Wild Years (32 page)

From the more recent past, Waits had wanted to record the music
from
Alice
since it was originally staged in 1992. However, problems with his old record label Island slowed down the process, undoubtedly stemming back to the fact a similar project for
The Black Rider
had led to one of Waits's more impenetrable and slowest-selling albums. So, even though the music from
Alice
was a lot more digestible, it was unavailable to Waits fans, except through low-quality bootlegs of the songs. The project got pushed back farther when Waits moved over to Anti/Epitaph. He wanted to immediately release his latest, freshest work with
Mule Variations.
Waits was pleased with the experience of working with the label and thought it may finally be the moment to officially record songs from the musical. “Well, you know, time is always a collaborator with music,” he explained to
Time Out.
“Invariably, you record things when they're new, but it's not necessarily the law.”
¹

However, it made no sense to record these older songs when he had music from his more recent show,
Woyzeck,
which was also not yet available to fans. In a bold marketing move, Waits decided to record and release the soundtracks for the two plays at the same time. He did change the name of
Woyzeck
to the more fan-friendly album title
Blood Money.
It is rare for any artist to drop two records at the same time, and when it does happen, it is usually done by superstar acts like Bruce Springsteen (who released
Human Touch
and
Lucky Town
simultaneously in 1992) or Guns N' Roses (
Use Your Illusion I
and
Use Your Illusion II
in 1991). Industry pundits questioned whether there were enough buyers out there to justify Waits's simultaneous releases, even though he had a large cult following. “If it turns out to be a good idea, I'll take credit for it. If not, I'll blame it on someone else,” Waits joked to
USA Today
. “When you haven't had a record out for seven years, people get upset. When you put two out at the same time, they get upset. It's either ‘Why've you been away so long?' or ‘Why are you here all the time?'”
²

Waits decided to make sure that the albums were respectful of their theatrical pasts, while at the same time stood alone as Tom Waits disks. He also continued his fascination with quirky instruments and disdain for the expected. In fact, only four of the songs on the two albums had that staple of modern composition, the electric guitar. Those four were “Everything You Can Think” from
Alice,
and “God's Away On Business,” “Knife Chase,” and “Starving in the Belly of the Whale” from
Blood Money
. Only a few other songs, all on
Blood Money,
used acoustic guitars. “The electric guitar thing is so overused,” Waits explained to
Time Out.
“They show up on everything, it almost seems like it's the guiding force of popular music.
Without it I wonder what people's music would sound like. It was like tying one hand behind your back just for the hell of it. See how you do. See if you can electrify some of these other instruments, or get them to be just as expressive. There's a reason guitar is in everything — it's portable, it's powerful, it's potent, and it comes in so many different forms, and it's simple to play. I still love it, but we tried to omit it on these records to see what will happen.”
³

Of the two albums,
Alice
is the more immediately accessible — if any album with the quirky, thorny likes of “Kommienezuspadt,” “Table Top Joe,” and “We're All Mad Here” could be labeled accessible.
Alice
has a gentleness, a poetic sense of woe, and a throbbing, beautiful suffering that is almost mournful. For the most part, the album eschews the more carnival-like musical atmosphere that Waits has been experimenting with since
Swordfishtrombones
for a more classical feel.
Alice
is a mix of Brechtian balladry, Dixieland jazz, and chamber music.“
Alice
is kind of like taking a pill,” Waits said in an interview for the electronic press kit that was on Anti's website for the albums. “It's a little dreamier. It's a little more …I don't know …druggy I'd say, more kind of an opiate. And dreamy. More of a song cycle.”
⁴

The song cycle starts in with the delicate, jazzy title track. “Alice” is a sax-laden ballad that would feel at home on one of Waits's Elektra albums. However, despite the refined musical backing, the lyrics catalogue a feeling of obsession. The words work in the framework of the musical about writer Lewis Carroll's strange relationship with young Alice. It also resonates outside the structure of the story, showing how people can become fixated on another person, even when they know that it is not what is best for them. “I'm imagining a whole Victorian atmosphere and someone like [Carroll], who had this obsession and compulsion,” Waits told
USA Today
. “He was mystified by this peculiar, sparkling little girl. I'm trying to explore the nature of obsession, not just in his frame of mind but also as it applies to any love affair.”
⁵

There are other unbearably fragile songs like “Flower's Grave,” “Lost in the Harbor,” and “No One Knows I'm Gone,” which bleed like an open wound. Ghosts of lost opportunities and squelched desires disappear into the quickly receding fog of life. Which is not to say that
Alice
is just a long group of lamentful ballads. “Kommienezuspadt” has Waits spouting guttural foreign-sounding words (and some occasional English ones) over a racing horn-laced calliope tune. “Actually there are a few words in there that have real meaning but the rest of it is just pure gibberish,” Waits
admitted. “But, a lot of people when they hear it they say, ‘Gee, I didn't know you spoke Romanian' or ‘I didn't know you spoke the odd dialect of Finland.' I have been known to tell them that I
do
speak those languages, but truthfully I don't.”
⁶

Alice
continues Waits's musical fascination with the deformed. “Table Top Joe” is an old-fashioned ragtime workout about a man who is born with just a head, no body. Instead of letting his deformity destroy him, Joe uses it to his advantage, putting together an act and becoming a vaudeville star. Not all of Waits's freaks are so lucky, though. “Poor Edward” tells the tragic story of a man who was literally two-faced; he had the full face of a woman on the back of his head. She is Edward's doppelganger, constantly belittling him and tempting him with evil thoughts. Eventually the face drives Edward to madness and suicide. These two songs are the opposite sides of a fever dream.

This dichotomy of joy and pain comes naturally to Waits as a song-writer. “I'm an old softie,” Waits said. “Most songwriters are probably writing one or two songs over and over again in one way or another. Kathleen said that with me, it's either Grand Weepers or Grim Reapers. Yeah, I run hot and cold. I like melody, and I like dissonance. I guess maybe it's an alcoholic personality. I get mad, and I cry.”
⁷

Blood Money
tends to be a darker, more acidic, yet less emotionally draining, listen. It also delves more into the tonal experimentation of Waits's later music. This probably stems from the bleak storyline of the source material, the musical
Woyzeck.
“It's a story that continues to surface in Europe,” Waits told
USA Today
. “[Producer Robert] Wilson told me about this lowly soldier who submitted to medical experiments and went slowly mad from taking medications and herbs. He finds out his wife is unfaithful. He slits her throat and throws his knife in the lake, goes in after it and drowns, and then his child is raised by the village idiot. I said, ‘ok, I'm in. You had me at “slit her throat.”'”
⁸

Musically as well as lyrically,
Blood Money
is more jagged, more screaming, more percussive. It has a playful black sense of humor behind the apocalyptic yowls of anger. “Misery is the River of the World” contradicts an enraged howl at the moon on the human conditions with a carnival oom-pah band backing. A subtle samba beat percolates underneath the resigned bitterness of “Everything Goes to Hell.” More stomping, clanging instrumentation reminiscent of
Bone Machine
appears on “God's Away On Business” as Waits spits out every word with poisonous bile only experienced by the betrayed. A similar sense of mental instability crops up
in the raging “Starving in the Belly of the Whale.” The instrumental “Knife Chase” weds a martial backbeat to a spy-film throb.

“There's certain sounds that I am attracted to,” Waits said. “I always like things that sound like they're trying to reach you from far away, so I feel like I need to lean in and give them some help. I like clank and I like boom and I like steam. I thought that would be a good title for a record: ‘Clank, Boom and Steam.' Clank, boom, pssssst! There's something kind of locomotive about it, coal-driven.”
⁹
It turns out that Waits would save that title for his next album, the song “Clang Boom Steam” would become one of the last tunes on the 2004 album
Real Gone.

Strangely, in the middle of all this dark experimentation, there are a couple of Waits's more touchingly romantic songs. Over a soft old-fashioned bed of music, “Coney Island Baby” features a lead played on a chamberlain. Waits reserves his simplest lyrics of straightforward devotion for this song, calling his love a princess, a rose, a pearl. Much like the earlier “Johnsburg, Illinois” and “Jersey Girl,” this song celebrates the little, subtle moments in a relationship. The song closes out with a piano quote from “Innocent When You Dream.” The next song, “All the World is Green,” is a similarly lovely ballad about trying to remember the moments when romance is pure and possibilities are endless. There is also a sense of desperate romantic resignation on the charming tunes “Another Man's Vine” and “The Part You Throw Away.”

For a few weeks before the disks were released, Anti's website previewed the two albums, allowing people to listen to the music online.
Blood Money
and
Alice
debuted on the
Billboard
album charts at #32 and #33 respectively. This made the albums Waits's second and third best-charting albums ever, with only
Mule Variations
charting higher. As usual, the chart positions were not as important to Waits as was the fact that he was able to finally complete the long journey to get this music out into the world. “I just try to walk my own path,” he told the
New York Times
. “You have to believe in yourself and you have to ride out the seasons. Everybody wants it to be summer all the time, in relationships and with their career. And when the weather starts to turn, they think they better get out. So it takes a certain amount of persistence.”
¹⁰

While it was summertime for his music, the movie career was going through a cold spell.
The Boom Boom Room
movie project never got off the ground, and another film he acted in called
Cadillac Tramps
was never released. But Waits continued to work on movie projects that interested him, contributing original tunes to the films rather than acting in them. He
and Kathleen composed the music to the Academy Award–winning Best Animated Short Film
Bunny
by Chris Wedge. Wedge had been working in film animation going back to the 1982 Disney computer thriller
Tron,
and had been chief animator for mtv's cockroach film
Joe's Apartment
and the fourth
Alien
movie,
Alien Resurrection.
Bunny
was an odd, slightly whimsical computer-animated ten-minute film about a bunny making a cake. While she is stirring the batter a moth flies in the room. She kills the moth, but doesn't realize that it has fallen into the cake batter. After she cooks the cake, she eats it and promptly dies. This brief description doesn't explain the quirky allure, astonishing computer graphics, and thoughtful poetry of the film. The success of
Bunny
led to the opportunity for Wedge to direct the feature-length movies
Ice Age
and
Robots.
In fact,
Bunny
is included on the dvd for
Ice Age.

Waits also contributed the end-title tune “The World Keeps Turning” to Ed Harris's critically acclaimed
Pollock,
the story of the life of revolutionary painter Jackson Pollock. “I asked Tom Waits, who I met some years back, if he'd write me a song for the end of the film,” Harris said in the director's commentary of the dvd.
¹¹
Waits also did two new songs, “The Long Way Home” and “Jayne's Blue Wish,” for Arliss Howard's movie
Big Bad Love.

In May of 2001, Waits got together with fellow artists Randy Newman and Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart to file a $40 million lawsuit against the Internet file-sharing site MP3.com for copyright infringement. The singers all found their songs stored and available without permission on the company's site as part of its My.MP3 service, including tracks from Waits's album
Mule Variations
and Newman's old singles “Short People” and “I Love L.A.” Their attorney, Bruce Van Dalsem of the law firm Gradstein, Luskin & Van Dalsem, explained, “This is a case of artists banding together to protect their most valuable assets — their songs. More successful song-writers of this caliber need to stand up against copyright infringement in order to protect their own rights and discourage the theft of music written by lesser-known artists who cannot afford to protect their smaller catalogs of work.” The My.MP3 program had been shut down earlier by a lawsuit by major record labels including Sony, Universal,
BMG
, Warners, and
EMI
. MP3.com had reached a licensing agreement with the labels and had re-launched in December of 2000. The suits differed by the fact that the labels had sued the company for unauthorized use of their master recordings, while the artists focused on the use of the compositions.
¹²