“Here’s the deal, folks. You do a commercial, you’re off
the artistic roll call for ever. End of story, okay?”
(Bill Hicks, Arizona Bay)
It all started with Tex Avery, genius creator of Bugs Bunny and animator of a pistol-packin’ bandit who held up ordinary hardworking Americans and relieved them of their scrumptious Frito Corn Chips. “Aye, yi, yi, yi, I am the Frito Bandito!” the little guy chirped in a Mel Blanc voiceover.
I like Frito’s Corn Chips, I love them I do
I want Frito’s Corn Chips, I’ll get them from you!
In 1971, following four years of repeated complaints from the National Mexican-American Anti-Defamation Committee, Avery’s Speedy Gonzales stereotype was rightly put out to pasture and Frito-Lay, makers of said chips, were forced to figure out alternative ways to hawk their product to ordinary hardworking Americans.
Step Right Up for the Frito Bandito!
Years passed. In 1988, ad agency Tracy-Locke hit on the inspired idea of adapting the Tom Waits track “Step Right Up” to flog a new Frito-Lay product called SalsaRio Doritos. The garrulous parody of a salesman hyping a mysterious product that solved all life’s problems in an instant went down a storm at Frito-Lay Session singer Stephen Carter was duly roped in to ape Waits’ gruff hipster delivery and, in September 1988, the ads were aired on some 250 US radio stations. “It’s buffo, boffo, bravo, gung ho, tallyho, but never mellow,” Carter barked. “Try ’em, buy ’em, get ’em, got ’em!”
The first Waits knew of the SalsaRio Doritos ad was when a DJ happened to play it on the morning of 3 October 1988. For the next week he did little but call friends and acquaintances to set them straight. Frito-Lay was messing with the wrong guy. Waits had already expressed strong opposition to artists letting their work be hijacked for commercial purposes. The irony of customizing the very track that lampooned the hyperbole of America’s hucksters clearly bypassed the suits at the company. A lawsuit was brought against Frito-Lay, and against Tracy-Locke, in November 1988 and came to court in LA in April 1990.
True, Waits had once succumbed to the lure of the advertising dollar himself. In August 1981, he’d done the voice-over for a commercial advertising Butcher’s Blend dry dog food.1* “As Dog travels through the envied and often tempting world of Man,” Waits growled as a Dalmatian padded hungrily past neon signs flashing “Beef,” “Liver,” and “Bacon,” “there’s one thing above all that tempts him most—the taste of meat! And that’s why Purina makes Butcher’s Blend. Butcher’s Blend is the first dry dog food with three tempting meaty tastes: beef, liver, and bacon. All in one bag. So c’mon, deliver your dog from the world of temptation. The world of Butcher’s Blend. The first dry dog food with three meaty tastes.”
Waits had certainly left himself open to charges of hypocrisy. But his real bone of contention was artists who allowed their songs to be repurposed as advertising slogans. Two such were Lou Reed, pictured astride a Honda motorcycle, and Waits’ old influence Dr. John, whose talents were enlisted to help shift toilet rolls. “You know, when a guy is singing to me about toilet paper … you may need the money but I mean, rob a 7–11!” Waits fulminated. “Do something with dignity and save us all the trouble of peeing on your grave.”
Fifteen years later, in a letter to The Nation, he put it more thoughtfully. “Songs carry emotional information, and some transport us back to a poignant time, place or event in our lives,” he wrote. “It’s no wonder a corporation would want to hitch a ride on the spell these songs cast and encourage you to buy soft drinks, underwear or automobiles while you’re in the trance. Artists who take money for ads poison and pervert their songs.”
On this issue Waits was with Bill Hicks, the taboo-busting comedian whose raging routines he had come to revere. After comedian Jay Leno did an ad for—guess what—Doritos, Hicks had stated that endorsing such products made you “another corporate fucking shill, another whore at the capitalist gangbang,” rendering “everything you say” suspect and “every word that comes out of your mouth” like “a turd falling into my drink.” Waits also claimed he’d had an epiphany upon hearing Jimmie Rodgers—not the Singing Brakeman but the late-fifties folk-pop singer of “Honeycomb” and “Kisses Sweeter than Wine” fame— adapt one of his songs into a TV jingle for Carpeteria. Disturbed by the experience, he’d worked it into Frank’s Wild Years, contorting “Innocent when You Dream” into “You’re in a Suit of Your Dreams” for the scene in which his hero took a job in an all-night Las Vegas haberdashery.
In 1992, Waits won his David-and-Goliath case against Frito-Lay and Tracy-Locke, earning more money (a handy $2.6 million) from the settlement than he’d made from all his albums to date. Bizarrely, the award failed to deter others from using Waits’ music to market their wares. When Herb Cohen licensed Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ version of “Heartattack and Vine” to Levi-Strauss, the singer again went to war. This time he couldn’t sue on the grounds that Levi-Strauss had committed “the Midler tort”—misappropriating Waits’ vocal style and thus implying that he himself endorsed the product—but he still won the case and an apology in Billboard.
Waits knew that Levi-Strauss had used soul classics such as Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It through the Grapevine” to sell their 501 jeans. For him the pernicious influence of music videos had filtered through to television commercials. Now immortal songs like “Grapevine” and “Revolution” and “Good Vibrations” were being attached to products whose taint they would never escape. Songs, he believed, should be non-visual, magical experiences that inspired the listener to supply his own accompanying images. At a time when nothing apparently had inherent value anymore—when the value of a copyrighted intellectual property lay solely in its ability to sell something else—Waits’ stand against selling out to Mammon was (and remains) heartwarmingly stubborn.
Aside from post-production work on Big Time—and preparing the music for CD release—Waits took it easy for much of 1988. The film, he explained, was supposed to “go out on the road” while he stayed home and enjoyed quality time with Kellesimone and Casey. “They don’t think I have a job,” he said of his kids. “They think I’m just like them.” Family life in Los Angeles was, he said, “a happy ending … to a terrible story,” though bringing up children was “like living with a bunch of drunks … you really have to be on your toes all the time.” Tom and Kathleen sometimes held parties on Union Avenue, gatherings such as the one that inspired the bizarre-sounding “Filipino Box Spring Hog.” “We sawed the floorboards out of the living room,” Waits explained of the indoor barbecue in the song. “We took the bed, the box spring, and first dug out the hole and filled it with wood, poured gasoline on it, and lit a fire. And the box spring over the top … was the grill. We brought in a pig and cooked it right there.”
Among the friends who showed up at the parties was Chuck E. Weiss, who’d cleaned up his act and now held down a Monday night residency at an unglamorous Sunset Strip club called the Central. “I’ve known Chuck for about a hundred years,” Waits said. “I go down there to the Central and […] that’s a damn good show, a good place to be on Monday nights.” Weiss and his band the Goddamn Liars played the Central almost every week for eleven years. The place was on the point of closing when he called actor pal Johnny Depp and suggested they renovate the place and change its name to the Viper Room. Overnight it became the place for decadent young movie stars to mingle, achieving a certain infamy in 1993 when River Phoenix collapsed and died on the street outside.
The late summer found Waits decamping to the Gallatin National Forest, halfway between Butte and Billings in Montana, to play a hit man in Austrian director Robert Dornhelm’s caper comedy Cold Feet. Co-starring with Sally Kirkland and Robert Altman regular Keith Carradine—with cameos from Jeff Bridges and a pre-Larry Sanders Rip Torn—Waits once again found himself living in a state of suspended animation as he waited to be called for scenes. “Movies are done in such small segments that you have to be very careful about preparation in order to stay in character,” he said. “You can’t really sit around and watch the world news.” Scripted by Montana-based novelists Thomas McGuane and Jim Harrison, Cold Feet was a likable if insubstantial comedy about a trio of smalltime crooks who smuggle emeralds into the US inside a thoroughbred horse. Double-crossed by Monte (Carradine), his ditzy girlfriend Maureen (Kirkland) motors north to Montana in a camper van with the deranged Kenny Prewitt (Waits) in order to track down her errant lover and the horse. Much of the movie was taken up with the relationship between Maureen and Kenny, whose dynamic suggested a pair of dysfunctional siblings. Waits drew on both the Zack of Down by Law and the Rudy of Ironweed to create Kenny, a kind of sulky brother to Kirkland’s oversexed bombshell.
As Kenny in Robert Dornhelm’s Cold Feet (1989), with Sally Kirkland as Maureen. (Kobal)
With his bleached eighties hair, fingerless leather gloves, and predilection for Turkish figs, Kenny was about as unsinister as any comedy psychopath in American cinema. Waits used his oddly loping, pigeon-toed gait to good effect and was the beneficiary of a few good McGuane/Harrison lines. “Actually I think of myself as executive material,” he confided in Kirkland as they sat round a campfire. “I don’t wanna grow old as just another murderer.” If Cold Feet was received less warmly than Dornhelm’s earlier Echo Park, Waits’ Kenny was generally liked. “Waits’ advantage is that he’s a character actor, which allows him a lot of range,” Premiere’s Christopher Connelly noted, adding that unlike the critically panned Madonna he didn’t have “a mass following” and wasn’t “used up as a cultural icon.”
As tedious as the filmmaking process was, Waits relished the chance to spend time with his family in the wilds of Montana. “This is the best summer I’ve had in a long, long time,” he told Franny Thumm, describing the afternoon he’d just enjoyed in a nearby swimming hole. He said he’d been out collecting rocks with Kellesimone, who told him that pretty stones were good people that had died, whereas “all the little ones you’re not interested in are bad people.” He said the mountains and “wide open spaces” were so beautiful “it takes the top of your head off.”
Montana made Tom and Kathleen think hard about where they wanted to live and what they wanted for their children. “[We’ve] been gridlocked in LA for so long,” Waits told Thumm. “I would like to exchange the dynamic so that going into town would be what going into the country is now.” Both Waits and Brennan wanted to distance themselves from what LA represented. “They’ve always lived simply and sensibly and seem really grounded,” Chris Blackwell says of the couple.
For Blackwell, too, the marriage only became stronger as it evolved. “As long as I’ve known them I have seen them as a team, as partners,” he says. Waits told Franny Thumm that no one made him laugh like Kathleen. “She’s great in emergencies and she’s brutally honest.” He added that she continued to challenge him as a songwriter, helping him to “feel safe in my uncertainty.” Brennan had helped Waits to demystify music, dissolving the artificial barriers that separated the creative process from the life that nurtured it. “After a while you realize that music—the writing and enjoying of it—is not off the coast of anything,” he said. “It’s not sovereign, it’s well-woven, a fabric of everything else: sunglasses, a great martini, Turkish figs, grand pianos.” It was a beautiful insight that changed the whole way he looked at his work.
Waits kept his toes in the musical waters with a splendidly irascible version of “Heigh Ho” for Stay Awake, Hal Willner’s 1988 album of Disney songs, while also providing an offscreen cameo as the voice of a DJ in Jim Jarmusch’s Memphis-set narrative triptych Mystery Train. But his main focus as 1989 commenced was on two projects: a role in the LA production of cult playwright Thomas Babe’s Demon Wine, and a collaboration on a “cowboy opera” called The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets with Robert Wilson.
In the world premiere of Babe’s play, which opened on 1 December at the Los Angeles Theater Center, Waits played Curly, son of a mobster (Philip Baker Hall) and pal of Jimmie (Bill Pullman, who’d played Buck in Cold Feet). “I feel a little intimidated,” he said of his first stage role since Frank’s Wild Years. The schedule was punishing for Waits, who wasn’t used to rehearsing eight hours before driving home to learn lines and prepare for the following day’s work. He felt sometimes “like an ant hanging onto a cracker in the middle of a storm.” But he enjoyed the freedom from musical responsibilities and saw parallels between Demon Wine and his own writing. “Both my songs and [Babe’s] play are about ‘the gravel of the earth,’ as he puts it,” he said. “He’s written this comedy that really slams into the American idea of success, the Horatio Alger myth that you can get what you want.” Director David Schweizer, he added, was “like a conductor, and we’re his orchestra, and he brings out something new in us every day.”
Robert Wilson was already a towering figure in avant-garde theatre when Kathleen Brennan took her husband to see the four-and-a-half-hour opera Einstein on the Beach at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The tall, gay son of an overbearing civic leader and an emotionally remote mother, Wilson had grown up in Texas with a chronic speech impediment that only improved when dance teacher Byrd Hoffman urged him to “take more time to speak.” Frustrated by smalltown Baptist life, Wilson moved to New York in 1962 to study architecture at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. What really liberated him was New York itself, along with the discovery of the avant-garde dance/performance art scene in downtown Manhattan. “Being awkward and shy, and not comfortable with my body, dance was a liberation,” he has said. “If you know your body, then you know yourself and you can relate.” He also became actively involved in movement and speech therapy with brain-damaged children, a fascination that runs through his subsequent career. For him, the secret to communicating with such kids was to relate to them as a child.
Absolute Robert Wilson (2006).
Returning to Texas in 1965 was a mistake: enmeshed once again with his toxic family, Wilson attempted suicide and was briefly committed to a mental institution. The day he was released, he left Waco once and for all, moving back to New York and the brave new world of its experimental theatre. After founding the experimental Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds company, Wilson’s early productions included The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, the twelve-hour Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, and the seven-day KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace, staged on a mountaintop in Iran. This was radical sixties theatre as communal art, with Wilson as the charismatic leader of what was a virtual cult. The extraordinary Deafman Glance, featuring a deaf African-American boy Wilson had adopted, was (said The New Yorker) “almost impossible to describe … [containing] elements of dance, mime, ‘happening,’ tableau vivant, farce, and medieval mystery play.” In France, Wilson was anointed by Louis Aragon and others as a natural heir to Surrealism. “It was not coming out of what the popular theatre was, which were the psychological, naturalistic theatre groups coming from a more artistic background,” Wilson said in 2000. “I think without John Cage, Alan Kaprow, Robert Morris, and [Robert] Rauschenberg, I probably couldn’t have been doing what I was doing, but I took it and went somewhere else with it.”
After A Letter for Queen Victoria flopped on Broadway in 1974, Wilson disbanded the Byrd Hoffman school, recognizing that many of its actors had become overly dependent on him. 1976’s Einstein on the Beach—originally staged at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House on 21 November 1976—featured a brilliant minimalist score by Philip Glass and marked Wilson’s entry into the world of opera. The acclaim notwithstanding, he made the decision to focus on working in Europe, where grants and subsidies for such forbidding work were easier to come by. If he’d had any doubts about America’s hostility towards the avant-garde, those were dispelled when the CIVIL wars, a vast performance commissioned for the 1984 Olympic Games, was cancelled at the last minute after the Olympic committee refused to cough up the final $200,000 to stage the work.
Wilson’s work was a full-scale imagistic assault on traditional theatre: stark but monumental, slow and dreamlike. His productions broke language down, forcing audiences to question the use of—and even the need for—words. For him, the movement of the human body was at least as important as verbal language as a code of communication. In his work, moreover, they were often in opposition to each other. Waits was entranced by the spectacle of Wilson’s theatre; its use of lighting and props profoundly affected his ideas for Big Time. “[Einstein] was real long, but it’s the closest thing to film I’ve ever seen in the theater because of what he does with the light,” he said. “It felt like waking up on an airplane in the middle of the night […] you look out the window and you don’t know where you are.”
Wilson in turn was captivated by the unorthodoxies of Waits’ music and expressed interest in collaborating when they first met in New York. “Tom and I are very different men,” he said in 1993. “He and I dress differently, have different styles. I tend to be cooler, more formal. But nevertheless I think we’re emotionally tied somehow. In my work the emotion is sometimes hidden or buried, and Tom’s music has a very deep emotional centre for me. I immediately liked it when I first heard it.”
“When I met him I felt I was with an inventor, Alexander Graham Bell or one of those guys,” Waits recalled of their first encounter. “He’s a deep thinker, a man who chooses his words very carefully and is not to be trifled with. We found out we were very different, but there was something we both understood about each other, which was a good thing.” The two very different men—described by writer Paul Schmidt as “America’s greatest minimalist” (Wilson) and its “greatest maximalist”—stayed in touch through the late eighties. “What I like about Robert,” Waits said, “is [that] he’ll go through his calendar when you’re talking about doing something, and he’ll say very seriously, ‘Well, I have a little time in 1998.’ And he’s not joking. And in 1998 you’ll get a call.” It didn’t take quite that long. When he did finally call, Wilson told Waits about the old German folk tale on which Carl Maria von Weber had based the 1821 opera Der Freischütz.
“I read this strange story in a library in Stuttgart,” the director said. “And I immediately thought it was something you might want to do.” In the story—“a sad little tale with a brutal ending,” said Waits—a file clerk falls for a forester’s daughter but to win her hand has to prove to her father that he is as good with a gun as he is with a pen. Offered magic bullets by the devil, the clerk enters into a classic Faustian pact that concludes tragically with the death of his new bride.
Waits agreed to write the songs for the play, which Wilson wanted to call The Black Rider, but said he wasn’t qualified to write the text. It was Allen Ginsberg who suggested Wilson turn instead to William Burroughs, whose own experience of accidentally shooting his wife dead in a drunken game of “William Tell” was eerily recalled by the play Over a long meeting with Waits and Brennan at Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel, Wilson proposed that Tom spend several weeks in Hamburg writing the music for a production at the city’s Thalia Theatre. Waits was simultaneously “intrigued, flattered, and scared.” The old fears he’d had about scoring One from the Heart flared up again, as did anxieties about being away from his family for long stretches of time. But Kathleen, a huge Wilson fan, urged Waits to seize the opportunity to work not only with the director but with seventy-five-year-old Burroughs, the model for Old Bull Lee in On the Road. “He was the [Beat writer] that I guess was more like Mark Twain with an edge,” Waits said when I asked about the author of Naked Lunch. “He was more suited [than Kerouac] to the whole notion of the country having some type of alter ego. He seemed to have an overview, one of maturity and cynicism. He had a strongly developed sense of irony, and I guess that’s really at the heart of the American experience.”
With Wilson and Greg Cohen, Waits flew to Kansas to meet Burroughs at his home in Lawrence. In Waits’ eyes, Burroughs had always been the scary old man of the Beat Generation, and in person he didn’t disappoint. Waits liked the fact that Burroughs had retired to the flat, featureless Midwest, living “like the crooked sheriff in a bad town.” Like some warped retake of the Napa Valley brainstorms on One from the Heart, the visit was a kind of literary summit, though the self-doubting Waits felt like a pygmy amidst avant-garde giants. “It was very exciting, really,” he told me. “Around three o’clock Burroughs started fondling his watch as we got closer to cocktail hour. He was very learned and serious. Obviously an authority on a wide variety of topics. Knew a lot about snakes, insects, firearms.”
At one point the cadaverous Burroughs, cocktail in hand, commenced “a little jig” and broke into the macabre 1930s ballroom-dance song “Taint No Sin.” For all present it was a moment of sublime inspiration, the song later being included in The Black Rider. “When Tom was here in Lawrence, he had some very good ideas,” Burroughs testified. “I had the idea of comparing the magic bullet in the original German story to heroin. Once you use one, you’ll use another. Tom said, ‘Yeah, and the first one’s always free,’ and of course that went right in.” After the summit, Burroughs began mailing texts to Waits, “piles of material” that dramaturge Wolfgang Wiens then cut and paste into the narrative. “[Burroughs] was just coughing up all this stuff, not writing in any linear way,” Waits explained. “Sometimes I would take something he wrote and turn it into a lyric. Sometimes we’d collaborate, like in ‘Just the Right Bullets.’”
In May 1989, Waits and Cohen departed the spring sunshine of LA for “the rainy streets, church bells, and train station” of Hamburg, the city where—in dives on the infamous Reeperbahn— British R&B bands had plied their trade and Anders Petersen shot the photograph used on the cover of Rain Dogs. Kathleen and the kids would once have accompanied him on such a trip, but Kellesimone was now in elementary school and Casey in kindergarten. Waits flew with heavy heart, not to mention the unvoiced fear that The Black Rider would somehow take him out of his depth. As with One from the Heart, however, the creative process quickly took shape.
Working by night with Thalia veteran Gerd Bessler at his nearby Music Factory studio, Waits and Cohen wrote and demoed songs that were then brought to Bob Wilson the next morning. “Long hours, cold coffee, hard rolls, and no place to lie down” made for fittingly Spartan conditions in which to create the harsh, discordant music2* “Gerd and Greg and I were the core of the music department in the early stages,” Waits wrote in his liner notes for the 1993 Black Rider album. “We fashioned together tapes in this crude fashion, never imagining they would be released, which gave us all an innocence and a freedom to abandon conventional recording techniques and work under the gun to have something finished to bring to Wilson’s carnival each morning.”
Eight years Waits’ senior, Wilson was the latest father (or at least older-brother) figure in his life, and the younger man was as anxious for “Bob’s” approval as he’d been eager to please Francis Ford Coppola. “For me, in all my years in school [there was] nothing like Wilson,” Waits said in 2004. “Like you’ll always remember a particular teacher? I’d say Wilson is my teacher. There’s nobody that’s affected me that much as an artist.” In turn, Wilson was deeply affected the first time he heard Waits play the piano. “Somehow he touched me, he got me,” the director recalled. “From the beginning there was this attraction. I can’t explain it because it’s so complicated … it’s funny, it’s sad, it’s touching, it’s noble, it’s elegant. It’s his signature, it’s something personal.”
Joining Wilson and Waits in Hamburg was Burroughs himself—less a father figure than a formative ancestor. Burroughs continued to ply Waits with cut-up texts that, in the latter’s words, “became a river of words for me to draw from in the lyrics for the songs.” Like Waits, Burroughs wrote at night and brought his texts to rehearsals the following morning. “[He] was as solid as a metal desk,” Waits wrote, “and his text was the branch this bundle would swing from.” (On the Black Rider album, three tracks—“That’s the Way,” “Flash Pan Hunter,” and “Crossroads”— were credited to Waits/Burroughs.)
If Frank’s Wild Years had made few concessions to conventional rock instrumentation, the Black Rider music veered still closer to the organic sound of a 1930s pit band playing songs by Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler.“[Greg] uses oboe, bass clarinet, low brass, low reeds,” Waits told Franny Thumm, who would work on the Black Rider recordings in California four years later. “It’s real wooden, he uses almost no percussion, but all his percussion is handled by the attack of the low reeds: Cha chung, chung, chung, chung. I love that.” Waits added that Robert Wilson was “right into the Eisler stuff and loves the German composers.” Undoubtedly the Weill/Eisler influence was more marked than usual because Waits and Cohen were actually working in Germany. Certainly it seeped from “Flash Pan Hunter” and the songs the pair fashioned for Pegleg to sing: both “The Black Rider” and “Just the Right Bullets” were rendered by Waits in a sardonically evil accent that recalled the Joel Grey of Cabaret.
Other songs were less Germanic but no less sombre. The bleak “November” was sung in the quavering voice of the ageing forester Bertram. “Gospel Train” was “Way Down in the Hole” arranged by Hieronymous Bosch, “Chase the Clouds” a demented hymn sung by a pastor so zealous his stentorian baritone gave way to a shrieking falsetto. “The Briar and the Rose,” with Waits on pump organ, was a love song to Kathleen disguised as a folk ballad. “I’ll Shoot the Moon” was a Tin Pan Alley pastiche delivered in a woozy croon, “Crossroads” a spaghetti-western cowboy song featuring hysterical yodelling from Waits and searing electric viola by Gerd Bessler. “We were trying,” Waits wrote of the songs, “to find a music that could dream its way into the forest of Wilson’s images and be absurd, terrifying, and fragile.” They succeeded. “I think that was a great test for Tom,” Wilson said later. “That he came in as a composer and could find a voice for other people whose voices are very different to his. In that sense he’s a real composer.”
Working with Wilson was unlike anything Waits had experienced, either in theatre or in film. The feeling of being thrown into the unknown, of having to trust methods that made no rational sense, amazed Waits. It necessitated letting go of the superego and entering a kind of dream state without maps or signs or cultural reference points of any kind. What made The Black Rider work was how the actors—“fearless, tireless, insane,” in Waits’ words—completely gave themselves up to Wilson’s vision and instincts for the play. During one rehearsal, Waits himself had to stand in for a member of the company who was off sick. “It was like,‘[Bob’s] using these people like clay,’” he said of the experience. “And this particular group of actors were thrilled, they’d melt themselves down, pour themselves into any mold.” By the end, Waits said, everybody was transformed.
While Wilson continued work on The Black Rider—the play would only premiere at the Thalia on 30 March 1990—Waits flew to London in late June to start filming on Ann Guedes’ Bearskin: An Urban Fairytale. He got top billing in this odd little film, playing half of a Punch-and-Judy act who employ a seventeen-year-old boy on the run from vengeful casino operators. British-financed and shot in London and Portugal, Bearskin was a stilted affair, devoid of credible characters or a remotely gripping plot. Waits had a lot of time on screen—including two brief scenes with Ian Dury3*—but aside from the occasional fun he had with the voices for Punch and co. he seemed unengaged on screen, bemused to be carrying a film as lead actor. “I don’t like coming out front,” his character Silva says of the Punch-and-Judy act. “You don’t know me. Maybe I got my own reasons for staying in the box.” Maybe he did.
In the fall, Waits and family made another trip to Ireland, visiting Brennan relatives in and around Tralee and attending the Thirty-fourth Cork Film Festival—where Big Time got a screening—in October. Two months later he turned forty, an often unwelcome landmark in any man’s life and certainly a turning point for anyone operating in the ageist world of western entertainment. Marking the onset of the traditional mid-life crisis, the forties were when the proverbial shit hit the fan—when you either sorted through your emotional baggage or drowned in it. Perhaps it was significant that Waits now commenced a run of seven movie appearances in four years, as though making up for lost time.
First up was The Two Jakes (1990), an underwhelming sequel to Roman Polanski’s timeless 1974 corruption picture Chinatown. Waits was given a one-minute walk-on as a plainclothes cop by his Ironweed co-star Jack Nicholson, who in the brief scene found himself on the receiving end of one of Waits’ boots. In Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991) he played to type as a disabled Viet-vet panhandler dispensing street sagacity to homeless Jeff Bridges in a brief scene in New York’s Grand Central Station. “[Tom] was a friend of [Jeff’s], basically,” Gilliam said. “It’s funny, because when I met him, and even in the course of making the film, I’d never heard a Tom Waits record. I just met him and liked him immediately.” Columbia Pictures complained that Waits’ character did nothing to advance Gilliam’s modern-day-Parsifal plot, but the Monty Python veteran insisted on keeping his scene.
Steve Rash’s Queens Logic (1991) gave us another Waits cameo as Monte, a garishly dressed loner who semi-socializes with a Big Chill-ish group of overwrought New Yorkers. With a high-calibre ensemble that included Joe Mantegna, Kevin Bacon, Chloe Webb, Linda Fiorentino, and John Malkovich, the film was a stilted example of the Thirtysomething genre, full of big female hair, men in vests, and people who spoke like characters in movies. As so often, Waits was a marginal presence in the drama, a man who couldn’t quite be placed in its peer group. In his one notable scene, sporting an unspeakable leather vest and an unconvincing Queens brogue, he toasted Webb and Fiorentino in a bar, lamenting the fact that—with one of them married and the other about to be—there were “no more fish in the sea” for him. Interestingly, Waits was also the last person we saw in the film, arriving alone at Webb’s wedding in a tux and ruffled shirt.
In the epic At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991), Waits was reunited with Ironweed’s Hector Babenco, who cast him as a bearded pilot-for-hire at large in the Amazon jungle. Waits’ Morty Wolf was a grizzled cynic, a Jew “without a country” and partner of the brooding, half-Cheyenne Lewis Moon (Tom Berenger). In his vest and Bermuda shorts, Wolf was as dissolute as he was mercenary. To him the Amazon rain forest—its mountains and stunning waterfalls shot as if for a travel brochure— was just a “green hell” that “gives me the fucking creeps.” Like Kenny in Cold Feet, Waits seemed to have been cast in this ponderous story of missionaries and native Indians more for his tantrums than anything else; certainly he didn’t have to dig far to channel his rage. But one wonders whether Wolf wasn’t also a sly—or just unconscious—portrayal of Herb Cohen in his gun-running days.
Next up was Waits’ turn as the insane insect-eater R. M. Renfield in Coppola’s 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula, starring Keanu Reeves, Gary Oldman, and Winona Ryder. “I told [Francis] I was Renfield and you gotta get me in there,” Waits said. “He hadn’t cast [it] yet—he’d cast all the other parts—and I really came at it like a kid … ‘Make me Renfield!’” The part, Waits said, was “a masochist’s nirvana,” requiring him to wear a straitjacket and sinister finger manacles for long stretches of time. Worst of all was the zoophagy: in one scene Waits was obliged to put real bugs in his mouth. His singular vocal talents also came in handy when Oldman failed to make Dracula sound menacing enough. Overdubbing the Count’s lustful grunts was, Waits said, “like porno radio.” Renfield afforded Waits the chance to explore the truly lurid side of his personality—to go, as he put it, into “your own dark rooms.” But the film was schlock, with Waits acting as hammily as everyone else involved and affecting a shocking English accent (spiced up with a little Romanian). How one longed for the austerity of Murnau’s Nosferatu or Dreyer’s Vampyr as Coppola overegged his pudding to a degree that would surely have appalled Robert Wilson.
Dracula at least provided a welcome excuse to work once again with Coppola, especially when the shoot entailed a two-week stay in the director’s idyllic Napa Valley retreat. “It was great to be in that environment,” Keanu Reeves recalled. “Going for a run in the morning, looking at the stars at night, going into Francis’s research library, spending time with him.” Among Reeves’ treasured memories of the stay was Waits serenading Winona Ryder at the piano with a rendition of “Tom Traubert’s Blues” that made her cry. British actress Sadie Frost, making her Hollywood debut in Dracula as Lucy, remembers Waits as “shy and brooding” around the more extroverted young stars Coppola had cast in the film. “Francis was playing little games with us to try and get us into character,” she says. “Tom seemed slightly pained and uncomfortable in the groups and, as I recall, was quite a heavy drinker. He was warm and friendly but seemed lacking in self-confidence and was missing his wife and kids—they were clearly his stability. In the end, I think, Francis had his hands so full with Gary Oldman and the others that he left Tom alone.”
Shooting with Coppola at Sony Pictures in Culver City in the summer of 1992 led to another reunion, this time an unforeseen one. Bones Howe, then heading up the studio’s music department, got wind that Waits was on the lot and stopped by to say hello. The two men hadn’t spoken in almost a decade. “It was like we hadn’t seen each other since last Thursday,” Howe says. “We talked about his production ideas for the next record, about how less was more and how you could get a bigger sound for each instrument … and we had this wonderful conversation. And then I had to go back to my office and he had to go back on set. And we haven’t seen each other since.”
More rewarding than either Wolf or Renfield was Earl Piggot in Short Cuts, based on the short stories of the great minimalist Raymond Carver but shifting them from the writer’s Pacific Northwest to an unglamorous part of Los Angeles—suburban Downey—that wasn’t far removed from the Whittier of Waits’ childhood. In this sprawling ensemble film directed by the veteran Robert Altman in the late summer of 1992, Waits played an alcoholic limo driver married to waitress Doreen (Lily Tomlin). The Piggot story was just one of a number of narrative threads woven together by Altman and co-writer Frank Barhydt, bringing into contact characters played by Andie MacDowell, Tim Robbins, Julianne Moore, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Robert Downey Jr., Frances McDormand, Lyle Lovett, and Jack Lemmon. Following up Altman’s return-to-form The Player, Short Cuts was critically lauded, won a special Golden Globe award, and spawned a virtual sub-genre of LA-based ensemble films that included Pulp Fiction, Magnolia, and Crash. “Altman was great to work with,” Waits stated. “He’s like a good sheriff in a bad town.”
As Earl in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1992), with Lily Tomlin as Doreen. (Kobal)
Piggot may be the best performance Waits ever gave as an actor. “Tom is unique, completely his own person,” Altman said later. “He’s bent, but in the right way. It’s a good bend.” The first of the film’s characters we see on the screen (unless one counts anchor man Howard Finnigan on the limo’s TV), Piggot was astutely caught by Waits as a man at once abusive and sentimental. Waits drew on his own alcoholism as he gave us a man more rounded and likable than the “drunken stupid pig” he is in his daughter’s estimation. For obvious reasons he was at home in the scenes shot in Johnnie’s Coffee Shop, as well as in a cocktail bar with the very Waitsian name the Low Note (whose house band included Greg Cohen). The Earl/Doreen storyline ended happily with the couple drinking cocktails and shaking maracas as a 7.4 quake hit LA. “This is it, baby!” Waits yelled. “We’re going out together!” (It wasn’t it and they weren’t, but it made for a great climax.)
Glancing back over his cinematic CV in late 1993, Waits sounded far from convinced that this was really what he was meant to be doing. “I don’t really consider myself an actor,” he told the New York Times. “I do some acting. I don’t have the confidence I’d like to have as an actor at this point. But I’ve learned that the acting and the music and the other projects all serve each other.” Six years later he piped the same tune to me. “I don’t know if I really think of myself as an actor,” he said. “I like doing it, but there’s a difference between being an actor and doing some acting.” What continued to grate with Waits was the fact that movie actors were paid less for their thespian skills than for the sheer boredom of waiting around in trailers. He also saw most actors as inherently immature. “I find myself usually having more in common with the directors than maybe sometimes the actors,” he admitted to Jim Jarmusch. “A lot of directors look at actors as insecurities with arms and legs—they’re just children, and they need to be constantly reassured and directed and given rewards and discipline.”
Waits’ gruffly impatient, almost macho side came strongly to the fore with his film acting. “Somebody told me acting makes a woman more of a woman and a man less of a man,” he grumbled. “Fussing around with your hair. Getting up at six in the morning and having all these people fussing around.”4* Compared to theatre—whether that was Demon Wine or The Black Rider—film was “so broken up … a mosaic.” In theatre you might actually “leave the ground,” where some films were “like you bought the last ticket on a death ship.” Waits would not appear in another mainstream film for six years.
By late 1992, in any case, Waits had made more than a few major changes in his life. Getting off the Hollywood merry-go-round was, in hindsight, the least of them.
1* “I was down on my luck,” Waits said in his defence. “And I’ve always liked dogs.”
2* Offering some respite from the austerity was Harry’s Hafen Basar (or Harry’s Harbour Bazaar), a junk shop on the Hamburg waterfront that became a regular stopoff for Waits. “Sailors from all over the world, when they land in Hamburg, that’s where they sell their $2 guitars, stuffed snakes, zebra jackets,” he said.
3* Dury was another middle-class teacher’s son who’d made himself over as a chronicler of the proletariat—to the point where his “Mockney” act took over from his class reality. “It was all part of inhabiting a persona,” said writer and broadcaster Charlie Gillett, who managed Dury’s early band Kilburn & the High Roads. “But that persona eventually became intertwined with Ian himself. In that way he’s more like Tom Waits—someone inseparable from the persona he’s created.”
4* For an interesting academic discussion of “the extent to which Waits’ music represents a theatrics of masculinity,” see Gabriel Solis, “Workin’ Hard, Hardly Workin’/Hey Man, You Know Me,” Journal of Popular Music Studies, Vol. 19, Issue 1, April 2007.