Happy Birthday, Maestro
December 7th, 2009
He was
small, thin, pale.
He stood funny. He had a trick knee,
psoriasis, postnasal drip. There was no comb,
lotion or prayer in this world that would get his hair to lie
down flat. He read too many books. He was unduly fascinated by
carnivals, buried treasure and mariachi music. When he
grew nervous, he rocked back and forth
like a rabbi deep in prayer.
He was often
nervous.
Moreover,
there was something kind
of wrong with him (maybe, he thinks now,
some minor brush with autism) that made him almost
painfully obsessed with sound. He heard noises the way van Gogh
saw colors — exaggerated, beautiful, shimmering, scary. There were
sounds all around him that made his hair stand on end, sounds nobody
else seemed to hear. Cars driving by under his bedroom window roared
louder than trains. If he waved his arm near his head, he heard a sharp
whistle in his ear like the whipping of a fishing line. If he ran his hand
across his bedsheets, he heard a harsh scrape, rougher than
sandpaper. Engulfed by these noises, he’d be compelled to
clear his head by reciting rhythmic nonsense syllables
aloud (shack-a-bone, shack-a-bone, shack-a-bone,
shack-a-bone) until he could
think straight
again.
For
the past thirty
years, Tom Waits has had
a musical career in this country unlike
anybody else’s. His was not a meteoric rise to fame.
He just appeared — a rough, tender, melancholic, thoroughly
experimental, lounge- singing, piano-playing, reclusive hobo in a
$7 suit and an old man’s hat — and that is what he has remained. Although
he tinkers endlessly with his music (since his first album, 1973′s Closing
Time, he has given us tragic blues, narcotic jazz, sinister German
opera and delirious, drunken carnival mambos, to name
just a few styles), he has never once tinkered
with his image, and that’s how
you know it isn’t an
“image.”
…He’s
not the most
marketable guy out there,
either. He doesn’t have the conventional
good looks or a very nice voice. He has been called
“gravelly voiced” so many times over the decades, you’d think
journalists were required by law to describe him this way. Tom Waits has
grown a bit weary of this description. He prefers other metaphors.
A little midwestern girl once wrote him a letter saying that
his voice reminded her of a cherry bomb and a clown,
to which he replied, “You got it,
babe. Thanks for
listening.”
…Waits
is always willing to
play with a new song, to see what
else it can become. He’ll play with it forever
in and out of the studio, in ways a real grown-up would
never imagine. He’ll pick it apart, turn it inside out,
drag it backward through the mud, ride a bicycle
over it — anything he can imagine to make
it sound thicker, rougher,
deeper, different.
“I like
my music,” he says,
“with the pulp and skin and seeds.”
He’s always fighting for new ways to hear or perform things.
“Play it like your hair’s on fire,” he has instructed musicians in the
studio, when he can’t explain his vision any other way.
“Play it like a midget’s Bar Mitzvah.” He wants
to see the very guts
of sound.
He
abhors patterns,
familiarity and ruts. He stopped
playing the piano for a while because, as he says,
his hands had become like old dogs, always returning to the
same place. Instead, he had fantasies of pushing his piano down the stairs
and recording that noise. He is known to sing through a police
megaphone. He once recorded a song in which
the primary instrument was
a creaking
door.
And
on Blood Money,
one of his new albums,
he actually recorded a solo on
a calliope — a huge, howling, ungodly
pneumatic organ, best known for providing music
for merry-go-rounds. “I tell you,” Waits says, “playing a
calliope is an experience. There’s an old expression, ‘Never let
your daughter marry a calliope player.’ Because they’re all out of their
minds. Because the calliope is so flaming loud. Louder than a bagpipe. In the
old days, they used them to announce the arrival of the circus because you
could literally hear it three miles away. Imagine something you could hear
three miles away, and now you’re right in front of it, in a studio…playing
it like a piano, and your face is red, you’re hair is sticking up, you’re
sweating. You could scream and nobody could hear you. It’s
probably the most visceral music experience I’ve ever had.
And when you’re done, you feel like you should probably
should go to the doctor. Just check me over, Doc,
I did a couple of numbers on the calliope
and I want you to take me
through the
paces.”
…Which
brings us to his
wife. Chances are, it was
Tom Waits’s wife who showed him
the photograph of the experimental pig-humans,
because she reads four local newspapers a day and cuts
out all the weird stories. You can also bet she’s the person who
dug up the story about the swastika-noodle soup. And if there’s anyone
who has ever heard the mating chord of the male spider, it’s probably Kathleen.
She’s the most mysterious figure in the whole Tom Waits mythology. Newspaper
articles and press releases always describe her the same way, as “the wife and
longtime collaborator of the gravely voiced singer.” You will see her name on
all of his albums after 1985. (“All songs written by Tom Waits and Kathleen
Brennan.”) She’s everywhere, but invisible. She’s private as a banker, rare
as a unicorn, never talks to reporters. But she is the very center of Tom
Waits — his muse, his partner and mother of his three children. And
sometimes, when he is playing live, you will hear him mumble,
almost to himself, “This one’s for Kathleen,” before he
eases into a slow and tender
rendition of “Jersey
Girl.”
I’ve
never met
the woman, and I
know nothing for certain
about her, except what her husband
has told me. Which means that she is a person
thoroughly composed, in my mind, of Tom Waits’s
words. Which means she’s the closest thing out there to a
living Tom Waits song. He has called her “an incandescent presence”
in his life and music. She’s “a rhododendron, an orchid and an oak.” He has
described her as a cross between Eudora Welty and Joan Jett.” She has
“the four B’s. Beauty, brightness, bravery, and brains.” He insists
that’s she’s the truly creative force in the relationship, the feral
influence who challenges his “pragmatic” limitations and
stirs intrigue into all their music. (“She has dreams
like Hieronymus Bosch… She’ll start talking
in tongues and I’ll
take it all
down.”)
He says
“she speaks to my
subtext, not my context.”
He claims she has expanded his vision
so enormously as an artist that he can hardly bear
to listen to any of the music he wrote before they met.
“She rescued me,” he says. “I’d be playing in a steak house
right now if it wasn’t for her. I wouldn’t even be playing
in a steak house. I’d be cooking in a steak house.”
“She’s the egret in the family,”
he says. “I’m the
mule.”
“We
met on New Year’s
Eve.” Tom Waits tells me.
He loves talking about his wife.
You can see it, the pleasure it gives him.
He tries not to go too nuts with it, of course, because
he does want to protect her privacy. (Which is why he sometimes
dodges interviewers’ questions about his wife with typical Waitsian
nonsense stories. Yeah, he’ll say, She’s a bush pilot. Or a soda jerk.
Runs a big motel down in Miami. Or this: He once claimed he fell
for Kathleen because she was the first woman he’d ever
met who could “stick a knitting needle through
her lip and still drink
coffee.”)
And
yet he wants
to talk about her because —
you can just see it — he loves the way
her name feels in his mouth. They met in
Hollywood, back in the early 1980s. Waits was
writing the music for the Coppola movie One from the
Heart, and Kathleen Brennan was a script supervisor on the
film. Their courtship had all the drunken, spinning, time-warping
delirium of a good New Year’s Eve party in someone else’s house. When
they were first falling in love, they used to drive wildly around L.A. at all hours
and she’d purposely try to get him lost, just for the entertainment value. She’d
tell him to take a left, then hop on the freeway, then cross over Adams
Boulevard, then straight through the ghetto, then into a worse
ghetto, then another left… “We’d end up in Indian country,”
Waits remembers. “Out where nobody could even
believe we were there. Places where you
could get shot just for wearing
corduroy.”
…he was
on the splits with his
manager. And legal headaches?
Everywhere. And studio producers trying
to put corny string sections behind his darkest songs?
And who owned him, exactly? And how had this happened?
It was at this point that his new bride stepped in and encouraged
her husband to blow off the whole industry. Screw it, Kathleen suggested.
You don’t need these outside people, anyhow. You can produce your own work.
Manage your own career. Arrange your own songs. Forget about security.
Who needs security when you have freedom? The two of them would get
by somehow, no matter what. It’s like she was always saying:
“Whatever you bring home, baby, I’ll cook it up. You bring
home a possum and a coon?
We will live
off it.”
The
result of her
dare was Swordfishtrombones —
a big, brassy, bluesy, gospel-grooved, dark-textured,
critically adored declaration of artistic independence. An album
like none before it. A boldly drawn line, running right through the center
of Tom Waits’s work, dividing his life into two neat categories: Before
Kathleen Brennan and after Kathleen Brennan. “Yeah,” Waits
says, and he’s still all dazzled about
her. “She’s really
radical.”
…He
likes a day in
the studio to end, he says,
“when my knees are all skinned up
and my pants are wet and my hair’s off to one
side and I feel like I’ve been in the foxhole all day.
I don’t think comfort is good for music. It’s good to come
out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you
can’t see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day
from recording and someone says, “What happened to
your hand?” And you don’t even know. When you’re
in that place, you can dance
on a broken
ankle.”
That’s
a good day of work.
A bad day is when the right
sound won’t reveal itself. Then Waits
will pace in tight circles, rock back and forth,
rub his hand over his neck, tug out his hair. He and
Kathleen have a code for this troublesome moment. They
say to each other, “Doctor, our flamingo is sick.” Because how do
you heal a sick flamingo? Why are its feathers falling out? Why are its
eyes runny? Why is it so depressed? Who the hell knows? It’s a fucking flamingo –
a weird pink foreign bird. And music is just that weird, just that foreign. It is
at difficult moments like these that Kathleen will show up with novel ideas.
(What if we played it like we were in China? But with banjos?) She’ll
bring him a Balinese folk dance to listen to, or old recordings
from the Smithsonian of Negro field hollers. Or she’ll
just take the flamingo off his hands for a while,
take it for a walk, try to put
some food into
it.
I ask
Tom Waits who does
the bulk of the songwriting
around the house — he or his wife?
He says there’s no way to judge it. It’s like
anything else in a good marriage. Sometimes it’s
fifty-fifty; sometimes it’s ninety-ten; sometimes one person
does all the work; sometimes the other. Gamely, he reaches for metaphors:
“I wash, she dries.” “I hold the nail, she swings the hammer.” “I’m the prospector,
she’s the cook.” “I bring home the flamingo, she beheads it.” In the end,
he concludes this way: “It’s like two people borrowing the
same ten bucks back and forth for years. After a while,
you don’t even write it down anymore.
Just put it on the tab.
Forget it.”
