Wild Years (27 page)

Advances in recording technology would now afford Waits the luxury of choosing the ideal environment in which to give birth to his compositions. With the advent of
DAT
(digital audio transfer), it had become easier than ever to record music virtually anywhere — in a car, in a bar, in a bathroom, in a field. These were crucial decisions for Waits; he believed that the choice of recording environment had an enormous impact on the finished product. He began by installing his band in a studio, but the space was all wrong. The vibe just wasn't there. It was sterile. He had to find another locale. Somewhere more sensual, more in keeping with the music.

“I was so disturbed; the studio we got was totally wrong,” Waits later explained to Rowland, still pained by the memory. “I was stomping around thinking, nothing will ever grow in this room. I'm more and more inclined toward texture, and you can't get texture with this whole bioregenerator-flesh approach to recording. It gets a little too scientific for me … The room becomes a character. And, fortunately, we stumbled upon a storage room that sounded so good — plus it already had maps on the wall. So I said, ‘That's it, we're sold.'”
²

The storage room in question was in the studio building. It had a cement floor and a broken window; furthermore, it wasn't soundproofed — if someone talked too loud in an adjoining room, if a car passed by, or if a plane passed over, it would become part of a song. In other words, the space had everything that Tom Waits would require. Additional features were a hot-water heater, a table, and a chair. And, of course, those maps. Tom and crew only had to haul out a stack of old crates and the “studio” was ready for business. Said Waits, “We invented a new place for it to happen.”
³

The music of
Bone Machine
was miles removed from Waits's early neobeatnik sound. Upon the album's release, he said that listening to those old songs again was sort of like looking at his baby pictures.
⁴
They summon up feelings of fondness and familiarity, but they reflect little of the long strange journey you've been on ever since. Waits told the
Morning Becomes Eclectic
audience that what he was most partial to at this point was “songs with adventure in them. I think that's what everybody's looking for: songs with adventure, and acts of depravity and eroticism, and shipwrecks, murder.” With
Bone Machine,
he was trying to “make songs that felt a little more handmade. Experiments and expeditions into a world of sound and stories. I was more interested in percussion — in these Bermuda Triangles of percussion that you find and sometimes you drop
off the edge of the world.”
⁵

To intensify that percussive clang, Waits exploited even more found sounds than usual. His favorite new instrument, created by a buddy of his, was called a conundrum. “It's just a metal configuration, like a metal cross,” he explained. “It looks a little bit like a Chinese torture device. It's a simple thing, but it gives you access to these alternative sound sources. Hit 'em with a hammer. Sounds like a jail door. Closing. Behind you. I like it. You end up with bloody knuckles when you play it. You just hit it with a hammer until you can't hit it any more. It's a great feeling to hit something like that. Really slam it as hard as you can with a hammer. It's good and therapeutic.”
⁶

Bone Machine
actually sounded scary. The effect wasn't necessarily something that Waits had been striving for — it just seemed to happen. Certainly, the fact that he was playing Renfield while he was recording it contributed to the album's macabre aura, but that didn't fully account for Waits's new direction. Waits himself didn't offer much insight, remarking to Rowland, “It just came out of the ground like a potato.”
⁷
The music of
Bone Machine
was more disturbing than anything Waits had ever written — and it was also some of the wildest and most intense.

The album's tracks were selected from a pool of about sixty songs and ideas that Tom and Kathleen had come up with. “You always throw out a lot of songs,” Waits remarked. “Not throw them out, but you cannibalize them. That's part of the process. Frankenstein that number over there. Take the head off of him and sew it onto this guy, immediately. Keep him alive until the head has been severed. It's part of song-building. Kathleen is great to work with. She's a lapsed Catholic from Illinois. She's loaded with mythology and [has a] great sense of melody. I spin the chamber and she fires it. It's Russian roulette. Sometimes you get great things.”
⁸

From the opening chords of the album's opening track, “Earth Died Screaming,” the listener knows that he or she is in for a rough and challenging ride. Waits borrowed the title from a fifties sci-fi movie that he'd never seen and created a song that is nothing less than a musical simulation of the apocalypse. Hellfire crackles in his vocals, which are punctuated by some very weird percussion. Les Claypool, leader of the rock band Primus, weaves in a queasy bass line (he was returning a favor — Waits had contributed vocals to Primus's single “Tommy the Cat”). The strange clicking sound that carries the tune was achieved by Waits and his band members going outside and hitting on things with sticks.

The next song, “Dirt in the Ground,” doesn't revel in chaos and destruction
like the preceding cut. It's more of a dirge, a reflection on mortality. The great tenor saxophonist Teddy Edwards provided Waits with the title: Edwards used to say, “We're all gonna be dirt in the ground” to the women he was trying to lure up to his hotel room. “Why worry, Sugar? It ain't gonna matter in the long run.” The notion appealed to Waits, but rather than building on the line's value as a seduction ploy he took it at face value.
⁹
The resulting song is a low, mournful prayer that is brought into sharp focus by Ralph Carney's plaintive horns. Next up is the rock-and-roll testimonial “Such a Scream.” Despite some disturbing lyrics — concerning a blood-red plow and the “dollhouse of her skull” — Waits has insisted that “Such a Scream” is actually a love song for Kathleen. Listen to the lyrics closely and you'll see exactly what he means.
¹⁰

“Who Are You” is a gorgeous ballad of love and loss that could easily have fit onto one of Waits's Elektra albums, though in an earlier version it would most likely have been played on piano with some strings blended in. The
Bone Machine
arrangement was built on Waits's guitar and percussion and the upright bass of former Canned Heat member Larry Taylor. When Hoskyns asked Waits to explain what this cryptic little song is all about (“They're lining up / To mad dog your tilta whirl”), Waits refused. “The stories behind most songs are less interesting than the songs themselves. So you say, ‘Hey, this is about Jackie Kennedy.' And it's, ‘Oh, wow.' Then you say, ‘No, I was just kidding, it's about Nancy Reagan.' It's a different song now. In fact, all my songs are about Nancy Reagan.”
¹¹

“The Ocean Doesn't Want Me” is a musical suicide note. Its instrumentation is spooky and Waits's voice is like that of a drowning man. He was inspired to write it after coming across a newspaper story accompanied by two photos — the first of a woman standing on a beach, and the second of the same woman a couple of hours later, a corpse washed up on the sand. Her living image had been captured by a passing photographer; when he came back that way again, she was dead. Gone in the blink of an eye, like the click of a shutter.
¹²

Tom's daughter made her contribution to
Bone Machine,
as well. As her father remarked, “Everybody gets in. Everybody wants to get into the action.” Kellesimone provided a lyric for “The Ocean Doesn't Want Me.” Explained Waits, “My little girl has a word — ‘strangels.' It's a cross between strange and angels. Strange angels. Or you could have braingels … the strange angels that live in your head would be braingels. We just went around and around with it, and it wound up in ‘The Ocean Doesn't Want Me.' … Hey, kids write thousands of songs before they learn how to talk.
They write better songs than anybody. You hope you can write something a kid would like. I got a fan letter from somebody in the Midwest. They said, ‘Well, my little girl is just coming around to your songs now. They scare her a little bit. She thinks you sound like a cross between a cherry bomb and a clown.' I like that. You can't fool kids. They either like ya or they don't.”
¹³

“Jesus Gonna Be Here” is about a con man, the kind of tortured dreamer Waits had been etching so vividly for years. “A Little Rain” feels like something from an old Kurt Weill theatrical score. “Black Wings” bolsters Waits's mounting reputation as a great modern poet and unfolds to a tune straight out of a spaghetti western.

Like “The Ocean Doesn't Want Me,” “Murder in the Red Barn” is a creepy little tale with its roots in a local news story. For a long time, Waits has been scouring the papers for ideas, skimming over accounts of politics and war and digging out reports on small human tragedies. He has told Hoskyns that he buys the local papers every day, “and they are full of car wrecks. I guess it all depends on what it is in the paper that attracts you. I'm always drawn to these terrible stories. I don't know why. Black Irish? You know … my wife is the same way. She comes from an Irish family and she's drawn to the shadows and the darkness. ‘Murder in the Red Barn' is just one of those stories, like an old Flannery O'Connor story. My favorite line is, ‘There's always some killin' / You got to do around the farm' … It's true.”
¹⁴

Waits cowrote “That Feel” with Keith Richards, and Richards played and sang on the track. “It's great to have somebody to write with,” Waits confided to Rowland. “It's still really a mystery why songs come around and then leave. Keith is always pondering these same questions; he's extremely down-to-earth and very mystical at the same time.” In fact, Richards' influence extended even further into
Bone Machine
— on “Such a Scream,” Waits lays down a scorching Stones-style guitar riff. Speaking to Rowland, he laughed, “You can't help it if you're around [Keith]. You start walking like him, and you know, it's just impossible. He's got arms like a fisherman. He's physically very strong, and he can outlast you. You think you can stay up late? You can't even come close. He can stay up for a week —on coffee and stories.”
¹⁵

So
Bone Machine,
like so many of Waits's earlier projects, draws on a disparate web of sources to produce unexpected results. Tom has confessed that even he and Kathleen haven't a clue how it all came together. It was like concocting a dish that you'd been longing to taste without benefit
of a recipe. Waits said to Douridas, “When do you put the cinnamon in? Is it after the nutmeg? Or do you first put the scallions in and you dice? What, do you brûlé that? Sauté that? I dunno. Sometimes. Do you lift the lid, or do you not lift the lid?”
¹⁶

Of course, sometimes your best efforts will only produce an unappetizing mess. “Well, some [songs] never come to life,” Waits continued, shifting metaphors. “Sometimes you have to be like a doctor. You have to look at them medically — ‘What's wrong with this?' You have to diagnose them. Some have maladies that are impossible to deal with. Some of them you can't diagnose. Some songs, you work on them for months and they'll never make the journey. They'll be left behind, and someone has to break the news. We had a lot. We had one called ‘Filipino Box Spring Hog.' It was a song about this old neighborhood ritual, and the song didn't make it on the record. It broke my heart, but it just couldn't come. It was good. Maybe it'll come out on something else.”
¹⁷
It did. The song eventually made its way onto the charity album
Born to Choose
and later onto Waits's
Mule Variations
.

Yet another aspect of
Bone Machine
's creation was compromise. Waits's mandate, beyond perfecting new modes of self-expression, was to communicate with others. To reach into the hearts and minds of his listeners. To avoid making them run for cover. “Well, you know, I always make compromises,” he told Douridas. “If I really put it down the way I really want to hear it, nobody else would want to listen to it but me. I clean everything up, within reason. 'Cause … I like to step on it. Step on the negative. Grind it into the gutter and put that through the projector.” Waits went on to say that Keith Richards called these stepped-on sounds the “hair in the gate.”
¹⁸
The hair that somehow gets trapped inside a movie projector, abruptly drawing the audience's attention away from the narrative that's been unreeling before them. Suddenly, that small imperfection holds more fascination than the film itself, but then, as quickly as it has come, the hair vanishes. And for a moment the audience misses it.

Having compromised and cleaned up as much as he could bear, Waits declared
Bone Machine
finished. Everyone involved stood back for a moment and had a good look at what they had wrought. “When I was done with
Bone Machine,
” Waits told Hoskyns, “we listened back and we were like, ‘Oh, man, everybody's got problems on this record.' The whole arc of it … you don't really get a sense of it until it's completely done. In the meantime, we were just doing the finer, closer work. You don't stand back from it and see how it all works together. Then when it's all over you have
to decide if it has four legs and a tail or what.”
¹⁹

A number of critics included
Bone Machine
in their top-ten-albums-of-1992 lists. The album won the Grammy for Best Alternative Album of the Year (an award that too often goes to work that is unworthy of the “alternative” designation). An array of musicians and critics sang its praises. But sales were slow, at best. Business as usual.