Wild Years (21 page)

Waits's next album,
Rain Dogs,
emitted a New York vibe. It was only natural. “Any place you move is going to have some effect,” Waits told Hoskyns. “I was exposed to a kind of melange of sounds [in New York], because I went to clubs more. It's rather oppressive, I think. I'd . . . go down to the Westbeth Building [in Greenwich Village], where I shared a room with [jazz musician] John Lurie and his brother Evan. We'd go down there
at night and write songs. It was quiet at night. I'd work 'til late and come home. The thing when you have kids is that you can stay up 'til five in the morning, but you still gonna get up and have to feed them.”
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Through John Lurie, Waits met a guitarist named Mark Ribot, a member of Lurie's avant-garde jazz group The Lounge Lizards. Waits recruited Ribot to work on
Rain Dogs,
and they hit it off so well that he invited Ribot on tour, as well. In contributing to the album, Ribot joined forces with two high-profile strummers. The first was the former Hall and Oates guitarist and longtime
Saturday Night Live
bandleader G. E. Smith. The second was the legendary Keith Richards. When the heavily committed Rolling Stone agreed to play on the songs “Big Black Mariah,” “Union Square,” and “Blind Love,” Waits was thrilled. Not only was Richards a brilliant guitarist, but he was also one of the few musicians whose reputation for hard living had outstripped Waits's own. (Waits himself has claimed that he tried to party with Richards but couldn't keep up.) So entrenched was Waits's admiration for Richards that he'd been known to say, when searching for a way to explain to his band what type of guitar sound he was going for, “It's a Keith Richards thing.” Now he'd have the genuine article there with him in the studio.

It really was a coup to get Richards. He rarely did guest work. “He's the best,” Waits enthused. “He's like a tree frog, an orangutan. When he plays, he looks like he's been dangled from a wire that comes up through the back of his neck, and he can lean at a forty-five-degree angle and not fall over. You think he has special shoes. But maybe it's just the music that's keeping him up.”
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In more sedate language, Richards expressed his own appreciation of Waits: “I'm really interested in his work and it's fun to sit around and write songs with him.”
³⁰
In 1986, Waits returned Richards' favor by singing on “Sleep Tonight,” a track from the Stones album
Dirty Work
.

The name
Rain Dogs
is a reference to New York's army of homeless people. When dogs are out in heavy rain, they become disoriented because the scents that guide them are washed away. Unable to find their way home, they cower in doorways or slink along back alleys. Waits envisioned the homeless this way — they'd lost their bearings and were condemned to wander through hostile terrain. Pleased with the metaphoric resonance of this title, Waits also liked its manly feel. For him it brought to mind “some kind of war movie starring Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin, and Rod Steiger as Solomon the watchmaker.”
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Rain Dogs
would be a vehicle for experimentation even more radical than the experimentation that had yielded
Swordfi shtrombones
. “Yeah, it's more rhythmic, much more rhythmic,” Waits remarked. “I still want to use a percussionist rather than a drum machine. This is gonna be even more oddball than
Swordfishtrombones
. I mean oddball for me. One man's ceiling is another man's floor. The thing is you have ideas — the hardest thing is bringing them out and making them as clear on the outside as they were to you . . . For me, there are things that I imagine and that thrill me that I want to hear that I'm going to try to accomplish in the studio. Sometimes you only get halfway there. The way that I'm constructing songs is different now than the way I used to, it's more like collage really. I'll take bits — I'll put that there and this here and I'll nail that to the side and then we'll paint it yellow and put a hat on it. It's more construction.”
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With “Singapore,” the first
Rain Dogs
cut, Waits cranked up the “mutant dwarf orchestra” sound he'd been working with on
Swordfishtrombones
. The song almost defies description: it's a deranged sea-shanty road tune. “In the land of the blind / the one-eyed man is king . . .” Waits couldn't remember who he'd lifted that line from — he thought it was George Orwell, but it could have been
Mary Poppins
. For all its dissonance and rough edges, “Singapore” is strangely compelling, a glimpse of a world few people will ever experience. So is “Cemetery Polka,” a peek at the family's internal workings; or, as Waits described it to Mark Rowland, “The way we talk behind each other's backs: ‘You know what happened to Uncle Vernon?' The kind of wickedness nobody outside your family could say.”
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The German music-hall feel of such
Rain Dogs
tracks as “Singapore,” “Cemetery Polka,” and “Tango 'Til They're Sore” prompted a lot of people to conclude that Waits had been influenced by Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill. “That macabre, dissonant style,” says Waits — “see, when I hear Weill I hear a lot of anger in those songs. I remember the first time that I heard that Peggy Lee tune ‘Is That All There Is?' I identified with that. ‘Is that all there is? If that's all there is, then let's keep dancing.' So you just find different things that you feel your voice is suited to. I didn't really know that much about Kurt Weill until people started saying, ‘Hey, he must be listening to a lot of Kurt Weill.' I thought, I better go find out who this guy is. I started listening to
The Happy End,
and
Threepenny Opera
and
Mahagonny
and all that really expressionistic music.”
³⁴
In fact, Waits became so fond of Weill's work that he recorded a version of “What Keeps
Mankind Alive?” for the Kurt Weill tribute album
Lost in the Stars,
which was produced by avant-gardist (and former
Saturday Night Live
musical director) Hal Willner.

After these three edgy songs,
Rain Dogs
shifts gears with “Jockey Full of Bourbon.” To a Tex-Mex swing-rumba beat, the song barrels through ranchero-jazz territory, evoking the tunes Waits's father used to play on the car radio as they drove down to Mexico together. “Tango 'Til They're Sore” is about a guy who falls out of a window at a New Year's Eve party and is somehow saved by the fact that he has confetti in his hair. “Big Black Mariah,” which coasts along a rock-steady Keith Richards guitar line, is pure voodoo New Orleans as it tells a little tale involving a Black Mariah —a type of paddy wagon that is often used as a hearse.

And
Rain Dogs
is enriched by even more forms of musical exploration. The instrumental “Midtown” could easily pass as the theme for a fifties cop show. “Blind Love” was probably the first country song Waits had written since
Closing Time
. While he admitted that he wasn't a great country- music fan, he did say that with “Blind Love” he was striving to reproduce the same roadhouse feel that fueled certain Merle Haggard classics. “Anywhere I Lay My Head” sounds like a New Orleans funeral march — the kind of piece that a Dixieland combo would offer up as it accompanied a casket to its burial site, winding its way through the narrow streets of the French Quarter.

More traditional Waits compositions find their place on
Rain Dogs,
too, including a couple of his most beautiful love songs. “Hang Down Your Head,” Tom and Kathleen's first official songwriting collaboration, is a lovely, unaffected folk-rock ballad. “Time” might have been one of Waits's most gorgeous piano ballads except that in his fever of instrumental experimentation he chose to play it on acoustic guitar, accordion, and bass.

The spoken-jazz piece “9th & Hennepin” was named for the Minneapolis street corner where Tom once stumbled onto a pimp war. It was a typical Tom Waits off-kilter and somewhat-out-of-sync-with-the-times experience: he was in a doughnut shop when three twelve-year-old pimps wearing fur coats pulled knives and other assorted pieces of silverware on each other. Although set in Minnesota, the song has an unmistakable New York feel.

“Downtown Train,” which became
Rain Dogs'
first single, is an unusually accessible Waits composition, and it is fueled by some quirky guitar work by G. E. Smith. Video director Jean Baptiste Mondino (red hot at the time thanks to his moody take on Don Henley's “Boys of Summer”),
was hired to make the “Downtown Train” video, and boxer Jake LaMotta (subject of the Martin Scorsese film
Raging Bull
) was cast as Waits's irate Italian neighbor. Despite its accessibility, the song features some of Waits's best lyrics; and its array of offbeat touches reveal it to be the work of a cockeyed genius.

Rain Dogs
shows Waits stretching and testing his art like never before, but it triggered the usual dynamic: critics loved it (Robert Palmer of the
New York Times
named it best album of 1985), but sales were poor. Waits, as ever, took it in stride. And he gave no sign of being tempted to compromise. “What do you mean by success?” he said to Mark Rowland. “My record sales have dropped off considerably in the United States [but] I do sell a lot of records in Europe. It's hard to gauge something you don't have real contact with. We have no real spiritual leadership, so we look to merchandising. The most deprived, underprivileged neighborhoods in the world understand business. Guns, ammo, narcotics . . . But yes,
sales have dropped off considerably in the last few years
. . . and I want to talk to somebody about it. I used to play Iowa. I haven't been to Iowa in some time.”
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By 1986, Waits was ready to launch into
Frank's Wild Years,
the musical. But before he submerged himself completely in that project he had another movie role to do. It was to be his biggest yet, and he planned to take full advantage of the opportunity. Since their first meeting, Tom and Jim Jarmusch had been talking about working on a project together, and now Jarmusch was offering Waits a starring role in his next film, a jailbreak drama called
Down by Law
. Jarmusch also wanted two of his songs, “Jockey Full of Bourbon” and “Tango 'Til They're Sore,” for the film's soundtrack.

Tom and Kathleen's New York minute was coming to an end. Their initial attraction to the frenetic metropolis was wearing thin, and now it was becoming apparent to them that midtown Manhattan was not an ideal environment for child rearing. Jarmusch provided them with the impetus to leave it all behind by setting
Down by Law
in New Orleans and arranging for the film to be shot on location there. The Waits clan packed up and headed south.

In the film, Waits plays Zach, a New Orleans dj who gets drunk after losing his job and his girlfriend and agrees to deliver a car for a local con man. When a body is found in the car's trunk, Zach is framed for murder. Joining Zach in jail is Jack, portrayed by Waits's friend John Lurie, a sweet-tempered pimp who is himself framed when a local stool pigeon sets him up to meet a new girl — who turns out to be about twelve years old. Completing this trio of cell mates is an Italian tourist, played by comedian Roberto Benigni (who so ecstatically accepted the Best Actor Oscar in 1999 for
Life Is Beautiful
). Benigni's character, Bob, barely speaks English (he insists to his cell mates, “I ham a good egg”), and he has actually
committed the crime he is accused of — he killed a man to defend the honor of a woman.

“It was good working with those people,” Waits told radio interviewer Dierdre O'Donohue. “Bob Benigni, who's a big comic in Italy . . . played Bob. Outside of the Pope, there's nobody bigger in Italy than Bob Benigni. He really was a joy to work with . . . He made his name as an outsider. He would speak at rallies and say the unspeakable. He used to make jokes about the Pope and the Vatican and he got a big name. He referred to the Pope, the equivalent of calling him ‘Pope, babe.' It created quite a stir in Vatican City.”
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After weeks of mutual distrust and fighting, the three convicts develop a grudging respect for each other. They start planning a breakout, and they finally pull it off, escaping into the Louisiana bayou.
Down by Law
is essentially an arty variation on an old film standard, but the rapport between the convicts along with mostly ad-libbed dialogue add layers of interest. Waits's portrayal of Zach was a tour de force, and he clearly reveled in it. For the first time in his career, he met the challenge of creating a fully rounded, feature-length character, and he did it with skill and subtlety.

He based his character on a dj he'd listened to as a teen in National City. He was called Lonely Lee “Baby” Sims, and the station he worked for promoted his show by begging listeners to come and visit the man at work so he wouldn't be so alone. Eventually, Lee “Baby” moved on, disappearing from Waits's radio and entering his memory bank. When Waits took on the character of dj Zach, something stirred up that old memory, and he decided to give Zach the professional name of Lee “Baby” Sims.

The problem was that Waits had made a false assumption. He figured that Sims had vanished from the scene long ago, that he was no longer “real.” But, as Waits found out, “Lee ‘Baby' Sims is one of the best-paid disc jockeys in the Western Hemisphere.” Tom told O'Donohue, “I think he lives in Hawaii. I think he was trying to sue us after
Down by Law
came out. He didn't like being portrayed as a ne'er-do-well. There was no offense made or intended, honestly . . . I had no idea that since I'm a kid he became this big sensation and he's a giant in the broadcasting world.” He added, “No offense, Lee ‘Baby' — it's all done with love and affection . . . Don't sue me.”
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