Wild Years (4 page)

The teenaged Tom Waits was deeply interested in story songs. It consistently amazed him to hear a whole, complicated yarn condensed into a set of lyrics. Country artist Bobby Gentry's 1967 pop crossover classic “Ode to Billie Joe,” a tale of passion, deceit, and suicide in the American heartland, was a prime example. It had more layers than an onion, and Waits was intrigued. Like Gentry, he wanted to tell stories that would draw people in and entertain them.
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Some nights at the Heritage, Waits was asked onstage to supplement the scheduled entertainment — usually bluegrass, country, folk, or traditional blues players. He'd either bring a guitar along or sit at the club's piano and perform covers of Mississippi John Hurt and Reverend Gary Davis tunes. Since the Heritage was a local joint employing mainly local
acts, very few of which had any original material, Tom didn't do much of his own music.

When the annual San Diego Folk Festival was on Waits could also be found there, checking out the local talent and the national acts that passed through. Blending with the crowd, digging the sounds, Waits couldn't have known that in a few short years he'd be playing that very gig himself.

All of this exposure to live musical performance was fueling Waits's desire to command the spotlight in his own right. He formed a band; an R&B cover outfit called The Systems. Speaking to Hoskyns, he reminisced, “I did an all-Schoenberg program for the first year . . . no, I played ‘Hit the Road, Jack,' ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?' It was pretty lame, really . . .”
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Another highlight of The Systems' lineup was James Brown's “Papa's Got a Brand New Bag,” which years later Waits would sometimes treat his concert audiences to.

Frank and Alma were somewhat bemused by their son's career choice. “I think when children choose something other than a life of crime, most parents are encouraging,” Waits told Mark Rowland of
Musician
magazine in 1987. “Music was always around when I was a kid, but there wasn't a lot of ‘encouragement' — which allowed me to carve my own niche.” Waits went on to describe how, as a fledgling performer, he had a sense of the inherent dangers of his mission but very little ability to focus, or to determine where the boundaries were. “When you're young, you're also very insecure. You don't know if you can lean on that window, if it'll break . . . I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I have a better idea now. In a way, I'd like to start now. A lot of great guys, only one-third of them is visible, the rest is beneath the ground. Took them ten years just to break the surface.” The fear — engendered in Waits at this early stage — of the risks involved in standing up to perform has persisted through the decades. “I still have nightmares about the stage where everything goes wrong. The piano catches fire. The lighting comes crashing to the stage. The curtain tears. The audience throws tomatoes and overripe fruit. They make their way to the front of the stage, and my shoes can't move. And I always play that in my head when planning a tour. The nightmare that you will come completely unraveled.”
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The time came when San Diego started feeling kind of small to Waits. He later remarked, obliquely, that “At a certain age, you realized the cool thing about San Diego was that there were a lot of tattoo parlors, and when you were ready, you knew exactly where you were going.” By way of
explanation, Waits then related a conversation he'd had with Paul Reubens (the comedian, formerly known as Pee Wee Herman, and one of Tom's costars in the movie
Mystery Men
). “He said that he grew up in Sarasota, Florida, and hated it. But then he went one night to a diner, and the whole place was populated by circus people. He went, oh, what a cool place to live. So, there's a certain place where you make that identification with your community. And then, the next thing it's like, jeez, I gotta get the hell out of here!”
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In order to “get the hell out of” San Diego, Waits began making his way up the coast to Los Angeles on a regular basis. It was the late sixties. The city's nightlife was rocking full tilt, and its effects were notoriously harsh. Waits threw himself into it. He'd work till three in the morning, party till dawn, sleep till noon. Speaking to Dave Zimmer of
Bam,
he admitted that he'd settled on singing and songwriting as a profession, “because I was basically lazy, irresponsible, impatient, unorganized, a terrible planner, and liked to sleep late.”
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The burgeoning L.A. narcotics scene did not attract him, however: alcohol had become his drug of choice, and it eased his entry into the urban night of seductive women, shabby taprooms, and untold possibilities. He hit the club circuit and was up to speed in no time, spending night after night in a range of seedy joints, getting hammered, watching a succession of bands struggle to capture the attention of their audiences. It occurred to Waits that this was something he could do. This epiphany, he told
Buzz
magazine, was actually triggered by an encounter with, of all people, Sir Monti Rock iii, an openly gay Puerto Rican singer and celebrity hairdresser who went on to front the seventies drag-queen group Disco Tex and The Sex-O-Lettes. Rock also played the part of the dj at the 2001 Odyssey disco — where John Travolta's character Tony Manero dazzled them on the dance floor — in the movie
Saturday Night Fever
. (It was Rock who uttered the classic line, “Look at that chick! She be dancin', man. She groovin'!”)

Waits caught Rock's show in a disreputable little Sunset Strip establishment called Filthy McNasty's. The place was nearly empty — Rock and his band, decked out in shocking-pink jumpers, were playing to the bar staff, Waits, and a handful of wayward businessmen. As Waits describes it, Rock was in the middle of a “bitter and distracted” version of “The Tennessee Waltz” when he suddenly stopped singing. Then he grabbed his drink, hurled it against the wall, and started screaming at the suits, calling them “a bunch of damned bloodsuckers.” Sweat pouring from his brow,
Rock launched into a long, rambling, brilliant, but “purely psychotic confession” that was like a “cross between an execution and a striptease.”

Waits, of course, was enthralled. Here was Sir Monti Rock iii, testifying like a preacher and sweet-talking like a pimp, spinning stories for that uncomprehending crowd about his experiences in Puerto Rico, about being a hairdresser, about his dreams of Hollywood stardom. Lighting up a cigarette, Rock then performed an a capella version of Ben E. King's R&B lament “I (Who Have Nothing).” The suits didn't get it at all, but Tom Waits did. He knew just where Rock was coming from. And it dawned on him right then and there that it was time to stop spinning his wheels. He had to get into show business as fast as he could.
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At about this time Waits also discovered the writings of Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and the other Beat Generation writers. It was an enormous revelation. Waits had found an entire set of kindred spirits and he wanted to share their energy and richness with the world. He explained to Barney Hoskyns that “It's like when you buy a record, and you hold it under your arm and make sure everyone can see the title of it … I felt I'd discovered something that was so rich, and I would have worn it on the top of my head if I could have … I incorporated it into what I was.”
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Waits devoured the unofficial Beat bible, Kerouac's
On the Road,
and he was hooked. He tracked down as many of Kerouac's writings as he could, in the process flipping through some rather esoteric publications — the kind whose readers tend to insist that they really do subscribe for the articles. Kerouac had no interest in filling the pages of such highbrow journals as
Gentleman's Quarterly
and the
New Yorker,
so he became a contributor to the type of publication favored by the common man — fifties stroke magazines with names like
Cad
and
Rogue
. Kerouac was real. He was human. He bled, he sweated, he fucked, he drank too much, and he wrote about it. Waits was right there with him.

Kerouac had coined the term “Beat” in 1948, but it achieved buzzword status in 1952, when Kerouac's friend and fellow writer John Clellon Holmes published a story in the
New York Times Magazine
called “This is the Beat Generation.” And it was then that this small, tightly knit group of writers began to work its way into the American literary canon.

The Beat movement had two centers: New York City and San Francisco. Ginsberg (the poet who went on to become a sixties cultural guru), Burroughs (who penned the classic surreal novel of drug addiction called
Naked Lunch
), and Kerouac had studied together at New York's Columbia
University in the forties, and this triumvirate presided over the flourishing East Village Beat Scene. In San Francisco, Beat blossomed at the City Lights Bookstore in North Beach under the nurturing hand of poet, publisher, and store owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti. (City Lights is still one of the world's most respected purveyors of alternative literature.)

Entrenched on both coasts, the Beat writers set about mixing two distinct artistic viewpoints. They immersed themselves in the unique structures of American poetry and fell under the powerful influence of Walt Whitman, particularly revering Whitman's lyric-epic poem
Leaves of Grass
(first published in 1855). With Whitman's breadth of vision, his notions of meter and verse, the Beats blended ideas of rhythmic improvisation and syncopation gleaned from the jazz musicians they worshipped, including such legends as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk. But the Beats represented something more than a literary style. They created a distinct lifestyle, one that was drastically out of step with its context — the button-down Eisenhower years. The Beats adamantly rejected middle-class values, materialism, nonpacifist approaches, and sped off in search of the artistic, sexual, and spiritual self. Along the way they ingested plenty of drugs, engaged in casual sex, explored jazz and Zen Buddhism.

The first true Beat novel was published in 1952
— Go,
by John Clellon Holmes. Then, in 1956, Ginsberg's
Howl
became the poetic manifesto of the Beat movement; in 1957, the government tried — and failed — to censor it through the courts. The vibrant, three-part, stream-of-consciousness epic drew on a range of older influences — Whitman, the scriptures — to create something unlike anything anyone had seen before. It revolutionized contemporary poetry. Kerouac's
On the Road
came out the next year, and Beat culture entered its heyday.

In the sixties the works of the Beat authors were embraced by the hippies, whose radical new set of counterculture values dovetailed with those the Beats had promoted in the previous decade. Beat influence was reflected in the work of many sixties cultural icons like Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and The Grateful Dead. And Tom Waits recast his life in order to live the Beat lifestyle and philosophy.

With a buddy named Sam Jones, Waits packed a car with the necessary gear and went on the road, Kerouac-style. They would see the country, get drunk, get laid, live high, have some great adventures. But the call of the music was too strong — Jones and Waits soon made their way back to California.

His energies renewed, Waits applied himself to his project of musical
self-expression. He wrote, drawing on such diverse influences as Irving Berlin, Johnny Mercer, and Stephen Foster
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; contributing to this nourishing mix were Mose Allison, Nat “King” Cole, Cab Calloway, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, and Randy Newman, not to mention George Gershwin and Jerome Kern. All helped to shape the distinctive Waits persona. Perhaps not surprisingly — considering his penchant for clever stage patter — Waits has also, over the years, cited comedians Rodney Dangerfield, Wally Cox, Harry the Hipster, Redd Foxx, Lord Buckley, and Lenny Bruce as early career influences.

Still, Waits had to develop the lyrical content of his songs. To that end, he became adept at eavesdropping. While working at the Heritage, he'd move around listening to patrons' conversations, taking notes. “When I put them together,” he later explained, “I found some music hiding in there.”
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At this point, Waits has said, he labored over his original material, constantly tweaking his songs, willing them to be better. Gradually, he pulled together a repertoire. He had an act. It was time to pound the pavement and scare up a few gigs. Waits played some very seedy joints and was usually paid about enough to get drunk after the show. Every Monday night he'd drive north to L.A., hoping to take part in Hoot Night, an amateur event at the popular Troubadour Club, but he never managed to get onstage. Most of his gigs were in San Diego, including the occasional showcase at the Heritage.

The songs Waits was performing had more of a folk vibe than the jazzy numbers that would become his specialty a few years down the road, and his voice was just kind of gruff; it hadn't yet been ravaged by alcohol and cigarettes to achieve that signature world-weary quality. His voice was, however, decidedly different. Speaking to Mark Rowland of
Musician
in 1987, Waits said that he'd never troubled himself with questions like, “‘Are you gonna fit in? Are you gonna be the only guy at the party with your shirt on inside out?' I was never embarrassed, but I'm liking [my voice] more now. Learning how to make it do different things.”
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After over a year of playing the local dive circuit, Waits was getting nowhere fast. The gigs were getting fewer and further between. Money was scarce, and most of it went toward funding his nights on the town and picking up a little extra hair of the dog to keep the world at bay. By now Waits was living in his car — an old fifties boat that was probably as spacious as many L.A. apartments. Frustration, and then desperation, set in.