Wild Years (28 page)

The following year, Robert Altman's film
Short Cuts
was released, featuring Tom Waits as an alcoholic limo driver. It was a high-profile gig. Altman, the fiercely independent director of some vivid pieces of American film culture — such as
Nashville
and
M*A*S*H,
both made in the seventies — had just come roaring out of an extended dry spell with
The Player
. This pitch-black send-up of the Hollywood motion-picture business was released in 1992, and it was Altman's first hit in years. Everyone was clamoring to work with him. Casting
Short Cuts,
a dissection of life in contemporary L.A. based on several intertwined Raymond Carver stories, Altman was able to build a powerhouse ensemble. Altman was renowned for assembling and coordinating huge casts, and he didn't hold back now.
Short Cuts
would star Tim Robbins (who'd anchored
The Player),
Andie MacDowell, Lily Tomlin, Julianne Moore, Madeleine Stowe, Matthew Mo-dine, Jack Lemmon, Robert Downey Jr., Lili Taylor, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Christopher Penn, Frances McDormand, Bruce Davison, Buck Henry, and Peter Gallagher, as well as actor-musicians Lyle Lovett, Huey Lewis, and Tom Waits.

Waits described his part to Douridas: “I played Earl Piggot, a limo driver who drinks, and I was married to Lily Tomlin.” He also spoke about how much he'd enjoyed working with Altman: “He's like a good sheriff in a bad town.” At that point in the interview, Waits began to ruminate on the film actor's life: “Film is difficult sometimes, because they don't pay you to act, they pay you to wait. Somebody told me acting makes a woman more of a woman and a man less of a man. Oh God — so that's what's been bothering me! Fussing around with your hair. Getting up six in the morning and having all these people fussing all around. I like it when I can actually leave the ground. That's rare in film. It's more common in a play where you can actually experience flight. Film is so broken up. It's a mosaic. In working with good people it's always enriching and always satisfying. But some films are like you bought the last ticket on a death ship.” Laughing, Waits then assumed a sinister tone — “and you'll never come home!”
²⁰

Short Cuts
was released in 1993 and was greeted with critical raves.
Altman was nominated for a 1993 Best Director Oscar, and the film garnered a number of prestigious foreign awards. The irascible Earl Piggot was seen by audiences the world over.

A few years earlier, in 1988, Waits had been asked to work on an operetta called
The Black Rider
. New York theater producer Robert Wilson, who had turned down Tom and Kathleen's request to help them get
Frank's Wild Years
off the ground, wanted to know whether Tom was interested in scoring the piece, which was based on a German legend, circa 1811, called “Gespensterbuch.” This story of a man who sells his soul to the Devil to win the love of a fair maiden had, in 1821, been turned into the opera
Der Freischutz (The Marksman)
by Carl Maria Von Weber, though Von Weber had substituted a happy ending for the original tragic one. The big inducement that Wilson could hold out for Waits was that Beat icon William Burroughs would write the contemporary version; and Burroughs, presumably, wasn't afraid of tragic conclusions.

Waits and Wilson met while Wilson was staying at the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, a historic establishment just blocks away from some of Waits's old Hollywood haunts. At that point, Waits had only seen one of Wilson's plays,
Einstein at the Beach,
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He claimed that he'd left the theater afterward and entered a dreamworld that he could not escape for weeks.
²¹
There, at the Roosevelt, Wilson presented his offer to Waits. While flattered, Waits was also a little intimidated, primarily by the prospect of working closely with his hero William Burroughs.

More discussion was needed. “We all went to meet William in Lawrence [Kansas],” Waits told Hoskyns. “Greg Cohen and Robert Wilson and myself. And we talked about this whole thing. It was very exciting, really. It felt like a literary summit. Burroughs took pictures of everyone standing on the porch. Took me out into the garage and showed me his shotgun paintings. Showed me the garden. Around three o'clock he started fondling his wristwatch as we got closer to cocktail hour. He was very learned and serious. Obviously an authority on a wide variety of topics. Knew a lot about snakes, insects, firearms.”
²²

Waits signed on. As the enterprise got under way, he found that the amazement he'd felt at finding himself collaborating with the likes of Burroughs wasn't waning. Burroughs “was Bull Lee in
On the Road,
” Waits said. “He was the one that was more like Mark Twain with an edge. He was more suited to the whole notion of the country having some type of alter ego. He seemed to be ideally suited to the position of poet laureate. He
seemed to have an overview, and one of maturity and cynicism. I've heard a lot of the stuff he did with Hal Willner. ‘The Thanksgiving Prayer' and all that stuff. It just really killed me. He had a strongly developed sense of irony, and I guess that's really at the heart of the American experience. If you read the papers over the years, you have to see that there's something very ironic about everything.”
²³

The Black Rider
is the saga of Wilhelm, a clerk who falls in love with a beautiful maiden named Katchen. Katchen's father, Kuno, is determined that his daughter marry a hunter, so he sets up a shooting contest for her hand. Though he can't shoot, Wilhelm is desperate to win Katchen, so he makes a pact with a dark, mysterious horseman named Pegleg. Pegleg gives Wilhelm five magic bullets that will hit any target the gunman chooses, but he insists on retaining one bullet for himself. Thanks to the magic bullet, Wilhelm wins the contest, but Kuno decrees that on Wilhelm and Katchen's wedding day, there will be one final contest. Wilhelm begs Pegleg for the last bullet; Pegleg finally gives in, but when Wilhelm shoots the bullet, it flies straight into Katchen's pure heart.

For several months during the early nineties, Waits lived in Hamburg, Germany, and worked on the music for
The Black Rider
. His domestic headquarters was a ratty old hotel, and his workplace was a facility called Gerd Bessler's Music Factory. He had brought Greg Cohen along to work on the songwriting and the arrangements. The two sustained themselves with cold coffee, hard rolls, and little sleep. Day after day, they toiled with a group of local musicians they alternately called The Black Rider Orchestra or The Devil's Rhubato Band. On his occasional day off, Waits meandered around Hamburg, browsing in old shops and exploring flea markets.

The Black Rider
played in Hamburg, Vienna, Paris, Barcelona, Genoa, Amsterdam, and Berlin. In 1993, it finally made it to American shores, where its home became the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Also in 1993, Waits released an album of the songs he'd written for the operetta. It couldn't really be called a new Tom Waits album — it was more of a side project.

In essence, the album
The Black Rider
documents Waits's attempt to reconstruct the German dance-hall style of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht in order to retell a traditional tale. As such, it has an even more pronounced central theme and theatrical feel than Waits's experimental works of the past decade. Many of the songs evoke a haunted-carnival atmosphere — the opening track, “Lucky Day Overture,” sets the mood with its carny-barker-from-Hell lyrics.

The title track sounds like something you'd hear on a swirling calliope in a German town (though Waits's German accent could have used some polishing). The album boasts several beautiful songs, like the ballad “November” and “The Briar and the Rose.” Like a theme from a cowboy movie, “Just the Right Bullets” bumps the proceedings up to a gallop, but, as a whole,
The Black Rider
album is an uneven piece of work. Many of the songs worked better in the theatrical context; outside of that context the collection's coherence is diminished. Also, while cool in theory, having Burroughs sing the old standard “T'Ain't No Sin” only serves to demonstrate that Burroughs's voice is even more ravaged than Waits's own.

Overall, however, Waits's collaboration with Wilson was a successful one. On the heels of it, in 1992, Wilson again approached Waits with a project proposal. This time, Kathleen was invited to participate as well. Working with the Thalia Theater Company of Hamburg, Wilson wanted to mount a production called
Alice,
a musical that explored the relationship between the Reverend Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell, otherwise known as Lewis Carroll and the Alice who tumbles into a well and lands in Wonderland.

Tom and Kathleen agreed to Wilson's request and wrote
Alice
for him. When the time came to orchestrate the material, Tom moved back to Hamburg on his own. He had just six weeks to complete this phase of the project. By the time the show opened, right before Christmas, he was practically crazed. The work was grueling, and he sorely missed his home and family. During the fine-tuning process many of those involved in the production could see how stressed out he'd become. By all accounts,
Alice
was a much more accessible work than
The Black Rider,
but Waits hadn't released any of the songs from it. He often, however, ventured to say that he'd like to record some of the
Alice
material — and he finally would get to release it in 2002.

Waits's musical adventures have taken many forms. One night, years back, he and Kathleen were listening to the radio when they heard a mesmerizing hymn called “Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet.” Waits managed to tape the song, but it was eaten by a tape deck. After spending years trying to track down a recording of the hymn, Waits gave up hope. Then, out of the blue, a friend asked him if he'd ever heard the song. The friend had a copy of his own and was happy to make one for Waits. On
Morning Becomes Eclectic,
Waits related what little he knew about that mysterious profession of faith in Jesus. “What I understand is that it was a recording
made of an old man on the beach in the middle of the night, digging clams. Somebody taped him singing all by himself and then they brought the tape home and added strings to the recording and that's what this is. But it's very eerie … it's just a strange little song.”
²⁴

Gavin Bryars had heard the song, too. Like Waits, the British composer found the lyrics, and the crude yet extremely affecting voice that sings them, impossible to forget. Bryars, however, explains the song's origins like this. In 1971, a friend of his named Alan Power was making a documentary about a group of London tramps. He asked Bryars to work on some of the audiotapes from the footage he'd shot — “bits of opera, sometimes folk songs, sometimes sentimental ballads.” Among these bits and pieces was a man singing “Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet.” In the end, Powers opted not to use the song in his film and gave it, along with other unused audio segments, to Bryars.
²⁵

Over the years, Bryars tinkered with the piece of tape. He knew beyond a doubt that its magic was highly communicable after he left it playing on a continuous reel one day and left the studio for coffee. When he returned, he found several people weeping quietly and others in an uncharacteristically subdued frame of mind, overcome by “the emotional power of the music.” From that volatile scrap of music Bryars created an orchestral concert piece, which he presented to live audiences and then recorded in 1975 for Brian Eno's Obscure Records label. When, some time later, “the possibility arose of making a
CD
version,” Bryars “resolved to reconsider the piece for this extended medium.” He fleshed out the instrumentation considerably and hit upon the idea of mixing Tom Waits's voice with that of the old man.
²⁶

Waits, of course, didn't need to be coaxed. He was thrilled to accept Bryars' invitation to participate in the project, a
CD
that would be released in 1993. And he wasn't simply drawn to it by his fascination with the tramp's particular refrain. He had always been enthralled by bums and vagabonds, and Bryars' project was a way for him to slip on the tattered hat and slide down into that underworld again. By recording “Jesus' Blood,” he could reassume the familiar persona of the starving old man warming his hands over a trash-can fire in some decaying shantytown.

Clearly, it was all just playacting. And Waits was again blurring the distinction between inhabiting the slums and slumming. He had escaped skid row years ago, if “escaped” is even the word — he was never actually imprisoned by it in the first place. Waits was going home to a place that
he'd never really occupied. Still, this was all done in the service of art. And it was art of the highest caliber. When Waits's voice meshes and builds with that of the tramp in Bryars' seventy-four-minute symphony, the results are poignant and mysterious beyond words.

Tom Waits was on top of the world in 1993. The critics hailed his music. Acting opportunities abounded, and he was doing interesting work in theater. No one could predict what he'd do next. As it turned out, his next move was to walk away from it all. He embarked on an extended vacation.

Waits had been working constantly for over twenty years, and he was due for a break. He had achieved financial security. The
Alice
episode had demonstrated to him that pushing too hard just makes you crazy. Finally, there was this important motivator: the birth of another son, Sullivan. Now, more than ever, Waits was determined not to be the clichéd rocker who fits in his kids between tour dates and stints in the studio. He wanted to hang out at the diner until everyone in the neighborhood knew him. He wanted to become a local character, to travel the back roads in his metallic-gold '67 Caddy Coupe DeVille. (“Drives great, but the driver's side door doesn't open, so if ya don't mind me scooching over top of you …”) Eventually, he trashed the old boat and had to replace it, choosing a newer model, a '70 Coupe DeVille. The day the '67 Caddy died, Casey Waits had found his dad wiping the blood from his forehead with a sack of McDonald's takeout and persuaded him to go to the hospital.