Tom Waits is on the road again, metaphorically speaking
TOURING is not for him, but veteran performer Tom Waits hopes his songs drive others on.
TOM Waits dishes out similes like a crotchety old pastor channelling the good word. He employs them randomly, spontaneously and with sparkling good humour, but also with mischief on his mind.
Throw in a handful of metaphors, some riddles, one or two jokes and a world-weary laugh and you have the essence of a conversation with one of the great American songwriters.
Those characteristics have weaved through many a Waits song, performance or interview in the past 40 years. The man with the gravelly voice and sharp suit has become famous as much for his liquid verbosity as for his skill at polishing the US's rich musical heritage, whether it be blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll, vaudeville or any combination thereof.
It was his wit, however, that got the upper hand when fellow music veteran Neil Young inducted him into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March. "They say I have no hits and that I'm difficult to work with," Waits growled at New York's Waldorf-Astoria. "They say it like it's a bad thing."
Indeed Waits, 61, has never been one to embrace the limelight or to indulge the periphery of rock stardom, for many years preferring to stay at home with his family in Santa Rosa, California, whenever he can.
Reflecting on the HoF recognition, he admits that he's not much of a joiner but says: "You don't want to hurt their feelings. Like they say, the only thing worse than being in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is not being in it. Nothing is duly expected of me by being a member of this, although I'm sure they'll call me and ask me to make a speech about someone new at some point."
Today's fresh topic for discussion on the Waits agenda is his first album of entirely new studio material in seven years, Bad as Me, which has its worldwide release on October 24. It's full of the conviction, bluster and romanticism that have been the touchstones of Waits's illustrious career, marked alternately by vivid storytelling and simple sentiment and set to musical backdrops that range from the industrially brutal (Hell Broke Luce, Get Lost) to the exquisitely understated (New Year's Eve, Kiss Me and Last Leaf).
There's also a pronounced bluesy swagger to the title track and the opening Chicago and Raised Right Men (the last one of two songs featuring Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea on bass) that conjure the spirit of John Lee Hooker, among others. Waits's favourite track, the mid-paced shuffle Talking at the Same Time, has his voice in a rare falsetto, cast somewhere, he says, between Skip James and Marvin Gaye.
Before entering the studio with an impressive ensemble cast in February, Waits recorded the new songs into a tape recorder ("the size of my hand") at home. "Then we go in the studio and do it for real," he says. "But it's really no different. If you're ready to record, the drama of 'I'm ready to record now' is the same on a $39 tape recorder as it is on two-inch tape. It's like doing a drawing on the back of a business card. It's still a canvas."
Clearly the studio is an environment the veteran songwriter enjoys. "Oh god yeah," he confirms. "There are a lot of arguments and a lot of decisions to make. 'Do you want a 38-piece orchestra here or for me to bang on a chair with a pen?' I don't know if there is a way of doing it; if there is one recipe."
The album marks the return to the Waits compound of the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards, who plays guitar on four tracks. Keef contributed to two of Waits's previous albums, 1985's Rain Dogs and 1992's Bone Machine. "We've done stuff off and on over the years," says Waits. "It seemed like a good idea again and he was able to do it, so we went to this old studio in Chinatown in New York and it worked out real well."
Also on board are his long-time collaborator, guitarist Marc Ribot, Los Lobos guitar player David Hidalgo and on drums Waits's 25-year-old son Casey, who also featured on his father's albums Blood Money (2002) and Real Gone (2004).
Such a close-knit bunch contributes to the easy chemistry evident on the album. "It's always good to have that," Waits says; "to have a shorthand working with somebody. If you walk into a room with a photographer you've never met, invariably he will take a picture of how uncomfortable he felt being around you. There's a lot of body language involved." Waits, then, has reason to be cheerful in his 2011 comfort zone, even if he prides himself on being "a grumpy guy". It's an endearing grumpiness, however. "Well, thank you," he says, cheerfully. "I guess we're all social animals, whether we want to admit it or not."
SOCIALLY or otherwise, Waits has been far from idle since the release of Real Gone seven years ago. In 2006 the celebrated singer, songwriter, poet and actor released the 3CD rarities compendium Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards, which also contained new material. He has appeared in a handful of movies, including The Book of Eli alongside Denzel Washington and Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Despite his oft-quoted reluctance to go on the road he played the US and Europe on his Glitter and Doom tour in 2008, which made its way on to CD and DVD.
There was also another collaboration with Robert Wilson, the New York director and playwright with whom Waits has worked three times, most successfully on the stage productions of The Black Rider (with William S. Burroughs) and Alice. The new project, which was due to debut in Paris this year, fell through. "Those things," he says wearily, "you know, you put it in the ground and you water it, then you wait for about 10 years. You gotta be ready for that. You get more bang for your buck with carrots and squash."
There has always been a theatrical element to Waits's work. He cut his teeth playing R&B and soul in and around National City in California in the mid-60s, but from playing his first gigs in the early 70s influences as varied as Bing Crosby, Jack Kerouac and Howlin' Wolf began to emerge.
It's easy to picture Waits as a caricature, not least based on the writer and performer he once was, sitting at the piano, a little the worse for wear perhaps, with a bourbon-soaked view of the world. That was the dynamic that informed his albums Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) and Small Change (1976). Through his landmark 80s period of Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Frank's Wild Years the palette became more complex, thanks in part to his wife Kathleen Brennan's input to the songwriting process, something she has maintained since then.
On the Grammy-winning Mule Variations (1998) Waits drew together many of the elements of his previous work into a highly intoxicating stew. Bad as Me is a similar concoction. Taking the album's extreme opposites as examples, Hell Broke Luce is a vicious, clunking anti-war tirade. "Oh, you picked up on that?" he says mischievously, since the lyrics leave little doubt about the song's sentiment:
While I was over here I never got to vote
I left my arm in my coat
My mom she died I never wrote
We sat by the fire and ate a goat
Just before he died he had a toke
Now I'm home and I'm blind
And I'm broke
What is next?
Waits delivers this in a despairing wail over a military-style march rhythm. "We got a Bo Diddley thing going," he explains, "at least what most people associate now with Bo Diddley, but it's more a drum and fife thing. I just started yelling over it."
When he says "you have to really dig down there to get the negative feel of the song", he's being ironic, but more pointedly he adds: "You can get away with a lot in a song that you couldn't get away with on a microphone in front of the House of Representatives."
On the opposite scale Bad as Me has some beautifully drawn and performed ballads, including the closing accordion-driven street waltz New Year's Eve. Also, the stripped-back, mournful Last Leaf, with Richards and Waits on vocals, is one of two songs (along with bonus track After You Die) where mortality appears to be the central theme. "If you're not considering that then you're not paying attention," Waits says. "It's one of the big topics for songs. You're not going to be able to write about it after you're gone. This is the best time to do it, while you're still here; before you are that thing, a vapour, floating around like a thistle."
For all that he is one of the most distinctive and consistent American songwriters and performers of the past 50 years, Waits insists there is no set formula to the creative process. He has always been a little guarded, too, about his technique, deflecting scrutiny of his songwriting with a mix of humour and invention. "It's always different, every time around," he says. "You're always making choices." And then: "Is this going to be like Billy Barty [American character actor] or Edgar Bergen [ventriloquist] or Liz Taylor or Eddie Izzard? You start with song titles usually."
Part of the fun, he insists, is in finding the song, or at least finding something to hang it on, whether it's weather or a field or an old man or a train. Once you've made the choice, you set yourself a deadline and stick to it.
"Time is a collaborator," he says. "If you have another three months you'll change it. If it has to be done tonight? 'Oh, shit, I guess that's what it will be.' You know, it will be what you came up with under those conditions at that point in your life. Are you going to have him in his socks and his underwear? Or plaid pants and a bowler hat? You have to decide. Some writers are always changing things."
He cites Procol Harum's 60s hit A Whiter Shade of Pale as an example of what might have been, by grunting its famous line: "I was feeling kinda seasick". "What if he didn't say that?" Waits says. "It could have been something else. Maybe it was and he changed it to that. What if he said: 'I was feeling kinda lonely?' He made a choice. 'I was feeling kinda seasick / the crowd called out for more.' That's a great image."
Images are another essential component of Waits's oeuvre, of course. Few writers are as capable of painting such elaborate portraits in a lyric. "We're all building roads that other people will drive on, hopefully, with a song," he says, employing metaphor once more. "Songs have very humble beginnings. You always have to be on the look-out, though, because they hide. As Fellini said: 'Death hides in clocks.' Who knows where songs hide? I don't know."
And if he did, it's unlikely he'd be telling, unless it was as a sidebar monologue during a performance. "It's like a magician who works on the same trick for 20 years and then he does it once for you and you think he's a genius," Waits says, modestly. "It's all flim flam. Smoke and mirrors. I don't know where they live."
WAITS is being fanciful on the topic of songs' origins and habitat, but the evidence is concrete regarding his considerable music legacy. Since his debut album Closing Time in 1973, Waits has released 16 studio albums, including the new one, and a handful of soundtracks, live albums and compilations.
He has covered other artists, from the Ramones to Leonard Bernstein, but has had many more artists pay tribute to his catalogue. Bruce Springsteen (Jersey Girl), the Eagles (Ol' 55) and Rod Stewart (Downtown Train) are just some of the performers who have plucked a Waits vignette from the vine. It's a catalogue he's proud of, but in terms of his own recordings it's not one he cares to go back and listen to. "God no. Sometimes I'll be shopping somewhere and something of mine will come on and I'll say: 'Turn that shit off so I can drink my f. . king coffee.'
"I'm not really for the listening process beyond the conception period," he says. "You don't raise 'em like kids. You make 'em and then throw them up in the air and they show up somewhere else. I like a lot of them but I never hear them again. You will never listen to a song as closely or as many times as you do when you're building a record. You'll never listen to the songs that way again."
As to his other work, Waits says he'll happily do more films if they appeal to him. "I get offers and if I like it and I have the time I'll do it and if I don't I won't," he says. "I don't have to do it to pay the rent so it's usually fun." And if the singer is adamant about not hearing his own recorded work, it seems just as certain that he won't be hitting the road any time soon. Touring is not for him, he says, although he said the same thing nine years ago and changed his mind for the Glitter and Doom shows.
The glowing reviews were not enough to make him do it again, although he admits there were rewarding moments. "I don't know if 'enjoy' is the right word," he says of the experience. "On the road I feel like a travelling salesman. It made some money and balanced the budget. It was enlightening and uplifting and rewarding I guess."
This time, however, he's not for budging. "No, no, no, no, no," he says in mock agitation. "It's not in my contract. Maybe I'll set myself up in a theatre somewhere and make everybody go on the road to hear me. The music's free," he says spruiking the idea, "but we charge you for travel."
No chance, then, that Australian audiences will get one more opportunity to see him perform. We haven't seen Waits in Australia since 1981 and it's looking increasingly unlikely he'll return.
Unless we resort to pleading. "OK, OK," he says. "I'm leaving now. I'm heading your way."
Tom Waits's Bad As Me is released through Anti-/Warner Music on October 24.
