Music:For those not acquainted with Tom Waits and his world, this book is a fine primer. For those who know something of Waits and his work, Patrick Humphries fills in some of the blanks. He met Waits in 1981, having "admired his work for half a decade", writes Philip King.
His first piece appeared in the Melody Maker of March 14th, 1981 ("The Heart of Saturday Morning - Desolation Angel"), "but that was a long time ago - and Tom Waits was yet to become practised in the art of deception. But hell, let him tell the story" . . . and he does.
Tom Waits hears no noise. He likes found sound. The piano sliding down the stairs, clacking chatter, random rattling, the bar racket, the traffic, the trains, the trucks, the blocks, the bell jar, the squeaking barn door hinge, the yelping cur off in the distance, the holler of language funnelled through microphone and megaphone.
The voice is at the heart of the matter - raw, ragged and wretched. His early preoccupation with old-timers and his unusual, precocious desire to become old while still in the bloom of youth makes sense when one learns of the rupture in his family caused by his parents' divorce in 1960 and his father's subsequent absence from his life. The old Tom Frost of the song Martha emerged from Waits very early on; one always wondered how such a young man could understand so deeply the regrets and griefs of old age.
It is difficult to penetrate the world created by Waits. Patrick Humphries has some success. We learn the personal details, biographical stuff, discography, filmography and so on. Waits inhabits the dark interior of the US with tears: Kerouac, Carver, Guthrie, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Son House, Leadbelly, the whore and the hobo and many more are present. It's an Ironweed world. This book made me want to listen again to the stories washed up by a tonal landscape that is the noise of the US's distressed heart beating.
TOM WAITS WAS born on December 7th, 1949, to schoolteachers Jesse Frank Waits and Alma Johnson McMurray. Now, 58 years and some 20 records and 26 films later, Tom Waits is that rarest of things: an honest, enduring artist, a free spirit, the last of the independents. Patrick Humphries tells us "the first song Tom remembers hearing as a child was the traditional Dublin street ballad Molly Malone. This song came from his father and it proved to be the beginning of a lifelong love of Ireland and all things Irish, but also deep in the genes was a love for all those towns huddled under what Waits would later call the 'dark warm narcotic American night'".
Waits cites Mose Alison, Thelonious Monk (Solo Monk, 1964), Randy Newman, George Gershwin, Irvin Berlin, Ray Charles, Stephen Foster and Frank Sinatra as some of his favourites. Humphries quotes Waits on seeing James Brown and Bob Dylan: "It was like you'd been dosed or taken a pill, I didn't recover my balance for weeks, when you're a teenager music is a whole other thing. You're emotionally fragile and the music is for you, it's talking to you." He also read voraciously: Eugene O'Neill, Larry McMurty, Harper Lee, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Corso and Kerouac.
This is a deeply researched, sometimes affectionate biography by a respected music writer. Waits's career has a sprawling quality, spanning as it does the 37 years from his first paid gig in November 1970, for which he was paid $25, to the release of Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards in 2006. Each album is (as you would expect from a rock journalist who cut his teeth freelancing for the NME) located and critiqued.
We travel with Waits from San Diego to Los Angeles. "I rolled around in the bowels of a small folk music circuit in the Los Angeles area," Waits would recall later, "picking up music from Mississippi John Hurt, Reverend Gary Davis, Utah Phillips, Zoot Sims, and Ray Charles recordings." We find him at the Troubadour, hang-out for Gram Parsons, Van Morrison, Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell and Crosby "steals the cash" as Waits christened them. Sidebars include a peek at Herb Cohen, manager to Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and Tim Buckley, and David Geffen, mogul, manager and founder of Asylum Records, which would become home to Waits for his first seven recordings between 1973 and 1980.
Waits became a day sleeper at the Tropicana Motor Hotel, where "if you are hungry in the middle of the night the porter will give you half his sandwich, you can't do that at a Hilton". There he meets Chuck E Weiss, falls in love with Rickie Lee Jones and hits out on the road, heading for another joint.
These are the barstool bard days, full of Bushmills and stout. The years of Ol' '55 (covered by The Eagles - "their records are good for keeping the dust off turntables"); of "they say this stuff is dangerous, let's do another line, meet me on the corner of Heart Attack and Vine"; of Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis; of Burma Shave; Jersey Girl (covered by Bruce Springsteen); Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night; and the ballad Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen), a song so lonely and so true. Patrick Humphries sent me back to look at The Old Grey Whistle Test from 1977, a beautiful, priceless piece of footage; no strings, just a trio, piano and the voice. Waits says of these years on the road, "I was sick all the time". In Tom Traubert's Blues you can feel the exhausted mind, you can smell, touch, see and hear the world Waits wandered - "a battered old suitcase in a hotel someplace", "an old shirt that is stained with blood and whiskey".
IN 1980, WAITS met Cork-born Kathleen Brennan on the set of One From the Heart, the picture he was scoring for Francis Ford Coppola. They married some three months after they met and honeymooned in Tralee. "If it wasn't for her," Waits confided recently, "I'd be playing a steakhouse somewhere - no exclamation mark, I'd probably be cleaning the steak house." They became a formidable, enduring partnership, domestically and creatively. They have three children, and on every album since 1985 all the songs have been written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. "I hold the nail and she swings the hammer" - that's how it works, according to Waits.
Throughout this book Patrick Humphries skips from music to film and back with ease. In the film world, Waits rubs shoulders with Francis Ford Coppola, Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, Jim Jarmusch, and Robert Altman, among others. "I don't really do acting," says Waits. If he doesn't really do acting, does he do music? Well, not exactly. It's more than that. He has a new go at it every day, and both he and Kathleen are precious and protective of it. His music is not up for grabs and he is scathing about the rock stars who take their 30 pieces of silver. Of ads, he says: "I hate the people who do them, I've been asked to endorse everything from underwear (lightning-resistant), to cigarettes. I turned them all down, they cut the bacon off your back before the pig is a ham. Corporations are happy to hijack a culture's memories for their product". In 1990, he won a $2.5 million suit against crisp makers Frito-Lay for its unauthorised use of his music in a commercial.
Waits and Brennan have left behind the plantation system of the music business and struck out on their own. After the Island years they hooked up with the Los Angeles punk rock specialists Anti-Epitaph and on April 27th, 1999, released the hugely successful Mule Variations. They have, aptly enough, been with Anti ever since.
TOM'S RELATIONSHIP WITH sound is still tempestuous, abrasive and fraught. He hears so much, how he can pull it into shape? Will he drop the hammer in the barrel? Will he throw the barn door on the floor?
I filmed with him for my documentary Freedom Highway in 1999. Kathleen and himself and their son Sullivan pulled into the yard. In the back of the open-topped truck was a banjo, a harmonium, a ship's piano, a guitar and a beat-up old amp. We picked a concrete-floored room in the corner of the barn. Waits said "I'll be right back". He returned dragging a big barn door, slapped it on the floor, got a bent wooden chair, put the chair on the door, sat on the chair and rocked a little, listened to the creak for a while and said "I'll be right back". He returned this time with a nail, a hammer, a tambourine and the banjo. He nailed the tambourine to the barn door on the floor, sat on the chair, rocked some more, tapped the tambourine with his foot, took up his banjo, looked up and said "I'm ready".
He sang half a dozen songs that day, among them Dylan's The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, and Leadbelly's Ain't Going Down to the Well No More. Being in a room that small, hearing a voice that big, was mesmerising; you could close your eyes and feel all of the US. He was in great form that day. Towards the end of his book, Patrick Humphries writes, "He's at a place now that few including himself figured he'd ever reach. The alcohol abuse, poor diet, chain smoking and incessant touring took their toll. But he survived, and for Tom Waits now, 'On the Road' means driving the kids to school, the dump, or the corner store . . . 'I love what I do'".
Waits marvelled in 2004, "I got the three cherries, you know. I pulled the handle and all the quarters came out".
Philip King is a musician and film-maker. His works include Bringing it All Back Home, Freedom Highway and Other Voices and his recent series, An Droichead Beo/The Living Bridge, on RTÉ1 television.
The Many Lives of Tom Waits, By Patrick Humphries, Omnibus, 354pp. £19.95