Wild Years (24 page)

Waits had met Marianne Faithfull when they were both working on producer Hal Willner's
Lost in the Stars
tribute to Kurt Weill (Faithfull's contribution was “The Ballad of the Soldier's Wife”). Waits was attracted to Faithfull's style; her voice, much like his own, had been ravaged by hard living and had evolved into a raspy croak. The two became phone friends, holding transatlantic musical debates. The idea of working together naturally came up. And, for the first time, Waits felt that he could produce the work of another artist.

He offered to produce Faithfull's next album, a concept piece that he wanted to call
Storeyville,
after New Orleans's historic red-light district. Waits pictured Faithfull portraying an aging hooker who tells her story in song, a kind of Prostitute's Revenge. In her autobiography, Faithfull admits to having had mixed feelings about the concept. “It's always curious the way people see me, which is always in a much more sexual light than I see myself. Much as I'd love to believe the sexpot image of me, I don't really see myself as an unrepentant hooker belting out blues from the bordello.”
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This conceptualizing underscores one of Waits's central songwriting blind spots. So many of his women characters are sketched in broad madonna/whore strokes, untouchable porcelain dolls or alcohol-addicted broken spirits. While these stereotypes began to break down somewhat when Kathleen entered Tom's life, they still have a tendency to creep into his creations. As it turned out, however, Marianne Faithfull would not be cast as the unrepentant hooker of Tom Waits's imaginings. The
Storeyville
album wasn't destined to be.

“A project like this requires weeks and weeks of sitting around listening to old records,” Faithfull remarks, “and the person you usually end up working with is the one who has the time. Tom wanted to do it, but he was busy having a life: getting married, having children, making records.”
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Waits's schedule was too hectic, and the window of opportunity to pull off such an ambitious project simply couldn't be found. Instead, Tom and Kathleen wrote a song for Faithfull's next album. It was called “Strange Weather,” and it took the form of a Brechtian lament that showcased Faithfull's Marlene Dietrich–like vocals to great effect. Hal Willner produced the album, named for the Waits/Brennan composition, and the song quickly became a standard in Faithfull's repertoire. Tom started performing it in concert himself, something he'd never done before with a song he'd written for someone else.

Waits also took part in Willner's next project,
Stay Awake,
a tribute to Disney movie music. Willner had corralled a diverse group of artists to perform on the album: Michael Stipe, Natalie Merchant, Bill Frisell, Bonnie Raitt, Aaron Neville, The Replacements, Suzanne Vega, Los Lobos, nrbq, Sinéad O'Connor, Sun Ra, Harry Nilsson, James Taylor, and Ringo Starr. As Waits put it, Willner's “getting a lot of odd characters to record their favorite Disney songs.”
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As one of those “odd characters,” Waits contributed an astonishingly twisted version of “Heigh Ho (The Dwarfs' Marching Song)” from
Snow White
. Instead of whistling while they worked, Waits's Seven Dwarfs produced a sound reminiscent of a chain gang consigned to Hell. He took great pleasure in the fact that the people at Disney were deeply disturbed by this.

Yet another welcome invitation was extended to Waits at about this time. He was asked to join a supergroup that would perform on a television comeback special featuring Roy Orbison. Launching his career in the 1950s, Orbison issued a string of up-tempo rockabilly tunes — like “Ooby Dooby” and “Dream Baby” — but such heart-wrenching offerings as “It's Over,” “Crying,” “Blue Bayou,” and “In Dreams” catapulted him to stardom.
He was flying high in 1964 with his biggest hit ever, “Pretty Woman,” when he was felled by a double whammy. The first blow was the result of a bad decision. He left his small record label, Monument, where he had been top dog, and signed with the conglomerate Warner Brothers, where he became lost in the shuffle, a low-priority package. The second blow was beyond anyone's control. The Beatles took America by storm and suddenly Orbison was an anachronism. His hits became smaller and more scarce. His life degenerated into a series of tragedies and disappointments.

Orbison's star would not rise again until the eighties. In 1986, David Lynch used “In Dreams” during a hallucinogenic scene in his instant cult classic
Blue Velvet,
and, just like that, Roy Orbison was hip again. Then Or-bison scored a minor hit with a remake of “Crying,” performed with k.d. lang, which was included on the soundtrack of the movie
Hiding Out
.

Then came the television special to which Waits was asked to contribute,
A Black and White Night
. This would be Orbison's big chance to solidify his resurrection. A group of the biggest names in rock, dubbed The Coconut Grove Band, would be on hand to lend Orbison some powerful support. This outfit included Elvis Costello, who had written a song for Orbison and was set to play organ, harmonica, and guitar. Coconut Grove's other guitarists included Bruce Springsteen, James Burton (of Elvis Presley's band), J. D. Souther, and Waits's pal T-Bone Burnett. Waits contributed guitar work, too, although he also put in some time at the organ. The backing vocalists included Jackson Browne, k.d. lang, Bonnie Raitt, and Jennifer Warnes.

A Black and White Night
(shot, of course, in black and white) had the desired effect. Orbison's career surged ahead over the next two years. With George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne, Orbison formed The Traveling Wilburys. The band released an album in 1988 that soared to number three on the charts and spawned the hit singles “Handle with Care” and “End of the Line.” Sadly, just weeks before he was due to release
Mystery Girl,
his first solo album in almost ten years, Orbison died of a massive heart attack.

Waits's parallel career as an actor was not growing stagnant as a result of all this musical activity. When director Hector Babenco's film adaptation of William Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel
Ironweed
premiered in 1987, filmgoers were treated to the spectacle of Tom Waits playing opposite Hollywood icons Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. As Babenco, who was still riding a wave of adulation for his film
Kiss of the Spider Woman,
got down to casting his take on Kennedy's dreary Depression-era tale of
two skid-row alcoholics, he somehow thought of Waits. “I play a character called Rudy,” Waits explained at the time. “I get hit in the head in the train yard with a big stick on a raid. I die in the emergency ward at the end from a hemorrhage or internal bleeding, brain damage, and exhaustion. It's all about . . . alcohol, baptism, and redemption . . . It was a good experience for me. I got a chance to work with great people. Well, in this one I was forced to drink against my will. Everybody was told, ‘'Cause it's part of the story . . .' So there was a lot of drinking going on.”
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As Rudy, Waits demonstrated that he could hold his own in the company of top-grade acting talent. He was no longer just a diverting cameo. Rudy's story was a vital thread in the
Ironweed
narrative, and Waits's screen presence was riveting. Waits modestly claimed that he'd actually picked up a few pointers from his costars. He told David Letterman that Meryl Streep should be declared “a national monument.”
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And when
Playboy
asked him what he'd taken away from the experience, Waits again expressed his admiration.

PLAYBOY: In
Ironweed,
you worked with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. What did you learn from them?

WAITS: Nicholson's a consummate storyteller. He's like a great bard. He says he knows about beauty parlors and train yards and everything in between. You can learn a lot from just watching him open a window or tie his shoes. It's great to be privy to those things. I watched everything. I watched them build characters from pieces of things in people they have known. It's like they build a doll from Grandmother's mouth and Aunt Betty's walk and Ethel Merman's posture, then they push their own truthful feelings through that exterior. They're great at it.
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Despite its unrelentingly grim subject matter,
Ironweed
is a strong and captivating piece of work. Playing Rudy was a valuable exercise for Tom, both a learning experience and a means of increasing his cachet as an actor. It also indirectly enriched his composing. Asked whether his film acting was having an influence on his music, he replied, “I'm getting a bit more courage about putting some optical illusions in the songs as I become more aware of visualization of music. I start with an idea that's visual and then kind of score it. I get ideas from that all the time.”
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Ever since he and Kathleen had created their play, Waits had wanted to make a movie of
Frank's Wild Years
. When it became apparent that this
plan just wasn't coming together, he shifted his focus to another, more feasible, film project. He would make a movie that was neither a film version of the play nor a concert film but an imaginative marriage of the two. It would be called
Big Time
. Waits would portray Frank and several other characters in a series of short sketches interspersed with scenes from highly theatrical concert performances filmed at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco and the Wiltern in Los Angeles. Chris Blum, who'd done the “Blow Wind Blow” video, would direct
Big Time
.

“What we tried to avoid is having a concert film that felt like a stuffed bird,” Waits explained to David Sheff of
Rolling Stone
. “I tried to film it like a Mexican cockfight instead of air-conditioned concert footage. Some of it felt like it was shot through a safari rifle. You forget about the camera, which is what I was trying to do. But when you see yourself in concert, it rarely looks like the way you feel when you're up there. I thought I was much taller. I thought I looked like Robert Wagner . . . If we had more money, we would have done the Rangoon gladiator sequences. And the shot of the audience holding up their matches and all that. We could have gotten the underwater ballet sequences, but it really would have been a different film, I think . . . Now that it's completed, I would not have had my underwear coming out of the back of my pants like I did, but there's always something you want to change after it's over.”
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Clearly,
Big Time
was not your typical rock-concert movie. It was no pallid souvenir of a special occasion; it was the vibrant occasion itself. It ranks right up there with the handful of concert movies that have managed to transcend the genre's constraints: The Talking Heads'
Stop Making Sense,
The Band's
Last Waltz,
and the Stones'
Gimme Shelter
.
Big Time
is visually and aurally stunning and often quite funny. It strikes a wonderful balance between fantasy and real life, whimsy and seriousness.

As a bonus, Waits thought, his latest undertaking would give him a break from the public aspect of his work. He'd miscalculated. He told the
Morning Becomes Eclectic
audience, “The idea . . . was you put the film out there, the film can go on the road, and I can stay home. That was the idea, but then I end up having to go out and do interviews. [
Big Time
is] getting mixed reviews. I guess that's what they call it — mixed reviews. One reviewer said, ‘Piano teachers will be shocked,' which is one of my favorite reviews. Another guy said it looked like it was filmed in the stomach of a very sick animal. Now those were the good reviews. I recommend it.”
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Tom Waits abides by a number of moral principles. This one is close to the top of his list: no musician should be an adman — a pitchman, a huckster. Musicians weren't put on this Earth to sell you a complete car paint job for just $29.99. Let someone else move the beer, the antiperspi-rant, the corn chips off the shelves.

Waits has always been exceptionally outspoken on the subject of musicians peddling their songs to Wall Street, but he's bucked the trend. In today's music world, few artists will resist the double allure of money and exposure. Even the most respected musicians now drink freely from the Devil's cup. Eric Clapton sang that “After Midnight” he's gonna let it all hang out and chug a frosty Michelob. And you couldn't see Sting in concert if you used an American Express card: Sting only accepts Visa. The stage sets for the last few Rolling Stones' tours have been billboard extravaganzas. Dylan's “The Times They Are A-Changin'” has been used to shill for a bank.

Tom Waits isn't having any of that crap. He expressed his frustration at what was going on to Mark Rowland of
Musician
back in 1987, and his sarcasm was lethal: “It's amazing, when I look at those artists. I find it unbelievable that they finally broke into the fascinating and lucrative world of advertising after years on the road, making albums, and living in crummy apartments. Finally advertising opened up and gave them a chance for what they really wanted to do, which was salute and support a major American product, and have that name blinking over their head as they sing. I think it's wonderful what advertising has done, giving them these opportunities to be spokesmen for Chevrolet, Pepsi, etc.”
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Given that the ad industry is notoriously voracious for novelty and fresh content, it's little wonder that Tom Waits, the great resister, was approached to sell his talents. “I get it all the time,” he continued to Rowland,
“and they offer people a whole lot of money. Unfortunately, I don't want to get on the bandwagon. You know, when a guy is singing to me about toilet paper — you may need the money but, I mean, rob a 7-11! Do something with dignity and save us all the trouble of peeing on your grave. I don't want to rail at length here, but it's like a fistula to me. If you subscribe to your own credibility, to the point where you do your own work, and then somebody puts decals all over it, it no longer carries the same weight . . . I really am against the people who allow their music to be nothing more than a jingle for jeans or Bud. But, I say, ‘Good, okay, now we know who you are.' 'Cause it's always money. There have been tours endorsed, encouraged, and financed by Miller, and I say, ‘Why don't you just get an office at Miller? Start really workin' for the guy.' I just hate it.”
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