Prologue
The Only Thing Worse than Being Misunderstood
“I do believe in the mysteries of things, about myself and the
things I see. I enjoy being puzzled and arriving at my own
incorrect conclusions.”
(Tom Waits to Mark Rowland, Musician, October 1987)
I’m guessing the woman was a Jewish-American Princess, though I’ve no idea how cold she was on her honeymoon.1* She certainly had a frosty look on her face as she did an about-turn and marched back towards me. Maybe not frosty, exactly; more plain scared. For she’d just let slip that Tom Waits had declined the chance to top one of the bills at California’s Coachella Festival. The little nugget had popped out and, as she trotted away, it dawned on her what she’d done.
“Hey,” she said in a palpably anxious voice as she returned, a clammy palm placed on my forearm. “Don’t get me in trouble with that Coachella story, you hear?”
I beg your pardon? You’d think she’d whispered that Waits was cheating on his wife, not that he’d turned down the organizers of a frigging rock festival. What did it matter if people knew? To her, apparently, it mattered a lot. The mild panic on the woman’s face told me something of what I was up against simply in attempting to write a book about Tom Waits.
A few weeks later, Keith Richards sent word from on high that he was happy to talk about working with Waits on Rain Dogs and Bone Machine. But the offer was summarily withdrawn because Tom—or more accurately, “Tom and Kathleen” (Brennan, Waits’ wife)—had been apprised of my request. The apparent perversity of not wishing one of rock’s undisputed greats to go on the record with his love and admiration confounded me. It also got me thinking about the Waitses’ real agenda in stymieing biographers past, present, and future.
At various points during two years of researching Waits’ life and work I had to stop and ask myself, “Do I actually have the right to write a book about Tom Waits?” It’s tough not to personalize the rebuffs, not just from the Waits camp but from certain acquaintances and collaborators. Tough, too, not to see their polite requests that such people not consort with me as covert censorship.
“What do you think they’re afraid of?” friends asked me. Generally what I said was something like: “I don’t know what they’re afraid of. I think they know I’m not Kitty Kelley or Albert Goldman or J. Randy Taraborrelli—or Nick Broomfield or A. J. Weberman or Rupert Pupkin. There’s not a lot of dirt to dig up anyway. So Waits got loaded with Rickie Lee Jones and Chuck E. Weiss. So they defaced lawn jockeys in Bel Air and got into a spat with some cops at Duke’s coffee shop. So what.” Usually I paused before adding: “Actually I don’t think they’re afraid of anything. They just don’t want a book out there that, in some cod-Freudian, ad hominem way, reduces Waits to the sum of his life experiences. And I have some sympathy with that; in fact, I have total respect for such a stance.”
My friend Jeb Loy Nichols reminded me of how the artist Joseph Cornell (one of Waits’ minor heroes) resisted all attempts at investigation of his life. For the eccentric Cornell—subject of Deborah Solomon’s biography Utopia Parkway—the only thing worse than being misunderstood was … being understood. And as Bob Dylan—one of Waits’ major heroes—once said, “What’s so bad about being misunderstood?”
For decades Waits has played an elaborate game with the media, hiding behind the persona he projects. To the question “Will the real Tom Waits please stand up?” there is no real answer. “Tom Waits” is as much a character created for his fans as it is a real man behind the closed doors of family life. “Am I Frank Sinatra or am I Jimi Hendrix?” he said when I asked him if his persona had ever merged with his actual personality. “Or am I Jimi Sinatra? It’s a ventriloquist act, everybody does one.”
But, I countered, some artists are more honest about it being an act than others. We aren’t supposed to think Neil Young is doing an act. “I don’t know if honesty is an issue in show business,” Waits retorted. “People don’t care whether you’re telling the truth or not, they just want to be told something they don’t already know. Make me laugh or make me cry, it doesn’t matter. If you’re watching a really bad movie and somebody turns to you and says, ‘You know, this is a true story,’ does it improve the film in any way? Not really. It’s still a bad movie.”
Reading this quote again, I think that Waits a) should be right but b) is being disingenuous. He knows full well that fans and critics alike experience rock music as, in some sense, communing with an artist’s soul. Robert Christgau, “dean of rock critics,” called this “the idea that the artist’s persona is their fundamental creation.” Put another way, fans of auteur-artists such as Bob Dylan and Neil Young have long sought to establish a correspondence between their life and their work. Heritage rock mags are predicated on rooting out the “stories” behind albums such as Blood on the Tracks or Tonight’s the Night. There’s an inordinate amount of investment in the notion of the artist as suffering seer or tortured poet.
“I spend my entire time trying to explain to people that I’m a creative writer,” P. J. Harvey—a hardcore Waits fan—told me. “People jump to conclusions, and I can understand it, because if I’m very interested in an artist—whether it’s Neil Young, Bob Dylan, whoever—I want to imagine that those stories are true. But I think also that when I listen to those writers I project my own stories into their songs. And I’d like people to be able to do that with mine.”
Dylan and Young, of course, wrote the book on messing with the preconceptions of fans and critics—of not being the “Bob Dylan” or “Neil Young” that people want them to be. Not for nothing was Dylan the first singer-songwriter model for the young Tom Waits starting out in San Diego.
The games Waits plays with interviewers thwart all attempts to marry his music to his life: like Prince, an artist he loves, he’s too protean to be so easily captured. Moreover, in our age of mass celebrity he refuses to sell himself as a rehab car-crash fuckup. He’s the anti-star who declines to live according to the narrative of sin and redemption that celebrity culture requires. All of which puts a biographer in the invidious position of feeling like a parasite feeding on a resentful host. (In 1999, after years of following his career and writing at length about him, I finally had the opportunity to interview Prince. “Is it truth or is it conjecture?” he asked me about Imp of the Perverse, a book I’d written about him. “What gives you the right to write a book of conjecture about my life?” I had to think about that. I guess I’m still thinking about it.)
I’ve interviewed Waits in person twice, and spoken to him on the phone a number of times. Like most of the journalists who’ve talked to him, I (like to think I) have got along well with him. I’ve been regularly reduced to helpless laughter by his conversation. The first encounter was between albums in downtown New York, the interview a special concession to New Musical Express, who’d made Swordfishtrombones their Best Album of the Year. Not being on the interview treadmill, Waits was easy company, teasing waitresses and talking about the everyday madness of his adopted Manhattan.
The second time, fourteen years later in a diner near his northern California home, Waits was partway into a week of being grilled by the European press, and I got the distinct sense that he’d been ground down by the earnestness of his interlocutors. He loosened up some when we went for a backroads spin in his 1970 Coupe de Ville, but there was a wariness, a fatigue, about him that hadn’t been there in 1985. The struggle to hold on to his privacy in the face of almost cultish fascination with his every move had, I thought, started to tell.
I first contemplated writing a book about him circa 1991. Somewhere in a drawer lies a thin proposal for a tome entitled A Sucker on the Vine: Tom Waits in Tinseltown. Fifteen years later came a phone call from an American editor and a conversation about possible biographical subjects. We stopped at Waits. I said that, as hard as it would be, a serious study of Waits as artist and man had to be attempted by somebody.
Yet nothing quite assuages the guilt a biographer feels in prying into the personal history of such a resistant subject. (“We have a right to know,” Waits mutters with sinister invasiveness on 1999’s hilarious “What’s He Building?”) I’ve often tried to put myself in Waits’ shoes during the process of researching this book, and try as I might to defend my right to write about a public figure I can understand his distaste for the idea of someone rooting about in his past. “The stories behind most songs are less interesting than the songs themselves,” he said to me in Santa Rosa. “I mean, that’s my opinion. So you tell somebody, ‘Hey, this is about Jackie Kennedy.’ And they go, ‘Oh wow.’ Then you say, ‘No, I was just kidding, it’s about Nancy Reagan.’ Well, it’s a different song now. In fact, all my songs are about Nancy Reagan.”
Waits should be right when he says this. What difference should it make to our love of his music if we know that this song is about Rickie Lee Jones, or that one about Nancy Reagan? It shouldn’t and ultimately doesn’t. Yet Waits—the Waits of the 1970s, at least—uniquely invites conjecture about his “real” self, for the simple reason that he turned himself into a work of art at the very start of his career. The persona of the skid-row boho/hobo, a young man out of time and place, was an ongoing experiment in performance art that, by some accounts, nearly killed him. Or at least exhausted itself, running aground on its own limitations.
Any biographer of Waits is necessarily engaged in an impossible but irresistible quest to find the truth about a man who claims “truth” is overrated—or simply irrelevant in the context of “show business.” But here’s the rub: is it conceivable that actually we glean more about the “real” Tom Waits by, as it were, reading between the lines of his songs than we do about supposedly more “open” singer-songwriters?
“I’m not sure you can’t tell more about me from what I’ve written than you can tell about purportedly confessional songwriters,” Randy Newman, one of Waits’ formative influences, once said to me. “When you meet them you’re not so sure that’s what they’re writing about.”
If Waits has always hidden behind his role as unreliable entertainer-, the tension in his music is in the space between the mask and the emotion, the frame and the picture. We enjoy the artifice but are moved by the pain and compassion that seep through the tropes of the “Tom Waits” schtick. “Most readings of Tom see his work as either a direct reflection of his self or entirely a performance,” says journalist Pete Silverton, who interviewed Waits a number of times over two decades. “I think it’s a far more interesting and complex mixture than that.”
Of course we have no “right to know” the real Tom Waits, any more than we have a right to know anyone who chooses to remove himself from everyday society. Yet artists unavoidably invite identification from the people who fall in love with their art: we all want to get closer to their greatness. “These American self-created men, like Woody [Guthrie] or Tom … I see them driving by sometimes,” Rickie Lee Jones wrote memorably in 2000. “They create a language for themselves and stick everybody in a car and drive to where people can understand what they’re saying. We feel fierce about these people. We want them to exist, we want them for ourselves, not just on magazine covers, but we want to live next door to them. We want them to be a part of the best of ourselves.”2* An unfortunate side effect of this is the uneasy symbiosis between the artist’s recalcitrance and our need to articulate the mystery of his art.
Interestingly, Waits has never gone down the Scott Walker route of refusing (almost) all interview requests. He is no rock-and-roll version of J. D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. He never hid out in the mountains like Dylan after his motorcycle accident, or like Bucky Wunderlick in Don DeLillo’s novel Great Jones Street. He’s never said, à la Melville’s Bartleby (or Alex Chilton or Lewis Taylor3†), “I would prefer not to.” Generally he’s been on hand to give good quote in support of the latest album. Yet for the better part of forty years he’s managed to shield himself behind a smokescreen of humour and verbal dexterity. For all the “Gee, I dunno”s and “Aw shucks” that pepper his talk, he remains one of the most articulate interviewees in the business.
In “What’s He Building?,” a prying busybody tries to imagine what his eccentric neighbour is up to in his uninviting abode. As the monologue unfolds, the conjecture becomes increasingly absurd. Vaguely sinister as the man sounds, it’s clear that Waits’ sympathies lie with him rather than with the nosy neighbour. Waits appears to lament the fact that America has become a country where any solitary activity spawns suspicions that there is a serial killer, or a Unabomber, living next door.
Cordoning off his own private life has made Waits prone to outbursts of fairly menacing temper. “Tom’s a very contradictory character,” his friend Jim Jarmusch pointed out. “He’s potentially violent if he thinks someone is fucking with him, but he’s gentle and kind too. It sounds schizophrenic but it makes perfect sense once you know him.”
How badly am I fucking with Waits? Throughout my research I’ve been aware that he and Kathleen know what I’m doing, if only because of emails from people who’ve felt duty-bound to run my interview requests by them, their manager Stuart Ross, or their assistant Julianne Deery. I do appreciate that it must be a little like being stalked, or just being loved by someone you wish would go away.
I thought things couldn’t get any worse when a veteran rock writer named “Uncle Ray”—pseudonym for a Creem contributor who’d met Waits in the mid-seventies—chose not to “interfere with Tom’s privacy” by talking to me. (Jeez, I thought. If I can’t even get ageing rock critics to talk to me, I really am screwed.) Things could have got worse, of course: one of Waits’ previous biographers, Jay S. Jacobs, told me Bette Midler’s response to his interview request was to threaten him with a lawsuit.
Fortunately there were many people from Waits’ past who were prepared to talk about him, either because they had nothing to lose in doing so or because they weren’t going to be told what to do, either by Waits, Brennan, Stuart Ross, or Julianne Deery.
“I think I have the right to tell you stuff about my days working with Tom,” says saxophonist Ralph Carney, who played with Waits for fifteen years. “It’s part of history now.”
“I often think of Tom and wish him well,” Bob Webb, one of his early mentors and sidemen, wrote me. “I mean him no disservice by answering your enquiry, though he apparently believes I’m doing just that. At heart I am too much of a biographer and historian myself to let these facts slip away unrecorded.”
In Waits’ defence I offer this email from Greg Cohen, for many years his virtual right-hand man (and indeed brother-in-law). “It has more to do with the fact that most people in the public eye have had a few bouts of having their privacy invaded,” Greg wrote. “It’s part of your job as an unauthorized biographer to deal with it, to find a way to either continue or let it go. Stuart isn’t doing anything wrong. I have never spoken to him about you. I know him to be a good guy who just happens to help Tom with many things. I am sure you would love to have a Stuart Ross in your life.”
I want to thank everybody who went on record with their (invariably glowing) recollections of working with Waits. I trust that by doing so they won’t find themselves excommunicated from the Waits-Brennan “circle of trust.” More than a few seem in any case to have been “dropped” by them years ago.
“I’m cut off,” says Bones Howe, the man who produced seven of Waits’ albums between 1974 and 1982. “There’s no way I could pick up the phone and talk to Tom now. I would love to be able to just ask him what’s going on. You know, what are his kids like? I mean, he came to my eldest daughter’s wedding. He was kind of in our family.”
One of the hardest things in the course of my research has been not taking umbrage at this intransigent duo—and particularly at the shadowy Kathleen, conceivably the architect of the wall of inaccessibility erected around her husband. At many points along the way I’ve had to stop and remind myself not to let their obstructions turn me against them: to reaffirm the reason for writing this book in the first place, which is to chart the growth of a remarkable artist—to look at where he came from, what he did with his experience, how he changed direction when he needed to—in the belief that people want to know more about it.
Mr. and Mrs. Waits at a gala tribute to Nicolas Cage, San Francisco, April 1998. (Pamela Gentile)
“I don’t think Kathleen is alone in developing their approach,” says San Francisco Chronicle critic Joel Selvin, who has met the Waitses informally and socially. “People love to see her as the power behind the throne, but my take is that they are very much a couple and highly collaborative. If she takes on a role that allows Tom to be more ‘Who, me?,’ then I suspect that’s part of the plan. They are fiercely private people who control the public’s contact with Tom as much as they can. Once past that veil of privacy, they are the most charming, witty, intelligent and caring people.”
Am I any more qualified to write a book about Waits than the many other writers who’ve followed his journey over the last four decades? I make no claims to be. Ten years his junior, I first noticed his name as a credit on Tim Buckley’s Sefronia, which included a version of the beautiful “Martha.” I remember thinking the jazzbo-beatnik posturing of Nighthawks at the Diner a little trite at the time. I’m not sure I grasped how great Waits really was until I lived for a long wet summer with Nick Cave, who often played Small Change and Foreign Affairs and Blue Valentine in the druggy crashpad we shared in Paddington.
And then came the miraculous metamorphosis of Swordfish-trombones, with its invoking of vanguard outsiders from Harry Partch to Howlin’ Wolf and its heroic resistance to the synthetic banalities of eighties rock-pop. By the time I saw Waits play New York’s Beacon Theater late in 1985, a few months after I’d first met him, it was plain that he was as important an American artist as anyone the twentieth century had produced.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke famously stated that fame was simply “the sum of all the misunderstandings that gather about a name,” and I can’t see Waits taking issue with that little aperçu. But perhaps he also knows something that both Bob Dylan and Neil Young grasped early on in their careers, which is that the less information you give people, the more they want. Keep ’em hungry, keep ’em guessing.4*
In 2004, Waits said it better than I or anyone else ever could: “You want to make sure that your demand is much higher than your supply. The public is a wild animal. It’s better not to feed them too well.”
Barney Hoskyns
London, August 2008