Wild Years (9 page)

A few years later, when he was directing
The Mike Douglas Show,
King would give Tom his first shot on the daytime talk-show circuit, but in 1973 Waits was at a low point. He was impressing the likes of King with his “gutsy, shrewd act,” opening minds to a new style of performance, but it was costing him. “I was sick through that whole period,” he said to David McGee. “I'd get onstage at Reno's and be thrown off by the fancy surroundings. It was starting to wear on me, all the touring. I'd been traveling quite a bit, living in hotels, eating bad food, drinking a lot. Too much. There's a lifestyle that's there before you arrive and you're introduced to it. It's unavoidable.”
¹²

So, if you can't avoid it, meet it head on. If his record company booked him a room at the Holiday Inn or the Ramada, Waits would cancel the reservation and seek out more comfortably sordid accommodations. In a hotel room where the window shades were torn, where cigarette burns dotted the carpet, where the mattress was hard and lumpy, where maid service was a low priority, and where the stench of stale beer and urine permeated the air, Waits could begin to relax. In short, as long as the place had an hourly rate it was okay by him.

In a 1988 issue of
Playboy,
Waits listed some of his favorite flophouses.

PLAYBOY
: While L.A. may be your stomping grounds, your other great love is the wee-hours world of America's big cities. From all your travels, what have been your favorite dives?

WAITS
: The Sterling Hotel, in Cleveland. Great lobby. Good place to sit with the old men and watch Rock Hudson movies. Then there's the Wilmont Hotel, in Chicago. The woman behind the desk, her son's the Marlboro man. There's the Alamo Hotel, in Austin, Texas, where I rode in an elevator one night with Sam Houston Johnson. He spit tobacco juice into a cup while we talked. Let's see: The Swiss American Hotel is San Francisco's insane asylum. The Paradise Motel, right here on Sunset in L.A. It's nice in the summer when there's a carnival across the street. And, oh, the Taft. I think they're a chain. You can probably get off a train in just about any town, get into a taxi and say, “Take me to the Taft Hotel,” and wind up somewhere unsavory.
¹³

Early on, Waits checked into hotels under his own name, but after learning firsthand — while fielding those late-night phone calls at the Tropicana — the joys of anonymity, he altered his approach. He adopted the dramatic road alias of Montclaire de Havelin, thereby ensuring that people he didn't know and didn't want to know couldn't find him.
¹⁴

Waits also hit on a virtually foolproof means of locating the most atmospheric hostelries in the country. At random, he'd choose an American president and then ask a cabbie to take him to the hotel bearing the man's name. He'd ask to go to the Eisenhower or the Cleveland, and it always worked. “Invariably, there would be a Cleveland,” he told David Fricke. “I would wind up in these very strange places — these rooms with stains on the wallpaper, foggy voices down the hall, sharing a bathroom with a guy with a hernia. I'd watch T.V. with old men in the lobby. I knew there was music in those places — and stories. That's what I was looking for.”
¹⁵

Like Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, or even Hunter S. Thompson, Waits soaked up the country. He explored America from the inside, shunning the tourist traps and seeking out the places where, he was convinced, real life was unfolding — a taproom in the Bowery or a Mexican restaurant in South Central. He thrived on urban action. He wanted to immerse himself in life and walk close to death. He loved the fact that if he really needed a Johnny Walker Red at 4:00 in the morning he could always find a place to buy one.

But because the world Waits was perpetually searching for was, very consciously, the substance of his art, a certain amount of idealization was unavoidable. The film-noir existence that he created for himself could never be as squalid as the real thing. Despite his best intentions, Waits was
a tourist in that late-night world of vagabonds and cheap diners and flop sweat. The fact that he had never been imprisoned by poverty and failure and mental instability made all the difference. Anytime he wanted to he could hop back into his Ol' 55 and drive himself out of there. His music was primarily inspired by a fifties black-and-white dream of skid row, a social underbelly that reflected Raymond Chandler's sensibility more accurately than his own experience.

The inhabitants of Waits's romanticized underclass tended to be white and to wear retro gear like fishnet stockings and battered Stetson hats. The trappings of urban poverty and crime circa 1974 — the food stamps, the drug paraphernalia — were foreign to them. But Waits was able to bring these existences into stark, often brilliant focus. Through them he could present a poetic truth, not necessarily a slice of life.

When it came right down to it, though, as long as that night world Waits was roaming around in — however idealized, anachronistic, limited — served as a conduit for poetic truth, that's where Waits would be found. He would continue to make statements like, “I'll always be a night owl,” or, “The moon beats the hell out of the sun.” And he would continue to listen, not just to the stories but to the sounds: “The night is music. I couldn't sleep on 23rd Street in New York — it was a musical traffic jam session. You can hear a melody, a horn session . . . broken glass jig jag clack whack shuffle shuffle. And a radiator with all those little Doc Severinsens playing. There's food for thought at our fingertips, and it begs to be dealt with.”
¹⁶

Waits's manager, Herb Cohen, suggested that he do a live album. One that would showcase the compelling Waits stage persona. Everyone involved was determined to avoid rehashing the first two albums, though, so they decided to use only the new ideas and songs that Tom was coming up with. Few precedents existed for them to follow, because while a concert album entirely made up of new material was no rarity in jazz, it was in rock. There were only a scattering of exceptions, like the mc5's 1969 debut album
Kick Out the Jams,
but most had come about for economic reasons as opposed to artistic ones.

Waits himself had some reservations about embarking on the live-album project, but he eventually agreed to do it. Bones Howe was enthusiastic from the outset, and he knew just how the job should be done. “I said I didn't want to go into a club. I'd seen Tom live and we could make a much better record if . . . we made a recording studio into a club. There was a room at the back of the Record Plant. It's a big recording studio, almost a soundstage. We put a little stage over in the corner. There was a booth with glass, so we didn't need to be in the room.” Howe scheduled the Record Plant shows for the last two days of July 1975, and everyone got to work creating the appropriate ambiance.

“We put tables in the room and we had a guest list,” says Howe. “We had beer and wine and potato chips on the tables. And we sold out four shows . . . two nights in a row. Tom got this stripper named Dwana to be the opening act.” Dwana was an old-time burlesque queen whom Tom had met on one of his jaunts to the Hollywood underworld. She warmed up the crowd — which was largely made up of friends and acquaintances of Waits and crew — and everyone was primed for a drunken voyage into an
Edward Hopper painting or a Charles Bukowski poem. Waits didn't plan on disappointing them.

Bones had put together a live band from the session musicians who had worked on
The Heart of Saturday Night
. Mike Melvoin served as bandleader and also covered keyboards. Pete Christlieb blew tenor sax, Jim Hughart hauled the upright bass, and Bill Goodwin played drums. Melvoin recalls the scene: “Candles on the tables . . . A room full of people. The show started with a stripper, who was the classic old tassle-twirler. It was wonderful. The ambiance was great. The band was sensational. The interaction between the band and Tom was wonderful — between the band and Tom and the audience. It was great chemistry, and I have to hand it to Bones for putting that together.”

The shows did sizzle. Tom bantered fluently with members of the audience (the song intros are as prominent on the album as the tunes). He was the hep-cat master of ceremonies, and he regaled everyone with long, off-color stories about his experiences in a series of seedy Hollywood haunts. His connection with the audience was genuine and strong. With his tales he bridged the gap between Beat poetry and vaudeville comedy, peppering his monologue with racy puns, like, “I've been so goddamned horny, the crack of dawn ain't safe around me,” and tossing out politically incorrect jokes, like, “I've been busier than a set of jumper cables in a Puerto Rican wedding.” These days, Waits dismisses all that hipster speak, insisting that he sounded like a cranky old drunk back them. Maybe he did sometimes, but for every groaner there were several turns of phrase that could take your breath away. When Waits was on, nobody did it better.

Later on, says Howe, when the time came to mix the album, he and Tom “just went out and hid in a recording studio. We took the best of each of the four shows, put an album together out of it and then mixed it. We had a really, really good time doing it. The album shows that.” The album's working title had been “Nighthawk Postcards from Easy Street,” but they shortened it to
Nighthawks at the Diner
. Listening to the finished product, it's evident that the sessions it documents were a hoot for everyone involved, but, as often happens with live albums, fun in concert didn't quite translate onto vinyl.

Essentially, the problem was the songs. While
Nighthawks
does boast some solid tunes, few of them are as clever as their spoken-word intros. Too many tracks are slight, not fleshed out well enough. Too many resemble other album cuts or older Waits songs. Such shortcomings hadn't marred Waits's earlier efforts, and
Nighthawks at the Diner
became the first
Tom Waits album to fail across the board. It sold poorly, the critics were uniformly unimpressed, and even Tom's loyal fan base considered it to be a strange misstep.

Of the handful of pearls strewn across the album's messy terrain, the best is probably “Better Off Without a Wife,” an aging bachelor's recital of rationalizations for staying single. Other memorable cuts are “Warm Beer and Cold Women,” the touching lament of a loser who “just don't fit in,” and the moody “On a Foggy Night,” a leftover from the
Heart of Saturday Night
sessions. Waits once explained that “Foggy Night” was the soundtrack to a film-noir thriller he caught on the late show one night. According to Waits, George Raft and Fred McMurray fight each other to win the heart of Rosalind Russell. The film ends as McMurray drives a big old Plymouth along a foggy road with Raft stowed in the trunk and this song playing on the radio.
¹

Also included on the album was the first Tom Waits/Chuck E. Weiss collaboration; titled “Spare Parts I (A Nocturnal Emission),” it was also the first Weiss song ever to be recorded. “Big Joe and Phantom 309” was Waits's first recorded cover, a remake of a 1967 release (called “Phantom 309”) by Red Sovine, a country singer who had been recording since the 1930s. Sovine was nicknamed “The Old Syrup Sopper” when he did an early radio series sponsored by Johnny Fair Syrup. The moniker was apt in more ways than one: Sovine's songs themselves were rather syrupy. His specialty was tunes about truckers — their lonely lives on the road, far from their homes and hearths and good women. Sovine died at the age of sixty-two in 1980, a few years after scoring his biggest hit with “Teddy Bear.” His greatest-hits album was flogged on late-night T.V. mail-order commercials for the rest of the decade. “Phantom 309” was an odd choice for inclusion on a Tom Waits album, but Waits, of course, never shied away from the offbeat, and he did a decent job with the song.

“Eggs and Sausage (In a Cadillac with Susan Michelson)” was released as a single. It's a good contribution to the album but ultimately too reminiscent of better Waits late-night diner songs, like “The Ghosts of Saturday Night.” At this point in his career, Tom's stories were becoming as vital a part of his presentation as his songs. His vivid accounts of life on the road and on the town served to complement his songs, not merely to introduce them. For example, he made his way into “Eggs and Sausage” during his 1976 show at the Boston Music Hall by saying, “I was in a little place called Stanfield, Arizona. I was only there one night. It was one of those kind of places — I spent a whole year there one night. I'll tell you about this little
diner. Walked inside, elbowed up to the counter with every other loser in town and ordered me up some Eggs Overwhelming and the Chicken Catastrophe. The waitress was wearing them little rhinestone cat glasses with the little pearl thing that clips on the sweater, so I knew I'd come to the right place.”
²

Another fun but slight
Nighthawks
cut was “Emotional Weather Report,” in which Tom describes his mental health in terms of the evening forecast. This and a number of other songs included on the album worked beautifully in the concert setting, but they didn't quite make the grade on your home stereo. “The idea of singing the weather report was just a silly idea that came up in the middle of hanging around in the studio while we were doing . . .
The Heart of Saturday Night,
” Howe concludes. “I don't think that so much fore-shadowed
Small Change
and
Foreign Affairs
as much as [it reflected] some of the things that are buried down in
The Heart of Saturday Night
. I think that
Nighthawks
is just like a playful little interlude in the middle of all that.”

As had become his habit, Waits hit the road as soon as he was released from the studio. There were venues to play, towns to visit, bars to check out, hovels to sleep in. Over the three years he'd been touring, he'd established a club circuit for himself: start off in Los Angeles; hop a plane to Denver; continue on to Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington, dc, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, San Diego; head back to Los Angeles. Six shows a week — two a night, three nights a week — a day of travel between each stop. Waits would often remark to his concert audiences at around this time that he enjoyed arriving home after a tour and finding the food he'd left in the fridge transformed into some petri-dish science experiment.