Wild Years (12 page)

Don Roy King, who had caught Waits's act at Reno McSweeney's in New York City a few years earlier, was now directing
The Mike Douglas Show,
a live television broadcast out of Philadelphia. The impression that Waits had made on King that night in New York hadn't diminished, so when Douglas's head booker received a press release announcing Waits's new album King was personally interested. King was the only member of the show's staff who had ever even heard of Waits, so he filled his colleagues in, explaining that Waits played this cool character onstage, a kind of beatnik street poet. An invitation was extended. One week later, during rehearsals, King got a call from an agitated staffer: Waits hadn't shown up at the appointed hour. The car they'd sent for him had picked him up, but he then seemed to have disappeared. A search of the studio revealed that the security guard posted at the door had refused to let Waits in. Confronted with this wild-haired, unshaven, generally disheveled-looking individual with no laces in his shoes, the guard could not believe that he was a guest of the dapper Mike Douglas. The show's frantic stage manager eventually found Tom asleep in the lobby.

“Now it was my turn to panic,” says King. “Tom Waits shuffled into the studio, mumbling something about South Philly, scratching a three-day beard, balancing an inch-and-a-half ash on a nonfiltered cigarette.” King was freaked. “It wasn't an act! I pushed for this guy to be on our national television show, and he's going to panhandle the audience!” There was no time left to rehearse. King instructed Waits to talk to the bandleader and go over his charts. The studio audience was taking their seats. “Ten minutes later, Mike Douglas
stormed into the control room. ‘I just stopped at the green room to say hi to the guests and there's some homeless guy in there asleep!'”King tried to reassure Douglas that everything was okay. The “homeless guy” was a guest, he explained, a jazz singer named Tom Waits. “It's just a role he plays. You'll love him.” In his mind, King was typing up his résumé. “The first half of the show went by in a blur,” he recalls. “I can't remember who the cohost was that week — Sheckey Green, Red Skelton, perhaps; maybe Joey Heatherton, Robert Goulet, Roy Clark — some seventies' popular-culture name. I can't remember any other guests either. Could have been Professor Irwin Corey, Shari Lewis, The Amazing Kreskin, I don't know. [The other guests were actress Glenda Jackson and composer Marvin Hamlisch.] But what I do remember is Tom Waits. And I'll bet every member of that staff and crew, every member of the studio and home audience remembers him, too. Tom knocked 'em dead!”

“Mike introduced him,” continues King, by saying, “‘A new talent on the cabaret scene, blah-blah-blah.' Something like that. And then suddenly there was Tom and all the regular rhythms of television talk skidded from four/four time into some beat only three-armed drummers could play. Mike was asking simple ‘How did you get started?' kinds of prewritten questions. But Tom was answering in this otherworldly, or rather underworldly, way. He was sputtering and wheezing and barely intelligible but genuinely poetic. Street poetic. His answers sounded like quotes from some Clifford Odets Depression[-era] play. Mike was getting nervous. I was holding my breath.”

Finally Douglas asked Waits to sing a song. The control room went quiet, and on the floor technicians scurried about, trying hard to stay out of Douglas's line of vision. The floor producer lost track of the cue-card sequence. King had the sickening feeling that the show was going down in flames. “Tom got up, lurched to the performance area, and began. I glanced over at Mike's monitor. He was hooked. I saw that small, crooked smile of his, the one that meant he liked what he saw. I always believed that Mike's success was due mostly to his unselfish love of performers doing well. He didn't mind being upstaged by his guests. If they got big laughs or standing ovations he was thrilled. They'd scored on his show, and he loved it. Well, he was loving this. Tom was mesmerizing and he knew it. We all knew it.”

King resorts to figurative language in conveying the impact of
Waits's performance: “In three riveting minutes the painting was done. It was harsh and hard-edged and very real. But there was an abstract rush to it, too. Some steady hand had splattered reds and blacks and yellows in a way that opened up a dark and unknown world and let us in. We'd been escorted to those backstreets we fear. Those alleys we've never seen after dark. Mike jumped up at the end, rushed over to Tom. I could tell he was surprised and happy and relieved. (Not nearly as relieved as his director, however.) I seem to remember Mike putting his arm around him, probably catching his ring on the rip in Tom's jacket. Tom mumbled a thank-you, and the show went on.” After that, King says, they filled their ninety-minute time slots with a parade of popular guests, “But things were never quite the same. Every camera operator, every band member, every writer on that show did Tom Waits impressions for weeks.”
¹²

He talked to me about doing this other material,” Bones Howe “recalls. Waits was ready to record again, and he described to Howe his method for putting
Foreign Affairs
together. “He said, ‘I'm going to do the demos first, and then I'm gonna let you listen to them. Then we should talk about what it should be.' I listened to the material and said, ‘It's like a black-and-white movie.' That's where the cover came from. The whole idea that it was going to be a black-and-white movie. It's the way it seemed to me when we were putting it together. Whether or not it came out that way, I don't have any idea, because there's such metamorphosis when you're working on [records]. They change and change.”

Broken dreams, back alleys, and whiskey bars made up the by-now-familiar terrain Waits traveled through while writing material for this new album. The delicate instrumental “Cinny's Waltz” opens
Foreign Affairs,
setting a nostalgic mood, echoing Gerry and the Pacemakers' sixties hit “Ferry 'Cross the Mersey.” “Muriel,” a sorrowful ballad, extends that mood a little farther into habitual sadness. In it, a man finds that since his lover has left him, the bars have been shuttered, the lights have been dimmed, the earth has gone dark. He's visited by the ghosts of their dead love — don't those apparitions know it's the end of the world?

Next up was “I Never Talk to Strangers,” which Tom did as a duet with the inimitable Bette Midler. David Geffen had introduced Midler to Waits's music as part of his campaign to expose the work of lesser-known artists to the broad audience a star performer could command. On her 1976 album
Songs for the New Depression,
Midler had included a sweet, intense version of “Shiver Me Timbers,” and now she was carrying the association a step further by agreeing to sing a duet with Waits. “I Never Talk to Strangers” appeared on both
Foreign Affairs
and Midler's 1977 release
Broken Blossom
. The song feels like the sequel to the
Closing Time
track “I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love with You.” Both are about a barfly who spots an attractive woman sitting a few stools over, but while the “I Hope That I Don't Fall” barfly fails to act, the “I Never Talk to Strangers” guy summons up enough courage to approach the object of his desires. Waits sings the man; Midler sings the woman. Each has been battered and scarred in the war of the sexes, and they circle one another warily — he tentatively sweet-talks her, she vigorously fends him off and then yields just a little. Waits's gruff patter and Midler's chiming responses dovetail exquisitely.

Foreign Affairs
also includes Waits's musical tribute to his Beat Generation heroes Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac. “Jack and Neal/California, Here I Come” depicts a wild cross-country road trip undertaken by the legendary
On the Road
buddies and a sexually adventurous nurse (“A redhead in a uniform will always get you horny”). They tear along highways and byways like race-car drivers, attempt to buy uppers from Mexican pushers, make love with their nurse while traversing the Nebraska plains, drain bottles of Mad Dog wine, moon passing cars, and perpetually run out of smokes. The song's virtuoso lyrics and jazzy melody perfectly capture the antisocial abandon of the novel it salutes. “Jack and Neal” builds to its joyous conclusion with Al Jolson's triumphant demand, “Open up your Golden Gate, California, here we come!”

Perhaps the most arresting
Foreign Affairs
cut is “Potter's Field,” a spoken-word piece about a blind, alcoholic stool pigeon who tries to score some booze in exchange for his account of a gangland hit. Behind Waits's voice, drums pound, horns wail, and a short, wonderfully nuanced crime drama unfolds in the listener's mind. There is an immediacy, a catch-you-by-the-throat urgency to this track, which was the most successful of Waits's spoken-word pieces to date.

Howe remembers that Waits said of “Potter's Field,” “I've written this lyric, and I don't think I want it to be a song. I think I want to recite it.” Responded Howe, “If you're going to recite it and not sing it, maybe we should score it like it's a little movie.” Waits thought this was a great idea. “That's how [Bob] Alcivar got involved,” says Bones. “Alcivar had been doing arrangements for me and had done some scoring and stuff for T.V. movies. I said [to Tom], you'll read it and the orchestra will play and we'll do it live. We'll score it live. We did it once, and it didn't exactly work out. But we had the tape of it. We took the tape back and Bob worked with the tape. I remember he shortened some places, and Tom wanted some things to be faster and some things to be slower, and we went back in and
recorded it again . . . live.”

Another beautiful
Foreign Affairs
musical story is the bittersweet ballad “Burma Shave.” Based loosely on an old Farley Granger film called
They Live by Night
(Granger is also mentioned in the song), the ballad tells of the singer's escape from a decaying town named Marysville. Tough as it is to leave behind the known and the familiar to head into uncharted territory, he has no choice. To stay on in this dying community is to die along with it, so he points his sedan toward an illusive destination — a nirvana called Burma Shave. Years later, Bruce Springsteen covered similar ground with the melancholy and moving “My Hometown,” but he didn't quite manage to capture the sense of desperation and regret that suffuses Waits's “Burma Shave.” Or, for that matter, the
Foreign Affairs
cut called “A Sight for Sore Eyes,” in which an aging bar patron explains to the bartender what has become of his friends — alive or dead — who have moved on.

Foreign Affairs
was a commercial flop. No one could realistically have expected Tom Waits to become a pop star, so the fate of
Foreign Affairs
wasn't particularly surprising, but it was a bit of a letdown after
Small Change,
which had sold well nationwide. The record-buying public is notoriously fickle, and Tom Waits had always been the very definition of a cult artist. He was continuing to produce strong, uncompromising material, and he knew it. He would simply absorb such disappointments and get on with it. Tailoring his work to enhance its commercial appeal was not an option he was prepared to consider.

Over the years, Tom had experienced a few brushes with the law. Nothing too serious. He told
Time
magazine in 1977 that he had been pulled over three times for driving while intoxicated (an infraction that was much less frowned upon in the late seventies than it is today) and had once been caught stealing cigarettes from parked cars. So he'd spent a little time in the iron-bar suite, but none of this had prepared him for the run-in he was about to have with the Hollywood cops.
¹

Early in the morning of May 27, 1977, Waits and Chuck E. Weiss were arrested at Duke's Coffee Shop. The police said that Waits and Weiss, accompanied by an unidentified “female companion,” were disturbing the peace. Waits said that he and Weiss were put in handcuffs and held at gun-point. The police report said that the whole thing started when Waits and Weiss defended a guy who had butted in ahead of three plainclothes cops who were standing in line at Duke's. “Suspects Weiss and Waits . . . yelled to the unknown male, ‘Hey man, I've got you covered,'” the report reads. The cops claimed that Waits and Weiss then taunted them, calling out, “You
guys want to fight? Come on.” Waits and Weiss walked out of the coffee shop, and when “the deputies exited the location, suspects Waits and Weiss assumed the combative stance with clenched fists, stating ‘Let's go at it.'” According to those “deputies,” when they informed Waits and Weiss that they were officers of the law, Chuck made a “sudden movement” as if he were reaching for a gun or some other weapon. At this point both Weiss and Waits were placed under arrest.
²

Waits was incredulous. He insisted that the plainclothesmen were at fault, not he and Chuck. The cops had been picking fights with the patrons of Duke's. He and Weiss were minding their own business and had just gone outside to make a phone call.
Rolling Stone
's Delores Ziebarth spoke to Herb Cohen just after the arrest, and he described to her what happened next: “the cops came running out, pulled their guns, threw Tom and Chuck to the ground and handcuffed them. They told Chuck they were arresting them for homosexual soliciting and being drunk and disorderly.”
³
Years later, Tom recalled that one of the arresting officers had put a gun to his head and asked him if he had any idea how fast a bullet could penetrate a skull. When the cops bundled Tom and Chuck into their car, Tom was sure they were going to be taken to some lonely location and shot.
⁴
Instead, they were carted off to the station house and booked. They pleaded not guilty to all charges. “When we start taking the testimony of witnesses,” Cohen added in that post-arrest interview, “the police will look pretty stupid. They are going to get a little upset. But they deserve it.” Waits himself told Ziebarth that “those guys must have gotten their dialogue from watching too many reruns of
Dragnet
.”
⁵