Wild Years (30 page)

The song is about Japan as a haven for entertainers. Celebrities who can no longer draw a crowd anywhere else often find that their popularity lives on in Japan; and A-list stars who are too proud to hawk cars, whiskey, television sets, or cigarettes at home can shill with impunity there. Visiting Japan is like visiting Mars, says Waits. He, himself, isn't big in Japan — except in a Godzilla-steps-on-Tokyo kind of way.
¹³

Songs like “Big in Japan” and
Bone Machine's
“Such a Scream” are
far more rock-oriented than anything Waits did when he was young.

“I always start at the wrong end of everything,” he told Hoskyns. “Throw out the instructions, and then wonder how you put this thing together. Maybe I'm raging against the dying light. What do they say? Youth is wasted on the young? You're more in touch maybe with those feelings the further you get from them. Time is not a line or a road where you get further away from things. It's all exponential. Everything that you experienced when you are eighteen is still with you.”
¹⁴

With the Mississippi John Hurt–meets–Bruce Springsteen story song “Hold On,” Waits proves his point. His ability to manufacture more accessible music has never left him. “Hold On” is a sensitive ballad about escaping bad relationships in a town that hobbles the spirit. Over a bed of acoustic guitars, Waits spreads his detailed analysis of small-town existence and the ties within it that bind. Just like a good short story, the song dramatizes the problems of its characters, pulling us in, making us care.

“Get Behind the Mule” is like an old-time blues lament. Waits had heard the story of legendary bluesman Robert Johnson — that he'd sold his soul to the Devil at a Mississippi crossroads for the ability to deliver sublime blues. The music came pouring out of him, and within the space of a couple of years he had recorded some timeless tunes, including “Crossroad Blues,” “Love in Vain,” and “Sweet Home

Chicago.” But then, like many of those who deal with the Devil, Johnson died young. When he had first run away from home in pursuit of his dream, Johnson's father had said, “Trouble with Robert is he wouldn't get behind the mule in the morning and plow.”
¹⁵

The gorgeous, melancholy love song “House Where Nobody Lives” builds on a strong lyrical idea, comparing an abandoned house to a person who lacks the capacity for love. Waits told David Fricke that the notion had been triggered by an old house he'd seen in the vicinity of his own. “It had busted windows, weeds, junk mail on the porch. It seems like everywhere I've ever lived, there was always a house like that. And what happens at Christmas? Everyone else puts their lights up. Then it looks even more like the bad tooth on the smile of the street. This place in particular, everybody felt so bad, they all put some Christmas lights on the house, even though nobody lived there.”
¹⁶

Another of Waits's Ken Nordine–inspired spoken-jazz numbers, “What's He Building?” is told from the perspective of a man keeping an eye on his neighbor because he's persuaded that the man is up to no good. He's not exactly sure how, but the guy has no friends, receives a lot of mail, and reads funny magazines. And what about those strange sounds coming from his house? It's not just an echo. It's not the T.V. Something evil is afoot … “We seem to be compelled to perceive our neighbors through the keyhole,” says Waits. “There's always someone in the neighborhood, the Boo Radley, the village idiot. You see that he drives this yellow station wagon without a windshield, and he has chickens in the backyard, and doesn't get home 'til 3:00
A.M
., and he says he's from Florida but the license says Indiana … so, you know, ‘I don't trust him.' It's really a disturbed creative process.”
¹⁷

“Chocolate Jesus” is an ironic look at the selling of religious figures. Tom's father-in-law, the type who's always on the lookout for a new way to make a buck, provided the inspiration. He'd once brought his powers of persuasion to bear on Tom and Kathleen in order to get them to invest in something called Testamints — little lozenges for religious people who have trouble finding time to worship in this hectic modern world. The mints had a cross on one side and a Bible quotation on the other. Tom and Kathleen thought this was hilarious and started playing around with the idea. They came up with a new product concept — the chocolate Jesus. “He died for our sins, and He's a yummy treat, too.”
¹⁸

A radical mood shift is achieved with “Georgia Lee,” a somber requiem for a little girl named Georgia Lee Moses who was murdered not far from Waits's home. While friends and neighbors turned to each other for comfort and support at her funeral, Waits sensed that everyone was wondering why Georgia Lee had gone unaided while she was still alive. Where were the police? The social workers? Could anyone have saved her? Why wasn't God there to protect her? With “Georgia Lee,” Waits helped to ensure that this little girl did not wind up as an anonymous statistic.
¹⁹

When
Mule Variations
was ready to be sent out into the marketplace, there was a danger that it would sink without a trace. After all, it had been six years since Waits's last album, and that's an eternity in the music business. Things had happened. Since the release of
The Black
Rider
in November 1993, multiplatinum artist Bruce Springsteen had seen his spare, subdued
Ghost of Tom Joad
sell a fraction of the pace his offerings normally sold at. Prince had released the equivalent of ten full-length
CDS
. Rap and R&B had pretty much replaced rock and roll in the hearts of a hefty portion of the music-buying public. The top-of-the-pops position had been wrested away from Nirvana and Pearl Jam by Britney Spears and The Backstreet Boys. In the larger arena, the world seemed a confusing and scary place as the century drew to a close. Speculation was rampant that when the clock chimed midnight on December 31, 1999, systems would crash worldwide, bringing civilization as we know it to an end. A sex scandal had nearly toppled Bill Clinton, one of the most popular American presidents of our time. School violence had reached terrifying new levels. America Online, an upstart Internet company that had been in business only for the time it had taken Waits to record three albums, had become powerful enough to purchase Time Warner, the largest media conglomerate in the world. The sense that almost anything could happen permeated the atmosphere.

The music world was in turmoil. Record companies were swallowing each other up. Polygram bought A&M, Geffen, Motown, Island, Def Jam, and many of the other more successful small labels. Universal bought Polygram, slashing and shuffling its cache of small labels. The industry was also up in arms about Napster, the computer program through which music fans were downloading musical selections from the Internet for free, seriously impacting on record sales. Many established acts — among them superstars like Springsteen, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Rod Stewart, and Madonna — found that their sales figures were dwindling alarmingly. Tom Waits could never begin to match the commercial clout of artists such as these. By the time
Mule Variations
came out would even a sliver of the pie be left for him?

“It's like looking for your waitress,” Waits said to Fricke. “People get like that with artists. We are a product-oriented society. We want it now, and we want an abundance of it in reserve. But there are limits to what you can do. One is not a tree that constantly blooms in the spring; the fruit falls and you put it in a basket … There's something to be said for longevity. For some people, being in pop music is like running for office. They court the press in a very conscientious fashion. They kiss babies. No matter how black their vision is,
their approach is the same. I'm more in charge of my own destiny. The songs are coming all the time. Just because you don't go fishing today doesn't mean there aren't any fish out there. So you don't fish for a couple of weeks, a couple of years? The fish will get along fine without you.”
²⁰

As it turns out, there was nothing to worry about.
Mule Variations
became the highest-charting album of Waits's career, debuting (and peaking) on the
Billboard
album charts at number thirty. Less surprisingly, it was also critically acclaimed.
Mojo
named it best album of the year, and Waits was nominated for two Grammys, winning the award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Not only had Tom Waits been remembered during that long silent stretch between albums, but also the music world had caught up with him a bit. Industry insiders and fans alike were according him a new respect. His influence had loomed over the previous decade, and not just in the area of music. It can be no coincidence that the ultimate hipster doofus of nineties' pop culture, Kramer of the wildly popular T.V. sitcom
Seinfeld,
mimicked the trademark wardrobe and hairstyle. A growing number of musicians considered cutting edge in their own right were citing Waits as a key influence — among them Les Clay-pool of Primus, Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse, and Beck.

Those feelings of appreciation were mutual. “I like Beck very much,” Waits remarked to Hoskyns. “Saw him in concert a couple of times, and it really moved me. He's got real strong roots. It's funny. I heard him talking about Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and I used to open shows for them in the old days. It was nice to hear a kid as young as he is talking about them, because I loved those guys. There's a really rich cultural heritage there, and it's nice to see that it's living on in someone as well rounded and as good a spokesman as Beck seems to be. He's got some street credibility too, because from what I hear he was a busker and really went out there and stood on a corner and drew a crowd. I love that. Those are some real important chops to have. And when he goes up onstage and throws that guitar around like a hula hoop, it's pretty remarkable what he can do to an audience.”
²¹

As well, Waits told many of his interviewers that Sparklehorse's 1996 debut album,
Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot
(the title was a tribute to
Swordfishtrombones,
itself a tribute to Captain Beefheart), was one of his favorites. Singer/songwriter Mark Linkous, essentially
a one-man band, had been crippled by an accidental drug overdose — he lay unconscious for fourteen hours with his legs pinned beneath him. Regaining his strength, he'd resumed working on his music, putting together the breath-taking
Good Morning Spider
. When he heard that his hero Tom Waits was also a big fan of Sparklehorse's work, Linkous invited him to contribute to one of the album's tracks. Unfortunately, the timing wasn't right, but Waits has agreed to lend a hand with Sparklehorse's next disc.
²²
Waits also continued to work with his pal Les Claypool; he sang and played mellotron on, as well as produced, “Coattails of a Dead Man,” a song from Primus's 1999 album
AntiPop
.

Waits feels for young musicians struggling to break out of the rigid molds that exist in today's music world. These days, when radio is formatted within an inch of its life and record companies have lost whatever taste they had for creative gambling, it is frustratingly difficult for such artists to make themselves heard. “It's gotta be hard for someone starting out now,” Waits said to Fricke. “All the business you have to go through, making the videos, all this competition. I thought it was bad when I started out.”
²³

Waits thought it would be a good idea to boost his new album's chances for survival by doing some live shows — not a grueling tour like those he would undertake in days gone by, but a five-month-long string of performances in a few strategic locations. “A tour usually implies fifty cities,” he said to Hoskyns. “I'll play some major cities. As to whether I'm gonna be wearing a leotard or not, nothing is planned. All these things have yet to be decided.”
²⁴

The first such show actually predated the release of
Mule Variations
by a month and a half. The venue was the annual South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Texas — the biggest showcase of new talent in the music business. Waits's show was the event of the conference. It was one of the few live performances he'd given in over a decade and the first time he'd played Austin in over fifteen years. Tickets for it were like gold. Local fans, record execs, and journalists fought one another for them. Several people were caught trying to sneak in. Everyone knew it was going to be an amazing show.

Taking the stage, Waits won over the crowd immediately, happily preaching to the converted. He played a strong and varied set, previewing the new album with “House Where Nobody Lives” and
“Filipino Box Spring Hog.” He threw in several tunes from his Island years and, to the delight of those assembled, dusted off the classic Elektra cuts “Tom Traubert's Blues” and “(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night.” The band was smoking, and Waits was visibly enjoying his rapport with the crowd.

It's sad that such an event had to end on a sour note. Waits was obviously shaken when a woman started heckling him from the crowd, calling him a sellout for allowing so many music-biz types to snatch up tickets, effectively shutting out his “real,” nonprofessional fans. While it's highly unlikely that Waits had decreed how the tickets would be divvied up, the woman's words seemed to sting him nonetheless.

It might have been because the heckler wasn't completely off base. The days of intimate gigs played in smoky little bars to audiences of twenty or so were long over for Waits. He could no longer lead the life of the troubadour who passes through town and has a drink with the patrons after the show. It was the classic irony of the entertainment business reasserting itself: the more successful you are at connecting with your audience, the more that audience swells, the more isolated you become from it.