Wild Years (36 page)

Then comes the hushed acoustic song which he previewed the album with on the charity
CD
, “Day After Tomorrow,” Waits's quiet and heartfelt protest of the Iraq War. However, it was more than just Iraq that inspired him, he admitted to the Australian radio show
The Deep End.
“It's a letter home. From a soldier … I've got kids that are draft age. And it's a troubling time we are all living through. You know, it was written to try and be a song about the Civil War or Vietnam War. Just war, you know … a war song.”
⁴⁶
The narrative may not have been specifically about the Iraq War as he claimed; however the timing was not just a coincidence. Waits was very much concerned with Iraq. “All you really can do is put a human face on the war. These are my feelings. I just tried to imagine a soldier writing home from anywhere. This is your war. You have lost, both sides
have lost,” Waits said on a radio interview with the
BBC
. “We're killing off our children. They're sending our children to war. They're sending
their
children to war. It's a mess, man. Anybody knows that.”
⁴⁷

The album closes with another human beatbox experiment — an un-titled a capella track without actual lyrics except for the word
chickaboom
repeated constantly over an indecipherable backing vocal. “I was making sounds that weren't words but once I listened back I could actually determine certain syllables,” Waits told
Mojo
. “It was like going back in time with the language where the sound came first and slowly shaped itself around items and experiences. I'm one of those people that if I don't have my knees skinned and a cut on my hands, I don't really feel like I've had much of a days work. That's where the [album] title came from — the blues thing, like I'm really gone.”
⁴⁸

The album came out as promised, and when the day of reckoning came, for the first time since
Nighthawks at the Diner,
a Waits album was released to decidedly lukewarm reviews. Not bad ones, not good ones, just blah ones. “On
Real Gone,
Tom Waits walks a fraying tightrope,” Thom Jurek said in the
All Music Guide
and this seemed to be the general consensus.
⁴⁹
People tended to point out that Waits was a genius, but then give the proviso that it was not his strongest work.
Seattle Weekly
was impressed by Waits's ability to “coax alien sounds out of acoustic instruments.”
⁵⁰
Splendid
magazine suggested that his flirtation with hip-hop was “almost as if he's daring people to call him a washed up old fogey, going further with this musical stunt than most of his diehard fans can stomach, probably just to make them uncomfortable.”
⁵¹

This refusal to do what is expected from him, of course, is totally in keeping with Waits's musical leanings and should be of little surprise. Perhaps the most accurate description of
Real Gone
's place in the Waits canon is Dean Truitt's of
One Way,
“With the passage of time,
Real Gone
may not go down as the jewel in Tom Waits' artistic crown.” And that was a good review.
⁵²
Waits took it all in stride, drolly telling the
Los Angeles Times,
“Kids love the record, little kids. They like songs about death.”
⁵³

Bones Howe thinks that the vast differences of opinions on the latest work may be attributed to a very simple fact. As Waits's music has gotten more and more experimental, it has become harder for the casual listener to embrace. “I think that as time goes on, he gets tougher and tougher to just pick up on if you don't have any history with him,” Howe admits. “It becomes more and more dissonant, more and more noisy. I think noisy is the best adjective. It's noisy music now. I used to call it his junkyard
music, but it's noisy music now. There are some [terrific] songs on each album, like the
Mule
album; [but] there are too many songs on there. That's where he could have used a producer, to say, ‘Hey, Tom …' We used to leave stuff out of the other records. He didn't leave anything out of that record. It would have been much better if a couple of those songs had been dropped.”

However, Bones recognizes that it is not in Waits's nature to pander with his music. It goes back to the days when they were working together. Howe always felt that the door could be opened even wider if Waits would play the music biz game a little more. He respected Waits's integrity, but “thought it was a shame that Tom never got any pop attention.” Howe acknowledges, “He didn't want any pop attention. He wanted success his way, and as it turned out, he got his success his way. [But] I always thought that one record that got him on
A.M
. radio would really do what it did for Laura Nyro. But, Tom was always against that.”

However, “success his way” has continued to expand. Waits has been able to make a living doing what he wants for over thirty years. While he still has never had a smash hit, his influence and reputation are as strong as ever. He finally got a million-selling album
(Mule Variations),
but even that is not the real test of Tom Waits's career. It is said of the first Velvet Underground lp that when it was released, it sold maybe a hundred copies, but at least eighty of those buyers went on to form a band. Waits, to this day, has that kind of power — the ability to influence listeners about the range of music and its possibilities. Not everyone is going to get it, but those who do will likely become converts. Maybe Waits describes his restless muse best: “Part of my compulsion is I'm unable to repeat myself in certain things. Other people are nervous when they have to digress or deviate from the scripts, and I'm compelled to change things all the time.”
⁵⁴

Sometimes Waits will return the favor, as well. When he finds a band he really likes, he will try to lend a hand. One big fan of Waits was singer/songwriter E (born Mark Oliver Everett) of the band the Eels. He'd heard through the grapevine that Waits was also a fan of his work, “but my low self-esteem refused to accept that,” E told
ice.
When Waits suggested a Shortlist Prize nomination for the Eels' album
Shootenanny!,
E was “forced to believe the rumors.” Waits later called him and they chatted, and E asked if they could work together. Waits agreed, added some guttural vocals to the Eels song “Going Fetal” on the album
Blinking Lights and Other Revelations.
“It's always nice when one of your heroes turns out to
be a really great guy,” E said.
⁵⁵

Singer Rob Thomas of the hugely popular rock band Matchbox Twenty, who has worked with legendary performers like Carlos Santana and Willie Nelson, is another artist who counts Waits as an inspiration. In fact, Thomas says that one of the songs on his solo album
Something to Be
was an attempt to emulate Waits's sound. “Paul [Matchbox Twenty drummer Doucette] and I are huge Tom Waits fans,” Thomas says enthusiastically. “One of the things about ‘Now Comes the Night' that I loved was that when I listen to old Tom Waits albums, I love that you can hear his foot on the foot pedal. That was one of the reasons that I wanted to record that song live, because I wanted to have that feeling. I play it for my friends and I'm like, ‘Listen, listen, not to the music, listen to that
bomp bomp, bomp bomp.
That's my foot on the pedal, man!' It comes from that, when I listen to ‘Tom Traubert's Blues' or something like that, you know? I think he's an American treasure.”

Singer Adam Cohen, who leads a band called Low Millions, also finds himself getting lost in the world of Waits music. “I love it,” he says unequivocally. “I'm inspired by it. [I'm] in awe of it. It's so insular in its genius that I often forget it, because I'm incapable of mimicking it or incorporating it into my world. It's so unique.” Cohen must know something about quality songwriting, because beyond his own good work, he's learned just a bit about great lyrics from his father, Leonard Cohen, who recorded Tom Waits's ninth favorite album.

Of course, it can go the other way around as well; Waits can get just as awestruck as the next guy. Singer Jakob Dylan, leader of the rock group the Wallflowers and son of Waits's inspiration — folk and rock music god Bob Dylan — learned this first-hand when he was backstage at the encounter between Waits and his father. Jakob was rather shocked to find that meeting his father had rendered Waits nearly speechless. “I'd be like, ‘Come on, you're Tom Waits, the coolest guy in the world … say something,'” Jakob Dylan said. “I know my dad is very charismatic and that can freak people out but he's also a great guy if you deal with him right. So Tom Waits is going, ‘Mnnub, mnubbb,' and I'm like, ‘Don't fall apart on me, man, you're my hero.'”
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However, this makes a certain amount of sense. Not necessarily in putting Waits in his place in the musical hierarchy, it's just a reminder that long before he became an alt-rock figurehead, he was just a fan himself. He's just a kid who pinned Dylan lyrics to his walls who is rather shocked that he has had the wonderful opportunity — and the talent — to make a
career of his first true love. This fascination with, and passion for, art has touched his work for thirty years. It has inspired him to seek out his own muse and poke and prod the music that moved him. This depth and range of influences was pointed out, yet again, when Amazon.com invited him to pick his ten favorite albums and he came up with this eccentric list:
Let the Buyer Beware
by Lenny Bruce,
In the Wee Small Hours
by Frank Sinatra,
The Abyssian Baptist Gospel Church Choir, Y Los Cubanos Postizos
by his guitarist Mark Ribot,
Purple Onion
by the Les Claypool Frog Brigade, a side project by his friend and Primus leader,
The Delivery Man
by Elvis Costello,
Ompa Til du Dør
by Kaizer's Orchestra,
Flying Saucer Tour
by Bill Hicks,
Masked Man
by Charlie Patton, and
The Specialty Sessions
by Little Richard.
⁵⁷
A few months later, he came up with a different list of twenty for
The Observer
which had many of the same albums, but was also even deeper and quirkier.

Waits assimilates all of these sounds and more in his imagination and in the studio to try and reach others. Besides, as is his way, Waits likes to downplay all the talk about his music being so special or revolutionary, telling
The San Francisco Chronicle
simply, “I'm not original. I'm doing bad impersonations of other people. I like to sound like Ray Charles. Who wouldn't? So, you're hearing my poor, failed attempt at a Ray Charles imitation.”
⁵⁸

Of course, the imitation spreads well beyond the music. In the end, Waits has pumped up his music and myth for several reasons. Yes, the romantic stories and the off-the-wall interviews probably helped him to get noticed and made him unique. But they were also a tool of survival. “The fact is that everybody who starts doing this to a certain extent develops some kind of persona or image to survive,” Waits told Mick Brown of
Word.
“Otherwise it's very dangerous to go out there. It's much safer to approach this with some kind of persona, because if it's not a ventriloquist act, if it's just you, then it's really scary… The whole thing's an act . Nobody would ever show you who they are — nobody would ever dare to do that, and if they do, they change their minds after a while because it gets to a point where you don't know what's true any more. The dice is throwing the man, instead of the man throwing the dice.”
⁵⁹

So, whether it is the man, the music, or the self-made myth, Tom Waits soldiers on, periodically poking his head up from his hole to check the weather, release an album, or play a live show. He sometimes indulges his acting hobby, most recently taking a surreal supporting role in the big-budget adventure
Domino,
starring Keira Knightley, Christopher Walken,
and Mickey Rourke.
⁶⁰
He can watch bemusedly as his musical
The Black Rider
is finally performed around the world by several different companies. And he can putter around on his long-rumored rarities box set
Orphans,
which Anti does acknowledge is on the way … someday. Waits has earned the right to take his career and his life at his own pace, so even if he'll lay low for a few years between albums, he's always there because the music is there. In fact, in this age of the Internet, it is available to more people in more ways than ever before. This can be a boon and a curse. It opens up his potential audience significantly. However, the Internet has also opened up the same old wound that Waits has tried to heal for years.

The legal wrangling with former manager Herb Cohen just keeps on keeping on. In June of 2005, a suit was filed against Warner Music claiming that Waits was getting underpaid for digital downloads of his Elektra/Asylum albums. A story on ABCNews.com explained: “According to the suit, under the terms of the two contracts, Waits was entitled to royalties of either 25% or 50% from revenues derived from third-party licenses. Third Story maintains that digital music downloads constitute a form of third-party license, and that Waits is entitled to payment at that level.”
⁶¹
Despite the altruistic description being handed to the news organizations, the suit was placed by Cohen's company Third Story Music, not by Waits. Add to this the fact that Cohen still gets the royalties for this music. Given their history, it seems unlikely that Cohen was just looking out for his old protégé in filing this suit. However, Bones Howe has been assured by his lawyers that this case will, indeed, be beneficial to all of them.