Wild Years (15 page)

Rickie Lee's sudden success meant a packed schedule and increased strain on her already-tenuous relationship with Tom. The two finally admitted that they wanted different things from life and stopped seeing each other. Since the breakup, Rickie Lee has generally been reluctant to discuss their relationship. Still, in one interview with Timothy White of
Billboard,
she did tarnish the carefully constructed Waits persona to some extent by insisting that in the long run what Tom really wanted was to lead a normal suburban existence with all the standard features — loving wife, kids, pets, Little League games,
PTA
meetings. Her remarks would prove prophetic.

When Waits finally became fed up with the fact that the Tropicana Hotel had become an amusement park for rock stars, he pulled up stakes and moved out. He said that the last straw was when they painted the swimming pool black.
²⁸
“When I started making albums and touring,” he told Dave Zimmer of
Bam
in 1982, “certain things started happening. People started sending me letters, telling me I was top drawer. And when I put my address and telephone number on the back of [
Small Change
], strangers started looking for my place and calling me on the phone. So while I gained a certain amount of professional success, my personal life began to shrink to the point that I became like a kind of geek.” At the Tropicana he'd begun to feel imprisoned. “When you can't go back and live in the world you come from, and you can't live in the world you're in, you get in your little sports car and drive ninety miles an hour down a dead-end street. There was always the danger of getting sucked down …I felt I'd painted myself in a corner. I'd fallen in with a bad crowd and needed a new landscape, a new story.”
²⁹

So Waits went off into a new landscape and didn't tell many people
where he was going. He became very hard to find. He moved into a little house on Crenshaw Street in Los Angeles — and Crenshaw, as Waits pointed out, is one very long street. The Tropicana was finally torn down and replaced with a huge art-deco gay hotel, which producer Mary Aloe describes as “a Dr. Seuss version of a Ramada. You go there and it looks like Whoville.” The motel's neighbor, Duke's Coffee Shop, moved up into the heart of Sunset Strip.

When reminiscing about the old Tropicana, Waits betrays a certain nostalgia. He told the listening audience of the Los Angeles radio show
Morning Becomes Eclectic
: “It wasn't that bad. It doesn't seem that long ago. I guess my life's different now. When I moved into the Tropicana it was nine dollars a night, and it was one of those out-of-the-way places — about a block away from the Alta Cienega, which is another one of those ‘murder motels' — but it's changed a lot. That bowling alley that used to be there changed hands four or five times and I think they're selling slacks there now. If you live in Los Angeles, things change so rapidly. Places that you used to go … if you leave town for two or three months, chances are they'll tear down the gas station or the donut shop or the cleaners where you go. The hotel is gone, so I guess it kind of stimulates your imagination about it once you tear down the place where it all happened. The stories get taller as the building gets shorter.”
³⁰

Waits continued to tour with his new, theatrical show, and it met with raves. He even arranged his props and backdrops on the set of the pbs concert series
Austin City Limits,
much to the delight of the live studio audience. But for the first time since the inauguration of his recording career Waits let a year go by without releasing an album; 1979 came and went with no sign of a Tom Waits record.
Blue Valentine
had gone over well with the critics, but it hadn't sold well in the United States. Neither had his previous album. It now seemed that Waits's popularity as a major recording artist was on the wane — at home, at least; he could take solace in the fact that he was getting bigger internationally. During his 1979 tour he traveled to Australia for the very first time.

Through it all, however, Waits's confusion over his work, and his life in general, was deepening. His retreat to the little house on Crenshaw had helped in the short term, but what he needed, he soon realized, was a dramatic change of scenery. In order to begin the process of recharging he was going to have to put some serious distance between himself and his familiar California milieu. So Tom Waits decided to move to New York City. Manhattan would challenge him, wake him up, shake him up.
Tom, of course, put a lighter spin on the decision. He told everyone that New York was a great town for shoes — that's why he was going, dammit! And it had a whole new set of bars for him to experience. So off he went, checking into the legendary Chelsea Hotel on arrival.

On
VH1 Storytellers,
Waits recalled sitting alone in his room at the Chelsea one night, trying to watch
The Ox-Bow Incident
. When the movie was less than half over the door opened and a strange couple, engaged in an argument, came in and sat down. Waits perched on the bed, watching them fight and missing his movie. It turned out that the two had stayed in the room before and had kept the key so they could get back in. Waits pointed out that they couldn't stay and that they were interrupting his evening's entertainment. It became apparent that the only way to get rid of the pair was to give them money for another room, so Tom slipped the guy a fifty-dollar bill. He was taken aback when the man came back with the change.
³¹
Soon afterward, Tom left the Chelsea and moved into a small flat he'd rented nearby. He even became a member of the McBurney ymca because he wanted to get himself into good physical shape. His life as a New Yorker had begun.

Bones Howe believes that the real reason Tom chose Manhattan as his new base of operations had nothing to do with scenery changes or shoes or a quest for fresh watering holes. He admits, “You know, Tom did go to New York and try to work with another producer. I was aware of that. He did some demos and stuff. He came back and we talked a lot about what he wanted to do. It was between
Blue Valentine
and
Heartattack and Vine
.” While in New York, Waits attempted to come to a meeting of the minds with Jack Nitzche and several other producers, but it just wasn't happening for him. None of it — neither the producers nor the city itself. New York, New York may be a wonderful town, where the Bronx is up and the Battery down, but Tom Waits was feeling a little lost.

He realized that it was time to give it up the day he found himself running through Chelsea trying not to spill his drink on his way to a workout at the Y. In fact, he more than once compared his time in the Big Apple to a prison term. “It was thirty below,” he told Dave Zimmer. “I was paying six hundred dollars a month for a miserable little apartment and I spent three hundred on locks for my doors, because I was constantly worried about burglars. One of my neighbors was this Yugoslavian lady who wore black pajamas and sticks on her back. I was rescued from this situation by Francis.”
³²

In the spring of 1980, Waits's New York City adventure was terminated when he learned that director Francis Ford Coppola wanted him to score his latest film. It was to be the first movie Coppola had made since releasing
Apocalypse Now,
in which he'd taken
Heart of Darkness
— Joseph Conrad's voyage into the Belgian Congo and the dark recesses of the human soul — and transformed it into a stunning, surreal take on the Vietnam War. Coppola was by now powerful enough within the industry (he also had
The Godfather
and
The Conversation
on his résumé) to be heading up his own studio, American Zoetrope Pictures, which had recently taken over the premises of historic Hollywood General Studios. Coppola was a player.

Apocalypse Now
came out in 1979. It had been a hellish picture to make. Shot on location in the Philippines, the production was plagued by a ballooning budget, schedule overruns, and the mega-tantrums thrown by Marlon Brando, who was being paid millions for a cameo role. Things got so taxing, physically and mentally, that star Martin Sheen suffered both a heart attack and a nervous breakdown. (Coming to terms with the ordeal that nearly broke her husband, Eleanor Coppola made a fascinating documentary based on the project called
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Journey,
which was released in 1992.)

Emerging from the pressure cooker that was
Apocalypse Now,
Coppola was ready to plunge into something a little simpler and lighter. Also, despite the fact that
Apocalypse Now
had rocked the film community and won critical raves, it was not an immediate commercial success. The costs of making the film had been staggering, and this coupled with the relatively poor box-office revenues it was generating
amounted to a significant financial blow for Coppola. He needed a commercial hit in order to refill the coffers of Zoetrope, his fledgling dream factory.

Coppola was banking on
One from the Heart,
a romantic trifle about Hank (Frederic Forrest) and Frannie (Teri Garr), a couple whose relationship has run out of steam. They drift apart and wind up in the arms of exotic new partners (played by Nastassja Kinski and Raul Julia). This lover's waltz is set against the frenetic, glowing backdrop of the Las Vegas Strip. Coppola, yet another notorious perfectionist, resolved to recreate Las Vegas on a studio soundstage — the hotels, the shops, the streets, the cityscape ablaze with a million twinkling lights were all constructed, at a horrendous cost, on-site at Zoetrope, and the results were astonishing.

Shortly after, he'd discovered Waits's music for himself. Coppola was given a copy of the Bette Midler/Tom Waits duet “I Never Talk to Strangers” from
Foreign Affairs
. “He liked the relationship between the singers,” Waits told Dave Zimmer. “That was the impetus for him contacting me and asking me if I was interested in writing music for his film.”
¹

Coppola did not conceive of
One from the Heart
as a traditional Hollywood musical; none of the film's stars would actually sing (except for Kinski, who performed the tune “Little Boy Blue” in a fantasy sequence). But Coppola strongly believed that his movie should have a kind of running lyrical explanation — almost like a Greek chorus — to move the story forward. It would be interesting, he thought, if Waits could write songs that expressed the feelings of Forrest's character and for Midler to sing the inner voice of Garr. “I Never Talk to Strangers,” Waits told Steve Pond of
Rolling Stone,
provided Coppola with “the thread of what he wanted for this score, which was a lounge operetta: piano, bass, drums and musical commentary.”
²

This idea captured Waits's interest, though looking back he acknowledges that the timing was off. He had already begun to tire of the cocktail-lounge dimension of his music, and he was eager to experiment with a new set of sounds. The piano and strings that had sweetened so many of his songs was now getting on his nerves — he claimed he was starting to sound like Perry Como. He wanted his songs to have a more earthy, visceral, lived-in sound. So in his contributions to
One from the Heart
he combined the best of the two
approaches, blending the old-school melancholy of “Old Boyfriends” and “Broken Bicycles” with the stark experimental impulse that had driven “You Can't Unring a Bell.” “When we were working on
One from the Heart
there was a lot of banging on tire irons,” Bones Howe recalls. “What I call Tom's junkyard music was really coming.” “I think by the time Francis called and asked me to write those songs, I had really decided I was gonna move away from the whole lounge thing,” says Waits. “He said he wanted a lounge operetta, and I was thinking, well, you're about a couple of years too late. All that was coming to a close for me. So I had to go and kind of bring all that back. It was like growing up and hitting the roof. I kept growing and kept banging into the roof. Because you have this image that other people have of you, based on what you've put out there so far and how they define you and what they want from you. It's difficult when you try to make some kind of turn or change in the weather for yourself. You also have to bring with you the perceptions of your audience.”
³
Zoetrope sent out feelers, Coppola and Waits came to terms creatively, and soon Waits was saying farewell to New York and catching a flight back to Hollywood. Waits's own version of how he hooked up with Coppola goes like this: “I met him in a bar. I gave him a ride home. He started borrowing money from me. And I said, ‘Look, I'll see what I can do to help you.'”
⁴
Seriously though, Waits had always been intrigued by the medium of film and, despite his reservations about revisiting familiar musical sites, he jumped at the chance to score an entire movie.

He'd contributed a few songs to Stallone's
Paradise Alley
; Robert Altman had used some Tom Waits music in his 1978 film
A Wedding
; in 1980 esteemed European director Nicolas Roeg had chosen an older Waits tune, “Invitation to the Blues,” for the soundtrack of his art-house flick
Bad Timing (A Sensual Obsession
). And not long before getting the Coppola offer Waits had agreed to write the theme song for an indie film called
On the Nickel
. (An alternate version of the theme showed up on Waits's next studio album,
Heartattack and Vine
.) The film documented the experience of the bums who inhabit a skid-row area in downtown Los Angeles. Veteran character actor Ralph Waite (best known as Pa on the seventies T.V. family drama
The Waltons
) not only starred in the film, but also wrote and produced it.
On the Nickel
was Ralph Waite's labor of love, and the story
it told — of a street survivor who goes back into the trenches to save a gutter-bound friend — piqued Tom's interest.
⁵
But no matter how much pleasure Waits derived from contributing bits and pieces to all these projects, nothing could match
One from the Heart
— quite simply, because Coppola had put the entire score into Waits's hands. As a bonus, Tom was given a cameo role in
One from the Heart,
as a street musician who plays trumpet out on the strip. (The way Bones Howe describes it is that “Tom wanted to be in the movie, so Francis [stuck] him in a cameo somewhere.”) Waits has since acted in four Coppola films, and the two men have become close friends (Waits even sang at the wedding of Coppola's director daughter Sofia and fellow director Spike Jonze). Says Coppola, “I am extremely fond of Tom Waits . . . as a wonderful person and friend, and great composer and performer. He is truly one of a kind. The score he wrote for
One from the Heart
is as fresh and imaginative now as it was twenty years ago. Also, Tom is a fine actor and a pleasure to work with.” As “fresh and imaginative” as the finished product turned out to be, the score was a major undertaking for Tom. Poised to begin his score-writing odyssey, he knew that he would need a guide and a support. Bones Howe, who had an intimate understanding of Waits's music and style of working, was obviously the man for the job. He was also willing to take it on.