Wild Years (6 page)

In a 1975 radio interview, Waits outlined his approach to car ownership. For one thing, the idea of forking over more than $150 or $200 for a car violated his principles. He'd rather pick up a twenty-five-dollar special and drive the thing until it cried uncle.
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Jerry Yester went with Waits on one of his car-hunting expeditions. “I helped him buy his '52 Cadillac,” he laughs. “It was like a work of art and he trashed it on purpose. There were newspapers in it and old paper plates and plastic forks. Beer cans. It was a mess. Kind of an Andy Warhol thing.”

The most Tom ever spent for a car was $150. That bought him a 1955 Buick Roadmaster on National City's Mile of Cars. He claimed that he “got
snookered” on the purchase price, but he was in love with that Roadmaster and he had to have it. He kept it for three years, traveling a few miles here and there between breakdowns. During that time he poured $3,500 into repairs. One day, when the Roadmaster was parked in front of the local dry cleaner's, its brakes finished, a stack of unpaid parking tickets jammed into its glove box, Waits knew that he'd had enough. He sold the thing to Ace Wrecking for twelve bucks.
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Despite Tom's
VH1 Storytellers
yarn about Beezer, many people have insisted that the Roadmaster was the real inspiration behind “Ol' 55.” Yester says, “I just love that song.” Recalling the
Closing Time
sessions, he explains, “we could sink our teeth into ‘Ol' 55' and get our pop rocks off. We were sitting around listening to the first take of it and Johnny [Seiter, who also drummed on the track] started singing harmonies to it. To hear Johnny's voice singing with it, it was like, ‘Oh, jeez, get out there in front of a mike.' Tom loved it and they sounded so great together.”

Waits has referred to his songs as short stories, and
Closing Time
is rife with tales of lost love and dashed dreams. “I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love with You” is an evocation of pure loneliness. A barfly contemplates a woman sitting by herself farther down the bar. He begins to imagine the possibilities. Could she be interested in him? How should he approach her? Could they become lovers? Would he break her heart? Would she break his? He hunches over his glass of stout, failing to make his move. Finally the woman goes off alone into the night. “That's one of those great story songs,” comments Yester. “I loved the way [Tom] played the guitar, because it was so unusual . . . It was always a surprise, even though I knew he was going to do it.”

Another one of
Closing Time's
musical short stories was more of an imaginative stretch for Waits. “Martha” is about an elderly man who looks up his first sweetheart fifty years after their breakup. The narrative has an undeniable nostalgic charm, and Waits — despite his age — is convincing in his portrayal of a man who surveys his life and comes to a sad realization. Although he's had a good ride, something has eluded him. Waits also wears his heart on his sleeve in the gorgeous “Grapefruit Moon.” It's a simple tale of a man trying desperately to forget the woman he has lost; every time he comes close to succeeding, however, he hears their favorite song and he is wrecked anew. But love doesn't always evade Waits's dreamers: “Little Trip to Heaven (On the Wings of Your Love)” is a serene hymn of love and devotion. Then Waits gets frisky and playful, dishing up some funky blues laced with sexual innuendo in “Ice Cream Man.”

Closing Time
fades out on the title track, a delicate instrumental suite that came dangerously close to not being recorded. Waits and Yester were working on a tune that just wasn't coming together. Says Yester, “Then we said, ‘Well, what about “Closing Time?” I just started making phone calls. It was a Sunday evening or a late afternoon and [the problem] was just finding who was available. I found Jesse Ehrlich to play cello, and Jesse said, ‘Well, I got a young guy [Arni Egilsson] plays bass. He's just wonderful. Here's his number.' I called him and he was in the middle of an afternoon barbecue and he'd had a few beers. He was feeling — he wasn't drunk, but he was just really laid back. He came down, and Tony Terran was on trumpet.”

Yester describes what transpired as “one of those magical sessions that happens once in a great while where no one wants to leave once it's over. Because it was so good and it happened so quickly. There wasn't any pain, any strain at all. It just flowed out of everybody.” Yester continues: “Richie Moore recorded it live to track. We listened . . . and it was great. We just kept listening to it. I think we stayed for like three hours after we recorded the song.”

The songs that make up
Closing Time
are, in Yester's estimation, still revolutionary. And he has never been able to pick a favorite. “Truthfully, all of them,” he smiles. He points out that “in early '72, no one was doing stuff like that. ‘Virginia Avenue,' give me a break. And ‘Ice Cream Man,' and great stuff like that. And ‘Martha' — who the hell was doing songs like that, except maybe Dave Van Ronk? Nobody was writing them. Tom was. His writing gift was huge. Obviously huge. And the way he played the piano, it was like Hoagy Carmichael, for Christ's sake . . .”

One night while Waits was in Denver, Colorado, playing a little blues club called Ebbett's Field, he had a brief conversation with a member of the house band. Guitarist Chuck E. Weiss had been hanging out at the club since he was a teenager, and he'd been lucky enough to play with veteran bluesman Lightnin' Hopkins. Hopkins became Weiss's mentor, and he took the skinny young guitarist with him on tour. Soon Weiss was playing with blues royalty — Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Dr. John — not to mention established rockers like Spencer Davis. In a 1999 interview broadcast on Colorado's kbco Radio, Waits recalled that Weiss had initially caught his eye because he was dressed in a chinchilla coat and towering platform shoes. They were outside the club, it was icy, and the shoes were like skates. Weiss was scrambling to stay on his feet.
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Intrigued, Waits struck up a conversation with Weiss, and he was impressed when he learned of the Hopkins connection. At sixteen, Waits had seen the blues legend perform
live. Waits and Weiss met up with one another again soon afterward, when Weiss moved to Hollywood, and the two became fast friends.

During the interval between signing with Elektra/Asylum and releasing
Closing Time,
Waits's involvement in the nightlife intensified. He wanted to live the marginal Charles Bukowski barfly lifestyle to its fullest. He wanted to frequent tough, smoky joints, shoot pool, mourn lost loves and opportunities. He wanted to search out beauty in squalor. On many nights, he could be found in some one-horse taproom where Budweiser was a sissy drink and if a woman wasn't mistreating you, it just meant you couldn't find one. Only in these havens for hard drinkers could he mix with the kind of people he felt compelled to write about. He was feeding his understanding of them.

“We used to go play pool a lot. We used to go drinking a lot — when drinking was fun instead of suicidal,” Yester laughs. “There was a place in Burbank that was fifty cents an hour for a nine-foot table covered with cigarette burns. And cheap beer, cheap Coors. Tom really loved those kinds of places. It had that kind of funkin' atmosphere.”

When Waits looks back on this era, he does so with amusement and a tinge of regret. In 1982 he told Dave Zimmer of
Bam,
“During that period, it was like going to a costume party and coming home without changing. I really became a character in my own story. I'd go out at night, get drunk, fall asleep underneath a car. Come home with leaves in my hair, grease on the side of my face, stumble into the kitchen, bang my head on the piano and somehow chronicle my own demise and the parade of horribles that lived next door.”
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Even though Waits was committed to witnessing and engaging in as many different experiences as he could, he wasn't endlessly resilient, and he did suffer the occasional jolt. Yester says that one of his favorite memories of Tom came out of an incident that occurred early on while they were working on
Closing Time
. Yester was mixing the album at Wally Heider Recording, which was located right in the middle of one of Hollywood's shabbier districts, a neighborhood that Waits had yet to explore. “We'd start working on the tunes and he didn't like to hang around,” says Yester. “He didn't want to hear it that many times. He was out just soaking up the atmosphere of Coyne and the Boulevard, which was hookers and all the strange population down in Hollywood at that time — God, it's a hundred times weirder now! It was very colorful.” One day, Yester explains, “Tom was gone for an hour, and he came back in and he was like . . . white. And just shaking a little. I said, ‘Jesus, Tom, what's the matter?' And he's,
like, ‘I just came on to a guy.'” Laughs Yester, “He's like, ‘This guy was one of the most beautiful women I ever saw in my life! We were going to go up to her place, and right before she said, “You know I'm a man?”' That really shook [Tom's] foundation.”

Waits took his show on the road, but when he wasn't touring he was in Los Angeles working on
Closing Time
. He had a little one-bedroom house in the Silver Lake district of L.A., and he described his setup to Rich Wiseman of
Rolling Stone
like this: “I live in a predominately Mexican-American neighborhood and I get along fine there. My friends won't come over. It's a hovel. My landlord is about ninety. He's always coming over and asking if I live here. And my neighbor up front is a throwback to the fifties, an old harlot. She wears these pedal pushers and gold-flecked spiked heels and has a big bouffant hairdo. She has one of the worst mouths I've ever heard. I wake up to that. I need a place that is cluttered so I can see the chaos. It's like a visual thesaurus.”
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Chuck E. Weiss was also living in Silver Lake then, but he eventually moved into the Tropicana Motel, a funky little fleabag on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. The Tropicana was a rock-and-roll landmark. There, music-world banditos rubbed shoulders with groupies, rock-star wannabes, hard-luck cases, and drunken traveling salesmen. Record labels put up touring bands at the Tropicana. Andy Warhol filmed his cult movie
Heat
at this atmospheric locale, and Jim Morrison lived there for years during the glory days of The Doors — he was a Tropicana resident most of the time between 1966 and 1969, at which point he moved to the slightly more upscale Alta Cienega Motel on La Cienega Boulevard. Van Morrison wrote “T.B. Sheets” and several other songs while staying at the Tropicana. Fred Neil was registered there when he recorded “Everybody's Talkin'.” Big Brother and the Holding Company, Rhinoceros, Bob Marley and the Wailers, and Alice Cooper all made the Tropicana their Hollywood base of operations at one time or another.

Rumors circulated that all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors — ranging from rampant drug use to deviant sex — were being committed at the Tropicana, but as long as you didn't kill anyone and you paid the rent on time, the management couldn't care less. Even the Hollywood cops didn't want to know about it unless the mayhem started spilling out into the streets.

Music and film producer Mary Aloe lived at the Tropicana when she first moved to Los Angeles. “There was this divey hole called the Tropicana,”
she recalls, “but it was in the heart of West Hollywood and I wanted to be in the heart of West Hollywood . . . It was like a Motel 6 with shag carpeting. Barely a good, working T.V. . . . old cigarette-butt holes burned in different things. There was a gold bedspread. Who knows if it had ever been washed? Met a lot of characters, mostly in the music business. Of course, I was some little debutante girl coming in with money. They tried to get me to invest in their projects.” Aloe says that some rooms had several people living in them; others were rented by those who needed some place “for a quickie — they'd picked up some trick in Hollywood.” At the Tropicana, she continues, you could mingle with “the famous and the infamous. Then you'd get your people who would stumble in there along the way and had no idea, like me.”

In October of 1970 Janis Joplin was found dead in a “suite” of a seedy Hollywood motel. Rumors spread quickly that it was the Tropicana, although some other stories have suggested that it might have been Landmark Motor Hotel in L.A. or the more upscale Chateau Marmont in Beverly Hills (where just over a decade later, comedian John Belushi would also die from an overdose). Tainted by the word of its part in the tragedy, the Tropicana fell on hard times for a while. It became a curiosity, a stop on the tour itinerary of morbid fans eager for a glimpse of the place where Janis supposedly drew her last breath. Actress Sylvia Miles, while starring in Warhol's
Heat,
stayed in the room where the death was believed to have taken place, and she claimed that she was often awakened in the wee hours by thrill-seekers in pursuit of the ghost of Janis.
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But Chuck E. Weiss did not choose to become a Tropicana resident because of the motel's storied past. The deciding factor for him was the little greasy spoon next door — Duke's. Weiss fell in love with both the menu and the atmosphere. Duke's became his favorite hangout. “I was driving from Silver Lake to there every day to eat,” explains Weiss, “and I thought, ‘I'll just move in there.' About seven, eight months later Tom moved in. There were a lot of different people there. Sam Shepard, the playwright, was living there. The Dead Boys were there. Levi and the Rockats were living there. Pretty soon, Blondie would stay there. I'm sure this was because of Tom. As soon as he moved in the place started to get an international reputation.”
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Waits further boosted the motel's “international reputation” by mentioning the fact that he lived at the Tropicana in the liner notes of his 1976 album
Small Change
. This triggered one of the most persistent of all the Waits myths. Nearly every Waits fan has heard a variation of it: late one
night, a friend of a friend of a friend, feeling drunk and melancholy, dials the number. A barely awake Waits answers, and the fan gushes on for a minute or two about the brilliance of Waits's work and how Waits is the only one who truly understands the caller. Waits finally replies, irritably, “Yeah, well, that's great, but I'm trying to sleep here,” and hangs up.