Middle-class Tom Waits
Offramp
"Middle-class Tom Waits
The great songwriter's early years, capacity for self-pastiche and
protection of his privacy
David Horspool
Since the early 1930s at least, when the bluesman Robert Johnson “sold
his soul to the Devil”, popular musicians have understood the uses of
a personal mythology. Sometimes, as seems to have been the case with
Johnson, the myths are foisted on their subjects, by managers,
promotional departments, journalists in need of a story. Just as
often, musicians do it for themselves. Some of the most ostensibly
“honest” stars around, from Bob Dylan to Neil Young, have relied on a
carefully cultivated mystique. Confessional songwriting usually
reveals just what the songwriter wishes it to reveal, and there are as
many perils in mapping the lives of singers onto their songs as there
are in reading writers through their novels. Tom Waits’s musical life
has been played out in two distinct halves, though in both he has been
more of a storyteller in song than a memoirist, closer to Randy Newman
than to Dylan. But what attracts his devoted following, among whom
Barney Hoskyns would be happy to be numbered, is the sense that the
broken-up world he evokes is something Waits has experienced himself.
The fact that Waits, who turns sixty this year, has refused to
cooperate in this biography, and has made a pretty good fist of
warning off those around him from giving Hoskyns any help either, only
places more weight on the matter of interpreting those songs.
Waits would be the first to admit that if he writes about the mean
streets, he “is not himself mean”. Until the age of eleven, he lived
in Whittier, a middle-class suburb of Los Angeles, which was also the
birthplace of Richard Nixon. Tom’s father, Frank, was a Spanish
teacher, and his mother, Alma, brought Waits and his two sisters up
with little help from her husband, an alcoholic whose absences
developed into a permanent split when Waits was around ten years old.
Nonetheless, Frank Waits, on whose side of the family, according to
his son, were “all the psychopaths and alcoholics”, had a lasting
influence on Tom. The first half of Waits’s musical career, in which
he produced booze-soaked, piano-led tales of late nights and
unrequited love, could be seen as the son inhabiting an exaggerated
version of the world his father had introduced him to. “I remember my
father taking me into bars when I was very young. I remember climbing
up a barstool like Jungle Jim, getting all the way up to the top and
sitting there with my dad. He could tell stories in there for ever.”
Waits’s bravura version of the tall tale of a ghost-trucker, “Big Joe
and Phantom 309” (“At the wheel sat a big man, / I have to say he must
have weighed two-ten / And he stuck out a big hand and said with a
grin / ‘Big Joe’s the name, and this here rig’s called Phantom 309’”),
might almost be a musical tribute to this small-hours storyspinning.
Another childhood habit that stayed with Waits was a desire to act
older than he was: “I was real repressed . . . . I wanted to skip
growing up and rush all the way to forty”. Hoskyns reproduces a
photograph of Waits reunited with his father backstage at a concert in
1975. The twenty-five-year-old son, ostentatiously calamitous in flat
cap and old man’s suit and tie, can of beer and cigarette in hand, is
doing his best to pull seniority on his father, who has the half-
proud, half-embarrassed look of any parent when their beloved is
showing off. But for Tom, the attraction to the old school went beyond
his wardrobe. He had by this time produced two albums of melodic,
pining songs that sounded more like productions of the 1950s than the
1970s. The fact that he was strong-armed by his management into
touring this material as an opening act for Frank Zappa and the
Mothers of Invention gives some indication of quite how out of step
Waits was with his times. But songs like “Martha”, “Ol’ 55”, “(Looking
for) The Heart of Saturday Night” or “Grapefruit Moon” have weathered
rather better than Zappa’s “Hungry Freaks, Daddy”, or “Billy the
Mountain” (which went on for half an hour).
For a time, as Hoskyns relates, Waits seems to have tried to live the
low life he was describing in his songs. He rented a room at a
famously louche West Hollywood motel, where the late nights and heavy
drinking “became a stage, because I became associated with it and
people came looking for me and calling me in the middle of the night”.
Waits read Kerouac, drank Bourbon and played his upright piano, while
his contemporaries were snorting cocaine and rocking out. People knew
that he was partially in character, but it would be hard to find a
rock musician who wasn’t also a poseur. Waits would defend himself by
pointing out that “I don’t normally wear Bermuda shorts and white
socks and wingtips and read Khalil Gibran. I’m the closest thing to
myself that I know”. Meanwhile, the voice got more gravelly, and the
songs by turns more sweepingly heartfelt (“Tom Traubert’s Blues”, a
beautifully unexpected incorporation of parts of “Waltzing Matilda”
into a hobo’s lament; “Kentucky Avenue”, a memoir of childhood scrapes
that becomes a fantasy of healing a crippled pal: “I’ll steal a
hacksaw from my Dad / And cut the braces from your legs”); or more
seedy (“Step Right Up”, a salesman’s patter for everything, delivered
to the insistent backing of an upright bass; “Pasties and a G-String
(at the Two O’Clock Club)”, a similar schtick for a strip joint).
The increasingly theatrical side of Waits’s music found one natural
endpoint in a suite of songs for a Francis Ford Coppola film, One from
the Heart (1982). The music far outlived the film, but by this time,
Waits was growing tired of self-pastiche. With a new album,
Swordfishtrombones (1983), he found another way of staging himself.
His voice took on a new rasp, and sometimes an almost hysterical
quality, while the instrumentation relied heavily on less familiar
percussion (Waits’s love affair with the marimba began here). Waits
himself is credited with “playing” a chair on the demented “Shore
Leave”. From now on, although he was still able to produce mainstream
pop songs (the best-known of which, “Downtown Train”, was covered by
Rod Stewart), he was more interested in the freakish, souped-up
carnival tunes that dominated his albums. Hoskyns is persuasive in
arguing that, although Waits himself was ready to try something new
anyway, he was greatly influenced by his new wife, Kathleen Brennan,
who has worked with him on all his albums since Swordfishtrombones.
Brennan also managed to pull the drawbridge up on Waits’s public life.
He does his fair share of promotional interviews, but the days of
knocking on Tom’s door at three in the morning are definitely over.
Waits’s “new” style is now almost thirty years old, and if
occasionally one longs for more of the bitter-sweetness of his early
output, it has to be admitted that there are still few songwriters
working today who can match him for creativity and originality. A rare
false move, where Brennan’s influence seems to have shaded into Yoko
territory, is her reported hand in Waits’s clunkingly straightforward
take on the Israel–Palestine question, “The Road to Peace”.
Hoskyns is a seasoned rock writer who gets around the non-cooperation
of Waits and his circle by doing a thorough cuttings job, and
combining it with those interviewees who would talk to him, and his
own intelligent observations. If the result is more a meditation on
Waits’s work than his life, that is surely the better direction in
which to tip the balance. The book is too long, because Hoskyns can’t
resist analysing every song that Waits has ever recorded, and a few he
hasn’t. But it provides a genuine insight into a great songwriter and
unique performer who has nevertheless done his best to remain
enigmatic. For Hoskyns, the two songs that provide the best clues to
Waits’s persona are “Eyeball Kid”, a satire on fame about a freakshow
attraction who “was born without a body / Not even a brow”, and
“What’s He Building in There?”, a paranoid fantasy about nosy
neighbours that seems a bit more sinister to me than Hoskyns allows.
For the listener to Waits’s music unencumbered by fears of invading
his privacy, it is easier to focus on a streak of sentiment running
all the way through from “I Hope that I Don’t Fall in Love with
You” (recorded in 1973) to “Coney Island Baby” (2002). Waits might now
be most often heard with his recommendation to “Keep the Devil / Way
down in the Hole” (from the song that has become the signature tune of
the cult television series The Wire), but perhaps his secret is the
opposite of Robert Johnson’s. He seems to have made a deal with the
angels.
Barney Hoskyns
LOWSIDE OF THE ROAD
A Life of Tom Waits
609pp. Faber. £20.
978 0 571 23552 0"