Wild Years (10 page)

It hadn't taken Waits long to realize that he'd rather headline at a small venue than open for another act in an arena. Still, some of those little clubs could be a drag. He once spent a week playing a Toronto steak house where the patrons clearly had a deeper interest in their porterhouses or rib eyes than in the entertainer before them. Such washouts were balanced by the great places, like the Cellar Door in Washington, dc, where the audience truly came to listen. There were even little cards on the tables that read “Quiet please.” Night after night, club after club, Tom was honing his act, perfecting his
Nighthawks
monologues, scatting and jiving like a hipster
stand-up. He was developing some highly stylized (and somewhat exaggerated) riffs on the Life and Times of Tom Waits. It was part Charles Bukowski, part Milton Berle. Witness this rap he did at the 1976 Boston Music Hall show: “It had all started one night in a place called Bloomington, Illinois, you know. I was hangin' around a little place called the Wilmont Hotel, staring at the animated wall-paper and the color-television test pattern. I stumbled down to a little place called the Four Corner Bar. Walked inside, passing out wolf tickets, decked out in full regalia — looking slicker than deer guts on a doorknob. I pulled up next to a shapely little miss . . . I'm talkin' about hubba hubba and ding ding ding . . . I elbowed up next to her. She took one look at me and she said, ‘Lookit here. In the first place, you're so ugly you can probably make a freight train take a dirt road.' I didn't let it get me down, though. She said, ‘You might as well hang it up, I'm a lesbian anyhow.' Shit . . . ‘I don't mind if you're a lesbian. I know there's a whole lot of that shit goin' round nowadays. It don't bother me . . . Shit, I got relatives out in Beirut.

We oughta get along real well.'”
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Waits's reputation as a top-quality live act was mounting. Here was an artist who could paint word pictures, and his music simmered. This led to Waits being offered his first serious television gig: he was invited to perform live on the pbs show
Soundstage
. Heightening the thrill factor for Waits was the knowledge that he would be sharing the bill with his longtime idol Mose Allison. The segment's highlight is the opening number, Waits's dramatic a capella performance of “Eggs and Sausage.” Wearing a ratty black sports coat, a loose tie, and a brown beret, he sits at the counter of a real diner, cigarette in hand. Around him we glimpse tired waitresses, bored patrons, sizzling burgers. His only musical accompaniment is the snapping of his fingers and the slapping of his leg. Finishing the tune, he turns to a waitress and asks for another cup of coffee.

Big Daddy Graham, stand-up comedian and Philadelphia radio personality, remembers seeing Waits during the
Nighthawks
tour in a small Philly club. “We were going to the late show. There used to be a bar across the street from the Main Point, where I saw him countless times. We already had our tickets, but the line was so long outside we figured let's go grab a drink. When we sat down, I sat directly next to Waits, who was drinking at the bar.” Big Daddy laughs.

“He ran over there for a drink in between shows. Never happened
to me before and never since . . . where you sit and drink with the guy you're going to see. It was pretty cool. I gave him a long set list of stuff I wanted him to do. And he pretty much did everything I asked. During the show he did ‘Phantom 309' and he dedicated it to ‘my new friend at the bar.'”

There is a tale dating from about this time that has made its way into Philadelphia music lore. Whether it's the gospel truth, an exaggeration, or pure fiction, Big Daddy isn't prepared to say, “But it's a great story.” It also revolves around the Main Point. Nearby there was a watering hole and restaurant called H. A. Winston's, an early incarnation of the chain bar —potted ferns, bulk-purchased antiques, and cute memorabilia strewn about. Everyone who played the Main Point — James Taylor, Pink Floyd —would stop in after their gig. The Winston's management was quite proud of this, but they could never get Waits to pay them a visit. Big Daddy explains why: “Because Waits conceived it as an un-Waits-like type of place. Which it was. It was really a thorn in their side that they couldn't get Waits up there.”

Working as a dishwasher at Winston's was a guy named Artie, who had once been in a band. In the Winston's pecking order, you started out as a dishwasher, you were promoted to busboy, and, if all went well, you finally became a waiter. When the time came for Artie to hang up his dishrag, he balked. He wanted to stay in the back washing dishes. Dealing with the public didn't appeal to him. Artie had played a gig with Tom Waits somewhere along the line, and somehow Waits found out that Artie had ended up at Winston's. He decided to drop by and see Artie after one of his shows at the Main Point.

“The management and everyone goes nuts that Waits has finally showed up,” says Big Daddy. “But he's not there to eat. He just wants to see Artie. And they don't like Artie. They're, like, ‘Artie is in the back washing dishes.' And Waits goes back and washes dishes with Artie for, like, an hour, while Artie tells him his story. They had those glass portholes that look [through to] the back of the restaurant. People kept peeking in. What I always remember was, according to Artie, Waits came back and went, ‘Hey, I see you have a Hobart there.' Hobart is the company that makes a particular kind of dishwasher. I always liked that line — ‘Hey, I see you have a Hobart.' Waits apparently was familiar with the workings of a Hobart.”

At about this time, Waits found himself looking down an intriguing new career path. Director Hal Ashby was making
Bound for Glory,
a film based on the autobiography of Woody Guthrie, the socialist songwriter and folksinger who, in the 1940s, penned such standards as “This Land Is Your Land” and “I Ain't Got No Home.” Guthrie saw America: he rode the rails, crossed the prairies, climbed the mountains, and sang for his supper during the Great Depression. In 1952, when he was just forty, Guthrie was diagnosed with Huntington's chorea, a degenerative neurological disease, and he died in hospital fifteen years later.

Ashby entered Waits's name on the list of actors he would like to see portray Woody Guthrie — along with nearly every other folk-ish singer of note, from Bob Dylan to Loudon Wainwright iii (“Dead Skunk”) to Tim Hardin (“If I Were a Carpenter”) to Guthrie's son Arlo (“Alice's Restaurant”). Somehow the part ended up going to a nonsinger, actor David Carradine, who was a hot property at the time due to his starring role in the martial-arts T.V. Western
Kung Fu
. Although Waits had been shut out in this instance, the notion that he could be an actor had taken root.

And he was fed up with touring. The daily grind was getting to him. Wake up in a new town, stumble out of the motel, try to find a decent cup of coffee, do a sound check, meet with some local interviewers, poke around town a bit, do a couple of shows, have a few drinks, sleep, head out to the airport — and on it went. It was getting kind of old. Add to that the fact that Waits was suddenly experiencing writer's block. It seemed inevitable. He had no time to himself. Someone was always there, pulling at his sleeve. He no longer had much opportunity to pull a stool up to the piano and let his ideas flow.

What finally pushed him over the edge was an incident that occurred at a little New Orleans club called Ballinjax. Waits was slated to appear there on a night that Bob Dylan was in town with his Rolling Thunder Revue (or, as Tom called it, Rolling Blunder Revue), a touring band made up of Dylan cronies. The revue featured one of Dylan's ex-girlfriends, folksinger Joan Baez; the former lead singer of the Byrds, Roger McGuinn, whose cover of Dylan's “Mr. Tambourine Man” was a major hit; and novelist and singer Kinky (“The Texas Jewboy”) Friedman. Rolling Blunder trooped into Ballinjax on Waits's gig night, settled in, and decided to hold an
impromptu jam session. “They got up there for an hour just before I was supposed to begin my set,” Waits told David McGee of
Rolling Stone
. “Nobody even asked me. Before I knew it, fuckin' Roger McGuinn was up there playing guitar and singing and Joan Baez and Kinky were singing. By the time I got onstage the audience was stoked. They were all lookin' around the room and shit. I don't need this crap — it was my show.”
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Tom needed a total change of scene, so he asked Herb Cohen to set him up some shows in Europe — a kind of working holiday. The dates were set, and Waits headed across the pond to play Ronnie Scott's, a famous London blues club. It was 1976, and as far as the British press was concerned, this new American phenomenon was a source of great interest. Here was the inheritor of the Beat tradition, a weather-beaten raconteur who'd been around. But, most importantly, Tom Waits gave great interviews. Punk was big in London, and the ladies and gentlemen of the press had already had their fill of interviewing sneering, uncommunicative punk-scene movers and shakers. And as pleased as these journalists were with Waits, Waits was delighted with them. They constituted a whole new audience for his stories. He'd joyfully spin yarns for them about all those seedy characters he hung out with back home — like this guy Chuck E. Weiss (or “Chalky Weiss,” as one British scribe recorded it), who'd sell you a rat's ass as an engagement ring.
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Then Waits would start handing out advice, telling his interviewers where, in America, they could find a drink at any hour of the day; listing the worst places to stay in a variety of cities; and explaining how to find a reasonably priced pavement princess when you're a stranger in town. The Brits loved Waits's stories of cruising L.A. in a big old honker of a car, equipped with a six-pack of Miller High Life, singing along with Ray Charles testifying “What'd I Say?” or James Brown begging “Please, Please, Please.” They could just picture him tossing his empties out the window, driving everywhere, going nowhere. The appeal was obvious. To these Europeans, who were forced to contend with confined spaces and complex social hierarchies, Waits embodied a drive-all-night, be-yourself dream of freedom.

Most of the European journalists who became so enthralled with Waits were unaware of the tradition he'd come out of. They were just too young. After all, Jack Kerouac and Lenny Bruce were already dead, Ken Kesey had entered the mainstream (the 1975 film adaption
of his novel
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
swept the Academy Awards), and Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs weren't getting any younger. But what did it matter? Tom Waits, great American storyteller and spokesman for the (somewhat romanticized) denizens of the night, was here and now and happy to oblige. He loved Britain. The pubs, the people, the attention — it was just what he needed, and he returned home rejuvenated.

By this time, Waits had pulled together enough material to make a new album, which he'd tentatively titled “Pasties and a G-String.” It represented a new direction for him, and that was evident to anyone who listened to the first few seconds of the finished product: “Wasted and wounded / It ain't what the moon did / I got what I paid for now.” The lyrics of the new song collection, which was finally named
Small Change,
had a dark immediacy to them, a sense of hurting that Waits hadn't really tapped before. Like his earlier recorded material, the
Small Change
songs were very well written and reflected their composer's famous sense of humor, but their lyrics had more sting.

Tom has always considered
Small Change
to be the high watermark of his early recording career. “There's probably more songs off that record that I continue to play on the road, and that endured,” he told Barney Hoskyns. “Some songs you may write and record but you may never sing them again. Others you sing every night and try to figure out what they mean. ‘Tom Traubert's Blues' was certainly one of those songs I continued to sing, and, in fact, close my show with.”
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“Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)” is the album's stunning opener, and it sets the tone for what follows. It tells the story of a man who finds himself stranded and penniless in a foreign land “where no one speaks English, and everything's broken.” Traubert is etched as a sympathetic character, but it's clear that he inhabits a hell of his own making. He'll never make his way home again because any cash he gets his hands on he squanders on drink. The song's chorus incorporates “Waltzing Matilda,” the classic Australian ballad of aimless travel. (“Matilda” is Aussie slang for “backpack,” and “waltzing matilda” means being on the road or hitchhiking.)

Bones Howe distinctly remembers when Waits wrote “Tom Traubert's Blues.” Howe's phone rang in the middle of the night. It was
Tom. Howe had long since become accustomed to the fact that being Tom's friend meant receiving calls from him at all hours. “He said the most wonderful thing about writing that song,” Bones recalls. “He went down and hung around on skid row in L.A. because he wanted to get stimulated for writing this material. He called me up and said, ‘I went down to skid row . . . I bought a pint of rye. In a brown paper bag.' I said, ‘Oh really?'” Waits replied to Howe, “Yeah — hunkered down, drank the pint of rye, went home, threw up, and wrote ‘Tom Traubert's Blues.'” Howe was even more struck by what Waits said to him next: “Every guy down there . . . everyone I spoke to, a woman put him there.”

Howe was amazed when he first heard the song, and he's still astonished by it. “I do a lot of seminars,” he says. “Occasionally I'll do something for songwriters. They all say the same thing to me. ‘All the great lyrics are done.' And I say, ‘I'm going to give you a lyric that you never heard before.'” Howe then says to his aspiring songwriters, “A battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace / And a wound that will never heal.” This particular Tom Waits lyric Howe considers to be “brilliant.” It's “the work of an extremely talented lyricist, poet, whatever you want to say. That is brilliant, brilliant work. And he never mentions the person, but you see the person.”