Tom Waits

A SUCCESSFUL musician, movie star, and film composer, Tom Waits has never had a commercial hit; some of his songs are best-known for being covered by other people. He has a huge fan base, but doesn't tour. His razor-sharp wit and lyrical prowess have put him in a category by himself. Just what that category is remains unclear. He has an obsession with shoes. When he took his son to Graceland, the tot suggested to a gift shop full of tourists that they dig up the King and make a necklace out of his teeth. His dad seemed pleased.

Although the details of Waits' story seem to change from interview to interview, the contours of his life spill somewhat consistently from an anecdote of his birth--he was born in the back of a taxi just outside the hospital. While still a youngster, he taught himself to play piano at a neighbor's house, and he kept a pad of paper by his bed so he could jot down the lyrics he thought of in the middle of the night. While most teenagers were listening to the Beach Boys, Waits grooved to Bing Crosby, Cole Porter, and Bob Dylan. He seemed to be short on life goals--other than perhaps buying into a restaurant. His reading material was "limited to menus and magazines."

A slew of odd jobs--including pizza tossing at Napoleone's Pizza House in San Diego (he later wrote a song about it)--landed him as the doorman at an L.A. club called the Heritage. One night, he started writing down people's conversations as they sat around the bar. "When I put them together," Waits said, "I found some music hiding in there." Playing at the Troubadour, he was noticed by Herb Cohen, who managed Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention. Cohen offered him a contract, and in 1972, Waits cut his first album, Closing Time, a low-key critical success which introduced his habit of singing about the down and out. It included "Ol' 55," which was covered by The Eagles. On tour with the Mothers, Waits was reviled by the audiences. He returned to L.A. and recorded The Heart of Saturday Night, which, again, the critics loved but no one bought. His music was becoming livelier, and finally he recorded his first "live" album (he invited a bunch of friends into the studio to hear him record it), Nighthawks at the Diner, which no one, including the critics, liked.

In 1976, he went back on tour, faced more hostile audiences, drank, and found it hard to write--no privacy. Roger McGuinn, Joan Baez, and Kinky Friedman (Bob Dylan's entourage) dealt the final blow during a tour stop in New Orleans. They took the stage unannounced just as Waits was scheduled to begin his set. Waits had had enough--he took off to Europe. After gigs in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, he spent two weeks in London writing songs. The result was Small Change, a breakthrough album that chronicled the terrible year he'd had and established him as a major singer and songwriter. His voice had changed--you can hear where all that whisky and smoke went to. Perhaps this album was what cemented his early reputation as a drunk, although Waits says that, really, it commemorates the moment when he realized that being a drunk was not all it's cracked up to be. "You know, I was really starting to believe that there was something amusing and wonderfully American about a drunk," he has said. "I ended up telling myself to cut that shit out." In any case, his star rose quickly, and critics and audiences alike loved the maudlin, loungey sentiments that Waits uncovered.

In 1978, as he was cranking out an album a year, Waits started working in film--both as an actor and composer--beginning with Paradise Alley with Sylvester Stallone. He won an Oscar nomination for the soundtrack to One From the Heart, the film through which he met his wife, Kathleen Brennan, who was a script editor on the project. "She can lie down on nails, stick a knitting needle through her lip and still drink coffee, so I knew she was the girl for me," said Waits. The couple has collaborated on many projects since then, including the opera Frank's Wild Years, which was performed at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in 1986, and released as an album in 1987.

In 1986, Waits collaborated with director Jim Jarmusch for the first time in Down by Law. He's since done two more films with Jarmusch (Mystery Train, Night on Earth), and the two formed a group called The Sons of Lee Marvin, whose sole purpose was to sit around and watch Lee Marvin films. He also began to work with Robert Wilson, artistic director of the Thalia Theatre in Germany. With William S. Burroughs writing the libretto, Waits doing the music, and Wilson directing, they put together The Black Rider, which was released as an album in 1993 (Waits' last release). Waits and Wilson have since put together a stage version of Alice in Wonderland, called Alice, but no album release date has been set.

These days, no one's exactly sure what Waits is up to--besides defending the ownership of his music. He won a lawsuit against Frito-Lay for using an impersonator to mimic his voice for a commercial without his permission, and won a lawsuit against his former record label, Third Story Music, for selling some of his tunes. Waits' rhetorical question, "If Michael Jackson wants to work for Pepsi, why doesn't he just get himself a suit and an office in their headquarters?" seems to sum up his belief that art should not be used to peddle products.

The one complaint Waits' fans have is that he doesn't tour (it seems he'd rather spend time with his family). In early 1996, however, he performed a benefit concert in San Francisco, for a friend arrested on trumped-up drug charges. The show sold out in forty-five minutes, and during the performance, someone called out: "Hey Tom, where you been?" Waits shot right back: "Where you been? You still working out at the airport?"

In the 1970s, Tom Waits combined a lyrical focus on desperate, lowlife characters with a persona that seemed to embody the same lifestyle, which he sang about in a raspy, gravelly voice. From the '80s on, his work became increasingly theatrical as he moved into acting and composing. Growing up in southern California, Waits attracted the attention of manager Herb Cohen, who also handled Frank Zappa, and was signed by him at the beginning of the 1970s, resulting in the material later released as The Early Years and The Early Years, Vol. 2. His formal recording debut came with Closing Time (1973) on Asylum Records, an album that contained "Ol' 55," which was covered by labelmates the Eagles for their On the Border album. Waits attracted critical acclaim and a cult audience for his subsequent albums, The Heart of Saturday Night (1974), the two-LP live set Nighthawks at the Diner (1975), Small Change (1976), Foreign Affairs (1977), Blue Valentine (1978), and Heart Attack and Vine (1980). His music and persona proved highly cinematic, and, starting in 1978, he launched parallel careers as an actor and as a composer of movie music. He wrote songs for and appeared in Paradise Alley (1978), wrote the title song for On the Nickel (1980), and was hired by director Francis Coppola to write the music for One from the Heart (1982), which earned him an Academy Award nomination. While working on that project, Waits met and married playwright Kathleen Brennan, with whom he later collaborated.

Moving to Island Records, Waits made Swordfishtrombones (1983), which found him experimenting with horns and percussion and using unusual recording techniques. The same year, he appeared in Coppola's Rumble Fish and The Outsiders, and, in 1984, he appeared in the director's The Cotton Club. In 1985, he released Rain Dogs. In 1986, he appeared in Down By Law and made his theatrical debut with Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in +Frank's Wild Years, a musical play he had written with Brennan. An album based on the play was released in 1987, the same year Waits appeared in the films Candy Mountain and Ironweed. In 1988, he released a film and soundtrack album depicting one of his concerts, Big Time. In 1989, he appeared in the films Bearskin: An Urban Fairytale, Cold Feet, and Wait Until Spring. His work for the theater continued in 1990 when Waits partnered with opera director Robert Wilson and beat novelist William Burroughs and staged +The Black Rider in Hamburg, Germany. In 1991, he appeared in the films Queens' Logic, The Fisher King, and At Play in the Fields of the Lord. In 1992, he scored the film Night on Earth; released the album Bone Machine, which won a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album; appeared in the film Bram Stoker's Dracula; and returned to Hamburg for the staging of his second collaboration with Robert Wilson, +Alice. The The Black Rider was documented on CD in 1993, the same year Waits appeared in the film Short Cuts.

A long absence from recording resulted in the 1998 release of Beautiful Maladies, a retrospective of his work for Island. In 1999, Waits finally returned with a new album, Mule Variations. The record was a critical success, winning a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk album, and was also his first for the independent Epitaph Records' Anti subsidiary. A small tour followed, but Waits jumped right back into the studio and began working on not one but two new albums. By the time he emerged in the spring of 2002, both Alice and Blood Money were released on Anti Records. Blood Money consisted of the songs from the third Wilson/Waits collaboration that was staged in Denmark in 2000 and won Best Drama of the year. After limited touring in support of these two endeavors, Waits returned to the recording studio and issued Real Gone in 2004. The album marked a large departure for him, in that it contained no keyboards at all, focusing only on rhythm-stringed instruments. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide