Wild Years (33 page)

While Waits was still recording the two albums, the world was interrupted
by tragedy. On September 11, 2001, the whole earth stood still with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, dc. As someone who had spent so much time (both good and bad) in Manhattan, the disaster touched Waits deeply, causing him to examine his life and his calling. “Artists are trying to figure out what they do that has value,” he told
USA Today
. “A lot of things have to happen before you turn on your record player. You want to be safe and warm and held. At times I think, ‘What am I doing? Making jewelry for the ears?' The world's on fire and we're on a bus without a driver. We're all very much awake now. It's important for us to remain awake and not go back to sleepwalking in our pajamas, playing golf, and contemplating our navels. The rest of the world is tapping us on the shoulder with the oldest conflict of time: the haves and have-nots. It's time for great men to step forward with wisdom and depth and compassion, and I don't know who they are. We all feel impotent politically. I don't know the answer. You have to start with self, family, and community.”
¹³

As has been a pattern throughout his career, a lot of respected artists continued to try to put their own individual stamp on Waits's songs. On her 2001 cover album
Strange Little Girls,
acclaimed singer/songwriter Tori Amos recorded a series of songs that were very specifically from a male songwriter's viewpoint and gave them a feminine twist. This led to some extremely radical rethinking of songs like Neil Young's “Heart of Gold,” Depeche Mode's “Enjoy the Silence,” Slayer's “Raining Blood,” Boomtown Rats' “I Don't Like Mondays,” and Eminem's “'97 Bonnie & Clyde.” The one song on the album that Amos was relatively faithful to the source material was a sparse, beautiful take of “Time” from
Raindogs.
“I thought about taking [it] to the organ, but I stripped it back,” Amos explained to
ice
magazine. “It's from the point of view of Death, so I felt you need to feel like you are sitting on the piano stool. No masks, no effects, it's right here, dry, with a little compression on the vocals.”
¹⁴

Waits contributed a tune to the first major record in over ten years for classic soul singer Solomon Burke. Burke had had many hits for Atlantic Records in the sixties such as “Cry To Me,” “Everybody Needs Somebody To Love,” and “Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Open Arms).” However, Burke was never the type to play the record label games. He didn't like the songs he was being asked to record and that he was getting paid the bare minimum for his shows and recordings. In fact, it was so bad that Burke would make the record companies pay him to cook for the band, and he would sell anything he felt he could get money for. Eventually,
he stood up for his rights and left Atlantic in the late sixties. After that he floated from one label to another, but he never replicated his early success. As an artist he was left behind, forgotten by the labels and soon by listeners in general.

In the years since, Burke has plied many trades, including undertaker, hot dog manufacturer, and currently an ordained minister in Los Angeles. He also had to spend a lot of time raising his family — he has twenty-one children and sixty-three grandchildren. Burke never stopped singing, though, he just stopped recording. He toured often through the eighties and nineties, and even did a little acting in movies like the 1986 Mickey Rourke–Robert DeNiro thriller
Angel Heart.
In 2002, when Andy Kaulkin, one of the heads of Epitaph Records, told Burke he was interested in making a new album, Burke considered it “divine intervention.” When he signed up with Fat Possum Records (another imprint of Epitaph) to do a comeback album at age sixty-three, many of the biggest names in music wanted to play a part in the project. Amazingly, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, Brian Wilson, Van Morrison, Nick Lowe, Dan Penn, and Waits all gave Burke songs to record. Critically acclaimed singer/songwriter Joe Henry signed on to produce. Burke came in to sing the songs without having heard any of them. Still, the album
Don't Give Up on Me
was recorded in four days. It became a surprise success, even netting Burke a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Blues album.

The song Waits offered up was a tune he had written with his wife called “Diamond in Your Mind.” While Burke liked the song very much, there was some of Waits's tough street language that Burke felt uncomfortable saying as a minister. Burke suggested that perhaps the words could be touched up a bit to make them more suitable for him. He was met with stunned silence. “When we started to change some of Tom's lyrics, Andy came into the studio and said quietly, ‘Dr. Burke, no disrespect, but you just don't change Tom Waits's lyrics,'” Burke remembers. “They got Tom on the phone, and I don't know what Andy said, but afterwards he came in and said, ‘You won't believe this, but Tom said it's okay!'”
¹⁵

Waits's music continued making its insidious way into other mainstream media, as well.
HBO
's critically acclaimed series
The Wire
used the Blind Boys of Alabama's celebratory cover of “Way Down in the Hole” as the theme for its first season of the show. It defiantly set the stage for the streetwise tales of drugs, violence, and death on the streets of Baltimore. Waits was impressed enough with the series that he allowed his own original recording of the song to play over the credits in the show's second
season. The third season of the series was opened by yet another recording of the same song — this one done by the legendary New Orleans funk outfit The Neville Brothers, specifically for the show.

Waits's music also played a big part on the television mystery series
Crossing Jordan
. The show stars Jill Hennessy as an offbeat Medical Examiner who fights her personal demons as she solves the murders of the cadavers that make it into her office. Jordan's father owns a bar, and since the M.E. (and the actress who plays her) is a frustrated singer, Jordan will occasionally take the stage at the bar. Significantly, one of the few times that she was allowed the chance, she performed a lilting version of “Innocent When You Dream” from
Frank's Wild Years.
“They submitted a few songs to me to look at,” Hennessy explained about the selection process for the songs on the show. “The ones that just hit me the most were Tom Waits and the Bob Dylan, because, that's what I was raised with. Living in New York for so long, I'm a huge fan of Tom Waits. So that's how it comes about. We all try to work together and come up with something that moves us the most.”

These performances also had a lot to do with the fact that the show was putting together a soundtrack cd. Hennessy's versions of “Innocent When You Dream” and Dylan's “It's All Over Now, Baby Blue” were included, as well as a lovely cover of Waits's “Hang Down Your Head” by respected folk singer/songwriter Lucinda Williams. “It was just great to work with people like T-Bone Burnett and Craig Street, who worked with Norah Jones,” Hennessy continued. “The end product was phenomenal. Alison Krauss was on it, Lucinda Williams, Cassandra Wilson …It was just a brilliantly done album. We were really well reviewed, which was the biggest thrill for me.”

In April of 2003, Waits was asked to present actor Dustin Hoffman a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 46th annual San Francisco International Film Festival. Waits and Hoffman had been friends since the late seventies, when they met through Bette Midler. Hoffman was in the middle of getting a divorce and staying at a cheap hotel. Midler brought Waits to visit, and as Waits explained to the audience, “Dustin was sitting at a piano playing, and there was a lot of alcohol involved.” Hoffman recalled the situation of their meeting to the crowd as well: “Tom sang all the songs from his album
Closing Time
because my marriage was ending, and you know how you think your first marriage will last forever. And you know, Tom, there wasn't just alcohol involved.”
¹⁶
Hoffman asked Waits to sing “Tom Traubert's Blues” and the standard “Moonglow,” and Waits
obliged. Later in the evening, Waits proudly pointed out that those days were past him; he hadn't drunk any alcohol in ten years.

Another Lifetime Achievement Award that night was given to Robert Altman, Waits's director in the film
Short Cuts.
Actress Lily Tomlin (who played Waits's wife in that film and was part of the ensemble for Altman's classic film
Nashville
) presented the award to Altman, complete with a performance of her old
Laugh-In
character Ernestine the telephone operator. Waits also played his skid-row ballad “On the Nickel” at the special request of Altman.
¹⁷
“I am not someone who can cry,” the venerable director explained from the podium. “I mean, I don't think I'm physically able to cry. The only time I recall ever crying at all is when I was listening to Tom Waits sing.”
¹⁸
Altman continued to respect Waits's work as an actor, as well, and in 2004 rumors started circulating that the veteran director was making a movie version of Garrison Keillor's respected radio and book series
The Prairie Home Companion,
with Waits pegged to play a starring role. Though at the time of this writing, Waits's management insists that no official overture had been made towards having him in the film, the rumor will not die. Also supposedly chosen for parts in the film, projected for a 2006 release, were Keillor, Meryl Streep (who also worked with Waits in
Ironwood),
teen star Lindsay Lohan, Maya Rudolph, and Waits's
Short Cuts
co-stars Lily Tomlin and Lyle Lovett. As the movie has come closer and closer to completion, rumors of Waits's participation in the film never seemed to come to fruition.

A great honor was bestowed on Waits when he was invited to perform at the Lincoln Center in New York in a special benefit concert called Healing the Divide, which was “dedicated to a theme of peace and reconciliation.”
¹⁹
Opening the show with a speech was the Dalai Lama, who spoke first because he started his spiritual practices at 3:30 in the morning and couldn't stay up for the entire show. “So His Holiness goes to bed at 7:30?” Waits joked with the crowd in his closing set. “That's not the holiness I used to know.” Waits performed with the Kronos String Quartet and longtime bassist Greg Cohen. During the set he did stunning versions of songs like “Way Down in the Hole,” “What's He Building?,” and the song he wrote for Solomon Burke, “Diamond in Your Mind.”
²⁰

A much more low-key performance came exactly one month later, when Waits joined old friend and touring partner Bonnie Raitt for the “Little Kids Rock” program at Spring Valley Elementary School in San Francisco. The program supports music education in schools. Raitt talked Waits into performing a duet of the song “Sweet and Shiny Eyes,” which
they had recorded together on her 1975 album
Home Plate.
They were joined by former Metallica bassist Jason Newsted and Norton Buffalo on harmonica. Waits informed the children that his first piano had been left out in the rain so that many of the keys were not functioning. “I was fine with that, though,” Waits told the kids. “I just played the ones that were working. I used to make up little songs when I was angry or sad. I'm still doing that.”
²¹

In a move to help celebrate new artists, Waits was added to an eclectic group of music industry judges to decide the winner of the third annual Shortlist Music Prize. Based on the Mercury Music Prize in England, the Shortlist Prize is formed to find the most daring and original new album of the year, spanning every genre and style. The star-studded list of judges for the 2003 prize included Waits, Dave Matthews, Tori Amos, Chris Martin of Coldplay, Erykah Badu, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Chemical Brothers, ?uestlove of the Roots, Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, Musiq, Mos Def, Perry Ferrell, and the Neptunes, as well as music-oriented filmmakers Cameron Crowe and Spike Jonze. The judges had to pick from a pool of nominees that included eclectic musical talents such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Cody Chestnutt, Sigur Ros, Floetry, the Streets, Bright Eyes, Cat Power, Interpol, and the Black Keys. The award was given to singer/songwriter Damien Rice, for his acclaimed debut solo album
O.
²²

History repeated itself in 2004 when Waits successfully sued a Spanish advertising agency in a case that mirrored his earlier suit with Frito-Lay. The company, Tandem Campany Guasch, had approached Waits to use “Innocent When You Dream” from
Frank's Wild Years,
in a commercial for Audi. As is his custom when approached for advertising, Waits turned down the offer flat. However, the company, perhaps not familiar with the earlier cases, but more likely hoping that Spanish laws would be less stringent, decided to create the commercial anyway. The song they used had the same structure as “Innocent When You Dream” and also featured a singer who nearly sounded identical to Waits. The ad ran in 2000, and soon Waits's people heard about it through postings on Internet sites. Again, Waits had to come out and explain that he was not the jingle vocal-ist, and he was not going against his fervent belief that celebrities should not endorse products. The original suit also named Volkswagen-Audi España as a co-defendant, but the Spanish courts cleared the car company of any wrongdoing.
²³

In 2003, Waits was approached to add a song to a tribute to the
seminal punk group the Ramones. Two of the band's members, lead singer Joey Ramone and bassist Dee Dee Ramone, had died in the past couple of years. A group of high profile fans of the band got together to create the disk
We're a Happy Family — A Tribute to the Ramones.
Included on the album were such artists as U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Eddie Vedder, Metallica, Kiss, The Pretenders, Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie, Garbage, and Green Day. Perhaps in appreciation of the scrappy recording of “I Don't Wanna Grow Up” that the legendary band did on their final album, Waits decided to do a feisty cover of “The Return of Jackie & Judy.” On the track, friend Les Claypool of Primus played bass, Epitaph head (and former Bad Religion member) Brett Gurewitz played guitar, and Waits's son Casey sat in on the drums. This led to yet another one of Waits's offbeat Grammy nominations; in 2004 he was nominated for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for the track. Surviving Ramone member Johnny Ramone said, “It took the Ramones thirty years to be eventually nominated for a Grammy. Thanks to Tom Waits for finally getting us there.”
²⁴
Johnny Ramone would also die soon after, a victim of cancer.