connaught Hotel. Suddenly she lets rip with a piercing little-girl shriek: “I don’t wanna talk any-more!!!” Then she laughs to let me know it’s nothing personal. It’s just that she’s barely set foot outside the hotel in three days.
Jones is in town to tout Pop Pop, a 1991 album of cover versions. Mainly the songs are old Tin Pan Alley selections—“My One and Only Love,” “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “The Second Time Around”—that make the interpretations of Jimi Hendrix’s “Up from the Skies” and Jefferson Airplane’s “Comin’ Back to Me” stick out like psychedelic sore thumbs. Unlike Girl at Her Volcano, the stunning live mini-album she made in 1983, Pop Pop is not a vehicle for the kind of bravura treatments Jones accorded “Lush Life,” “My Funny Valentine,” and Tom Waits’ tender “Rainbow Sleeves.” Accompanied for the most part by acoustic nylon-string guitar and standup bass, the songs are performed in a decidedly low-key, even occasionally off-key style that’s clearly disconcerted many of the album’s reviewers. “I picked songs that were less dramatic, less suicidal in their texts,” she tells me. “And then I sang them in a more remote style, a style that was more sensual than emotional. The overall theme was tenderness instead of sadness, and it made it all a little new for me.”
Sniffling in the darkness, Jones is endearingly direct. “What’s your name?” she asks suddenly. When she sees me chewing a fingernail, I receive a swift admonishment. “Don’t bite your nails,” she counsels. “Don’t bite your skin.” We talk for a while about the highs and lows of her career; of her friendships (or otherwise) with fellow musicians. “You have to go out to make friends,” she says, “and I’m not comfortable enough with people to sit with them for very long.” On the matter of her career Jones is equally sanguine. “When you’re really successful in pop music, disaster is always around the corner,” she states cheerily. “How long can you maintain that, and what will it mean if you don’t? You make enough money to keep going, and you’re famous among people you’d like to know you. The negative side is that sometimes you feel misunderstood; you feel the record company doesn’t even think of trying to sell you to people outside the core of those who already like you.”
At the end of the interview I choose my moment and inform Jones that I’m planning a book about her old beau. A frosty look crosses her face as she matter-of-factly declares it’s her policy never to talk about Tom Waits or their relationship. It’s a stance she’s pretty much stuck to since we spoke that day. “It’s like, ‘Isn’t there anything else here you want to know?’” she said crossly in 2003. “I knew that guy for a year twenty-four years ago, and they’re still asking me about it.” On the one hand it’s insulting for a female artist to find herself appraised only in the context of her relationships with men; on the other it’s in any case a relationship where the myths have long outstripped any reality. “[Waits] said something nice,” Jones told the Guardian.“[He said] maybe the reason people are so obsessed with this … maybe it wasn’t a great love affair, maybe it’s just all mythology, just part of their pop thing. I guess I would only have my heart hurt if I thought they’re asking me but they’re not asking him. Because then it feels disrespectful. Then I thought, he’s so scary they wouldn’t dare ask him!”
“Maybe it’s just all mythology …”With Rickie Lee at Shangri-La, June 1979. (Jenny Lens)
When Jones showed up for Waits’ Blue Valentine cover shoot in early September 1978, she was flying high on the news that she’d just been signed to Warner Brothers Records by the label’s head of A&R, Lenny Waronker. “I remember I went to the shoot and Tom introduced me to her,” says Bones Howe. “She said, ‘I just got a contract with Warner Brothers!’ I said, ‘That’s wonderful. Lenny’s a great guy and you’ll have a good time.’ And I thought to myself, ‘There’s another singer-songwriter shot through the breeze.’” How wrong he was.
Using photographer Elliot Gilbert, Waits staged the shoot in a twenty-four-hour gas station. Jones vamped it up in a red jacket, Waits pinning her against the bonnet of the customized 1964 Thunderbird he’d bought to replace his beloved black Cadillac. The pictures of the couple, with Chuck E. Weiss hovering in the background, were as theatrical as they were sexy: Waits as Clyde to Jones’ Bonnie, curly locks piled high over his unshaven face, arms skinny and tattooed; Jones clinging to her bad-boy lover, shooting a look at Gilbert’s camera that said, “Hands off, he’s mine.”
With the album completed, Waits prepared once again to hit the road. Interviewed at the Tropicana, he described how he’d just had four years of clutter cleared from his kitchen so he could get to his refrigerator. The prospect of touring again was clearly depressing him. “To go on the road for eight months and lean on a lamp-post and play the town drunk … well, it’s limiting,” he sighed. To promote Blue Valentine he assembled a new touring group. Replacing Frank Vicari was Herb Hardesty, who, in addition to playing tenor sax, was a dab hand on the trumpet and flugelhorn. There was a fellow New Orleans import in the form of John Evans “Big John” Thomassie, a bearded hulk recommended by Paul Body. “Big fat guy,” Body says. “Heck of a drummer.” Body also alerted Waits to twenty-five-year-old bassist Greg Cohen, native Angeleno and graduate of the California School of the Arts. “Waits auditioned us all at once, so he couldn’t really tell how well each of us played individually,” Cohen recalled. “He ended up hiring the whole band. At the time I was playing with a lounge band in Los Angeles, doing the schlocky pop tunes of the day, so Tom rescued me from all that.” Completing the lineup was Arthur Richards, the bluesy guitarist who’d played on The Heart of Saturday Night.
Determined to heighten the sense of theatre in his live performances, Waits had an entire gas-station stage set—complete with spare tyres and a Super 76 petrol pump straight out of Edward Hopper’s 1940 painting Gas—built for the tour. The Tom Waits Experience had turned into a miniature Broadway show. “We had a good time on the road,” says Herb Hardesty. “All the musicians got along well, and we played to our very best standard every night. When Tom started telling his stories and singing on stage, the audience got very quiet. As soon as he finished the song, the crowd broke out in applause. It was one of the highlights of my life.”
Supported by Leon Redbone, Waits once again started in the Pacific Northwest in early October before zigzagging down through northern California and then heading east to Chicago via Boulder. The road quickly took its usual toll. When he arrived in Minneapolis on 22 October, he was livid to learn that Blue Valentine hadn’t yet made it to local record stores. “It’s supposed to be coming out a week before I come into a town,” he grumbled to an interviewer. “If I do a new song now, you see, no one’s familiar with it, so I have to set it up.”
Waits suspected the bean-counters at Elektra-Asylum now viewed him as a bad bet. On a roster that included the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt—not to mention Queen and Carly Simon—he had officially been demoted to the dubious category of Prestige Artist. “It bothers me that I work so hard at something and nobody hears it,” he said in Minneapolis. His hostility towards his labelmates hadn’t abated either. “I don’t like them people,” he said. “I don’t hang out in the same places that they do. There is an inner sanctum of pathetic sort of groups out here that I find very tiresome and tedious.” Increasingly jaundiced towards his LA peers, he was contemplating a move to New York. “My music is very urban,” he said during a promotional stop in Manhattan. “I like LA but I enjoy going to New York, I feel very at home here … just hanging around.”
Waits bemoaned the fact that he could no longer write when he was on tour. “I used to, because I traveled alone,” he said. “Now I got the whole catastrophe—I’ve got a truck, bus, van and a road manager … and an agent and a crew, a prop man and a light man. The entire disaster.” This is not the sound of a man embracing the hurly-burly of life on the road. “[There’s] somebody pulling on my coat all the time,” he grouched. “[I] get no sleep; different town every night. I’m a real scatterbrain out there—now I just come home to write.”
Waits’ spirits hardly improved when, in Valparaiso, Indiana, a man leapt on to the stage of the Bridge-Vu Theater and made off with his jacket. In its pockets were cash, credit cards, letters, and the driving licence he’d only just got back from the City of Los Angeles. But the real nadir was reached after Waits played Miami’s Gusman Cultural Center on 10 November. Attempting to score cocaine in the early hours of the next morning, he found himself in a rundown apartment with a dealer who’d just been shot in the chest. “Black guy with suspenders and a terrible wound,” he recalled of the “hellish” scene. “He was bleeding through the bandage … and we were counting out the money on a glass table … real gangster stuff.”
The jaunt on Miami’s wild side made Waits think hard about his drinking and drug use. “I’m off the sauce,” he announced in New York at the end of the month. “Touring sixty cities, I gotta stay healthy.” The idea of Waits not drinking—and even not smoking, which he attempted less successfully—was unfathomable to his fans. But Waits had been playing the part of “Wino Man” for so long it was starting to catch up with him.1*
It was ironic, therefore, when he agreed to write a theme song for a documentary film about LA’s skid row down on Fifth Street, where he’d done his early research for “Tom Traubert’s Blues.” Approached by Ralph Waite of The Waltons, he delivered “On the Nickel,” one of his great lullaby-ballads. A namecheck for tragic Grady Tuck, an eccentric and much-loved figure on the San Diego folk scene, made the song still more poignant for those in the know.
The Blue Valentine tour ground on into December. “This has been one long experiment in terror these last two weeks,” Waits said in Dallas on 8 December. “The hardest part is no sleep and a lot of traveling.” It was striking that Waits used the exact same phrase—“experiment in terror”—that he’d used of his live experiences with Frank Zappa. More often Waits was less terrified than simply irritated, especially when fans and critics complained that his live repertoire stemmed mainly from Foreign Affairs and Blue Valentine. “I decide what I’m going to play,” he snapped. “I don’t ask the audience. I don’t have any hits. Helen Keller gets more airplay than I do … when I get on stage it’s my radio show and I’ll do whatever I want.” He said that what he really wanted was to stay in one place for two months—to “do it, like, in New York, in a theater, on Broadway.” He was tired of playing “beer bars … with bad plumbing, termites and junk all over the carpet.”
Waits wound up the first leg of the tour with a homecoming show at San Diego’s California Theater. Aired on KGB-FM, it gave at least some of his fans what they wanted in the form of songs from Small Change (“Jitterbug Boy,” “The One that Got Away”) and even The Heart of Saturday Night (“Depot, Depot,” “New Coat of Paint”). After four sellouts at the Hartford Theater in Huntington Beach, he crawled back to the Tropicana.
At home he was restless, lamenting the fact that his natural instinct after coming off a tour was to lie around drinking beer and watching Bonanza or I Love Lucy on TV. He even made noises about quitting the motel that had been home for two and a half years. “I like it because I’m very accessible there, but sometimes that’s annoying,” he confessed. “I’ve thought about moving out but I never seem to get around to it. Where would I go? Probably another motel somewhere.”
Waits’ inamorata hadn’t slowed down any during the three months he was away on tour. But at least Rickie Lee Jones was now at work on her debut album for Warners, who were putting all their guns behind her. Bones Howe may have figured Rickie was “just another singer-songwriter shot through the breeze,” but Lenny Waronker was convinced of her talent. “She came in with massive attitude, to the point where you were kind of intimidated,” he says. “She was such a unique individual.” Lenny recalls her talking very little about Waits. “She was very private about the relationship,” he says. “If she referred to him, it was in a very minimal way. But one thing she got from him really struck home with me. It had to do with imagination and the importance of using it. It was one of those small statements that says a lot. Something like, ‘Never let anybody mess with your imagination.’”
For all that he liked to portray the relationship as an outlaw romance, Waits was himself intimidated by Jones. “I love her madly in my own way—you’ll gather that our relationship wasn’t exactly like Mike Todd and Elizabeth Taylor—but she scares me to death,” he said. “She is much older than I am in terms of street wisdom. Sometimes she seems as ancient as dirt, and yet other times she’s so like a little girl.” If that sounded like an outtake from Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman,” Jones’ streetwise recklessness certainly masked a deeper insecurity. “I think she was a lot more special than I ever knew, because I didn’t think she was very pretty or smart,” she said of herself in 1984. “She was real scared of everybody and everything, every staircase she walked down, every move she made, every word she said.” Waits, she felt, had a confidence she would always lack. “He was always, I thought— and maybe this is because I was in love with him—much more charming than me. He could charm the socks off you. And he seemed to really be able to make friends with big wheels and do it gracefully on their level.”
For the attention of Mr. Waits: Rickie Lee writes …
The songs for Rickie Lee Jones had come together slowly. “Easy Money” had, as planned, appeared on Lowell George’s solo album, while “The Last Chance Texaco” was heard on her 1978 demo tape by a knocked-out Emmylou Harris. “Company,” “After Hours,” and “On Saturday Afternoons in 1963” were as delicately beautiful as any of Waits’ great ballads. For Waronker the obvious choice as lead single was a song called “Chuck E’s in Love,” inspired by a phone call Waits had received as he and Jones slobbed around one night at the Tropicana. It was Weiss calling from Denver to say he’d been smitten by a distant cousin. When Waits uttered the immortal line, Jones instantly seized on it. (The sassy boho classic concealed a deeper grief for a friendship Jones thought she might be about to lose, revealing at the end that Weiss was in love with her. If that was true, it must have been a factor in the gradual dissolution of the Waits-Jones-Weiss triad.)
Recording sessions for Rickie Lee Jones had begun in late 1978, with Waronker and co-producer Russ Titelman recruiting a slew of studio personnel that rivalled the average Steely Dan album. Steve Gadd and Jeff Porcaro drummed, Dr. John and Randy Newman guested, and Michael McDonald sang backup on “Young Blood.” The only conspicuous absentee was Waits himself, who felt peeved as his girlfriend got the big-budget treatment at a time when Elektra-Asylum was losing interest in him. The production—Waronker’s fabled “Burbank sound”—was far slicker than Waits’ had ever been. “Rickie Lee was fairly wild,” Titelman told me of the recordings. “But you knew you were in the presence of something special. The sessions were spontaneous, explosive. She’d never done this before, she was just a kid with a guitar, but she knew exactly what she wanted. At the end of the session, we played through the album and she sat there and asked, ‘Is that me?’”
Lenny’s hunch had been dead-on. By May, after an appearance on Saturday Night Live, “Chuck E’s in Love” was in the charts. By early July it was at No. 4 and the beret-sporting, cigarillo-toting Jones—who’d only dared to dream of the cult acclaim accorded her boyfriend—was almost a household name. Success changed everything, as it invariably does. On one hand it made Jones manic; on the other it made her feel inadequate and undeserving. In a long Rolling Stone cover story that included an Annie Leibovitz shot of Jones and Chuck E. Weiss at Duke’s, Rickie Lee spilled all her beans while paradoxically voicing the belief that “if you talk to magazines … then you’re vulnerable and it’ll fuck you every time.” Jones boasted that she liked “taking any kind of risk” and had “done every kind of drug you can do—STP, pot, cocaine, everything but junk …” She also took interviewer Timothy White to the Tropicana and showed him Waits’ bungalow, with the piano where he let her write. “I just thought you’d like to see this nice, crazy little place,” she giggled. “Now you’ve seen just about everything in my world.”
In fact, Jones was being subtly undermined by Waits. “I started feeling more insecure as my career began,” she said. “Maybe it’s the influence of other people who were more dominant, without naming names …” For Waits, Rickie’s “overnight success” was an uncomfortable remake of A Star Is Born on the sleazier streets of West Hollywood. Eclipsed by the attention she was getting, he was unsure how to deal with it. And as he withdrew emotionally from her, she fell into the consoling arms of heroin. “Tom didn’t have as much recognition as Rickie Lee had, and he’d been around much longer,” Chuck E. Weiss said. “It was the same with me. I had a bit of envy for what she achieved too. But she couldn’t handle it, man.”
For Weiss, “Chuck E’s in Love” became more of a curse than a blessing. Being namechecked on “Jitterbug Boy” and “I Wish I Was in New Orleans” was one thing; being on America’s lips was quite another level of fame. “I was honored that a friend of mine would write a song about me,” he said. “But when it became such a huge hit, I wasn’t as honored as before. It became less personal. I imagine it’s the same for Rickie as it is for me. She’s known for the song and so am I.” Like Jones, Weiss felt the sadness of the change in the friendship. “It affected all three of us in a very strange way,” he said. “There was a lot of emotional stuff going on with all three of us. It had to do with her success and we were all taking drugs and getting high. And that intensified the drama of it, for sure. So it was all mixed up. And we were very young. Things were never really normal again after that.”2*
In mid-April, Waits and band flew to Holland for a short European tour that took in Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Vienna, London, Dublin, Brussels, and Paris. Performances were interspersed with TV appearances and press interviews. “I’m trying to cut down on the road because everything gets run down,” Waits said in Copenhagen. “Lot of traveling. No sleep. Bad food. Get tired of myself, usually want to get twelve hours of sleep and some twelve-year-old Scotch. Huh-huh. Trying to get healthy. Doing push-ups now. In the hotel room. All by myself. Feel kinda stupid. Have to do something”3* If the bellyaching was becoming monotonous, few rock stars of the era were as honest about how debilitating it was to play nightly shows in different cities and countries. Evidently Herb Cohen had clocked his boy’s state of mind, because he decided to tag along for the ride.
In Vienna on 19 April, Waits was filmed by Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher for a short documentary that incorporated live performances of “Sweet Little Bullet,” “Christmas Card,” and a loose-limbed take on “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” “He came in from Amsterdam saying he hadn’t slept all night, but he agreed on the spot to let us film him,” says Rossacher. “He said he didn’t want to do a proper interview but instead he wanted to tell stories.” Rossacher and Dolezal drove Waits to a gas station, where he reminisced about working for Spotco’s Self-Service in National City—“One day, Spotco, I’ll be leaning against a gas pump in Vienna, Austria …”—before adjourning to a Greek cafe where he told a long joke about a saxophonist who moves to Rome to rekindle his musical fire, miming a horn solo in his phlegmiest scat voice. Early the next morning they wound up in a bar where a soused Waits danced with a Thai prostitute.
Scoping the scene with Rudi Dolezal, Vienna, April 1979. (Hannes Rossacher)
At the Konzerthaus that night, Waits was out front as a showman, freed from the refuge of the piano stool as he slashed at his guitar and pulled off a jerky fusion of Mick Jagger and James Brown at the microphone. Backstage, as he prepared to encore, he paced between hangers-on, grinning like a cheeky urchin before firing up “When the Saints Go Marching In,” the Dixieland anthem he was tacking on to the end of “I Wish I Was in New Orleans.” Skinny and shuffling compulsively, a tie round his collarless neck, he resembled a penniless pub rocker. The can in his hand gave the lie to his claims that he’d forsaken booze. “I’ve been trying to give up drinking,” he said in London, “but every time I stop it makes me so nervous I have to take a drink.” It was a cavalier bon mot that masked the deeper reality of his alcoholism. Years later he would reflect on his drinking in this period. “When you begin, it’s a man takes a drink,” he said. “When you end up, it’s a drink takes a man. Keeping my balance during that period was tricky. When I was in my twenties I thought I was invincible, made out of rubber. You skate along the straight razor and flirt with it all the time.”
The more Waits divorced himself from the Beat verse/jazz-trio platform of his core sound, the more he dreamed of junking it altogether. “I’m trying to do an R&B album when I get home,” he said in Copenhagen. “Trying to do something a little more, uh, mix-it-up.” He said he had two months to write an album and “no idea of what I’m going to come up with.” In London to play the Palladium, he told the New Musical Express he planned to do something “harder” than he’d ever attempted before, something Blue Valentine had only hinted at. “I think my voice is ready for it now,” he stated. “I’m ready to scream … yeah, I really feel like screaming.”4*
On stage in that European fortnight you could hear Waits tapping into a hard-blues mode that suggested Howlin’ Wolf via Captain Beefheart, harnessing his bourbon-soaked growl in the service of a music that rocked. “I was trying to find some new channel or breakthrough for myself,” he told me. “I was still in the rhythm of making a record, going out on the road for eight months, coming home and making another record, living in hotels. And I was still with Herbie Cohen in this tight little world.”
After two shows at the Palace Theatre in Paris, Waits and entourage flew twenty-two hours to the land of “Waltzing Matilda.” His appearance on Don Lane’s chat show was a memorable introduction to the Antipodes. All itchy shuffling and bony angles, with his porkpie hat and cigarettes as failsafe props, Waits happily played up to his image as showbiz hobo. Paradoxically Waits never seemed more comfortable than on chat shows, teasing interrogators as he kept them guessing as to how real his “act” was.
Road burnout: backstage with Greg Cohen, Copenhagen, April 1979. (Tom Sheehan)
Taking in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Perth, Waits’ first Australian tour was a triumph. He would kick off with the swingingest “Romeo Is Bleeding,” cool down with “Annie’s Back in Town” and a medley of “Jitterbug Boy”/“Better Off Without a Wife,” and—halfway through “I Wish I Was in New Orleans”—go full-pelt into “When the Saints Go Marching In,” Herb Hardesty blowing up a storm on second-line trumpet as Waits’ voice resembled a blend of Dr. John and Joe Cocker. A lachrymose rendition of the blues ballad “Since I Fell for You” would give way to the sinister “Red Shoes,” introduced as “a little Christmas carol.” He’d come out of the applause and segue into “Silent Night,” itself a preface to “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis.” Romping it up again, the band would kick into a “Pasties and a G-String” ingeniously reframed as “Do the Hokey Cokey,” Waits deconstructing the piece in his most demented, syllable-eliding, meta-Satchmo gurgle of a voice.
“Burma Shave” was sublime, Hardesty riffing on Gershwin’s “Summertime” as Arthur Richards laid bittersweet chords over Greg Cohen’s ambling bass line. Waits turned the song into a theatre piece, slouching between the petrol pumps in a smalltown-punk leather jacket and prefacing the song with the back-story of his Marysville cousin before delivering the song in a conspiratorial spoken-word whisper. Waits’ stage act was now a virtual mime show of contorted gestures, with one arm raised over his head while the other’s long double-jointed fingers crawled on his shoulders like a tarantula. Bent over with his eyes closed, his tousled head was lost in a shroud of cigarette smoke. The voice sounded blacker than ever.
At the piano, Waits’ head lolled every which way and his chin bobbed around the microphone. Naturally in Australia he had to play “Tom Traubert’s Blues,” announcing that he’d “kind of borrowed your unofficial national anthem on this little thing” and tearing the guts out of its alcoholic tragicomedy. For an encore Waits delivered a long and chilling “Small Change,” Hardesty wheezing around him as Tom spat out the words and even broke into a lurchingly inebriated “Hey, Big Spender.” As a seventy-five-minute set it was magnificent.
Returning to LA in May, Waits glanced around his glorified Tropicana crash pad and knew it was time for a change of scenery. The fact that the Tropicana management had just painted the pool black seemed to augur ill. “That’s when I said this has gone too far,” he told me. “It was a pretty heavy place at times. I had a good seat at the bar and I could see everyone in the room, but I think there are other things to write about.”
The scale of Rickie Lee Jones’ heroin problem wasn’t helping matters. Though he continued to hare around with her and Weiss, their drug use kept him at one remove. “For all the craziness he projects, Tom’s a fairly normal guy,” Paul Body says. “That whole sort of jazz-junkie life was never his thing and I think it might have freaked him out.” In amongst the jockey-stealing escapades there were moments of danger that terrified the middle-class boy from Whittier and Chula Vista. “I found myself in some places I can’t believe I made it out of alive,” he confessed years later. “People with guns. People with gunshot wounds. People with heavy drug problems. People who carried guns everywhere they went, always had a gun. You live like that, you attract lower company.”
The fact that Rickie Lee was now a star made little difference to her drug intake. “The record company were making such a fuss over her,” Chuck E. Weiss said. “They more or less chose to ignore some of the heavy drug use that was going on. I thought that was bullshit at the time, that they wouldn’t pay attention to that. As long as she kept producing the songs, it didn’t matter to them. It was a harsh lesson for all of us to learn at that point.” Weiss’ words are themselves harsh. Both Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman did their best to help Jones and certainly didn’t ignore her problems. But there was far less understanding of addiction than there is today, when rehab has become a virtual career move.
Jones has said she was a heroin addict for two years, though it was a subsequent six months of cocaine use that ultimately brought her to her knees. Being with Waits, a man all too familiar with the effects of drugs on jazz musicians, would only have made her shame greater. “Rickie Lee’s heroin problem was being gossiped about,” says Louie Lista. “Chuckie was having a lot of trouble with that at the time as well. The party started becoming a little too costly. In that pre-Betty Ford era a lot of us started taking falls behind all the excess.”
Waits’ experiences with Jones and Weiss impacted directly on the new songs he was writing. The harsh and unforgiving world of junkies and prostitutes flowed into his music at the precise time when it was becoming harder, blacker, more grittily bluesy. Blue Valentine had taken Waits halfway there, but now he wanted to up the ante with a sound that spared no one. It was Howlin’ Wolf in Hollywood Babylon, a brutal blues that cranked up guitar and drums and unleashed Waits’ voice at its most savage and inflamed.
Exerting an influence on Waits at this time was a new and exciting wave of LA roots-rock bands emerging from the city’s punk scene. In amongst such bands as the Blasters and Los Lobos, a group Waits particularly loved was Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs, who held down a chaotic Monday night residency at Hollywood’s Cathay de Grande club. “The Pigs were a soulful bunch,” says Stephen Hodges, who drummed in Long Beach rivals the James Harman Band. “You’d go to the gig and then by the end it’s going really bad because Jimmy’s getting drunker and drunker. But he was a really intelligent guy and we all had some really brilliant moments with him.”
Pigs guitarist Carlos “Guitarlos” Ayala recalls Waits checking out the band at the Cathay de Grande, and later hanging out and drinking with Jimmy Koncek. “He hit it off with Jimmy because nobody else could understand him,” Guitarlos says. “Jimmy had that loser’s vibe, that James Dean charisma, and I think Tom wanted to cultivate that too.” Stephen Hodges says the Pigs’ style and attitude was as important to Waits as their sound. “It was the whole thing, because that was how Waits dressed,” he says. “It was the whole bowling shirt and hairspray thing.” The band eventually became enough of a local legend to inspire a song on Van Halen’s 1984 album Jump.
Benefit for Top Jimmy and wife Luci, busted for possession in Oklahoma, December 1981. (Courtesy of Carlos Guitarlos)
One night Waits was slouched in the Ski Room when a woman stumbled in off Sunset Boulevard, collapsed on the floor, and cried out that she was having a heart attack. As Waits looked on in disbelief, the bartender took one look at the distraught creature and told her to take it outside. This was a new low in Californian cold-bloodedness. Waits went back to the Tropicana and sketched out a stark piece called “Heartattack and Vine”—“Sweet Little Bullet” with added rage and cynicism.
Waits planned to call the new album Lucky Streak and have it ready for a fall release. But he was also continuing work on Guy Peellaert’s Las Vegas book and on Why Is the Dream So Much Sweeter than the Taste? with Paul Hampton, projects that may have eaten into time he’d normally have channelled into his music. Further delaying recording was Waits’ surprise decision to accompany Jones on part of her first European tour. Flying with her to London in late August, Waits was by her side as she played dates in Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Manchester, Birmingham, and London. Photographed before a show at the capital’s Dominion Theatre, the couple were all over each other, Jones clinging to Waits like a little girl on her dad’s lap. But Waits knew the relationship wasn’t right, wasn’t healthy: within weeks of returning home he had broken up with her.
“I think one of the reasons Tom backed off Rickie Lee was the heroin factor,” says Robert Marchese. But it wasn’t only heroin that made him pull back from her. Jones’ underlying dependency was not ultimately what Waits needed in a woman, and years later Jones came to understand that. “I think Tom had his feet on the ground much more than me,” she said. “He was making himself up, but he didn’t have so much trouble in his background as I did.”
The loss of Waits devastated Jones, who holed up with her habit in a suite at the swanky Chateau Marmont and began a six-month slide into cocaine psychosis. “It’s an evil, evil drug,” she said. “It’s the best argument for the idea of a devil, because it opens the door to the worst parts of the human spirit and mind.” Gradually Jones pulled herself together, pouring her pain into one of pop’s great breakup albums. Musically a fusion of Steely Dan’s Aja and Joni Mitchell’s majestic Court and Spark, 1981’s Pirates was a testament to overpowering grief, perfectly described by Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden as “explosively passionate and exhilaratingly eccentric.” “I think you picked this up in Mexico from your dad,” she sang on “We Belong Together,” dispelling any doubt as to who she was singing about. In “A Lucky Guy” she foolishly told Waits she loved him, her girlish soprano only underscoring the sense of unrequited adoration. “Living It Up” told the tale of the Waits-Weiss-Jones triad, casting them as Louie, Eddie, and Zero. On the sublime “Traces of the Western Slopes” she sang of the extremes of grief.
“The western slopes was a phrase my friend from Denver used to use to refer to whacked-out people,” Jones said in 2001. “‘She’s off on the western slope,’ he might say. So did I ever find the western slopes? I came back with maps. I left a trail of bread. I made a poster for the tourist board.” When Jones came to Britain to promote Pirates, she was “somewhat worse for wear,” according to interviewer Paolo Hewitt. “About five minutes into the interview, in a room on the fourteenth floor, she pointed at the window and said people kept walking past and looking in at her.” If that isn’t cocaine psychosis I don’t know what it is.
Jones still hadn’t gotten over Waits in 1983, when she released the part-live mini-album Girl at Her Volcano, complete with versions of Rodgers and Hart’s “My Funny Valentine,” Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” and June Christy’s signature ballad “Something Cool” that were as agonizingly vulnerable as Billie Holiday at her most broken. The choice of “Rainbow Sleeves,” an exquisite if shamelessly sentimental ballad Waits had written for Bette Midler, seemed almost masochistic.
Waits’ breakup with Jones was symptomatic of a more general desire for change on his part. He was tired of playing “Tom Waits” for people who couldn’t see the true depths of his music, who wanted jokes from a performing seal. In late September, shortly before setting off on tour, he finally moved out of his Tropicana bungalow and into a quiet East Hollywood neighbourhood close to his father. “It got a little too aggravating for me,” he said of the Trop. “So I left and I now live on Crenshaw Boulevard. No one will ever find me, it’s a long street.”
By the end of October, Waits felt he was “poised on the threshold of some sort of a new direction.” He said he was “getting a little tired of growling and scratching the back of my neck.” His deepest dread was of sinking into a rut. When I first met him in 1985, he looked back on this watershed period of his career and compared the compromises he’d made to those made by politicians. “Something compels you to be popular,” he said. “Seems like the politics of music do to a lot of musicians the same thing as politics do to a guy when he finally gets into office—he sells all his ideas to get there.” For Waits, creative stagnation was bound up with everything else negative in his life, not least his drinking. On some level he understood that alcohol was part of his act, trapping him in a role he no longer wanted to play “Most of us expect artists to do irresponsible things, to be out of control,” he said in 1999. “Somehow we believe that if you’re way down there, you’re going to bring something back up for us, and we won’t have to make the trip.” Sadly, as the example of Amy Winehouse can attest, this seems to be a lesson each musical generation has to learn for itself.
As Waits approached thirty that December, he was concerned enough about his health to quit smoking (again) and “ration” his drinking (again). “As I turn the corner on 30 I’m fastly becoming concerned about personal hygiene,” he said. “Drinking and smoking and smoking and drinking started slowing me down.” He even alluded for the first time to the possibility of one day starting a family. He said he hadn’t found Ms. Right but would “take a white girl, about five-two with big tits and bad teeth.” He pointedly refused to answer questions about Rickie Lee Jones.
David McGee became aware of Waits’ desire for a family when he played New York’s Beacon Theater again at the beginning of November. Visiting McGee and his wife, Waits took a great shine to their one-year-old son Travis, dandling him on his knee as he played the piano in their Hell’s Kitchen apartment. “Looking back on those years I can see the metamorphosis in Tom taking shape,” McGee reflects. “I can only surmise that in my stable home, with a wife and a young son, he found a sanctuary he didn’t have anywhere else in New York and dearly wanted in his own life.”
For the first time since his 1973 debut, Waits hadn’t released a new album for over a year. The Paul Hampton project was fizzling out and the Peellaert book looked to be heading the same way. (In the end Peellaert gave up on Waits, instead commissioning Michael Herr to write the text. It eventually appeared, as The Big Room, in 1986.) Stallone’s Paradise Alley had opened in September with most of Waits’ cameo cut out of it. The relationship with Rickie Lee had failed, or had proved to be a kind of amour fou. He’d moved out of the Tropicana, effectively putting a distance between himself and his best friend Chuck E. Weiss— a man who very obviously was stuck in a rut. Waits was so disillusioned that he was close to jacking music in altogether.
Asked in 1992 whether he’d ever contemplated suicide, Waits admitted he’d thought about it. “For people who are very depressed, thoughts about suicide are like erotic thoughts,” he said. “These are the thoughts you toy with that make you very excited. But … if I had really been thinking about it, it already would have happened.” As Christmas loomed, Waits felt a deeper loneliness than he’d ever known. “I’ve tried all kinds and nothing works,” he’d joked of women the previous year. “I may have to settle for livestock, like my first meaningful experience.” He added that he generally ended up “making the scene with a magazine,” a phrase he’d used three years before on Nighthawks at the Diner. “I’ve got a subscription to the Frederick’s of Hollywood’s catalogue,” he said. “I used to jack off to Vogue, but now it takes a little more. I occasionally read Hustler. They show photographs of the ovaries themselves.”
The onanistic jokes masked Waits’ longing for love. While facetiously he claimed he wanted to “adopt a bunch of Mexicans and live out in Pico Rivera and watch a black and white TV set with a T-shirt on and a beer in one hand and dogshit on the lawn,” like many a child of divorced parents he wanted to heal the wound inside by re-creating the family. “As much as he surrounded himself with people, Tom in some ways was a lonely guy,” maintains Bones Howe. “He spent a lot of time alone, writing. He did value the fact that he could be off by himself and write and explore people and all of that that he was very good at, but also I think that he was a guy who longed for closer friendships and family.”
With the approach of the eighties, Waits made the decision to move to New York. As a personal sendoff to La-la Land he agreed to accompany Chuck E. Weiss to a New Year’s Eve party at the Troupers’ Hall on La Brea Avenue. It was the second annual event promoted by Pumpin’ Piano Productions, spearheaded by Art Fein, and featured R&B legend Roy Brown, Pee Wee Crayton, and sax legend Lee Allen. “Each year they’d resurrect some relic from the fifties,” remembers Paul Body. “It was the hippest party around, man.”
Waits and Weiss rolled up at the hall, bought tickets, and proceeded to get royally wrecked. To Waits’ mild amusement, part of the evening’s entertainment was a “Beatnik Poetry Contest,” with people reading to the accompaniment of a female bongo player. “I was moved to participate by reading a poem about the death of Louis Armstrong,” recalls writer Tom Nolan. “I didn’t win the audience applause contest but Waits came up afterwards and hugged me. And I thought, ‘Well, I think I’m gonna retire as a poet now.’”
Waits saw old faces at the party and took the opportunity to say goodbye to friends. Joking that he was moving to New York “for the shoes,” he told Paul Body and others that he’d stay in touch. As Art Fein strolled on stage to announce the raffle-ticket winner of a 1962 Cadillac bought that afternoon for $200, Waits was suddenly introduced to a pretty blonde dressed all in black. “It was love at first sight, no question of it,” he recalled. “I was leaving town the next day going to New York, never to return. But never say never.” Barely catching more than the girl’s name— Kathleen—Waits slunk off into the bowels of the party, listened to Roy Brown belting out “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” and at some point left the party with a female friend on whose floor he crashed as the new decade commenced. “On New Year’s morning I woke up and my best friend had puked in my kitchen,” says Michael Hacker, who lived across the hall from the woman in question. “I was standing in my doorway and the first voice I heard in the new decade was Waits.’”
That night, three thousand miles away, Waits checked into the Chelsea, which he intended to be his temporary base in Manhattan. “I just needed a new urban landscape,” he said on 28 January. “I’ve always wanted to live here. It’s a good working atmosphere for me. So I packed up three suitcases and took off. Once I get located I’ll go back to LA and get the rest of my stuff.” Within a month he had found a $600-a-month apartment on West 26th Street with windows that overlooked Eighth Avenue. A stone’s throw from Macy’s department store, Waits was right in the noisy heart of what he called “a fascinating urban landscape.”
Anyone au fait with recovery from alcoholism or addiction will have worked out that Waits’ city-swap was essentially a “geographical,” defined as the fantasy of removing oneself from Place A in the hope of feeling different in Place B. For four months he made a valiant effort to start again in a city that in some ways seemed a more appropriate environment for him than Los Angeles. He even went to the unprecedented lengths of seeing a psychiatrist, a Dr. David Feuer, and joining a fitness class at the McBurney YMCA. One morning, however, he found himself running down the street to work out, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “The glass … [had] some aluminum foil over it so it wouldn’t spill,” he recalled in 1999. “I realized I was kind of coming apart.” His drinking seemed to increase in proportion to his frustration at not being able to find a new channel. “You’re like a wound-up toy car who’s hit a wall and you just keep hitting it,” he said in 2004. “I was very self-destructive. Drinking and smoking and staying out all night long, and it wasn’t good for me so I sounded like I’d been screaming into a pillow. You know, I needed to shift gears—I knew that I wanted to change but I didn’t really know how to do it.”
Among the new projects Waits contemplated was an idea for a Broadway musical based on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, to be written with David McGee. The concept, according to McGee, was “to take stock of New York in the seventies,” with Waits suggesting they replace Wilder’s Stage Manager with a grizzled newsstand vendor who comments on the action as it unfolds but also hides a dark secret—a murder—of his own. Hardened as he was to urban street life, Waits nonetheless felt like a fish out of water in Manhattan. “It’s a hard city, you know?” he told me. “You have to be on your toes. When I arrived, I actually had a cab driver say to me, ‘If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere, just like Frank said …’ You have to be a little off-center because it’s overwhelming.”
As Waits braved the vicious winter, he thought long and hard about changes he wanted to make. Tempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater, he considered making a clean sweep of things. Rumours reached Bones Howe that Waits was recording demos with Jack Nitzsche, the irascible arranger and producer who’d worked with everyone from Phil Spector and Neil Young to Graham Parker and who was about to start work on a new album by Mink de Ville. Asked about it later in the year, Waits didn’t deny that he’d met with Nitzsche. “I had some plans to explore new producers,” he said. “I’d moved to New York for about five-six months, wanting to challenge myself with an entirely new environment.” But he told Stephen Peeples that in the end his “very close and personal” relationship with Howe had won out over other considerations. “I decided that the change was something that had to take place inside of me and with my own musical growth,” he said. “I wanted to take some dangerous chances, and I felt Bones could best accommodate me.”
This was slightly disingenuous. What actually drew Waits back to California was a phone call from film director Francis Ford Coppola, then recovering from the drama and hype of his Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now. For his follow-up project Coppola was making a film set in Las Vegas, itself a subject Waits had thought a lot about. One from the Heart was intended to be an intensely stylized look at a group of intertwined love affairs in the garish desert city of neon and slot machines.
Wanting the film to be built around music, Coppola had asked his son to recommend contemporary singer-songwriters who wrote in the Tin Pan Alley idiom. When Gian-Carlo Coppola played his father his Tom Waits albums, the director flipped. “I Never Talk to Strangers,” the Foreign Affairs duet with Bette Midler, was exactly how he heard the music for One from the Heart in his mind. “He liked the relationship between the singers, a conversation between a guy and a girl in a bar,” Waits recalled. “That was the impetus for him contacting me and asking me if I was interested in writing music for his film.”
Still stoked about plans for Our Town, David McGee took the news in his stride when Waits called to tell him about Coppola. “I don’t know what to do,” he told McGee plaintively. “Are you crazy?” McGee replied. “You have to go. Francis Ford Coppola called you. Go. Get out of here as fast as you can.” “You think?” “And never look back. We can pick up our thing when you finish. Go. Tom, Francis Ford Coppola called.” McGee says he can still hear how blasé Waits sounded, “though I don’t think he was that way at all … he knew how big this was.”
When Coppola flew to New York to oversee auditions for the film, he scheduled a meeting with Waits. Though Waits instantly responded to Coppola’s vision and enthusiasm, he felt conflicted about the idea of the film. It was as if he was at the biggest crossroads of his life with no idea which way to turn. On one hand he was exhilarated at the prospect of writing a movie soundtrack; on the other the film entailed revisiting a whole genre of music he’d already decided to leave behind. It was, he later admitted, a “step backwards” to return to his old milieu of “mortuary piano” and “cocktail hairdos” at the precise time he was trying to slam the door on it.
“By the time Francis asked me to write those songs, I had really decided I was going to move away from that whole lounge thing,” he told me. “He said he wanted a ‘lounge operetta,’ and I was thinking, ‘Well, you’re about a couple of years too late.’ All that was coming to a close for me, so I had to kind of go and bring it all back. It was like growing up and hitting the roof.”
Still, Waits wasn’t having much fun in New York. With wind-chill temperatures some days dropping to thirty below and constant fears that his tiny apartment was being burgled, his sojourn in the City That Never Slept was turning into what he remembered as a “prison sentence.” The narrowness of Manhattan, with its giant buildings bearing down on him, made him feel claustrophobic. Flying back to the sprawl of Los Angeles on 30 April, he was relieved to be home. “Tom was always just an LA guy to me,” says Paul Body. “There was nothing New York about him. I didn’t get any East Coast vibe off of him anytime.”
The One from the Heart assignment was almost scuppered when Herb Cohen refused to yield publishing rights to Coppola. Fortunately Bones Howe, whom Coppola had hired to oversee the music, intervened to work out a compromise. “One of the things Francis wanted was to own all the music in the film,” Howe says. “I had a meeting with Francis and told him I had a conflict of interest. He said, ‘Well, think of someone else to do the music.’ I read the script and said, ‘Francis, I think you should make a deal with Tom because I think he would be perfect for this movie.’ Between Herb and Francis’ lawyers, they managed to make it work.” In the end publishing rights were split between Cohen and Zoetrope.
By May, Waits was installed in his own wood-panelled office on the Zoetrope lot. Complete with a grand piano, a battered couch, and the usual Waits detritus of books, papers, ashtrays, and beer cans, it was little more than a tony version of his old Tropicana bungalow. But for the first time in his life Waits felt like those for-hire songwriters who’d worked to order on Tin Pan Alley. He was living in the songwriting fantasy he’d had when he’d first showed up in Los Angeles eight years before.
And then one afternoon came a soft knock at the door. Tom Waits’ life was about to change forever.
1* The notion of Waits as “Wino Man” evokes something Lou Reed said to me in 1996: “I ducked behind [my] image for so long that after a while there was a real danger of it becoming just a parody thing. Even if I was trying to be serious, you didn’t know whether to take it seriously or not. There’d been so much posturing that there was a real confusion between that life and real life. I was doing a tightrope act that was pretty scary no matter where you were viewing it from.”
2* Attempting to capitalize on Weiss’ sudden fame, Art Fein dangled a $5,000 deal with Mercury in front of him. “Chuckie was a sometime singer but I didn’t know him as a songwriter,” Fein told me. “He would sing R&B stuff, and to no effect. He wasn’t playing anywhere, it was just something he did. So when ‘Chuck E’s’ came out, I said, ‘So Chuck, are you gonna put a record out?’ And he said yes, but he was doing whatever drugs he was doing and generally not being together. He said, ‘I wanna do my own material,’ and he went into a studio in Malibu with Dr. John. They were both about equally coherent at the time.” Fein recalled Weiss being carried unconscious out of Canter’s Deli the night before the sessions began. The Other Side of Town eventually appeared in 1981 and featured “Sidekick,” a duet with Rickie Lee. Said Fein, “It came out in France and it came out here too, but needless to say nobody heard it and it was too late.”
3* The “twelve-year-old Scotch” quip almost became the title of Waits’ next album. “He would call me from the road,” remembers Bones Howe. “He’d wake me up in the middle of the night to make me laugh. My wife handed me the phone once and Tom said, ‘I just figured out the name of the next album. Twelve-Year-Old Scotch and Twelve-Year-Old Girls.’ And he hung up the phone.”
4* According to Paolo Hewitt, then of Melody Maker, the London Palladium show was particularly memorable for Waits’ encore. The curtain closed after the set and when it reopened it had been done up like a sitting room, with Waits seated on the sofa in a white dressing gown, smoking and reading a newspaper with the TV on. “He finally looked up and asked the audience if they wanted to watch anything,” Hewitt says. “It being Saturday night, the reply was ‘Match of the Day.’ Of course, Waits had no idea what was being asked for, until someone shouted, ‘The football!’ He tried to change channels but couldn’t tune in to the BBC. So instead he ambled over to the piano in his dressing gown and played the encore.”
