Home > Contemporary Musicians > Waits, Tom

Singer, songwriter, pianist

Saturday Review made this observation about Tom Waits: "No other musician creates a separate reality as engrossing, convincing, or terrifying as the one Tom Waits invents each time he makes a record. You don't just put on a Waits album. You think about it first. Then you pour yourself a drink." Tom Waits is well known for a lifestyle close to the fringes. He prefers to sleep in derelict hotels, eat in greasy spoons, drink in forgotten bars, and smoke Pall Malls. His songs are populated with the characters he meets in unsavory places.

Born in a taxicab in Pomona, Waits grew up in Southern California and then became the piano bar drifter whose life is so aptly characterized in his songs. He was "discovered" playing piano in a bar and released his first album, Closing Time, an acoustic set of blues and ballads, in 1977. He became well known for his gravely voice and jazz/blues-based songs with their sentimental, and starkly real, look at the other side of life. His albums held to this expected style, with an increasing use of backing instruments, until the release of the unusual Swordfishtrombones in 1983. New Statesman described the album as "junkyard orchestral deviation, . . . a series of fragments from a semi-legible journal in which Waits and his band play just about anything that comes to hand, as long as it makes noise."

In an interview in Playboy Waits commented on this move toward a less organized, more discordant sound: "I was cutting off a very small part of what I wanted to do. I wasn't getting down to things I was really hearing and experiencing. Music with a lot of strings gets like Perry Como after awhile. It's why I don't really work with the piano much anymore, like, anybody who plays the piano would thrill at seeing and hearing one thrown off a 12-story building, watching it hit the sidewalk and being there to hear that thump." High Fidelity looked at the album this way: "With Swordfishtrombones Waits turned minimalist in instrumental approach and surrealist in lyrical and general atmosphere, not so much eccentric as artistically ambitious. It was as if he imagined Kurt Weill and Captain Beefheart running into each other on an empty Hollywood sound stage while Coppola lurked in his computer programmed trailer ready to film the encounter in glorious living black and white and Waits himself transcribed the score."

The reference to filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola is apt. Waits began working with Coppola in 1982 when he wrote the soundtrack for "One from the Heart." The score was nominated for an Academy Award. Then he began his acting career, playing character roles in the Coppola films "Rumble Fish" (1983), "The Cotton Club" (1984), and "The Outsiders" (1987). He also played major roles in "Down by Law" (1986) and "Ironweed" (1987).

Waits met his wife, playwright Kathleen Brennan, in 1988. With her he cowrote the play "Frank's Wild Years," which was produced by Chicago's Steppenwolf Company in summer 1988. Stereo Review described the play: "Frank's Wild Years began as a song from Swordfishtrombones about a man who gets drunk one night and sets fire to his house with his wife and Chihuahua inside. 'Frank' then took on a life of his own in a musical play . . . about a down-and-out lounge singer who, sitting on a park bench in East St.Louis, is freezing to death and reliving his life in a semi-hallucinatory state. Frank's Wild Years [the album] includes many of the songs from the play, but it further develops the musical settings of Frank's reminiscences."

When asked by Playboy how his involvement with theater and film affected his music, Waits replied: "Just that I'm more comfortable stepping into characters in songs. On Frank's Wild Years, I did it in 'I'll Take New York' and 'Straight to the Top.' I've learned how to be different musical characters without feeling like I'm eclipsing myself. On the contrary, you discover a whole family living inside you." Waits saw the album Frank's Wild Years (1987) as the completion of a trilogy of albums, beginning with Swordfishtrombones (1983) and continued by Rain Dogs (1985). Audio had this observation about the album: "Now, Waits has explored the beaten-down, seedy, and desperate, but his subjects have never been quite this odd. His voice has always been scruffy, but here he contorts it into the most bizarre shapes it has ever assumed. Frank's Wild Years is disconcerting, challenging, even disturbing, as it dares you to explore dark places on its own terms."

Unlike most musicians who gravitate toward commercial compromises in their music, Stereo Review observed, Waits "abandoned what few commercial pre-tensions he had left and began to make music of ever-increasing eccentricity and conviction. No longer are his characters romanticized symbols of life on the edges. Now they are real." In the midst of this period when Waits was pushing the limits of his art, Electra released Anthology, an excellent retrospective of his best recordings from his years on the Electra/Asylum label.

In 1988 Waits returned to film, producing his major performance and story film "Big Time." Instead of a character actor, in this film he is the star. Yet, he is still in character as a drifter who fantasizes about making the big time in music. He discussed the film with Rolling Stone: "What we tried to avoid is having a concert film that felt like a stuffed bird. I tried to film it like a Mexican cockfight instead of air-conditioned concert footage. Some of it felt like it was shot through a safari rifle. You forget about the cameras, which is what I was trying to do." Rolling Stone continued with this observation: "But in spite of media attention, Tom Waits has remained an outsider. It's exactly that lonesome-drifter persona that has always made his work so compelling. The seams were invisible between the desolate characters in his songs and the character standing onstage with a jazzman's goatee, a secondhand suit and a hobo's roar."

About his lack of drive for fame and awards, Waits told Playboy: I've gotten only one award in my life, from a place called Club Tenco in Italy. They gave me a guitar made out of tigereye. Club Tenco was created as an alternative to the big San Remo festival they have every year. It's to commemorate the death of a big singer who's name was Tenco and who shot himself in the heart because he'd lost at the San Remo Festival. For awhile it was popular in Italy for singers to shoot them-selves in the heart. That's my award."

—Tim LaBorie