“I’m better off here in the sticks where I can’t hurt myself.”
(Tom Waits to Amanda Petrusich, Pitchfork.com, 27 November 2006)
Bob Seger was driving through Westwood in the summer of 1988 when he spotted a familiar figure walking in the eighty-five-degree sunshine. Ambling along in his ungainly way, dressed head to toe in black, was Tom Waits.
Seger pulled over to the kerb to offer Waits a ride, and the two men rode around the well-heeled LA neighbourhood conversing somewhat awkwardly. Waits sat in the passenger seat wondering what on earth he had in common with the Michigan-born singer of “Still the Same” and “Shame on the Moon”—a man who, into the bargain, was wearing shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. “Hey, can I drop you somewhere?” Seger asked after fifteen uncomfortable minutes. Waits pondered the offer for a second. “Uh, just drop me back where you picked me up, Bob,” he replied finally. “I wasn’t done walking.”
It turned out that Waits was one of Seger’s favourite songwriters. The following year, Seger recorded a version of “Downtown Train,” a song he’d fallen in love with. Somewhat rashly, though, he mentioned it to Rod Stewart on a summer visit to London. The next thing he knew, Stewart had cut his own version of “Downtown Train.” The track soared to No. 3 on the US singles chart. Seger was livid, calling Stewart a “nonperson” for stealing the idea of covering the song. (Former Scandal singer Patty Smyth had actually got there first, recording “Downtown Train” in 1987.) Stewart in turn claimed he’d already recorded the song in London and only then decided to redo it in LA. “It’s most disappointing to hear something like this, since the geezer knows very well the full truth,” Stewart said. “It sounds like sour grapes to me.”
Stewart’s success with the song in early 1990 certainly made up for Waits’ own lack of chart success. Moreover, the former Faces singer went on to record “Tom Traubert’s Blues” on his 1993 album Unplugged … and Seated, while over the years Seger himself has cut at least three other Waits songs (“New Coat of Paint,” “16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought Six,” and “Blind Love”). Royalties from Stewart’s covers in particular would keep Waits and family comfortable through the nineties. “Tom’s brilliant,” Rod said. “[He] said he put a swimming pool for his kids in his back garden and I paid for it!”
1990 also brought an award of $2.6 million—$375,000 in actual compensatory damages, $2 million in punitive damages, $100,000 in damages for violating the Lanham Act, and $125,000 in attorney fees—against Frito-Lay and Tracy-Locke. The defendants appealed but to no avail: Waits finally saw a payout of $2.5 million in August 1992. “I spent it all on candy,” he said. “My mom told me I was foolish.” Fighting the battle against Frito-Lay had been gruelling, but it sent out a message that Tom and Kathleen were tireless adversaries. “Never get involved in litigation,” Waits said just a couple of months before the cheque came. “Your hair will fall out, your bones will turn to sand.” But, he added, “when you have to, you have to … if somebody burned your house down, you’d have to do something about it.”
On another copyright issue, Waits was powerless to act. 1991 saw the release of The Early Years, a selection of the demo recordings Waits had made for Herb Cohen in 1971. Waits was furious that these callow sketches from his musical youth were being made available. Listening to the voice of “Virginia Avenue” or “I’m Your Late Night Evening Prostitute” was for Waits as mortifying as Stephen Carter’s soundalike on the Frito-Lay ad. “My early records, I can barely listen to them,” he said. “I sound like a kid. I said, ‘Boy, what are they doing recording a guy that sounds like that?’” Rubbing salt in the wound was the countenancing of the album’s UK release by Demon-Edsel’s co-owner Elvis Costello, with whom Waits had become friendly. “Waits gave Elvis a real hard time about it,” says a former Demon-Edsel employee. “It caused quite a bit of friction between them.” Costello can’t have helped his cause by subsequently okaying the UK release of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ Bizarre/Straight album Black Music for White People, with the version of “Heartattack and Vine” that Herb Cohen licensed to Levi-Strauss.1*
While Waits concentrated on films and fatherhood in 1990–1, he contributed to a number of albums by people he admired. There were two tracks on Devout Catalyst, an album by his “word-jazz” hero Ken Nordine. “We did a little kind of word duet,” Waits said of “The Movie,” which also featured the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia. “I did a little story and he talked in the pauses, and I talked in his pauses, and it was kind of a little woven duet.” There was also a brace of songs on Mississippi Lad, a twilight release by Waits’ tenor-saxophone idol—and sometime sideman—Teddy Edwards, whose PolyGram deal the younger man had helped to arrange. “[Tom is] America’s best lyricist since Johnny Mercer,” Edwards said. “He came down to the studio … and he sang two of my songs, wouldn’t accept any money, just trying to give me the best boost that he could.” “I’m Not Your Fool Anymore” and the exquisite “Little Man” were recorded at Sunset Sound in mid-March 1991.
It wasn’t only the old guard that Waits helped out, however. He’d become a fan of alterna-metal funksters Primus, an exuberant and eclectic band that spliced the influences of Frank Zappa and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and agreed to guest on their song “Tommy the Cat” on the loopily-named 1991 album Sailing the Seas of Cheese. The band’s bassist Les Claypool—and, later, its drummer Bryan Mantia, aka “Brain”—would become regular Waits collaborators over the next fifteen years. Waits had met the band while fishing in northern California. “I was over at Bodega Bay and I wasn’t catching a thing,” he recalled of the encounter. “I flagged these guys down and asked them if they’d sell me one of their fish to put on my line and have my picture taken with it so I wouldn’t feel humiliated when I got home.”
Primus turned out to be natives of an area where Tom and Kathleen were now thinking of putting down roots of their own. Having come to know the area well through their visits to Francis Ford Coppola’s estate in the Napa Valley, they’d decided that somewhere north of the Bay Area was the ideal setting for their new life—a region that combined beautiful scenery with civilized and liberal people. “It just seemed a good place to go—north,” Waits reflected in 1999. “You live in LA, you go south, there’s just more LA.”
The first place Waits bought, on the outskirts of Sonoma, proved a dud. Though it was love at first sight—a house with a porch and a view of nearby railroad tracks—the trains stopped running soon after the Waitses moved in and a bypass road was built to handle the resulting automobile traffic. Tom and Kathleen wasted little time in selling up, and this time they really got away from it all. “Now I live out,” he said. “Way out.” They found their second home near the small town of Valley Ford, located in the Two Rock area midway between Santa Rosa and the Pacific Ocean, and have lived there ever since: not bad for a man whose idea of hell on earth had once been a cabin in Colorado.
Though he felt like “an unplugged appliance” for the first few months—“it gets really dark and really, really quiet,” he observed— Waits loved being in the back of beyond. “I live in a little town out in the sticks,” he said in October 1992. “The radio is terrible where I am. The food’s terrible and everyone’s got gun racks. There’s a lot of roadkill out there too.” A visitor to the Waits compound that very month was none other than Jim Jarmusch. “Tom lives with his family in a big, strange house hidden away somewhere in California,” Jarmusch reported. “I think of it as the Tom Waits version of a gangster hideout—a world in and of itself.” He added that—“for reasons I am very respectful of”—its location would remain anonymous. Those close to Waits religiously observe the same etiquette. While journalists are never permitted near the place, Waits is wary even of allowing music-business acquaintances to visit the house. “I’m trying to learn how to be invisible,” he told Jarmusch. “I haven’t been pulled over since I moved out of LA. I think it’s possible to be invisible, certainly more in an area like this than it is in Los Angeles or New York City.”2*
1992 saw another dramatic change in Waits’ life: he quit drinking. “My wife said, ‘You drank enough,’” he told Mick Brown. “It comes from love, you know? ‘I want you to stick around, Goddamn it.’” It took a few months of slipping and sliding—clambering onto and then falling off the wagon—before his recovery began in earnest. Waits was still drinking the night he stopped by a recording session for John Hammond, the blues singer he’d first met in 1973. After hanging out with Hammond, producer J. J. Cale, and a guesting John Lee Hooker, he had to be driven home to Valley Ford from San Francisco. It must have been a night like this that finally pushed him to his rock bottom. “Some day you just have to quit being a vagabond and being drunk every day,” he said in October. “One day you just wake up and realize there’s an empty space in your soul. It’s not cool, just weird.” Many years later he came clean and—breaking his anonymity—admitted he was in AA. “I’m in the program,” he stated. “I’m clean and sober. Hooray. But you know, it was a struggle.”3*
It didn’t take long for Waits to figure out that recovery and ongoing twelve-step sobriety meant growing up. If he was really going to be the father he wanted to be, he knew he had to change. Perhaps Kathleen, too, had had enough of enabling him. “Because I utterly adore my wife and kids I had no choice but to grow up fast,” Waits said. “You can’t bring kids up if you’re still one yourself.” That summer, he wrote the brilliantly bratty “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” about the ingrained aversion to maturity. Rebutting Cyril Connolly’s famous line that there was “no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,” he willed himself to believe that “life starts with the family unit and [doesn’t end] with it.” Holding a baby in your arms, he said, made you realize “how strong life is.”
As other musicians have done, Waits worried that sobriety would stop the creative juices flowing. But he maintained that “all the big questions” came only when one finally forsook the bottle. “You know, ‘What am I made of? What’s left when you drain the pool?’” In time, recovery entailed coming to terms with himself and his past. “I never got along with myself,” he admitted. Though Waits has never been one for soul-baring confession, he has in recent years been more open about the specific dysfunction of his childhood and the effects of his father’s own alcoholism. “[With] popular music there aren’t very many real serious qualifications to enter that field,” he said in 1992. “A lot of broken people find their way into it because nobody belongs near them.” Broken people, like broken bicycles and broken shoes, had long been a fixation of Waits.’ “I like things that are kind of falling apart,” he admitted to another interviewer. “[Because] I come from a broken home, I guess. I like things that have been ignored or need to be put back together.”
April 1992 saw the release of Waits’ first new album in almost five years. Recorded as the soundtrack to an episodic Jim Jarmusch film about nocturnal taxi drivers and their passengers in LA, New York, Rome, and Helsinki, Night on Earth was mainly instrumental, consisting of variations on a theme interspersed with three vocal pieces (“Good Old World,” “Back in the Good Old World,” “On the Other Side of the World”) that Waits had co-written with Kathleen. Though Jarmusch had originally put in a modest order for two themes, when Waits played the waltz-time “Good Old World” over the phone the director flipped and asked him to underscore the whole film. Jarmusch was so enthused he flew to California to sit in on some of the recordings.
Jarmusch found Waits holed up in a funky recording studio that he’d discovered in the small town of Cotati—a converted chicken ranch called Prairie Sun. With Biff Dawes engineering and Francis Thumm serving as keyboardist and co-arranger, Waits worked on the Night on Earth music with a new group of Bay Area musicians that included guitarist Joe Gore, cellist Matt Brubeck, bassist Clark Suprynowicz, accordionist Josef Brinckmann, and pianist/percussionist Mule Patterson.4* The session group also included Ralph Carney, who’d recently moved to Oakland from Brooklyn and knew Jarmusch from his native Ohio. Carney’s saxes and other woodwinds were all over Night on Earth; on certain tracks he even experimented with flute and pan pipes. “There were a couple of things I did that were too hippie for Tom,” he says. “He was like, ‘I hate flute!’ Jim would say he liked something and I could see Tom champing at the bit.”
“It was a fairly egalitarian situation, though Tom was definitely leading things,” recalls Clark Suprynowicz. “I really think I learned something from the experience, because Tom’s way of directing the ensemble was very much as a theatre person. He would go into the recording booth and listen back to a take we’d done of something. Then he’d come out and look at Ralph and say, ‘It just sounds too friendly! Can’t we make it more antisocial?!’” After an early take of “Good Old World (Waltz),” Waits emerged from the booth and began dragging himself around the studio like he had a club foot. “Boys, boys!” he implored the musicians. “It’s gotta limp a little bit!” Suprynowicz, co-founder of the Bay Area Jazz Composers’ Orchestra, says he found Waits’ methodology educational: “Sometimes to get the result you want from music, that’s the only way to get it. There are things that just aren’t captured by terms like crescendo or diminuendo.”
Anybody assuming Night on Earth was a bona fide follow-up to Frank’s Wild Years would have been scratching his head a quarter of the way into the record. Though “Back in the Good Old World (Gypsy)” kicked things off in a Swordfish/Rain Dogs vein, with Waits growling a lyric of regretful nostalgia over an unsettling fusion of cello, harmonium, guitar, baritone horn and Flintstones percussion, the soundtrack’s ensuing “mood” pieces all followed the same eerily suspenseful, slightly monotonous pattern. For “Los Angeles Theme (Another Private Dick),” played as Winona Ryder ferried Gena Rowlands through LA, Waits drew on his own Hollywood-noir roots. But this wasn’t “Heart of Saturday Night” or even “Heartattack and Vine”: rather it was a dark city of lonely souls floating through empty streets. “New York Theme” (subtitled “Hey You Can Have That Heartattack Outside, Buddy”) took the same riff and made it slightly swingier in feel. The Paris and Helsinki moods offered minor variations on the main motif.
Markedly different were the instrumental “Good Old World (Waltz),” a front-parlour recital complete with tentative, quaintly amateurish strings. “Carnival (Brunello Del Montalcino)”— heard as sheep-loving Roberto Benigni drove through Rome— was a reprise of “Back in the Good Old World” that might have been scored by Nino Rota. “Dragging a Dead Priest” sounded like a pit band from hell warming up for a version of “Shore Leave,” all scraping sounds and tinkling bottles. “It was five minutes of really spooky, meandering music,” says Clark Suprynowicz. “When we finished it I said to Tom, ‘Hey, we could get a grant with this!’ He was hip enough to the art world to get a laugh out of that.”
“On the Other Side of the World” was a prototype nineties Waits ballad featuring sparse accordion/piano/banjo/clarinet instrumentation and a line about a white horse lost in his wife’s hair. The stiff, slightly formal chanson nature of the song, like the references to “roses” and “crows,” was fast becoming Waits’ new orthodoxy. This was music like rock had never happened, with zero concession to youth’s need for amplified angst and anger.
Night on Earth was barely in stores—and being greeted quizzically by critics—when Waits figured it was time to make a real new album. Sobriety seemed to energize him as he set to work on a record that forsook the cabaret noir tendencies of The Black Rider in favour of something more primordially American. Waits wanted to get back to basics, strip things to the bone, whether on gritty blues/gospel songs or sparse piano ballads. Thematically, too, the album would get down to the irreducible core of human existence. “Blood and death, those are my pet subjects,” Waits said with a leery grin. “It really is all about bones, cemeteries, and dirty blood.”
Eight of the songs on Bone Machine were co-written with Kathleen, clear evidence of her growing role in Waits’ music. “[We] went into a room for about a month and banged them out,” Waits said. “It’s a different kind of thing, writing songs with someone. But hey, we got kids together—we can make songs together.” Most of the songs were on the quiet side; a few were loud and pounding. None came easy. “I get real cranky about the songs,” he admitted. “I get mad at [them]. ‘Oh, you little sissy, you little wimp, you’re not gonna go on my fucking record, y’little bastard!’” Waits estimated that altogether there were “about sixty ideas for songs” for Bone Machine, most demoed at home on a cheap Sony tape recorder. In the late spring of ’92, with a pared-down shortlist of twenty or so, Waits went back into Prairie Sun with Biff Dawes and the redoubtable Larry Taylor. Seven years Waits’ senior, Taylor had become part of his musical furniture, as trusted a sidekick as his fellow bassist Greg Cohen had been for so long. In his trademark baseball cap and ZZ Top beard, Taylor would be an ever-present in Waits’ setup for years to come.
This time, the main Prairie Sun studio felt too sterile for the music; Waits sensed that nothing would “grow” in it. Instead he set up camp in an old storage room whose acoustics he instantly preferred. “I said, ‘What about this room over here, I bet this room sounds good,’ and everybody laughed,” he recalled. “I said, ‘No, really, what’s wrong with this room here? Get all these crates out of here and let’s do it right here, just run the wires down the hill.’” Waits dug the fact that the room wasn’t soundproofed— that ambient sounds from the outside world entered the normally hermetic chamber of recording. “We had airplanes to deal with and cars,” he said. “So—‘Oh, we’d better stop, wait for that train to pass.’ I like dealing with that, it puts you in correct perspective on what you’re doing.”
With rain pouring down around them, Waits, Taylor, and Dawes quickly laid the foundations for the album’s sixteen tracks, Waits variously supplying vocals, guitar, piano, and primitive percussion. There were almost no drums per se on the finished record. “You can go crazy trying to communicate certain details of what you want to a drummer,” Waits said, “so I started hitting them myself.” The very title of the album was as much a reflection of the sound Waits wanted for it as a metaphor for the human body and its inevitable demise. “I wanted to explore more machinery sounds,” he explained. “I’m exploring more and more things that make a sound but are not traditional instruments. It’s a good time to do it, too, because there’s a lot of garbage in the world that I can use that is just sitting out there rusting.” The more technologically disembodied modern life seemed, the more stubbornly Luddite Waits became. Bashing away at various metal objects that dangled off the Conundrum— a “kind of perverted giant Spanish iron cross” built by his friend Serge Etienne—also helped Waits discharge some of the rage that could no longer be defused by alcohol. “Drumming is therapeutic,” he testified. “I wish I’d found it when I was younger.”
Though three tracks consisted simply of Waits and Taylor, a handful of supplementary musicians came to Cotati to flesh out Bone Machine. Along with old reliable Ralph Carney, there were Les Claypool of Primus, and Brain, then of the Limbomaniacs. Joe Gore returned on guitar, David Phillips sweetened three songs with pining pedal steel, and David Hidalgo played fiddle and accordion on “Whistle down the Wind.” Second engineer Joe Marquez added banjo to “Murder in the Red Barn,” and was—along with Waits and wife—one of the stick-banging percussionists christened “the Boners” on “Earth Died Screaming.” Also present for the sessions was Francis Thumm, though this time employed in the curious capacity of “security guard.”
Sobriety seems to have changed Waits’ recording routine, for the Bone Machine sessions started promptly at 10 a.m. each morning. “Everybody hates it but me,” Waits admitted. “But I think this is the best time ’cause everyone’s clean and everyone is empty.” The recordings were also done fast, with minimum fuss. “I thought I was going to be up there for longer and it turned out to be just one day,” Ralph Carney recalls. To Waits’ consternation, halfway through the sessions he had to put Bone Machine on hold. Francis Ford Coppola needed him in LA for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. “I just thought, ‘Oh God, I have to stop recording and go get a bad haircut and eat bugs,’” Waits recalled. “And then come back home again.”
Fittingly, Bone Machine began with the sound of “the Boners” approaching as if over the brow of a hill—a ramshackle percussion unit bashing away like cannibals. Switching from the menacing spoken word of the verses to the unholy howl of its choruses, “Earth Died Screaming” was the scariest opening track of Waits’ career to date, a brutal distillation of the apocalypse. Though Waits joked that the biblical influence was the result of Kathleen’s lapsed Catholicism, like the Dylan of John Wesley Harding he had dipped into the Book of Revelation, drawing also on memories of fire-and-brimstone street preachers he’d known in downtown LA. The song concluded with a strange, sad coda that Waits played on the Chamberlin, an electro-mechanical instrument first developed in 1946, with tapes of recorded sounds activated by a keyboard.
Heaven was still “full” on “Dirt in the Ground,” a mournful dirge improbably inspired by a pickup line of Teddy Edwards.’ “[Teddy] used to tell girls that in hotel lobbies,” Waits recalled. “He’d say, ‘Listen darling, we all gon’ be dirt in the ground.’ So I always thought that would be a good song title.” Like most western men in their forties, Waits had woken up to his own mortality—to what death really meant as you hit the middle of your life. Though he denied the subject was morbid, his ulterior motive in writing about it seemed to be to disarm it—to face the terror of the end and thus vanquish it. “Dirt” consisted of Waits at the piano, Taylor on bass, and Ralph Carney doing little more than exhaling through a bass clarinet and alto and tenor saxes. The vocal was a raspy falsetto—what Waits called his “Prince voice”—that he claimed he could “only do … once or twice and then it’s gone.”
“Such a Scream” came as light relief—an explosion of sexual energy—after “Earth” and “Dirt.” A love-call to Kathleen, “Scream” was as ecstatic as it was frenetic, all machine-gun drums and saxophone-yapping as Waits hymned his wife and muse. The track got even more combustive as Waits’ grinding rhythm guitar gatecrashed the second verse like a poor man’s Keith Richards. One of Bone Machine’s indisputable highlights, “Scream” remains the most exhilaratingly funky track Waits ever recorded.
A splurge of percussion and distorted vocals guided the listener into the home-recorded “All Stripped Down,” a vision of apocalypse-as-party that took its cue from Burroughs’ “T’ain’t No Sin.” Vocally the track sounded like Captain Beefheart duetting with Prince, flipping between villainous growl and distressed-chicken falsetto. “What I like to try and do with my voice is get kind of schizophrenic with it,” Waits said.
By contrast, “Who Are You” was the most traditional song Waits had recorded in an age, with strummed guitars and Springsteen-esque vocal lines. It was also startlingly vituperative: a classic putdown song in the mode of Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street” and reminiscent of his swipes at the likes of Edie Sedgwick. So acerbic was the Waits/Brennan lyric that it was difficult not to infer a real-life object of their contempt.
“The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me” gave us another new Waits voice, one clearly influenced by Ken Nordine. A failed-suicide note as whimsical as it was creepy, the spoken-word lyric posited a curious metaphysic: the desire to die, it suggested, was not enough for suicide to occur—nature had to be ready to receive you. Accompanying himself on Chamberlin and percussion, Waits sang of “strangels” and “braingels,” marine creatures who would assist in the drowning. The former was a word Kellesimone had coined, a hybrid of “strange” and “angels.”
Waits’ falsetto got yet another airing on “Jesus Gonna Be Here,” his most overt gospel pastiche to date. This was Waits in blackface, singing with a lisp as he parodied—or paid homage to—the country-blues preachers of yesteryear. In an inspired switch, Waits took over the “bull fiddle” while Larry Taylor played greasy Ry Cooder slide, staying in the same key when Waits changed to fit the standard twelve-bar progression. As the song ended, the drone of a helicopter could be heard over the studio.
Jesus gonna be here: Waits preaches the gospel.
Kathleen Brennan collaborated on “A Little Rain,” prototype for a new kind of ballad we’d hear more of on Mule Variations. No Steinways for Waits anymore: here was the humble, almost domesticated sound of the upright piano, bringing him full circle from Closing Time. He said he liked to “go back and forth” between rage and soppiness. While he loved hearing “family heirlooms thrown against the wall,” he still had “the other side of me, the old drunk in the corner who had too much wine starting to get a little sentimental.” “A Little Rain” stemmed primarily from protective feelings towards his children, the third verse prompted by the murder of a local fifteen-year-old girl who’d climbed into a stranger’s car. Having lived most of his life in big cities, Waits was fascinated by the local news in and around Sonoma County. Where murder was commonplace in LA or New York, “here, where you see the golden fields or whatever, it’s in greater relief.” Reports of teenagers losing their lives in car wrecks naturally affected Tom and Kathleen. Did his mind also go back to “Burma Shave” and the memory of his own cousin hightailing it out of Marysville? Or even to his own memories of being trapped in Chula Vista? “People see the world through MTV and movies and they don’t see much of the world where they live,” he reflected. “So they go screaming out of these little towns looking for a piece of that, so they can jump into that river somewhere.”
“In the Colosseum” brought an instant change of mood. With Waits hammering the Conundrum as Brain bashed out a 4/4 stomp of a beat, the track was the closest thing on the album to The Black Rider. Yet even here, as Waits welcomed us to the horrorshow of Roman barbarity, there was less of the Weill/Eisler imprint in the music. For Waits, with the presidential elections just months away, the song was a first stab at a political statement. “I just kind of imagine this modern Caligula that government has become,” he said.“[We’re] all kind of marooned in this place where information and ideas become very abstract, yet the hyena is still tearing at the flesh.”
Bone Machine’s standout track was “Goin’ out West,” a throwback to the demonic R&B of “Heartattack and Vine” and “16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought Six.” Over possibly the greatest drum sound ever—Waits whacking what sounds like a metal door— Joe Gore and Larry Taylor created an infernal Cramps-ish racket that put the likes of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion utterly in the shade. Waits raged away in the guise of a wannabe actor en route to California, a deluded ex-con who claimed he looked good with his shirt off and planned to call himself Hannibal or Rex. The song was Elmore Leonard’s Be Cool distilled into three frenzied minutes, a capsule snapshot of a dumb Everglades hunk with a head full of celluloid fantasies. Waits had seen dolts like this swarming into LA for years. “I figured, ‘Let’s do a rocker,’” Waits said of the song. “‘We’ll just slam it and scream.’” It was Brennan who argued it should be more specific; should in fact be about people who come to California with “a phone number somebody gave them, you know, for a psychic who used to work with Ann-Margret.” As a native Angeleno, Waits understood how outsiders coming to LA had “this golden image that everything will be all right when you get here, no matter how twisted your imagination … orange trees, bikinis, sunglasses.”
“Murder in the Red Barn” offered an immediate contrast. With its loping rhythm and twangy banjo, the minimal, back-woodsy arrangement recalled Rain Dogs’ “Gun Street Girl.” This was Waits and Brennan taking in their new surroundings and the murky things going on behind the scenes. “I buy the local papers every day,” Waits told me. “They’re full of car wrecks and … I guess it all depends on what it is in the paper that attracts you. I’m always drawn to these terrible stories, I don’t know why. ‘Murder in the Red Barn’ is just one of those stories, like an old Flannery O’Connor story.” The song—and Bone Machine in general—also reflected the influence of Cormac McCarthy, whose primordial, brutally beautiful All the Pretty Horses he had recently finished.5*
The sinister “Black Wings” was another departure for Waits. The spoken-word portrait of a shadowy protean figure, the voice suggested a demonic Leonard Cohen, the music spaghetti-western guitar noir. “I like that place with my voice,” Waits said of what was really a kind of acting turn. “[A] little of that Marconi feeling.” Nobody admits to knowing this furtive entity, who may be a CIA agent out of a Burroughs novel—or may be Death itself.
Tom Jans was a Californian singer-songwriter, a melancholy folkie whose country-soul ballad “Lovin’ Arms” had been covered by dozens of artists from Dobie Gray and Millie Jackson to Elvis Presley. The pathos of Jans’ 1984 death prompted Tom to dedicate Bone Machine’s “Whistle down the Wind” to him.“[He was] from the central coast of California, kind of a Steinbeck upbringing in a small town,” Waits said. “It was written about another friend, but it was the kind of song Tom would have written.” Close in feel to “A Little Rain,” the track again featured simple upright piano and discreet pedal steel, along this time with David Hidalgo’s overdubbed fiddle and accordion. It remains one of Waits’ most tender ballads, the sad song of a man who’s lost all hope. The writing is exquisite, full of poetic detail and touching regret.6*
The album’s mood again switched dramatically with the intemperate strum-along of “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up.” This howl of indignation at the pressures of mid-life responsibility was almost certainly a side-effect of Waits sobering up. “Everybody wants to grow up until they grow up,” he commented. “You ever been to a party and you look around and everybody around you is real grown up and you feel like, ‘Oh, Jesus’?” But the song was also a child’s honest (and rather moving) perception of the adult world, and a cry of alarm at how quickly life was zipping by. Waits had been on the point of binning the song when Kathleen—its co-author—came to its rescue. Waits’ response was to “put it through a Marshall and [turn] it up real loud, and then it felt better.”
Recorded on a tape recorder at home, “Let Me Get Up on It” was an experiment in unabashed lo-fi—and maybe how Waits would have liked the whole of Bone Machine to sound. “I ended up liking it better than anything we got in the studio for a while,” Waits confessed. DIY percussion and chain-link clanking met bullhorn snarl in a minute-long track that anticipated “Top of the Hill” and other raucous examples of Waitsian neo-primitivism.
Bone Machine’s last song, “That Feel,” was a capsule manifesto, a testament to the endurance of the spirit and the indestructible worth of one’s humanity. Like Hair’s “Ain’t Got No … I Got Life,” it said that while you can strip everything to the bone—reduce life to calcium—nothing can kill the soul. In a sense it was Waits’ homage to everything that shouldn’t be anaesthetized by alcohol and drugs—to the very fact of feeling— which made it ironic that the song’s co-author and singer was Keith Richards, overdubbed at his Studio 900 in New York’s Flatiron district after the basic track was done at Prairie Sun with Larry Taylor and David Phillips.
Though Waits spent “several weeks” earlier in the year writing with Richards—ostensibly for the latter’s Main Offender album— this was the only song to see the light of day. “It wasn’t for anything,” Richards claimed of the sessions. “We enjoy doing it, just kicking it around, having some fun. Maybe when we’ve got a few more songs we might think about doing it for something.” Waddy Wachtel, then a member of Richards’ X-pensive Winos, recalls the session for “That Feel” as “kind of mellow,” adding that “it wasn’t a long night at all … weird, I know.” How Waits survived the session without drinking was an AA miracle. “You can’t drink with [Keith], but you can write with him,” Waits claimed of an experience he remembered as “a total joy.” Howling along on backing vocals, Richards helped turn the song into something almost religious. For Waits, Richards was a holy innocent, a piratical gypsy who literally lived for music. “I felt like I’ve known him a long time,” he said of the Stone. “He loves those shadows in music. And he’s totally mystified by music, like a kid. He finds great joy in it, and madness and abandon.”
When Bone Machine was released in August 1992, Waits’ mother was appalled by the title. “She said it sounds so degrading,” Waits laughed. “Sounds like something hellish or devilish.” What Alma thought of the album’s cover—conceived by Waits with Bob Dylan’s photographer son Jesse—is anyone’s guess. In his glacier goggles and a “devil’s-horns” skull cup borrowed from Casey, Waits resembled the cadaverous Bruce Spence in Mad Max 3, his expression somewhere between triumphant glee and a Francis Bacon scream of agony.
Island set up a slew of interviews to publicize the record, flying Waits to Paris in July to talk to the European press. As ever, he alternated in interviews between grouchiness, leg-pulling, and disarming candour. “He was staying at a chic hotel in the Place des Vosges,” says Pete Silverton, who talked to him for the UK magazine Vox. “After we’d finished we walked across the square and had coffee with Kathleen. She and I chatted about this and that and Paris and art. Then I said, ‘How about talking about Tom?’ She looked at me as if to say, ‘You know better than that,’ and we went back to talking about Paris and art. To me it was clear she was his salvation, the Zimmer frame for his genius. She was smart and bright and fun and interesting and amused by Tom’s shtick, seeing it for what it was—a clever performance that refracted parts of Tom and left other parts untouched and private.”
In America, where American journalists invariably met him in such establishments as the Limbo Diner in San Francisco or Rinehart’s Truck Stop in Petaluma, Waits complained that he was still being pigeonholed as some booze-addled Beat throwback. “A lot of people seem to have bought one record … a long time ago and got me down,” he sighed. “‘Oh, that guy. The one with the deep voice without a shave? Know him. Sings about eggs and sausage? Yeah, got it.’”
When Jim Jarmusch came to Sonoma County to shoot the video for “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”—a be-goggled, devil-horned Waits scooting about the local hills on Casey’s bicycle— he found his friend in a state of near-exhaustion. He began to regret asking Waits to appear in Coffee and Cigarettes, a series of semi-staged conversations between people the director admired. Certainly Waits was in a surly mood when Jarmusch arrived late in the morning to film him with Iggy Pop. “You said this was going to be funny, Jim,” Waits barked. “Maybe you better just circle the jokes ’cause I don’t see ’em.” He glanced at Iggy and asked what he thought. Iggy replied diplomatically that he was going to get some coffee. Jarmusch calmed Waits down. “I knew it was just early in the morning and Tom was in a bad mood,” he said. “His attitude changed completely, but I wanted him to keep some of that paranoid surliness in the script.” One suspects the “paranoid surliness” was the result of being asked to tread such a slender line between fact and fiction: Jarmusch wanted him to play a version of himself for the camera.
In the Waits/Pop segment of Coffee and Cigarettes, filmed in the booth of a diner near Waits’ house, Waits was clearly the alpha male of the encounter. Iggy (“call me Jim”) was all sweetness and light as Waits talked. With a pedal steel whining on the jukebox in the background, Waits and Pop agreed that life was so much better without smoking, then tempted each other into a nicotine relapse. “The beauty of quitting is that now I’ve quit, I can have one,” Waits rationalized. “’Cause I’ve quit.” The conversation meandered on. Pop noted the lack of Waits records on the jukebox; Waits asked if Pop preferred Taco Bell or the International House of Pancakes; Pop recommended a drummer to Waits; Waits took offence. When Pop could stand the tension no longer and split, Waits checked the jukebox and—with a grunt of satisfaction—remarked that “he’s not on here either.” Then, furtively, he sparked up another cigarette.
No wonder Waits was exhausted: he’d bitten off more than he could chew in 1992. Like many alcoholics in early recovery, he wanted to make up for what he perceived as lost time by working overtime. Barely had he finished Bone Machine when he decided he wanted to make a lasting document of the Black Rider music he and Greg Cohen had demoed in Hamburg.
Bringing the Black Rider tapes to Prairie Sun, Waits sorted the usable material from the tracks he wanted to redo with a new ensemble of Bay Area musicians. Retained from Hamburg were “The Black Rider,” “T’Ain’t No Sin,” “Flash Pan Hunter (Intro),” “That’s the Way,” “The Briar and the Rose,” “Crossroads,” Greg Cohen’s “Interlude,” “The Last Rose of Summer,” and “Carnival.” “November” hailed from Hamburg but overdubbed Don Neely’s saw. The vocal “Gospel Train” was from Hamburg, but with Ralph Carney and Bill Douglass overdubbed. Where the Hamburg musicians had been christened “the Devil’s Rhubato Band,” Waits referred to the new California group as “Rhubato West.” (Rubato is a musical term meaning rhythmic flexibility within a phrase or measure.) Alongside a core of players who’d worked on Night on Earth and/or Bone Machine—Ralph Carney, Francis Thumm, Joe Gore, Matt Brubeck—came a troupe of versatile jazz/classical/experimental musicians based in the Bay Area. This slightly more schooled edition of the “demented ensembles” Waits had employed since Swordfishtrombones comprised Don Neely (bowed saw), Bill Douglass (bass), Nik Phelps (French horn), Larry Rhodes (bassoon, contra bassoon), Kenny Wollesen (percussion, marimba), Linda Deluca (viola), and Kevin Porter (trombone). From this pool of musicians came the performances on “Just the Right Bullets,” “Black Box Theme,” “Russian Dance,” “Gospel Train (Orchestra),” “I’ll Shoot the Moon,” “Flash Pan Hunter,” “Oily Night,” and “Lucky Day.”
“Tom had a lot of different horn players on The Black Rider, and of course my insecurity came up,” says Ralph Carney. “I’m a player that, like, if I get someone I really like to play with, I’ll play with them for fifty years. It’s that Duke Ellington thing. The Black Rider was the last thing I did for a while. It was kind of like, ‘Okay, this is real sporadic. It’s not a sure thing anymore.’”
Starting out with charts for the songs, Waits realized the music required a cruder, more intuitive tack. He used the expression “going out to the meadow” to connote this departure from the script or score. However, the risks entailed in going out to the meadow were great: all it took was one player not being on board and a piece of music could fall apart irreversibly. “Blood is all over the walls and the fucking thing will never breathe again,” Waits said melodramatically. “And you point to one of the musicians and you accuse him of murder.” Waits was only half-kidding; sometimes there was a mere hair’s breadth between saving a great track and losing it forever. His frustration in the studio could sometimes boil over into rage.
On The Black Rider’s opening track, “Lucky Day (Overture),” Waits enacted the long-harboured fantasy of being a Big Top MC, introducing an assortment of “human oddities” he’d learned about in Daniel P. Mannix’s cult book Freaks: We Who Are Not as Others (1976). Waits namechecked Harry’s Harbour Bazaar, the junk shop he’d found in Hamburg, and invited us to view a three-headed baby, a dog-faced boy and a monkey woman, Johnny Eck (“the man born without a body”), and even Hitler’s brain. Re-creating the demi-monde of the Reeperbahn in rural northern California, Waits transferred all the fascination and empathy he’d once felt for hobos and drunks to the kinds of deformed creature who’d appeared in Tod Browning’s classic 1932 film Freaks.
With new toys at Prairie Sun, Cotati, August 1993. (Jay Blakesberg)
“The Black Rider” itself was another excuse for Waits to play MC, this time in the form of Pegleg’s macabre invitation to a kind of death trip. The demonic cabaret of the piece, recorded grainily in Hamburg, was pure Brecht/Weill. The forlorn “November” also hailed from Hamburg but began with the eerie sound of Don Neely’s bowed saw and replaced Waits’ frail septuagenarian vocal with a more recognizable croak. Weill was back with a bang on the menacing “Just the Right Bullets,” Pegleg offering Wilhelm the magic bullets that would enable him to win the hand of Katchen. A highlight of the track was Joe Gore’s Morricone guitar playing off Kenny Wollesen’s Looney Tunes percussion.
The instrumental “Black Box Theme” began with gamelan-style tinkling before settling into an eerie mix of Chamberlin, banjo, and woodwind. Burroughs’ creepy cameo “T’ain’t No Sin,” with Waits playing marimba, was followed by the short bassoon/bass/clarinet instrumental “Flash Pan Hunter (Intro).” Set to Hans-Jorn Braudenberg’s funereal pump organ, “That’s the Way” flowed seamlessly into a less hymnal version of “The Briar and the Rose,” sung—cracked notes and all—as a tender love song to Kathleen.
The new “Russian Dance” was an ominous instrumental with a succession of false endings, arranged for cello, viola, synthesized strings, and the stomping Cossack-style boots of Waits, Brennan, Francis Thumm, Joe Marquez, and ranch foreman Clive Butters. The stiff, lurching rhythm of “Gospel Train (Orchestra),” with its grinding bass/cello underpinning and dissonant woodwind, was almost industrial.
There was some light relief in “I’ll Shoot the Moon,” the album’s sole concession to Tin Pan Americana. The ghost of Hoagy Carmichael inhabited Waits’ vocal, wafting over a palm-court blend of sax and pump organ, marimba, and trombone. Then we were back in Weill time for “Flash Pan Hunter,” Waits snarling Burroughs’ mocking lyric before reviving the hysterical yodel-sob of Frank’s Wild Years’ “Temptation.”
On “Crossroads”—the tragic denouement of the “magic bullets” story—Waits affected a cowboy burr somewhere between Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. He also played guitar and Chamberlin before loosing his throatiest yodel at the end of the track. “Gospel Train” was yet another MC exhortation, except that here it was a revivalist preacher—a variation on “Way Down in the Hole” and “Jesus Gonna Be Here”—urging us to turn away from Satan and board the locomotive to heaven.
Greg Cohen’s half-minute “Interlude”—a little trio piece for bassoon, French horn, and clarinet—fed directly into the deranged “Oily Night,” whose pizzicato viola and cello were augmented by the Boners, making their first appearance since “Earth Died Screaming” and sounding like a hundred ticking clocks. A melee of brass, woodwind, and percussion then entered the fray, followed by Waits’ fiendishly slowed-down voice. This was the music of nightmares, finally relieved by the album’s penultimate song. Like a reprise of “Innocent when You Dream,” “Lucky Day” was all pump organ, Salvation Army horns, and bellowing sentimentality.
“The Last Rose of Summer,” with Waits on pump organ and Chamberlin and Cohen on bass, lamented the loss of summer as the year moved inexorably towards decay and death. “Carnival,” finally, brought the album’s carousel madness full circle, all staccato Emax strings, Chamberlin effects … and one last train whistle.
Waits had intended The Black Rider to come out in the spring of 1993 but delayed the album’s release until the fall, presumably to leave enough of a gap between releases. For reasons not entirely clear, he decided to mix the record not at Prairie Sun but at an old haunt of his in LA. Working obsessively at the twenty-three-year-old studio now known as the Sunset Sound Factory, Waits spent three weeks trying to capture the sound he heard in his head. When in doubt, he and Biff Dawes would leave the studio with a cassette tape and listen intently to a track in the 1964 gold Sedan de Ville he kept in the parking lot. He trusted the car’s acoustics more than the speakers at Sunset Sound.
When the album did finally appear, a year after Bone Machine, it sorted the men from the boys among Waits’ fans. If Night on Earth had mystified people, The Black Rider perplexed and alienated in about equal measure. “[Island] didn’t do much with it,” Waits said in 2000. “But you know, people don’t know what to do with recordings from theatre experiences. They wonder, ‘Should I have seen the show? And if I haven’t will it make sense?’” Anyone open to demanding, avant-garde sounds was with Waits all the way. “I remember I had the same feeling with the album that I’d had with the Hal Willner albums,” says Kate St. John, who would be part of the group that performed The Black Rider in London in 2004. “I was kind of disenchanted with music at the time and I thought, ‘There are great things going on musically after all, and thank God for people like Tom Waits, who’s older and clever and interesting.’”
The Black Rider sessions had barely finished when Waits turned his attention to another enticing commission from Robert Wilson. “Make hay while the sun shines,” he told Jim Jarmusch. This time Wilson’s proposal was an operatic treatment of the relationship between Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Alice Pleasance Liddell, the enchanting girl who’d inspired Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Though William Burroughs was too ill to get involved, Wilson once again chose to work with the Thalia company, not least because The Black Rider had been a success and would continue to tour the world profitably in a variety of productions. He had first discussed the opera with writer Paul Schmidt and dramaturge Wolfgang Wiens in August 1991. As with nearly all his work, Alice would be a complex narrative mixing fact and fiction, blending the story of the Carroll/Liddell relationship with fantastical scenes from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass. Central to the text would be Dodgson the photographer of children—and specifically of young girls. Relishing the theatrical possibilities of Carroll’s hallucinatory dreamscapes, Waits was quick to join the team. He remained in awe of Wilson, describing him as the “sighted giant” on whose shoulders he himself—a “blind crippled midget”—perched. Once again there was the prospect of being apart from Kathleen and the kids, but once again she begged him not to pass up the chance to work with a man she regarded as a genius.
The first tryouts for Alice were held in Hamburg in the early spring of 1992, at which time Paul Schmidt incorporated the texts he’d adapted from Carroll. So busy was Waits during the spring and summer that he could only mull over the material Schmidt was sending him. By the time he was preparing to leave for Hamburg at the start of November, he and Kathleen had sketched out fifteen songs for Wilson. “I’m still not packed,” Waits said on the eve of his departure. “But I’ll never be ready for this trip till I get home from it.” Along with his clothes were a number of strange instruments he’d been gathering, the creations of a group of Bay Area eccentrics bored of conventional sounds and textures. Most of these men were influenced by Harry Partch—who’d lived for a period in Petaluma—and most were contributors to the quarterly publication Experimental Musical Instruments. Among the contraptions Waits liked were Darrell DeVore’s Wind Wands, Bart Hopkin’s PVC Membrane saxophone, and Qubias Reed Ghazala’s photon clarinet, played by beams of light bouncing off light-sensitive keys. Richard A. Waters’ Waterphone was a polytonal metal instrument, complete with a pipe into which one poured water; Tom Nunn’s T-Rodimba was assembled out of plywood and hardware and fitted with a violin pickup.
With just six weeks to complete the Alice music, Waits was under intense pressure in Hamburg. This time, too, he was working more or less alone, demoing the songs at Gerd Bessler’s studio without Greg Cohen at his side. “It was a pretty fraught time for Tom,” recalled the BBC’s Mark Cooper, who came to Hamburg to film a piece about the production for the Late Show arts programme. “When we arrived he was involved in all the fine-tuning, and the sheer stress was obviously getting to him.” Waits “threw a complete paddy” when he saw the grand piano Cooper had set up for his interview. Instead he demanded to be filmed at a dilapidated upright piano in the corner of the room.
In the Late Show piece, Robert Wilson again stated that the deep differences between him and Waits were key to their collaboration. “We’re very different men,” he said. “Different lifestyles, different aesthetics. We dress differently. Even our ideas about art are quite different. I’m a little more formal and cooler and he’s a little freer. But somehow it works together.” Wilson, who’d divided Alice into two acts of seven scenes and seven of his “knee plays,”7* told Waits he wanted to use the songs as “intersections” with Schmidt’s text. To a degree this meant that Waits was given carte blanche with the songs. “Once you go down the rabbit hole, anybody can say anything they want,” he said. “You could have songs about convenience stores. And you’re far from home, which is a bit like falling down the rabbit hole, in a way. So it’s conducive, Hamburg.” The influence of the city itself was manifest in songs such as “Kommienezuspadt” (a piece of cod-German gibberish that Waits invented) and “Down There in the Reeperbahn,” a hysterical portrait of the street deviants and androgynous flotsam that flocked to Hamburg’s wildest thoroughfare.
If Waits took liberties with the brief Wilson and Schmidt had set him, they were mainly to do with his ongoing immersion in the literature of carnivals and “freaks.” The phantasmagoria of Alice’s experience in Carroll’s novels found equivalence in the aberrations of American freak shows and amusement parks. “It seemed to me it was kind of a natural connection,” Schmidt observed. “The other interesting thing that Tom really found was sort of the underside of Victorian life … and that’s where a lot of [his] images plug in beautifully.” Several references were made in the Alice songs to Dreamland, the Coney Island park that operated in the early years of the twentieth century, while “Table Top Joe” and “Chained Together for Life” (aka “Poor Edward”) were specifically about Johnny Eck—who’d appeared in Freaks—and Edward Mordrake, an English aristocrat born with a woman’s face on the back of his head. “Obviously I’m making light of something and I hope it’s not at anybody’s expense,” Waits would later say of such songs.“[There] are people with physical deformities and I’m not poking fun at that at all. I’m just taking the idea of show business to a ridiculous place.”
Most of the Alice music was more approachable than The Black Rider, pointing forward to the parlour ballads of Mule Variations and Orphans while drawing on Waits’ Tin Pan Alley style of old. Later, Waits characterized it as “adult songs for children, or children’s songs for adults … an odyssey in dream logic and nonsense.” As with The Black Rider and Night on Earth, his primary choice of instrumentation—woodwinds, viola, pump organ, upright piano—suggested an amateur chamber group playing in a church hall.
“Alice” itself was something of a throwback, a tender blend of Kurt Weill and One from the Heart. Performed by the White Rabbit in Scene One and positing Alice as a kind of frozen surface that Dodgson/Carroll falls through, it hinted at the suspect nature of Dodgson’s feelings for Liddell but carried a more universal meaning: Waits would later describe Kathleen as “my Alice.”
Performed by the Caterpillar in Scene Two, “Table Top Joe” was sung by Waits in a strange languid croon accompanied by a rickety xylophonic instrument that most likely was Tom Nunn’s Bug. For “Down There in the Reeperbahn,” Waits came up with another new voice, sobbing like a hysterical drag queen as he sang of “little Hans” who ran off with a man. For “Hang Me in the Bottle” (aka “We’re All Mad Here”), Waits reverted to the evil-Beefheart voice of Pegleg in a song that revisited the Black Rider-esque subject of death and putrefaction. The same sardonic timbre was used for the White Knight’s “Everything You Can Think of Is True,” the song in which he most clearly celebrated the loss of co-ordinates in Carroll’s work. The frantic “Kommienezuspadt,” driven by ticking clocks and percussion that sounded like a cash-register opening and shutting, was the closest thing in Alice to the feel of The Black Rider. Performed by a chorus of Victorian vicars, “One, Two, and Through” was Waits’ setting of Carroll’s famous Jabberwocky poem from Through the Looking Glass.
“But There’s Never a Rose” (aka “Lost in the Harbor”) was a melancholy pump-organ dirge with political overtones—specifically, references to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. “Whatever Became of Old Father Craft?” was a hysterical pisstake of Catholicism, with Waits corpsing in the studio as he drawled morosely of being abused by a priest. “Chained Together for Life” was a song of grave compassion for the unfortunate Mordrake, Gerd Bessler’s viola soaring tragically over Waits’ disconsolate pump organ.
Exactly how the Alice songs sounded in Wilson’s production is hard to say with any certainty. We do know that the Bay Area instruments were utilized in the production, most of them played by Ali Husseini. Bessler himself occasionally switched from his Stroh-viola to the PVC Membrane saxophone. We have a rough idea of what Waits intended for the individual pieces only because a tape of his demo recordings from Bessler’s Music Factory studio was stolen from the back of a car outside Harry’s Harbour Bazaar—while Waits was purchasing a stuffed anaconda—and subsequently bootlegged. To recover the tapes, Waits was obliged to pay a ransom of $3,000, a sum he found vaguely insulting. “Not a lot of money, was it,” he remarked. “I was a little insulted. I think they wanted fast cash and no arguments.”
Waits remained in Hamburg long enough to see the premiere of Alice on 19 December, taking the stage after the final curtain to declaim a version of “Down There in the Reeperbahn” that thrilled the audience. The production, however, met with mixed reviews, critics praising the first act but carping about the second. Waits was too exhausted to be overly concerned. By Christmas he was home with Kathleen and the children, relieved to have survived the busiest year of his life and the first tenuous months of his sobriety. Having contemplated a tour to promote Bone Machine just a few months earlier, he now decided that he needed a break for his sanity. “Sometimes when I think about touring, I would rather be attacked by a school of hagfish,” he said. “Hagfish eat another fish from the inside out. That’s sometimes what touring does to you.”
As 1993 began, there was an even more compelling reason for Waits to take his foot off the accelerator. Kathleen was pregnant with their third child.
1* This time the lawsuit did not drag on ad infinitum. Levi-Strauss dropped the ad and publicly apologized to Waits. Muddying matters somewhat was the fact that Hawkins—godfather of horror rock and most famous for the immortal “I Put a Spell on You”—had had a prominent role as a hotel night clerk in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train.
2* “Are you a cop?” Waits half-seriously demanded of one interviewer who asked where he lived. “Are you from the census bureau? Is this a deposition? Are you in real estate? I’m not talking!”
3* It’s not inconceivable that Chuck E. Weiss had a hand in Waits’ recovery, and may even have “twelfth-stepped” his friend into AA. Chuckie had cleaned up in “the program” nine years earlier.
4* Patterson was a humorous alias for Waits himself, an allusion to the stubbornness Kathleen often accused him of. In the long conversation Jim Jarmusch recorded with him in October 1992, Waits invented an entire persona for Patterson, complete with a loaded .38 stuffed in a gym bag.
5* On “Murder in the Red Barn,” Waits could almost be Nick Cave—or, rather, Nick Cave impersonating Tom Waits. Like Waits, Cave was a middle-class boy with a schoolteacher father; like Waits, too, he was obsessed by the Bible and the Southern Gothic strain in American literature, pastiching both in And the Ass Saw the Angel.
6* The cause and circumstances of Jans’ death in Santa Monica remain mysterious to this day. Though he’d been involved in a motorcycle accident not long before, rumours abound that his death was drug-related. Certainly he was depressed that his 1982 album Champion—whose sleeve thanked Tom and Kathleen—failed even to secure a US release.
7* Wilson coined the term “knee play” to indicate an interlude between scenes— the connective tissue in the “meat” of a performance.