Wild Years (2 page)

Even Waits himself acknowledges that he has created such an overpowering legend for himself that it's sometimes difficult to distinguish fact from fiction — real-life events from the elements of what he thought would make, at one time or another, a cool story. Waits is a very funny man and an entertainer at heart. When he does interviews, imparting the truth is not nearly as important as spinning a yarn. He'll gladly tell an obvious fib if it makes the tale more interesting or sets up a joke. Sometimes he seems motivated by the desire to relieve the monotony of answering the same questions over and over again. Waits once told Gavin Martin of
New Musical Express,
“Music paper interviews, I hate to tell you but two days after they're printed they're lining the trash can. They're not binding. They're not locked away in a vault somewhere tying you to your word.”
³

Of course Waits doesn't simply tell stories to amuse himself and his audience; he also tells them to shield himself because, although he is a very forthright character, he is also an intensely private man. He has allowed
few hard facts about his personal life to escape into the arena of public knowledge; those details of his past that he does — only occasionally —make mention of he downplays, tosses off. Minor bits of information, such as his mother's first name (which is Alma) or where he went to school (Hilltop Junior and Senior High Schools in Chula Vista, California), have been unearthed — with difficulty, and despite Waits's efforts to conceal them — but they provide little real insight. The stories that Waits has built up around himself as a protective device have done their job. And if you want to piss Tom Waits off, pry a little.

Then there is the rear guard: Waits's friends are fiercely protective of him. Not one of them will utter a negative word about the man. Which doesn't necessarily mean that they're all covering something up. Many will tell you that Waits is just a good man at heart and bears few people any ill will. Perhaps he's just what he seems to be — a genial guy and a loyal friend. As Bones Howe, who produced seven albums with Waits, from
The Heart of Saturday Night
(1974) to the soundtrack to the film
One from the Heart
(1982), put it, “He's the only artist I've worked with throughout this forty-three-year career that I miss being around and hanging out with. He's my favorite.”

Waits does deserve a private life. So in this biography I have tried to respect the boundaries he has struggled to establish and to delve, instead, into his music and the dynamic legend that he has created for himself. I haven't dragged any skeletons out of his closet or speculated about his sex life. This book is a celebration of a brilliant storyteller — a man who happily reinvented himself as a beatnik purveyor of squalid urban hip. And the process of reinvention continues. I have to acknowledge right off the bat that many of the things described in the coming chapters quite possibly never happened — except in the mind of a compelling self-mythologizer. But it's important to realize that they are still vital pieces of the puzzle that is Tom Waits.

“I've got a personality that an audience likes,” Waits said in 1976. “I'm like the guy they knew — someone raggedy and irresponsible, who never really amounted to much but was always good for a few laughs. A victim, just a victim. But I don't mind the image.”
⁴
Because of all this, Waits has taken on a larger-than-life quality. Legend has it that Tom Waits has lived life to its fullest, stared down his demons, and awoken countless times not knowing where he was. Often, tales of his exploits have a strong basis in truth. And even when they don't, they really should . . .

There are certain people in this world who are difficult to imagine as children. Tom Waits is certainly one of them. In fact, in the 1973 press-kit bio for his first album,
Closing Time,
Waits claimed that he was born in a taxicab with three day's growth of beard. As soon as he popped out, he told the driver to head for Times Square on the double. In other interviews, he maintained that the driver wouldn't let him out of the cab until he had come up with the fare — which was pretty tough since he didn't have pockets.

This tall tale evolved into stage patter. At a show Waits gave in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 16, 1976, he treated the audience to the following version: “I was born at a very young age in the backseat of a yellow cab in the Murphy Hospital parking lot in Whittier, California. It's not easy for a young boy growing up in Whittier. I had to make decisions very early. First thing I did was pay, like, a buck eighty-five on the meter. As soon as I got out of the cab I went out looking for a job. The only job I could land was as labor organizer at a maternity ward for a while. I got laid off, got a little disenchanted with labor.”
¹

Since then, the story that Tom Waits was born in a taxi outside a hospital has become official — the Gospel According to Saint Tom. Is it true? Quite possibly not, but the people who would know aren't talking (even the County of Los Angeles seems to be in on the conspiracy, accepting payment for a copy of Waits's birth certificate but failing to deliver it).

The taxi story didn't make it into the brief birth announcement that appeared on the society page of the
Pomona Progress-Bulletin
on December 9, 1949: “
WAITS
— To Mr. and Mrs. Jesse F. Waits, 318 N. Pickering Street, Whittier, a son, Thomas Alan, 7 pounds, 10 ounces, born December 7 at Park Avenue Hospital.” But how else could that announcement
read? “Born in a Tijuana taxi double-parked in a loading zone?” Not likely. In the end, it doesn't really matter. The fact is that even if Tom Waits wasn't born in a taxi, the notion feels right. It's the way it should have been.

So what do we know? He was born Thomas Alan Waits on December 7, 1949 at a hospital in the sleepy Los Angeles suburb of Pomona, not far from Whittier. Waits has often said in interviews — he did at the Princeton show — that he was born at the Murphy Hospital, and there is little reason to doubt it, despite the published birth announcement, which indicates he was born at the Park Avenue Hospital. The hospital-name discrepancy may be explained as a typo, a trick of memory, an institutional name change — it's not that important.

Waits's parents, Frank (after whom Tom named one of his most enduring musical characters) and Alma, were schoolteachers. They both taught for years, although in at least one television interview Waits claimed that his father was a bail bondsman and his mother was a fan dancer — his, he insisted, was a typical show-biz clan.
²
Alma's family was Norwegian; Frank was of Scottish and Irish descent. Frank was actually named Jesse, after his own father, Jesse Waits, but he always went by Frank, his middle name. Tom has said that the name Jesse Frank was a tribute to Old West outlaws Frank and Jesse James — the James Brothers; but as a young man Jesse Junior started using his middle name because he liked the cachet of having the same handle as the Chairman of the Board, Frank Sinatra. The bobby-soxers just wouldn't fall so easily for a Jesse.

In concert, Tom Waits has claimed that he was “conceived one night in April 1949 at the Crossroads Motel in La Verne, California [northwest of Pomona], amidst the broken bottles of Four Roses, the smoldering Lucky Strike, half a tuna-salad sandwich, and the Old Spice.”
³
Where could a couple of young parents go from there? As it turns out, the Waits family lived for most of Tom's first ten years in Whittier, a town that is probably best known as the home of Richard Milhous Nixon.

Tom had two sisters, and the childhood they passed together was fairly unremarkable. Frank was a frustrated guitarist, and he instilled in young Tom an appreciation of music. Despite his Anglo origins, Frank was fascinated by all things Mexican. By day he taught Spanish at a local school, and by night he played guitar in a mariachi band. Waits's earliest musical memories are of the mariachi, romantica, and ranchera music Frank would play on the car radio. Alma was also of a musical bent, singing whenever she had a chance. Tom, however, never really felt that he came from a musical family. When Mark Rowland asked him about it for
a
Musician
magazine interview, Waits cracked, “Not like Liza Minelli, all right? Contrary to popular belief, we don't have the same mother. I took her out a couple of times, nothing ever happened.”
⁴

The same Princeton audience that heard Waits relate the myth of his birth was also told a touching story of how Alma Waits nurtured her son's musical curiosity. She got him his first musical instrument. “I remember it was Christmastime . . . As the snow fell down all over Whittier, I was coming home from work in the factory. I was right by Palace Pawnshop. There was a piano in the window. It was right next to an old bent-up saxophone, old Toro mowers, some dentures and shit. I knew I had to get my hands on that sucker. And it being Christmastime, I ran all the way home, pulled on my mother's coat . . . [and] I said, ‘I just got to get my hands on that piano so I can get double-parked on Easy Street.' Well, Mother, bless her soul, ran all the way down to Palace Pawnshop. The moon was high — she stood out in front of the pawnshop and goddamn if she didn't throw a brick through the window and get it for me. What can I say? The rest is history.”

Tom had a gang of neighborhood buddies. They engaged in standard kid stuff — “hanging around in the Sav-On parking lots and buying baseball cards,” was how Waits described it to Rich Wiseman of
Rolling Stone
.
⁵
Waits learned to play the piano at a neighbor's house, and he tells the story of how he learned to play the guitar in a minor key from a childhood friend named Billy Swed. Billy also provided his pal with a verbal demonstration of the hard-luck lifestyle that has continued to enthrall Waits over the years. A twelve-year-old dropout who already drank and smoked, Billy lived with his overweight mother in a trailer on a polluted lake over by the local hobo jungle. Tom idolized Billy; he was convinced that the writing on Billy's blue jeans was some secret musical code that he was incapable of cracking. One day, Tom went down to the lake to see his friend, but Billy and his mother had vanished. Tom insisted that he learned more from Billy than he ever did in school.
⁶

He also received some life instruction from a young friend named Kipper. Kipper was handicapped — confined to a wheelchair. When they were both about ten, Tom and Kipper would hang out together, often racing each other to the school bus. Years later, Tom memorialized Kipper, and his neighborhood in general, in the song “Kentucky Avenue,” named for a Whittier thoroughfare.

Waits introduced that song during a 1981 concert with this childhood reminiscence: “I grew up on a street called Kentucky Avenue in Whittier,
California. My dad was teaching night school at Montebello. I had a little tree fort and everything. I had my first cigarette when I was about seven years old. It was such a thrill. I used to pick 'em up right out of the gutter after it was raining. My dad smoked Kents. Now, I never liked Kents — I tried to get him to change brands. I used to repair everybody's bicycles in the neighborhood. I was the little neighborhood mechanic. There was a guy called Joey Navinski who played the trombone, and a guy called Dickie Faulkner whose nose was always running. And there was a woman called Mrs. Storm. She lived with her sister. She used to sit in her kitchen with her window open and a twelve-gauge shotgun [sticking] out of it . . . so we took the long way around.”
⁷

Waits has said that the musical persona he adopted was a slightly idealized version of his own father, and he's also maintained that his musical tastes were influenced by two of his uncles, Vernon and Robert. Through the decades, the exploits of this pair of uncles have recurred regularly in Waits's tales, and they have gradually reached Bunyanesque dimensions. Uncle Vernon had a hard, raspy voice. Young Tom wished he could sound just like him; and the adult Waits insists that he came up with his trademark vocals by imitating Vernon. His uncle's voice was affected by throat surgery he underwent as a child. Family lore has it that the doctors left gauze and a small pair of scissors inside him when they closed him up. Tom says that years later, during Christmas dinner, these surgical relics again saw the light of day — Uncle Vernon, choking on his food, coughed them up.
⁸

Uncle Robert was a botanist who also played the pipe organ for the local church, and Tom was intrigued by what he could do with the instrument. When Robert played the organ, the building would actually vibrate from the sheer force of it. The problem was, Uncle Robert's music kept getting louder and more experimental, prompting members of the congregation to complain. Old favorites became swirling masses of sound. Cherished hymns ended up resembling “Lady of Spain.” The organ's vibrations were stripping the paint off the walls. Finally, Uncle Robert was fired, but he never stopped playing. The church was eventually torn down, and Uncle Robert had the pipe organ delivered to his house, where the pipes extended right through the ceiling. Uncle Robert also had a piano that had — somehow — been left out in the rain. Most of the keys no longer worked, so Tom learned to play it using only the black keys.

Waits has described how taken he was with Uncle Robert's house, which was in an orange grove. The place was a disaster area, clothes and
trash strewn everywhere, but this was romantic clutter to Tom, a squalor born of long nights, hard work, and not enough money. The image of a downtrodden man in a downtrodden environment appealed to Tom so much that at one point he asked his mother why he couldn't let his room get as messy as Uncle Robert's. His mother pointed out that Uncle Robert was blind.
⁹

One of Waits's most famous remarks is that he slept through the sixties. In the early seventies most music-world denizens were still either on a post-Beatles psychedelic high or in a Southern California Jackson Browne folk-rock navel-gazing mode. Tom Waits seemed like such an anachronism — a grizzled, drunken hipster cat in roach-killers and a filthy beret who looked and acted like he'd just driven across town from skid row — that one could almost believe in that marathon sleep. But Tom's sixties experience was actually much more unsettling than his glib comment suggests.