“We all die kind of a toe at a time, but …
some old fruit trees put out the best stuff.”
(Tom Waits to Sylvie Simmons, Mojo, 2004)
Tom Waits fumed after Bone Machine won a Grammy for Best Alternative Album. “Alternative to what?!” he huffed to Jim Jarmusch. He was marginally less irked when Mule Variations instead won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. (Beck’s beautiful Mutations scooped Best Alternative Album this time.) “That’s not a bad thing to be called if you’ve got to be in some kind of category,” he said. “I have a kind of miscellaneous quality to myself, but I’ll take folk. I started when I was a teenager playing folk clubs.”
Still, Waits would have preferred to be classified as a blues singer, and argued that in any case Grammy awards were like Food and Drug Administration stickers. “It’s safer,” he said. “It’s kind of people formulating their tastes for what they like.” Giving Waits a second Grammy seemed a faintly desperate attempt to drag him into the musical mainstream, to make this truculent cult figure fit. To go from “alternative” to “folk” in seven years was absurd. Shoehorning Waits into “folk” smacked of Grammy apparatchiks soliciting brownie points for hipness.
The next best thing to being deemed a “blues” artist was producing an album by John Hammond, son of the A&R legend who’d signed Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen to Columbia Records. Waits had been friendly with Hammond ever since opening for him in San Francisco in 1973. One of the finest white bluesmen to emerge from the 1960s, Hammond had blown mean harmonica on Mule Variations, whose bluesier tracks had given Waits a new appetite for black American roots music. “John’s particular dialect in music is that of Charley Patton’s shoe size and Skip James’ watch chain,” Waits said in tribute. “He has a blacksmith’s rhythm and the kind of soul and precision it takes to cut diamonds or to handle snakes.”
Still, donning the producer’s cap was daunting. Aside from keeping a watchful eye on Chuck E. Weiss’ Extremely Cool, Waits had never produced another artist. (Among the other artists who’d requested his services were Morphine and—via Keith Richards—the Neville Brothers.) “[Hammond] asked me to produce the record and I said to myself, ‘Jesus, how could I say no?’” Waits recalled. “Except I don’t know what that means, to produce a record. ‘You mean stand around and drink coffee while you play?’” Doubtless it was Hammond’s suggestion that Wicked Grin consist almost entirely of Waits songs that clinched his friend’s involvement. Soon Waits was stoked for the sessions, enlisting Larry Taylor and Stephen Hodges as the rhythm section, former Sir Douglas Quintet mainstay Augie Meyers as the keyboardist, and Charlie Musselwhite as the specialist harmonica player. He himself opted to play rhythm guitar throughout the album.
“Tom played guitar a lot better than he played it back in 1982” says Hodges, who had drummed on the original Swordfishtrombones version of “16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought Six.” “I mean, he never played it badly, but he’d gotten into playing really cool bass lines and rhythms—R. L. Burnsidey, Howlin’ Wolfey things. He played ninety-eight per cent of the rhythm guitar on Wicked Grin, and that is one bitchin’-ass rhythm-guitar record. He knows where to hit the holes. He could set the mood pretty much on his own.”
Wicked grins: with blues veterans John Hammond (centre) and Charlie Musselwhite, San Francisco, May 2001. (Jay Blakesberg)
Though Hammond had played with everyone from The Band to Duane Allman, bluesifying Waits’ songs—“the most evocative, imagistic, incredible material I’ve ever recorded”—was a whole new ballgame. “With the arrival of the musicians, a new shape took form,” he said of the sessions. “There was magic involved. And with Tom on hand and in the band, the songs just came together. I was inspired. Another side of me emerged.”
Of the album’s thirteen tracks, some made more blues sense than others. “2:19” and “Buzz Fledderjohn” were Mule Variations outtakes tailor-made for Hammond. “16 Shells” and “Get Behind the Mule” were no-brainers, as were “Gin Soaked Boy” and “Lowside of the Road” (both left off Wicked Grin but snuck on to Hammond’s 2001 album Ready for Love). “Heartattack and Vine” and “’Til the Money Runs Out” were pre-Island relics into which new life was breathed. “Fannin Street,” a country-folk parable about forsaking love for the bright lights of Houston, was a Waits/Brennan song written specially for the sessions. “I Know I’ve Been Changed” was a traditional spiritual and the sole track to feature Waits’ voice. The producer’s personal favourite, however, was a spooky reworking of Bone Machine’s “Murder in the Red Barn.”
Somehow it was typical of Waits to lurch straight from the mutant blues of Wicked Grin into the milieu of nineteenth-century Germany. But then it wasn’t every day that Robert Wilson came a-calling, and Waits had got the Americana bug out of his system for long enough to contemplate the notion of writing songs for Wilson’s version of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, to be staged in Copenhagen in November 2000. Adapted from Büchner by Ann-Christin Rommen and Wolfgang Wiens, Woyzeck— left unfinished and fragmentary when the twenty-three-year-old playwright died of typhus in 1837—told the story of a young working-class soldier who supports his mistress and illegitimate son by performing menial tasks for a condescending captain and submitting to medical experiments by a doctor in a small town. When his mistress, Marie, is unfaithful to him with a handsome drum major, Woyzeck seeks drunken solace in the arms of another woman but wakes to find a bloody knife in his hand and Marie’s lifeless body before him.
“It’s a story that continues to surface in Europe,” said Waits, who’d first heard it in a Boston coffee shop. “He slits her throat and throws his knife in the lake, goes in after it and drowns, and then his child is raised by the village idiot. I said, ‘OK, I’m in. You had me at “He slits her throat.”’” But the increasingly politicized Waits also liked the fact that Woyzeck—based on a real murder in Leipzig in 1821—was “a proletariat story … about a poor soldier who is manipulated by the government.” In a sense Woyzeck was a typical Waits (anti)hero, a man who’d been dealt a tough hand and couldn’t make sense of his life. First performed in 1913, the play had long been recognized as one of the great proto-expressionist works of German theatre, as well as a play that refused to shirk the determinism of class and exploitation. “It’s much more contemporary than most modern plays,” Wilson said. “Five hundred years from now this’ll still be interesting because there’s no shit, there’s no garbage.” Turned into a famous opera by Alban Berg (Wozzeck, 1925) and a 1979 film by Werner Herzog, its stark anti-naturalism greatly appealed to Robert Wilson, who had most recently been working with Lou Reed on 1997’s Time Rocker and 2000’s POEtry.
In turn, Wilson’s obsessiveness continued to appeal to Waits, who flew to Copenhagen in early February 2000 for preliminary discussions. “I must have recognized aspects of myself in him,” Waits said of Wilson. “He seems almost autistic as he’s compelled to communicate, but has the limits of certain known forms of communication, and he’s gone far beyond in developing others.” He added that, “for a sober person like myself,” working with Wilson was “the closest thing to a drug experience” available.
As intoxicating as the prospect of working with Wilson again was, self-doubt quickly set in as Waits and Brennan began work on the Woyzeck songs. But then Wilson had never been interested in formal technique anyway. “[It] is not important,” he argued. “Emotional telegraphing and truth is what is important.” As with Alice seven years before, Waits again mined his fascination with carnivals and freaks, watching Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train “to get some inspiration” from the film’s sinister fairground scenes. Sure enough, Woyzeck started with a carnival announcer inviting the audience to view “the astronomical horse and the two little canary birds,” together with a monkey puppet that spoke in a voice remarkably similar to Waits.’ As the announcer paraded these creatures, he and the entire cast sang the opening “Misery Is the River of the World,” a gruff trudge of a song that could have been the bastard child of “Heigh Ho” and “Underground.”
Juggling writing and parenthood as they’d now done for some years, Waits and Brennan worked hard on the songs through the summer of 2000 before he once again flew solo to Europe. Joining Robert Wilson at the Betty Nansen Theatre, Waits found memories of The Black Rider and Alice flooding back as full musical rehearsals began in October. The insomniac hothouse atmosphere of Wilson’s productions was “kind of like being an astronaut for a few months … sitting out there in the dark at a little table with these little lamps like you’re at Cape Canaveral.” As with the Thalia company in Hamburg, the Danish actors were enthusiastic participants, submitting their egos to Wilson’s vision of Büchner. Waits himself felt more confident than he had on Alice or The Black Rider. Working closely with actors was an intricately intuitive business. “You really have to give it away and at the same time you really are kind of spotting somebody who’s on the trapeze,” Waits said of the process. “You can’t tell them to get down and let you up there so you can show them how to do it.”
Four years later, when an acclaimed British production of The Black Rider—with Marianne Faithfull as Pegleg—came to San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, multi-instrumentalist Kate St. John had an opportunity to observe exactly how Waits “directed” performers. “He was really, really interesting and inspiring,” she remembers. “He had a bit of a problem with ‘Gospel Train’ and wanted to deconstruct what we’d done. So he got us to play and just sort of paced around listening really hard and thinking intently about what he wanted. We stopped and he said, ‘What this piece needs is a short-back-and-sides.’ And that was great, because we all knew what he meant. I was playing a rhythmic thing on the accordion, and he said, ‘Just do it really straight like a train.’ It was completely changed and so much better.”
Waits raced against the clock to get the songs right for Woyzeck’s premiere on 21 November. Panic stations seemed to be the normal course of events for Wilson’s productions. “A week before they open, most plays or operas are just dreck, complete pandemonium,” Waits said. “You want to shoot yourself and then quit, or quit and then shoot yourself.” But somehow, against all odds, things fell into place just before opening night.1*
As he had done after Alice, Waits spent Christmas and the New Year recovering at home with Kathleen and the children. For the first half of 2001 he kept his head down in Valley Ford, though he did join John Hammond on stage in San Francisco on 21 March for three numbers from Wicked Grin. There were occasional visits to Prairie Sun to record songs for soundtracks and other projects—tracks that would later appear on the Orphans box set—but for the most part he focused on life as a family man. Waits was often sighted locally, not least at Kellesimone’s soccer games. “Any regular at Sebastopol’s Food for Thought or Lucy’s Cafe or Incredible Records has probably seen the hapless drifter wander through,” wrote local reporter John Beck. “Adding another volume to West County folklore, Tom Waits stories abound. Like the time he paced the sideline at his daughter’s soccer game, wearing a low-brow porkpie hat, cigarette hanging from his lip, yelling ‘Kick the ball!’”
Nine months after Woyzeck began its Copenhagen run, however, Waits decided to repeat what he’d done with The Black Rider and record his own versions of the songs he’d written for both Woyzeck and Alice. The plan was to release the two sets of songs simultaneously as separate albums—a feat attempted with varying degrees of success by artists as unalike as Bruce Springsteen (Human Touch/Lucky Town) and Guns N’ Roses (Use Your Illusion 1 and 2). They would be released as Alice and Blood Money. “We were going to call [it] Woyzeck but it was thought nobody knew who he was,” Waits said. “Kathleen said, ‘Let’s call it Blood Money,’ and that made sense. The guy’s a lowly soldier who’s offered money for medical experiments which contribute to his loss of balance and sanity.”2*
Brennan had been badgering Waits for some years to revisit Alice, and now seemed the right time to pull its songs out of the vault. Among other things, this required Waits to locate the demos that had been stolen and then sold back to the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg. (He claimed he had to buy the bootleg on eBay, but an avid Dutch fan is said to have sent him a copy.) “It’s like giving away a box of clothes and then you get them back, you know,” he said. “‘Hey, those pants, I like those pants, that shirt. I always liked that shirt.’”
Recording the Alice and Woyzeck music together—in parallel— was draining. “The reason no one does two records at the same time is that it’s just too damn much work,” Waits told Terry Gilliam, adding he went “back and forth” between the two works “depending on how I was feeling.” Even on productive days Waits felt as if he’d “been in the foxhole all day.” On bad ones, “when the right sound won’t reveal itself,” he would pace the studio in circles or rock himself back and forth on a chair in his customary way.
The contrast with Mule Variations was marked, Waits assembling a large pool of musicians from the jazz and avant-garde circuits in San Francisco. Alongside Larry Taylor came more recent collaborators (Joe Gore, Matt Brubeck, Andrew Borger, Nik Phelps, Charlie Musselwhite) and debutants Eric Perney (bass), Colin Stetson (woodwinds), Gino Robair (drums), Ara Anderson (horns), Tim Allen (scraper [sic]), Matthew Sperry (bass), Dawn Harms (Stroh violin and viola), Myles Boisen (banjo, guitar), Carla Kihlstedt (violin), and Don Plonsey (clarinet). In addition, the two principal arrangers in the Copenhagen production of Woyzeck—keyboardist Bent Clausen and violinist/multi-instrumentalist Bebe Risenfors—were flown to California for the sessions, which took place not at Prairie Sun but in a studio called In the Pocket, in nearby Forestville. Rounding out the eclectic musical company—on a couple of tracks—were two percussionists: former Police man Stewart Copeland and a sixteen-year-old named Casey Waits. “If you grow up in the mortuary business, you’re probably going to be an undertaker,” Waits said of his son’s appearance on Blood Money’s sinister “Knife Chase.” “I told him, ‘If you want to be an astronaut I can’t help you.’”
Pointedly not called for the sessions was Ralph Carney, who was hurt and let it be known among fellow Bay Area musicians. Peeved, Waits called Carney and vented his anger. “He explained that he needed to have new people around to shake things up,” Carney remembers. “It was such a heavy call that I kind of blocked it out.”
Just as with Bone Machine and Mule Variations, Waits demanded a certain discipline from the Alice/Woyzeck players. “Most of the musicians drove up from San Francisco, and I wanted them there by 10 a.m. so they were clean,” he said. “I instructed them that they were not allowed to listen to any music in the car on the way up.” It was as if Waits was “directing” the recording sessions like Robert Wilson—and the musicians responded as actors responded to Wilson. The basic arrangements and textures in the Alice/Blood Money recordings were comparable to those on The Black Rider. Just as One from the Heart had forced him to resurrect the Gin Pan Alley style of the seventies, working with Wilson on Woyzeck drew Waits back into a style he’d almost outgrown by Mule Variations. Small chamber groups of strings and woodwinds performed alongside piano and/or pump organ and other favoured Waits keyboards (Mellotron, Chamberlin, etc.). Guitars were conspicuous by their near-absence. “The electric guitar thing is so overused,” Waits said. “They show up on everything, it almost seems like it’s the guiding force of popular music. Without it I wonder what people’s music would sound like. So it was like tying one hand behind your back just for the hell of it.”
Oddly, few of the Gatmo contraptions showed up on the recordings, though the Stroh violin—an old hybrid instrument with a metal cone attached to the bridge for amplification—was ubiquitous on Alice’s nocturnes, played by either Bebe Risenfors or Dawn Harms. There was also a four-foot-long Indonesian “seed pod” that Waits himself played on “Kommienezuspadt.”
Though Blood Money had its hushed moments (“All the World Is Green,” “Lullaby,” “The Part You Throw Away,” “Woe”), in the main it was Alice that featured the softer, dreamier music. “I guess Alice is probably more metaphysical or something, maybe more water, more feminine maybe,” Waits said. “It’s like taking a pill … or a mushroom or something.” By contrast, Waits saw Blood Money as “more earthbound, more carnival, more the slaving meat-wheel that we’re all on.” The key to distinguishing the two works, Waits said, was “making sure both of them had diverse textures and subject matter.” Both sets of songs also had to work sequentially, irrespective of their context in the plays. “You try to create some sort of counterpoint for this story,” he noted, “but you’re still dealing with song logic.”
On Alice’s opening “Alice,” Colin Stetson’s languid tenor phrases recalled Teddy Edwards and Frank Vicari as they danced round piano chords that wouldn’t have been out of place on One from the Heart. “It’s like a private moment,” Waits said of the song. “It’s like sitting in a chair … by yourself … thinking about someone.” Next up, “Everything You Can Think” pulled us into Lewis Carroll’s hallucinatory universe, Waits growling at us in his gruffest “Underground” voice while Mellotron chords meshed with Matt Brubeck’s uneasy cello in a kind of fever-waltz. “Flower’s Grave” was a spare piano ballad in the “Briar and the Rose” mode, Waits’ weary growl backed by a clarinet and a small chamber string section. The chamber feel continued on the sombre “No One Knows I’m Gone,” originally sung by Alice at the start of the Wilson/Paul Schmidt play and similar to the demo version of the song from Hamburg. Sung as if by a corpse lying six feet under, “No One Knows” was Waits’ idea of what it was like for Alice disappearing down the rabbit hole.
“Kommienezuspadt” was less berserk than Waits’ Hamburg demo, more of a frisky gallop this time, with Waits spewing out his cod-Kraut gibberish and bashing away on the seed pod while Colin Stetson blew R&B baritone sax behind him. Topped off with an anguished viola solo by Bebe Risenfors, “Poor Edward” came close to the mordant Tod Browning melodrama of its demo version. “Table Top Joe,” however, was almost lounge-jazz in feel. This Joe was a “Straight to the Top” swinger, Waits scat-ting like he’d done in his Nighthawks days as Bent Clausen fooled around on the piano and Stewart Copeland shuffled along on a little trap kit. In stark contrast, “Lost in the Harbor” returned us to the deep melancholia of “No One Knows I’m Gone,” Waits wheezing away on the pump organ and warbling like an old man. “That’s the Humpty Dumpty situation,” he said of the song, “looking over one side of the wall and the other—‘over here, over there,’” Waits says. “It’s East Berlin-West Berlin, Palestine and Israel, Northern Ireland. That [enemies] are really kind of neighbors as well.”
“We’re All Mad Here” was slower and less leering than the “Hang Me in a Bottle” demo, its pizzicato violin/marimba/bass clarinet blend recalling “Shore Leave.” “Watch Her Disappear,” not included in the original demos, was a poem of voyeuristic love recited in the almost prurient voice of “What’s He Building?” Kurt Weill was revived on a version of “Reeperbahn” that was much less hysterical than its demo version, while “I’m Still Here” was Waits in “Picture in a Frame”/“Take It with Me” mode, alone at the piano as he imagined Alice in old age. Where once Waits felt he’d been drowned in strings, now he elected to use no more than a cello and a pair of violins to create the same orchestral drapes. It’s hard not to hear this exquisite ballad as a song for Kathleen.
Another Mule Variations song, “Georgia Lee,” came to mind with “Fish & Bird,” a muted waltz featuring a small ensemble of piano, pump organ, violins, trumpet, and clarinet. The plea of a sailor asking his beloved to wait for him, the song was another coded articulation of Carroll’s love for Alice. “I’m imagining a whole Victorian atmosphere and someone like himself, who had this obsession and compulsion,” Waits said of Carroll. “I’m trying to explore the nature of obsession, not just in his frame of mind but also as it applies to any love affair.”
The penultimate “Barcarolle” took its name from the musical term for a sailors’ waltz. Sailors, Waits explained, were “always waltzing … moving from one side to the next.” The song in question was a recap of the Alice narrative, a restatement of Carroll’s enduring fascination with his bewitching heroine-muse. Backed by a skeleton crew of a band—Stetson on tenor sax, Clausen on unsettling piano, Dawn Harms on violin, and Matt Brubeck on bass—Waits sung a sad lullaby whose intimations of loss and death were all too plain. The closing instrumental “Fawn,” with Waits on piano and Carla Kihlstedt on weepy violin, served as a perfect coda to the album.
If the differences between Alice and Blood Money have been exaggerated by critics, the latter album certainly boasts the greater share of angry, testosterone-fuelled songs. Yet both albums were to an extent bipolar, shifting from rage to contrition. The notion that Alice represented Waits’ dreamy “feminine” side and Blood Money his raging “masculine” side was too glib. “I have no trouble,” he pointed out, “jumping from a parlor song to a Nazi carousel”—something that happened several times within the thirteen-song sequence on Blood Money. “I run hot and cold,” Waits told the New York Times. “I like melody and I like dissonance. I guess maybe it’s an alcoholic personality. I get mad and I cry.” Ten years sober, he was still framing his impulses in the context of addiction. But the same polarities (hard/soft, angry/tender, masculine/feminine) could as easily have been observed in the work of Neil Young, another maverick who’d upped sticks to northern California to rage against the gradual dying of the light.
“Misery Is the River of the World” got things under way on Blood Money, setting the harshly anti-humanist tone for Büchner’s play. After the twisted roots music on Bone Machine and Mule Variations, we were back into the curt vile cynicism of The Black Rider, complete with percussion and marimbas that dated even further back to the hectoring stomp of “Underground” and “Singapore.” The notion of human existence as remorseless and unstoppable was a worldview Waits in any case partly held. Look around you, he might have said: humanity was capable of such rottenness that in the end the only sane response was to surrender to its churning flow.
The misanthropy continued with “Everything Goes to Hell,” a jaundiced duet between Marie and the Drum Major set to a jarring time signature and bongo and baritone sax parts that harked back to “Jockey Full of Bourbon.” What was the point in being good, the song asked? We were all going to hell anyway.
“Coney Island Baby” was Woyzeck’s naive idealization of Marie as a suburban American princess who took him out to Dreamland—the New York theme park once again standing as a symbol of America’s escapism. “It’s a circus story, really,” Kathleen had said to Waits. “You know, it starts with the Ferris wheel and the whole thing and this gal Marie is a Coney Island baby.” When she played Waits a melody she’d found on the piano, he fell in love with it. “I said, ‘God, that is just so simple and so beautiful,’ and I hung onto it and put it onto a tape recorder and I carried it around.” A classic throwback to 1920s Tin Pan Alley, the song was like the missing link between Mule Variations’ “Black Market Baby” and Real Gone’s “Dead and Lovely.”
“All the World Is Green,” one of two Waits tracks Julian Schnabel used in his acclaimed The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2008), was a thé dansant piece performed as a duet between Woyzeck and Marie in the play. Colin Stetson’s wistfully woody clarinet was the signature instrument on this palm-court reverie about forgiveness.
Picking up from the splenetic mood of “Misery Is the River of the World,” “God’s Away on Business” was not only a descendant of “Singapore” and “Cemetery Polka” but another instalment in Waits’ ongoing iteration of his personal theology. God had been sozzled and wantonly cruel on “Heartattack and Vine,” irresponsibly neglectful on “Georgia Lee;” now he was merely out of town like a travelling salesman. Sung by the doctor who performed experiments on Woyzeck, the track was a dwarves’ march through WeillWorld—a style that was arguably becoming as predictable as Waits’ ballad mode of old.
“Another Man’s Vine” was delivered in a voice that—on the chorus, at least—was equal parts Mac Rebennack and “House where Nobody Lives” country-soul. If the piano and horns came from New Orleans, the trademark marimbas added a menacing faux-exotic touch to the arrangement. On its heels, the warped thriller muzak of “Knife Chase”—as sinister as it was suspenseful—sounded like Waits parodying Lalo Schifrin.
“Lullaby” spoke for itself, Waits channelling his own paternal feelings as he sang this tender song performed in Woyzeck by Karl, the village idiot who adopts Marie’s little boy. “Starving in the Belly of a Whale,” sung by the Captain who employs and demeans Woyzeck, was a cross between “God’s Away on Business” and The Black Rider’s “Just the Right Bullets.” Charlie Musselwhite’s harmonica gave the track an inflamed bluesiness that was offset by Waits’ ticking spaghetti-western guitar.
“The Part You Throw Away,” not included in Woyzeck itself, was a delicate waltz-time ballad featuring pizzicato strings instead of guitar or piano. Intended as a song of guilt-admission and renunciation (sung by Marie), it was covered by Ute Lemper on her Punishing Kiss two years before Blood Money came out.3* Waits followed it with the short, bittersweet “Woe,” a dirgelike ballad sung by Woyzeck as he stares at Marie’s lifeless body. “I like beautiful melodies telling you terrible things,” Waits said of such songs. “Is it my thorny, dark, oozing side, or is it just the way I see the world?”
“Calliope” was a discordant instrumental played on the old merry-go-round instrument of the same name, accompanied only by Nik Phelps’ trumpet and Waits overdubbing himself on a toy piano. It was Greg Cohen who’d found the calliope in question—a fifty-seven-whistle beast built for a circus in 1929—on a flatbed truck in Iowa. After he called Waits to alert him that it was for sale, his sometime boss sprang for it, no questions asked. “It took four guys to pick it up and put it in the back of an El Camino,” Waits said. “It’s all hoses and pipes. They’re ear-splittingly loud. They suggest you play it with earplugs, but I think, what’s the point of that?” Waits claimed that playing the calliope was “probably the most visceral music experience I’ve ever had.” The calliope was also heard on Blood Money’s last track, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” with Waits backed by a blend of horns, harmonium, marimba, and violins. Ara Anderson blew a long Dixieland trumpet solo before Waits resumed Marie’s blaring song of unrepentant infidelity.
Performed in Woyzeck but not included on Blood Money were “Diamond in Your Mind,” “Shiny Things,” “It’s Over,” and “It’s Just the Way We Are Boys.” The first three all found homes— “Diamond” on Solomon Burke’s Don’t Give Up on Me, “Shiny Things” and “It’s Over” on Orphans—while an early version of “Just the Way We Are” had already featured in the Steppenwolf production of Frank’s Wild Years. Waits himself recorded “Diamond” live at Healing the Divide, a fundraising show for “peace and reconciliation” staged in New York on 21 September 2003.
With Waits immersed in Alice and Blood Money, his disowned past came back to haunt him in the form of the Elektra/Rhino compilation Used Songs, 1973–1980. “I can’t listen to the old stuff,” he’d groaned the previous summer. “I’ve got big ears and I dressed funny. And I have a monochromatic vocal style. I have a hard time listening to my old records, the stuff before my wife.”
No doubt this was why Waits repeatedly ignored phone messages from Bones Howe to discuss the mastering and sequencing of the compilation. “There was a track where I thought the bass was a little light, and there was a suggestion I had about the sequence,” Howe recalls. “I called him and I could never get to him. A girl said, ‘I’m his assistant and you’ll have to tell me about it.’ I said, ‘I would really like to talk to Tom about it.’ And she called me back and said, ‘Tom just says to tell me what you wanted to tell him.’ So I just said, ‘Okay, so that’s where we are.’ I told her what I thought. She called me back the next day and said Tom agreed with me that there probably should be more bass on that track.”
Bones Howe, Montecito, March 2007. (Art Sperl)
Waits doesn’t come out of this looking great. As a mere matter of courtesy, a call back to the man who’d got his career on track in the first place doesn’t seem so much to ask. Then again, it’s the way the Dylans and Youngs of this world have always operated, and why should Waits be any different? “I’m thinking it’s not going to hurt Waits to talk to Bones for half an hour,” agrees Michael Hacker, who’d worked with both men on One from the Heart. “And yet it’s almost part of the toolkit that makes someone like Waits successful. It’s almost like you can’t leave your past behind unless you cut those people off. I mean, I’m a Dylan freak and he certainly cuts people off.”
“I think Tom’s leery of people that he works with getting too close,” says Ralph Carney, himself excommunicated from the Waits inner circle. “That’s kind of what happened with me. I’m sure if I ran into him he’d be like, ‘Hey, Ralphie, how’s it goin’…’ But I’m in a period now where they don’t speak to me, even though everyone’s like, ‘Don’t take it personal, man.’” Stephen Hodges, who played behind Waits with Carney on numerous occasions, says this is “maybe not an area I should talk about … there’s a certain thing going on here with Tom’s office, and the deal is that … because Ralph’s deeply affected by the whole association with Tom and what have you, it’s made things difficult between him and the Waits camp.”4*
Bones Howe, understandably hurt, talks of Waits in the tones of a spurned parent. He reminds me of The Band’s “Tears of Rage”—“Now you throw us all aside and put us all away …” Of all the great musicians Bones has worked with over the years, Waits—with the exception of certain long-gone jazz legends—is the only one he misses speaking to. “I would love to be able to pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey man, what’s going on? How are your kids?’” Howe says. “We’re two complete opposites in a lot of ways but there are parts of us that are very much alike. I wouldn’t make another Fifth Dimension record, but I’d make another record with Tom tomorrow. He is a real person and he has good manners. He’s a gentleman. That’s one of the reasons I miss him.”
Howe can only assume that Kathleen Brennan has something to do with the friendship ending; it would hardly be the first time that a relationship or marriage created an unspoken rift. “In a lot of ways Tom is very selfish about his artistry,” Howe says. “And I don’t know what Kathleen’s contributions to those records have really been. I just don’t know. She’s his wife and the mother of his kids and she’s his co-producer and his co-writer.” Michael Hacker maintains that “giving Kathleen so much credit is a winwin thing for Waits … nothing’s diminished him and it allows him in a way to deflect certain things. He can be this gracious collaborator but really at the end it’s all about Waits.”
When the dreaded interview treadmill cranked up again in May 2002, Waits took his usual pains to credit Kathleen while underlining just how averse she was to the whole media circus. “She hates all this,” he told one interviewer as he pointed at his minidisc recorder. He had wise counsel for anyone struggling in marriages or relationships. “Everybody wants it to be summer all the time, in relationships and with their career,” he said. “And when the weather starts to turn, they think they better get out. So it takes a certain amount of persistence.” Recalls Kate St. John of the San Francisco rehearsals for The Black Rider, “Kathleen was always there and they seemed very happy … they were obviously among the chosen few who just do meet the right person in their life.”
Safeguarding the privacy of family life seemed more important than ever to Waits. He had been quietly appalled by the televisual antics of Ozzy Osbourne and family in The Osbournes, despite having met and liked the former Black Sabbath singer at their mutual friend Nicolas Cage’s house in LA. “I don’t think any of us are sick,” he said apropos MTV’s hit show, “but I think the culture is sick and it gives us the flu.” If a man stopped valuing his privacy, Waits said, sooner or later he wouldn’t have a life at all.
With Kellesimone in college—and soon to become a painter5*— Waits’ parental energies were now focused mostly on his sons. With the teenage Casey it was usually a case of drop-offs and pickups, often from shows by hip-hop artists that made Waits feel his age. “As you start getting older, you get out of touch,” he admitted. “I’m like a turtleneck sweater. And then your kids kind of enlighten you: ‘Dad, have you heard Blackalicious?’ I take them to the show but I drop them off. I’m not allowed to go in. It’d be too embarrassing.” Waits protested too much: Casey was proud enough of his father to set up an interview with his favourite magazine, Big Brother Skateboarding. “We love [Casey],” wrote Russell Bongard. “Without him telling his dad to do this interview we would have never gotten Tom on the phone.”
Waits was more comfortable helping out with excursions at Sullivan’s elementary school, not least because of the Chevy Suburban he drove. “I’m down with the field trips,” he said. “I’m always looking for a nine-passenger opportunity.” Once he took Sullivan and assorted classmates to a local guitar factory, only to find that none of the employees recognized him. A few weeks later he drove the kids on another trip, this time to a recycling centre. “We pull up to the dump,” he said, “and six guys surround my car—‘Hey! It’s Tom Waits!’” Everybody, he remarked forlornly, knew him at the dump.
The longer Waits was a father, the easier he found it to juggle work and domesticity. Where once it was essential to separate the world of “ball games, graduations, and family reunions” from that of Mellotrons and bullhorns, increasingly he saw his life as one seamless thing. “The way you do anything,” he liked to say, “is the way you do everything.” Now he felt he could “go back and forth between the documentary and the romantic comedy …”
“Perhaps the most singular feature about Tom Waits as an artist,” Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in a fine GQ profile, “is the way he has braided his creative life into his home life with such wit and grace. This whole idea runs contrary to our every stereotype about how geniuses need to work.” On the rare occasions when Waits felt conflict between work and home life, the family dog— Bob—became a useful ally.“[He has] a need to mark a territory, and I’m kind of like that,” he said. “If I’ve been gone for three days and I come home, first thing I have to do is take a walk around the house and establish myself again.”
Waits was still Mr. Cranky when it came to the prying eyes of the outside world. “If people are a little nervous about approaching you at the market, it’s good,” he maintained. “I’m not Chuckles the Clown or Bozo. I don’t cut the ribbon at the opening of markets. Hit your baseball into my yard and you’ll never see it again.” Quoting Robert De Niro in Meet the Parents, Waits said he had a “circle of trust” around him, made up only of close friends and loved ones. Interviewers continued to experience his ire, moreover. When an Australian journalist asked whether basing songs on works by Lewis Carroll and Georg Büchner meant his own “well of characters” was “drying up,” Waits let him have it with both barrels. “I beg your pardon, are you trying to insult me?” he snarled down the phone. “Are you saying I’m drying up?” Just because he wasn’t living in motels or sleeping in his car anymore, he barked, didn’t mean there was “nothing left to write about.”
Waits’ anger also spilled out when he talked about the music industry. In May 2001 he’d joined forces with Randy Newman and Nancy and Ann Wilson of Heart in filing a $40-million copyright-infringement lawsuit against mp3.com in Los Angeles.6* In September 2002, along with his old benefactors Glenn Frey and Don Henley, he would appear at a joint hearing on industry accounting practices, called by members of the California senate judiciary committee and the senate committee on the entertainment industry. “The record companies are like cartels,” Waits raged. “It’s a nightmare to be trapped in one. I’m on a good label now that’s not part of the plantation system. But all the old records I did for Island have been swallowed up and spit out in whatever form they choose.” He urged young artists not to sign away their publishing rights as he had done. “Most people are so anxious to record, they’ll sign anything,” he remarked. “It’s like going across the river on the back of an alligator.”
Viewing the music industry in the wider context of capitalist entertainment, Waits continued to rail against the use of songs in commercials. He bemoaned the fact that he could no longer hear “Good Vibrations” without thinking of Sunkist orange juice. “In the old days if somebody was doing a commercial, you used to say, ‘Oh, gee, too bad, he probably needs the money,’” he said. “But now it’s like hawking cigarettes and underwear with rock and roll. While you’re dreaming about your connection with that song, why don’t you think about soda or candy or something?”7* One wonders if Waits ever confronted Keith Richards on this thorny issue. When it came to endorsing products, the Rolling Stones were more shamelessly avaricious than anybody.
Allied to the commercial abuse of music, Waits felt, was a general loss of community in the way music was consumed. Where once blues, country, folk, and gospel had brought people together in shared experience, now music was too “secular and compartmentalized” to provide a genuine connection. “Everyone is really afraid of intimacy,” he observed. “Most of our fear really involves fear of each other.”
As they did for so many artists, the events of 11 September 2001 left Waits shaken and questioning the purpose of what he did. Asked about his worldview post-9/11, he said he felt the planet was “on fire” but added that at least artists were now wide awake. “It’s important … not to go back to sleepwalking in our pajamas, playing golf and contemplating our navels,” Waits said. “The rest of the world is tapping us on the shoulder with the oldest conflict of time—the haves and have-nots. It’s time for great men to step forward with wisdom and depth and compassion.”
Another subject Waits touched on in interviews was acting. With the exception of Mystery Men, Waits hadn’t appeared in a film for almost a decade. “It’s not the life I want to have, wearing someone else’s clothes and saying someone else’s words,” he said brusquely. What thespian inclinations he retained seemed to be fulfilled in his music. “When you sing, you’re kind of acting,” he said. “The whole act of singing is like a big question you’re asking, something you are reaching towards, wondering about or ranting over.” It was the sheer vanity of Hollywood actors that riled Waits. A man of rare natural humility in a business rife with narcissistic egomaniacs, he kept a constant check on tendencies to self-aggrandizement. “I try not to let any of it go to my head, but sometimes that’s impossible,” he said. “I have my own life, and then I do this concentrated stuff of making a record and going on the road and doing interviews.”
Released in May 2002, Alice and Blood Money debuted at 32 and 33 on the Billboard chart, each selling 32,000-plus in their first week of release and delivering Waits’ highest chart positions to date. He conceded it was “a little bit of a gimmick” to put them out on the same day. “How are they different?” he said. “One’s chicken, one’s fish.” Asked if the albums in any sense rounded off a kind of Robert Wilson trilogy, Waits replied that they could be viewed in those terms. Whether the “gimmick” of the dual release did Alice and Blood Money any favours was debatable. While reviewers and fans warmed more to Alice than to Blood Money, few fell in love with either album in the way they’d fallen for Mule Variations.
Within a year, moreover, Waits had swung back towards the more American—bluesier, blacker—feel of Mule Variations. Using Larry Taylor, Marc Ribot, Brain, Les Claypool, his son Casey, and former Swedish glam-metal guitarist Harry Cody, Waits set about recording his roughest, most unkempt music to date. “Those last albums were more meticulous,” Waits said of Alice and Blood Money. “There were more ballads on them, and there were strings and all that stuff. You’ve been kind of staring into the water and now you want to do something that’s liberating.”
Waits had told me that he wanted to find a way of bringing his hard and soft sides closer to each other—to, in some sense, reconcile rather than dialectically oppose the “grand weepers” and “grim reapers.” “I guess I’d like to try and find some way to put those things together instead of end-to-end,” he’d said. “Find a way to smash one into the other, or mutate it in some way.” He saw the next album as his opportunity to do just that. He also wanted to give voice to a political rage his fans had never heard before, writing three songs with Kathleen (“Hoist that Rag,” “Sins of the Father,” and “Day after Tomorrow”) that directly addressed the malpractices of the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq. “I’m not a politician,” he told me. “I keep my mouth shut because I don’t want to put my foot in it. But at a certain point, saying absolutely nothing is a political statement all of its own.”
For the new album, Waits decided to forgo any kind of official recording environment, instead using a mobile studio to record in an abandoned schoolhouse in the Chinese immigrant “ghost” town of Locke, located in “the Sacramento delta” a hundred miles east of his home. “We just said the delta,” he told me. “Most people assumed it was the Mississippi delta. But see, there’s a Sacramento delta and that’s where we were. The old schoolhouse seemed to help the music somehow, I don’t know how.” The album would bear the self-consciously bluesy title Real Gone.
As blues-rooted as it was, the album also had one foot in the newer African-American art form that was hip hop. “It’s the growing edge of the blues,” Waits said. “[It’s] following in the same tradition and carrying the same rebellious nature.” Expanding on the homemade “human beatbox” intro to “Big in Japan,” Waits decided to make his own “oral percussion” the rhythmic basis of the new album. Having employed DJ Ill Media on Mule Variations—and fallen in love with Missy Elliott and the Wu Tang Clan, to boot—he wanted to incorporate elements of the radical new hip hop that his eldest son loved: San Francisco turntablists and freestylers such as El-P, Sage Francis, and Aesop Rock. “All that stuff gets played around the house because that’s what happens when you have kids,” Waits said of Casey’s tastes. “You stop dominating the turntable. I haven’t had that kind of sway around here for years. ‘Put on that Leadbelly record one more time, Dad, and I’m going to throw a bottle at your head.’” Kathleen wasn’t so sure of the new direction. “I keep wanting to use turntables and stuff but my wife says no,” Waits had said in 2002. “She says that’s going to be like a ducktail eventually, or a flat-top or mohawk. And I struggle with that. I can’t really tell.”
Overriding Brennan’s misgivings, Waits began recording himself in the bathroom at home, overdubbing percussive sounds and grunted exclamations on his Fostex four-track while the rest of the family slept. “I like to use my voice like a drum, you know,” he said. “I counterpoint and all that. And then of course I sub-vocalize, because I’m dyslexic, attention deficit disorder.” The “bathroom sessions” left him “sweating, eyes all bugged out, hair sticking up”—and his throat in shreds. He emphasized that these lo-fi recordings weren’t loops but oral patterns sustained for upwards of three and a half minutes. “Loops start feeling like wallpaper after a while,” he told me. “You know it’s coming around again and your mind has no need to probe any further.” He compared the crude recordings to the sounds singers make “when you’re trying to communicate with a drummer and you don’t play the drums.”
The bathroom tapes formed the rhythmic ruts for all Real Gone’s more raucous selections: “Top of the Hill,” “Shake It,” “Don’t Go into the Barn,” “Metropolitan Glide,” “Baby Gonna Leave Me,” “Clang Boom Steam,” and hidden track “Chickaboom.” (“Clang Boom Steam”—originally “clank boom and steam” on Bone Machine’s “Such a Scream”—was a virtual onomatopoeia for Waits’ mouthbox sound.) Over the scratchy, distorted “beats” of “Top of the Hill” and “Metropolitan Glide,” moreover, Casey’s turntables could be heard swirling as Larry Taylor anchored the raw sound and Marc Ribot worked his usual jagged magic. “What happened this time was there’s one guy in my band who’s eighteen and one guy’s in his mid-sixties,” Waits said. “When everybody gets together you know they’re going to learn something. Each wants what the other knows.”
The sound of Real Gone was echoey and booming. Startling by its total absence was any sign of piano. “I don’t know why the piano didn’t get used,” Waits said. “It just didn’t work. I bring hundreds of instruments into the studio, and everybody else who comes in brings a couple of hundred too. You end up with this plethora of instruments that you don’t even know where to begin.” In fact, there was a decidedly low quota of “exotic” instruments on Real Gone: only one use of Chamberlin (on “Circus”), and Ribot’s cigar-box banjo on “Trampled Rose.” After eschewing it on Alice and Blood Money, the guitar had returned with an unholy vengeance. Equally ubiquitous was the percussion: endless bashings and smashings administered by Brain and/or Waits and son. Here was Waits in his mid-fifties, the mad man of Valley Ford, letting loose in the most unbridled way he’d ever done. “It wasn’t really a conscious thing,” he said, “but I always figured that you get to be more eccentric as you get older and people have to endure it. ‘Old Uncle Al has spittle around his chin, but that’s okay, he’s old.’”
Real Gone also alluded to the finality of death and loss—of people and places lost to eternity. Death was overtly present on “Don’t Go into the Barn,” “How’s It Gonna End,” “Dead and Lovely,” and “Green Grass,” less overtly on several other tracks. Waits had recently lost both his dear friend Teddy Edwards and Alice/Blood Money bassist Matthew Sperry, the latter dead at thirty-four after being hit by a car while cycling in Oakland. “I think there’s a pretty heavy emphasis on mortality in whatever you do,” he said. “How do you avoid it? We’re decomposing as we go. We’re the dead on vacation. It’s not a theme I need to pursue. It pursues me.”
Opening track “Top of the Hill” said, “Welcome to my neck of the woods.” It was the sound of a man at once folksy and a bit crusty, doing his oral-beatbox thang out back in the shack. Loops or no loops, the effect was close to trancelike: you either fell into the groove of Waits’ mouth percussion or you didn’t. (There was a curious synchronicity in the release of Björk’s album Oceania, on which—in her very different way—the Icelandic siren performed similar trickery.) In Waits’ formulation, this was music for dancing like nobody was watching, complete with squiggly turntable scratches and an old kazoo.
“Hoist that Rag,” Real Gone’s most fearsome song, began with a lurching Afro-Cuban groove, as if some monster had broken into a Havana dance hall and taken over the stage. Ribot, who’d tackled Cuban music with his own occasional outfit Los Cubanos Postizos, twisted and writhed as Waits yelped his song of coded bellicosity, sung as if by a degenerate Donald Rumsfeld. Though “Hoist” consisted of nothing but guitar, bass, and percussion, the brute force of the chorus was a tirade of rage. This was righteous indignation, a magnificently unpatriotic attack on America’s stars-and-stripes imperialism. Said Robert Christgau, “I wouldn’t put it past [Waits] to actually make some politics out of this lifelong dedication of a middle-class teacher’s son to the lower reaches—the lower depths … to actually politicize a little bit, actually making something out of what I’m sure is a situation that appalls him.”
The eight-minute “Sins of the Father,” with its fretless banjo and muted rock-steady groove, alluded none too obliquely to George W. Bush and the electoral rigging in his brother Jeb’s home state of Florida. Reverbed guitars and banjos vied with bongos-in-the-dirt percussion that recalled “Lowside of the Road.” A processional Dylanesque epic with densely allusive verses and a host of quasi-biblical imagery, it told of a wayward son’s urge to cleanse the past—to take his inherited sins “down to the pond.”
“Shake It” found Waits once again in Stones mode, a Fat Possum version of Rain Dogs’ “Big Black Mariah.” Brash and distempered, the track’s telegraphic lyric—the song of a wild jailbird holed up in a motel—read like some cross between Cormac McCarthy and James Ellroy. “Don’t Go into the Barn” was more of the same, a splice of “Top of the Hill” and “Murder in the Red Barn.” Waits was starting to love barns as much as he loved skies, trees, crows, dogs, monkeys, and roses, but this particular barn was an old slave house where bones and chains were being dug up. Along with Waits’ Beefheart snarls, Harry Cody’s acoustic guitar gave the track a visceral blues edge.
If “How’s It Gonna End” was The Big Death Question, it was also a song about narrative arcs in literature and film. (At the end of the song, an old man slept in the front row of an old movie house.) People—Joel Tornabene, Shane and Bum Mahoney, a girl who drowns in a lake—came to violent ends in this sparse song built around banjo and guitar. Meanwhile, “Metropolitan Glide” was mutant James Brown, a style Waits identified as “cubist funk.” A kind of reprise of “Top of the Hill,” the song was an instruction manual for a new dance à la the Twist or the Mashed Potato—though its immediate inspiration was the Terror Squad’s hip-hop track “Lean Back.” There was a soul/funk/gospel sample tucked in there—and a passing nod to Beefheart too.
“Dead and Lovely” was another Waits song about a woman gone astray, in this case a nice middle-class girl entangled with a bona fide Bad Guy, a battered trophy wife who’d wound up prematurely deceased. Part-based on Carol Wayne, who—in Waits’ words—used to do “goofy dumb blonde stuff” on The Tonight Show and later died in mysterious circumstances in Mexico, the song’s jaunty rhythm was offset by the lonesome Twin Peaks twang of Ribot’s guitar.
It’s odd in retrospect that it took Tom Waits so long to write a song called “Circus,” Real Gone’s very own “Ocean Doesn’t Want Me” or “What’s He Building?” The usual parade of oddities showed up for this track: Horse-Face Ethel and her Marvelous Pigs, Yodeling Elaine, Zuzu Bolin and Mighty Tiny, Molly Hoey with her tattoo gun, one-eyed Myra who trained the ostrich and camels and wore a Roy Orbison T-shirt. You’d think Waits might have outgrown this particular preoccupation. “Everybody wants to run away and join the circus,” he said. “That’s what a lot of people do in music to some degree. You want something with heightened reality. That’s what I wanted to do.” Starting life as a song with a hip-hop sample that he’d “looped from the radio,” the track, Waits decided, had to be “more pathetic and tawdry.” In due course, with Casey on drums, “Circus” turned into spoken word.
A folk song of mythopoeic jealousy, “Trampled Rose” featured Ribot on a boxy banjo that sounded like a dimestore dobro. Like Alice’s “No One Knows I’m Gone,” “Green Grass” pictured how it would feel to be dead but conscious, addressing those who mourned at the graveside in a whispered sub-baritone. Despite being couched in almost pastoral terms, ultimately its sentiment was that of the late Warren Zevon’s heartbreaking “Keep Me in Your Heart.”
After that low-key interlude—from “Dead and Lovely” to “Green Grass”—Real Gone returned to full-on raucousness with “Baby Gonna Leave Me,” a gratuitous splurge of deranged noise. With Waits frothing at the mouth, it was a further footnote to his ongoing love affair with the piratical Keith Richards—except this time with Marc Ribot doing the impersonating. “Clang Boom Steam” was a snatch of Waits in the bathroom that segued straight into “Make it Rain,” Real Gone’s “Downtown Train.” The album’s most orthodox track—and a bone thrown to the sales guys at Epitaph—it was a song about a man abandoned by a faithless woman and demanding an apocalyptic deluge to wash away his pain.
The most affecting song on Real Gone was saved for last. “Day after Tomorrow” was almost out of place here, so plain and unalloyed was its message, couched in the form of a letter written home from the war front. “The government looks at these eighteen-year-old kids as shell casings, you know,” he said, all too aware of his own sons. “Like we’re getting low on ammo, send in some more. We’re neck deep in the big muddy and the big chief is telling us to push on and offer up our children.” The song harked back to Woody Guthrie and early Dylan in its conjuring of a twenty-one-year-old soldier’s shell-shocked bewilderment and longing for home. It was interesting that the boy was not from California or the south but from Rockford, Illinois—close to Kathleen’s hometown of McHenry. “I saw Tom do the song on The Daily Show,” says Bones Howe. “It was like going back, just acoustic guitar and bass. Like, ‘One more time and we’ll have it.’ I thought, that’s Frank, it’s the troubadour, just playing and singing. It was very poignant to me.”
Here again Waits worked through some hoary theological dilemmas, asking whose prayers God heeded and whose he refused. Like all great artists, he was forced to confront the concept—the existence or otherwise—of a creator, to address what “God” meant in such a callous universe. For all the evil religion had wrought, Waits saw the value in living by (some of) its principles. His early experience of church was necessarily ingrained in him. Moreover, anyone serious about twelve-step recovery had to acknowledge “God” (or at least a “Higher Power”) in some form and could not be entirely atheist/materialist about life. “With the God stuff I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what’s out there any more than anyone else, ’cause no one’s really come back to tell me. I don’t know if I’m on a conveyer belt or if I’m on the tongue of a very angry animal about to be snapped back into his mouth. I think everyone believes in something; even people who don’t believe in anything believe that.”
Lest anyone thought Waits might end the album on such a simple, forlorn note as “Day after Tomorrow,” hidden track “Chickaboom” was a hectic variation on “Clang Boom Steam,” though by this point on the album there was something slightly undignified about a man of Waits’ age making such idiotic sounds with his mouth.
Personally I wasn’t entirely convinced—or at least entranced— by Real Gone. Mule Variations had leavened its moments of barking weirdness with plaintive piano ballads. Now here was Waits with an album that featured no piano at all, just a cacophonous brew of human beatbox, threadbare bass, and gnarly guitar. If he was still taking more risks than all the other American “singer-songwriters” of his generation put together, I couldn’t help feeling that some of Real Gone’s musical modes (the Fat Possum stomp of “Shake It,” the Tod Browning galleria that was “Circus,” the sepulchral loungecore of “Dead and Lovely”) had been done before and better—by Tom Waits. Because the album’s main templates (“Temptation,” “Such a Scream,” “Lowside of the Road”) were ultimately more satisfying, hearing them reheated on, say, “Don’t Go into the Barn” and “Baby Gonna Leave Me” was oddly disappointing.
Twenty years after Swordfishtrombones—and eighteen since Marc Ribot had first worked with him—was Tom Waits finally chasing his own musical tail?
1* In the audience for the Woyzeck premiere was none other than Mathilde Bondo. When she approached Waits afterwards to say hello, he got away from her as quickly as possible, treating her as if she were just another fan rather than the woman who’d part-inspired the most famous song he ever wrote. Perhaps he simply didn’t recognize her after all those years.
2* Originally, with a nod to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Blood Money was to be called Redrum.
3* Along with music by Waits and others of the usual suspects—Kurt Weill, Elvis Costello, Nick Cave—Lemper’s album featured a song, “Scope J,” by Scott Walker. Interesting, therefore, to note a few parallels between Waits and Walker. Like Waits, Walker had abandoned a generic musical style to embark on a series of radical experiments, his immersion in Jacques Brel paralleling Waits’ fascination with the likes of Kurt Weill. Like Waits, he favoured the use of unusual “instruments”—dustbins, cinder blocks, even slabs of meat. And like Waits, he communicated his musical requirements to musicians in bizarre similes and metaphors.
4* “And,” Hodges added, “in turn that’s kind of red-flagged you ….”
5* An exhibition of Kellesimone’s paintings, “Men in Power,” was held at San Francisco’s Luscious Garage gallery in December 2007.
6* That same month found Waits accepting a Founders Award—for being an “extraordinary musical storyteller”—at the eighteenth annual ASCAP Pop Music Awards at LA’s Beverly Hilton Hotel. Waits gave a speech and played four songs live, while Keith Richards paid tribute to his friend in a rambling video message. Among the Rolling Stone’s more intelligible comments was a story about Waits recommending the purchase of ten thousand worms to aerate his Connecticut lawn.
7* Waits would have been appalled—and Bill Hicks writhing in his grave—at the news in March 2008 that Scottish singer Paolo Nutini had inked a deal to promote sportswear brand Puma by performing his song “New Shoes” across a broad spectrum of TV, mobile, radio, online, and in-store appearances. The deal was set up by a new “brand partnerships division” of Warner Music International. Warners, of course, had been Waits’ old home.