Rusty Nails and Wild Violets

Tom Waits at 75

Dec 15, 2024

Last Saturday Tom Waits turned 75. Not just one of my favorite musicians and songwriters, I have long numbered him amongst my top five writers of any kind, period. His songs are just as evocative, emotional, meaningful, and insightful as my most valued literary and dramatic counterparts. As a creative figure, few have been as significant to me. His career spans and encompasses almost everything I want out of music and art - emotional connection, compellingly complex and damaged characters, dynamic storytelling, avant-garde experimentation, mood, vibes, etc. and etc.

I largely knew of him originally as an oblique reference my brothers would make. I specifically remember, for some reason, watching a bit of the Roy Orbison tribute concert that he was a part of and hearing them note that he didn’t sound like he usually does. This was, I seem to recall, accompanied by rough approximations of his growling delivery.

I bought Alice/Blood Money to deliver to my brother on a brief furlough from his trip to the Governor’s Honors Program in 2002 but never listened to either before making delivery. I did, however, happen to catch him on Letterman around this time - not because I was interested in him per se, so much as because I was a fan of the Late Show and he happened to be on. For whatever reason I either didn’t see - or don’t remember - the performance of “All the World is Green” from that episode, but his panel interview - especially his story about accompanying his son’s class on a field trip first to a music store, where he fails to be recognized, and then to the dump, where he is swamped with admirers - has stuck with me ever since.

This seemed like the kind of guy I should be a fan of.

And yet for whatever reason I didn’t listen to any of his albums until later in college, when I finally gave Alice a spin and was instantly transported to another world. I was immediately obsessed. It was shortly after this that I learned he had a new album coming out. Real Gone was released not only so close to the onset of my fandom, but also during a period wherein I was obsessed with old monster movies and dark Victorian literature and the moody, haunted tales within these albums, conveyed in such a rough-hewn and cynically passionate manor, were a perfect fit for my interests. I played them constantly as I wrote a heartbreak-inspired spec remake of Son of Dracula, and I had dreams of filming an adaptation of Threepenny Opera with Waits as something of a fourth-wall breaking Greek chorus (I was doing a lot of work with the UGA theatre department around this time).

Invitation to the Blues

I don’t remember when or in what order I started digging deeper back into his catalog, though it wasn’t long before I started listening to earlier records - particularly Rain Dogs, his sprawling compendium of every musical interest and influence he had ever had up to that point - and the initial run of Closing Time, The Heart of Saturday Night, and Small Change (I skipped over Nighthawks at the Diner for a while). I was struck, listening to the front end of his discography, at how fragile and vulnerable he sounded compared to the more demonstrative force and theatrical stylization and experimentation of those later albums. But what was perhaps even more striking was the extent to which it was very clear that the young man plaintively crooning the skid row ballads on Closing Time was every bit the older maestro growling and howling on Mule Variations. There is a direct continuation that springs from a consistent authenticity. From his earliest days as a piano-bound barroom troubadour he was something of a poet laureate for the downtrodden, which is why his mid-career pivot to hell’s carnival barker made complete sense as a natural evolution. He gives voice to the most hopelessly lost souls. Whether you’re listening to Misery is the River of the World or Earth Died Screaming and howling along in lamentation at the cosmic injustice of the universe, or sobbing along to Tom Traubert’s Blues while driving around aimlessly in the middle of cold, sleepless night, he’s the perfect companion.

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Straight to the Top

It wasn’t until the onset of the 2010s that I familiarized myself with his middle period - the point where, after he seemed to be a bit adrift creatively on Blue Valentine and Foreign Affairs, he met his wife Kathleen Brennan and discovered - at her recommendation - Captain Beefheart, which lit fires upon untapped layers of his soul and kicked off a run of experimental records starting with Swordfishtrombones that would turn his sound inside out and expand his songwriting in way that carved a natural path to the world of experimental theatre. Brennan has cowritten everything he has done since, and is by all accounts, especially Waits’ own, just as important a figure in his creative output as he is. “She’s the brains,” Waits once told The Guardian. “I’m just the figurehead. She’s the one steering the ship.”

The first iteration of this was Frank’s Wild Years, a show written by Waits and Brennan that was staged at Steppenwolf Theatre (directed by Gary Sinese) and starred Waits as the titular Frank O’Brien, a character who had first appeared on the same-named track from Swordfishtrombones.

The transcript for the original show can be found here, and a lengthy bit of audio recording of one of the performances is miraculously available on YouTube.

The songs from the production were later turned into the album Frank’s Wild Years, and while the production itself never went beyond the walls of the Briar Street Theatre in Chicago, it’s an essential part of Waits’ development as an artist, particularly over the course of the next ten years where his live shows would take on a heightened theatricality - the apex of which can be seen in the (unfortunately hard to find) concert film Big Time1 - and where he would go on to write the music for a number stage productions for avant-grade director Robert Wilson - including The Black Rider (with a book written by William S Burroughs), Alice (based on both Alice in Wonderland and the life of Lewis Carroll), and Blood Money (an adaptation of Georg Büchner’s Woyzek), all of which he would re-arrange and record as albums.

This was the era of Waits that I was perhaps most indebted to when I made my first grad school short film. I was possessed by the notion that I wanted to make a movie that was the cinematic equivalent of a Tom Waits song/album, and the short script I produced in 2010 bore that out somewhat. I cannot explain this in any rational way, but to me the movie - a slapstick noir about a hapless drunk who accidentally kills his girlfriend’s husband while she sleeps in the next room and struggles to dispose of the corpse before she wakes up - is born out of a heady mix of 80s avant-garde theatrical conventions, the music of not only Waits but also Glenn Branca, Philip Glass (particularly Einstein on the Beach) and even, to a degree, Glen Gould, with equal doses of Chaplin and the Coen Brothers. Much the same as Waits was, in albums like Rain Dogs, taking every single musical influence and interest he had and running them all through a juicer and filtering them through his own unique voice, I was attempting (and failing) to do the same within a ten-minute student film.

But it’s frankly a goal that I still find myself chasing to this day - to craft something of stirring and undeniable emotional resonance while also pushing against or even blowing past the edges of conventional genre and craft. He’s the perfect example of the universality of specificity - like any great artist, Waits is ultimately a category all to himself, and yet his songs can and have been covered by a wide array of artists in a stunning variety of styles.

What’s He Building in There?

Waits stands for me as a singular model of how an artist should live within and interact with not only their own art but the greater world around them. The work itself is not only unmistakably idiosyncratic but is also fashioned in a manner that is totally antithetical to today’s glossy and over-produced fare. His rough-hewn and handmade style is in large part a result of his production methods and his instrumentation. He recorded Bone Machine in what was called the “Waits room” - a bare storage closet in the basement of the recording studio; he recorded Real Gone in an abandoned school house. It’s been said that he can make music out of anything - scrap metal, exposed plumbing, a hack saw. “I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in,” he has said. Long before the conglomerated landscape had choked every trace of humanity from the arts, and terms like “bespoke” moved from cringey brand-speak to a necessary stay against the over-corporatized2 artistic landscape, Waits was forging his own distinctly low-tech path.

Few people talk about music and creativity with his particular blend of knowledge, insight, and reverence for what is in essence a form of true magic. I remember reading once in an interview with him where he said that he had a habit of keeping multiple radios at his house, all tuned to different stations, and that the way the songs bled into and knocked against each other often revealed new melodies or insights. “Songs lay eggs in you,” he has said. “Some songs come out of the ground just like a potato. Others you need to build out of things you have lying around.” Replace “songs” with “stories” or “scripts” (or, lord knows, newsletters) and I know exactly what he means.

For further illustration of how he is able to imbue the simplest things with the utmost creativity, take a look at the video press conference he released to announce his 2008 Glitter and Doom Tour:

That very tour provided me an opportunity I never thought I would get, as the announcement promised that his brief trip through the southern US would end with a stop at Atlanta’s Fox Theatre. I was toiling away in the service industry at the time, serving as General Manager of a pizzeria and losing myself to drink and despair on the heels of a particularly rough breakup. It was a scenario befitting the artist - I bought a pair of tickets before the split, and as the show loomed I was hoping that it would perhaps be a bridge back into this other person’s life, the two of us having shared our appreciation for his work. That wasn’t meant to be. I don’t remember if I even asked. I ended up going with a friend who had to leave part way through the show, and so I ostensibly saw him alone, the eighth of Jack Daniels I had snuck into the theater my only companion (at one quiet moment it fell out of my pocket and clattered loudly on the floor).

But it didn’t matter. In spite of - perhaps in part because of - the devastating emotional context, it was the best show I have ever seen, an exhilarating artistic experience. From the opening moments, in which Waits emerged from the darkness to the opening strains of Lucinda, stomping his shoes into a box of dirt at his feet and kicking up a huge cloud of dust at every down beat, I was experiencing the overwhelming joy of being in the hands of a master performer who was in complete control of not only the stage but everyone in the audience watching. The complete audio, for those interested, is still available here.

Aside from a later appearance at Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit, it was the last concert he has played to date in America.

Three years after the 2008 tour, Waits released Bad as Me, which is so far still his last studio album. By all accounts it would seem that his days of recording and performing music are behind him, though we can hopefully never say never. I remember the four years between Real Gone and Bad as Me feeling like an eternity; it has now been 13 years since the latter. He performed a new song for David Letterman in the last week before the host’s retirement from the Late Show in 2015. It is, to my knowledge, the last new piece of music we’ve gotten from him.

He hasn’t disappeared completely, though the low profile he has kept since the birth of his children has grown into something of a semi-reclusion. He still shows up in movies, such as his turn as (what else?) a grizzled old prospector for the Coen Brothers in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, or as a volatile film director in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza. He’s had a filmography that would make any actor jealous - from his stellar turn in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts to his all-too-brief and yet perfectly-cast role as Renfield in Bram Stoker’s Dracula for Francis Ford Coppola. I remember sitting in agony through an advance screening of Tony Scott’s Domino and almost leaping out of my seat when he showed up, unexpected by me, as a Bible thumper late in the film. He’s always a welcome presence - if only because it’s the only time we get to see him anymore.

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Ain’t No Good Thing Ever Dies

In my writing classes, I impress as often as I can upon my students the importance of detail and specificity. I urge them to consider things like perspective when writing anything - to think about how the point of view we’re reading from or experiencing dramatic events from not only influences how we interpret them, but can also become a powerful narrative tool in itself. I also stress the importance of concision - how to say the most that you possibly can with as few words as possible (this is especially important in screenwriting). To illustrate these points, I always single out a Waits lyric made up of what I consider to be perhaps the saddest lines in the history of songwriting, from Whistle Down the Wind:

And sometimes the music from a dance
Will carry across the plains
And the places that I’m dreaming of
Do they dream only of me?

Four short lines that tell the entire story of a person’s life, and which convey the absolute depth of loneliness and longing that the human heart is capable of3. Our fundamental condition on this earth - alone in our own consciousnesses, desperate to connect - told in 25 words.

-cs

Notes and Errata.