Tom Waits - A Life on the Wrong Side

So much gossip and rumor has been wasted on Tom Waits that meeting him brings on a certain nervousness. Honestly, his gambling debts, his animal magnetism, his indifference to other people's feelings... His huge collection of guns, his craziest expenses, his facial plastic surgery, his drug arrests and the hundreds of rooms that make up his house. His tax evasion, his mania for urinating in the street...

Tom Waits turns out, all things considered, to be a kind person: intelligent, open, sunny, helpful, witty, brave, bold, talkative, clean-cut, respectful. … And he agrees to talk about anything, except his own work…

You have an incredible record collection. Is there one that could be called “unusual”?

In the Seventies, a Los Angeles label released an album titled: “The best of Marcel Marceau”. It's 40 minutes of silence followed by applause. At the time it sold rather well.

I like to put it on for a bit of company. Actually, it bothers me when you can hear the murmur of people talking.

And what's the most interesting recording you own?

It's a beautiful and mysterious recording released, from what I've been told, by Robbie Robertson's label. It's crickets. You heard right, crickets. The first time I listened to this record I would have sworn I was listening to the Vienna Boys Choir or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. It has harmony parts in a choral landscape. Then a voice comes in saying: “What you are listening to is the sound of crickets. The only thing that has been manipulated is the speed of the sound these crickets produce: it's been slowed down.” No effect of any kind was used, other than slowing down the tape speed.

That sound is so mesmerizing. I played it for Charlie Musselwhite and he looked at me as if I'd pulled a leprechaun out of my pocket.

Have there been any songs that in some way “enlightened” you?

Absolutely. I'll give you some titles now, but tomorrow the list will be completely different: Gershwin's second prelude, “Pathatique Sonata”, “El Paso”, “You’ve Really Got Me” by the Kinks, “Solider Boy” by the Shirelles, “Lean Back” by Fat Joe, “Night Train”, “Come In My Kitchen” by R.J., “Sad Eyed Lady”, “Rite of Spring Ode to Billy Joe”, “Louie Louie”, “Just a Fool” by Ike and Tina, “Prisoner of Love” by J.B., “Pitch a Wing Dan Doodlec (all night long)” by Howlin Wolf, “Ringo” by Lorne Green, “Ball and Chain”, “Deportee”, “Strange Fruit”, “Sophisticated Lady”, “Georgia On My Mind”, “Can’t Stop Loving You”, “Just Like A Woman”, “So Lonesome I Could Cry”, “Who’ll Stop The Rain?”, “Moon River”, “Autumn Leaves”, “Danny Boy”, “Dirty Ol’ Town”, “Waltzing Mathilda”, “Train Keeps a Rollin”, “Boris the Spider”, “You’ve Really Got a Hold On Me”, “Red Right Hand”, “All Shook Up”, “Cause Of It All”, “Shenandoah”, “China Pig”, “Summertime”, “Without a Song”, “Auld Ang Syne”, “This is a Man’s World”, “Crawlinking Snake”, “Nassun Dorma”, “Bring it on Home to Me”, “Hound Dog”, “Hello Walls”, “You Win Again”, “Sunday Morn’ Coming Down”, “Almost Blue”, “Pump It Up”, “Greensleeves”, “Just Wanna See His Face” by the Stones, “Restless Farewell”, “Fairytale of NY”, “Bring Me A Little Water Sylvie”, “Raglan Road”, “96 Tears”, “In Dreams” by Roy Orbison, “Substitute”, “Good Time Charlie’s Got The Blues”, Theme from Rawhide, “Same Thing”, “Walk Away Rene”, “For What it’s Worth”, the main theme from “Once Upon a Time in America”, “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing”, “Oh Holy Night”, “Mass in E Minor”, “Harlem Shuffle”, “Trouble Man”, “Wade in The Water”, “Empty Bed Blues”, “Havanagila”.

Can you name some people who have influenced your creative life?

Okay, off the top of my head: Kerouac, Dylan, Bukowski, Rod Serling, Don Van Vliet, Cantinflas, James Brown, Harry Belafonte, Ma Rainey, Big Mama Thorton, Howlin Wolf, Lead Belly, Lord Buckley, Mabel Mercer, Lee Marvin, Thelonious Monk, John Ford, Fellini, Weegee, Jagger, Richards, Willie Dixion, John McCormick, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson, Hoagy Carmichael, Enrico Caruso.

What's the strangest thing that's ever been left behind in a dressing room?

Well, Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' restroom and was one-sixteenth Iroquois.

You've always been amused by the connection between fashion and history.

Take, for example, the two-piece swimsuit made in 1947 by a French designer. The sight of the first woman in a minimal two-piece was as explosive as the detonation of the atomic bomb by the United States on the island of Bikini, in the Marshall Islands. From that moment on, the two-piece took the name “bikini”.

What is Paradise for you?

My wife and I in a Motel 6 room on Route 66 with a thermos of coffee, a cheap guitar, a tape player bought from a pawn shop, and a car ready to go parked right outside the door.

What is hard for you?

Basically I sit straddling reality and imagination.

My reality needs imagination the way a bulb needs a socket to sit in.

My imagination needs reality the way a blind man needs a cane. …

Math is hard. … Reading a map. Following orders. Carpentry. Electronics. Plumbing. Remembering things correctly. Straight lines. Finding a safety pin. Patience with other people. Ordering dinner in Chinese. Stereo instructions in German.

What's wrong with the world?

We're buried under the weight of information, which gets mistaken for knowledge; quantity gets mistaken for abundance, and opulence for happiness.

Last year Leona Helmsley's dog [the heiress who died in 2007 and left millions of dollars to her little dog] earned 12 million dollars… and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio, earned 30,000.

It's a glaring example of the madness growing in every one of our minds. We're monkeys with money and guns.

You love doing cameos in films. What are your all-time favorite movie scenes?

Robert De Niro in the ring in "Raging Bull". Julie Christie's face in "Heaven Can Wait" when she says: "A cup of coffee?". James Dean in "East of Eden" telling the nurse to leave, sitting on the hospital bed next to his hospitalized father. Marlene Dietrich in "Touch of Evil" saying: "He was some kind of a man". Scout saying: "Hey, Mr. Cunningham" in "To Kill a Mockingbird". Nic Cage falling apart in the shop in "Matchstick Men"… and eating a piece of paper in "Vampire's Kiss". The final scene of "Chinatown".

Then there's Rod Steiger in "The Pawnbroker" explaining everything about gold to the Puerto Rican. Brando in "The Godfather" dying among the tomatoes with those horrifying orange teeth. Lee Marvin in "Emperor of the North" under the sidecar. Dennis Weaver in "Touch of Evil" saying: "I'm just the night man". The hanging scene in "Breaker Morant". Rutger Hauer's monologue in "Blade Runner" as he's dying. Anthony Quinn dancing on the beach in "Zorba the Greek". Nicholson covered in feathers in "The Witches of Eastwick" while the ladies stick pins in the voodoo doll. When, in "Mad Max 2", Mel Gibson's dog gets hit by an arrow. When Rachel in "Dominion", the prequel to "The Exorcist", says "Could you help an old alter boy father?". The blind boy in the tavern in "Treasure Island". Frankenstein after he strangles the little girl by the riverbank.

The strangest thing that ever happened in the strangest place.

A Japanese merchant ship, during World War II, was struck by several torpedoes. Some engineers were called in to solve the problem of how to bring the ship back to the surface. One of the engineers said he remembered a Donald Duck cartoon in which there was a ship on the ocean floor with a gash in its hull that was brought to the surface by filling it with ping-pong balls. All the experts burst out laughing, all except one who thought it was an idea worth trying. After all, where in the world could you find twenty million ping-pong balls if not in Tokyo? It turned out to be the perfect solution: the balls were literally injected into the hull through the gash, the ship rose to the surface, and the engineer got promoted.

The moral of this story is: "solutions to problems are always found on a completely different level" and "believe in yourself when facing the toughest situations"

How would you describe your modus vivendi?

Jim Jarmusch once told me: "Fast, cheap and good… pick two. If you pick 'fast' and 'cheap,' it can't also be good; if you pick 'cheap' and 'good,' it can't be fast. If you pick 'fast' and 'good,' it won't be cheap. Fast, cheap and good… Pick two words that describe how you want to live.

What differences did you find between Marc Ribot and Smokey Hormel?

Octopuses have eight tentacles and squids have ten, each with hundreds of suckers, and every one of those suckers has the power to burst a man's artery. They also have small beaks, like those of birds, which they use to inject venom into their victims.

There are tales of giant octopuses and squids with a hundred tentacles. It's known that some giant squids have dragged entire ships underwater to feed on the disoriented sailors.

What have you learned from being a father?

"Never lend the car to someone you brought into the world." Actually, that was said by Erma Bombeck.

What extraordinary things have you found in unexpected places?

1. Sheer beauty: oil stains left by cars in a parking lot.

2. A shoeshiner's stand in Brazil that looked like a throne but was actually made from scrap wood.

3. Fake teeth in the window of a pawn shop in Reno, Nevada.

4. Perfect acoustics: in prison.

5. The best food: at Tulsa airport, Oklahoma.

6. The highest number of souvenir shops: Fatima, Portugal.

7. The worst venue for a Chicago crowd: a Morrissey concert.

9. The greatest poverty: Washington D.C.

10. A homeless man with a beautiful operatic voice singing the word "Bacteria" into an empty dumpster in Chinatown.

11. A Chinese man with a Texan accent in Scotland.

12. The best night's sleep: in a dry riverbed in Arizona.

13. The highest number of people wearing red pants: St. Louis.

14. The most beautiful horses: New York City.

15. A judge in Baltimore presided over a trial in which a man was charged with murder. He pleaded guilty and was found guilty by a jury of his peers… He was let go when the judge told him, at the end of the trial: "You are guilty, sir… But I cannot put an innocent man in prison." You see, the murderer was a Siamese twin.

16. The largest penis (in proportion to body size): that of the barnacle.

You've always had a passion for words and their origins. What's the origin of the word "Bedlam"?

It's a contraction of the word Bethlehem. It comes from the Saint Mary of Bethlehem hospital just outside London. The hospital began taking in people with mental disorders in the late 14th century. In the 16th century it became a full-blown asylum.

From that point on, the term "bedlam" came to be used to describe any madhouse, and any scene of noisy confusion.

It seems your hearing isn't perfect.

I have an acoustic astigmatism that makes me hear things the wrong way, I get acoustic illusions. I guess nowadays they'd call it ADD. There's always a struggle going on in my brain, taking what's said to me, turning it into rough Latin, and sending it back to me.

What was your most exciting musical experience?

My most exciting musical experience was in Times Square, more than thirty years ago. There was a rehearsal space near the Brill Building where all the rooms were divided into microscopic areas, with just enough room to open the door. Inside there was a wall piano, cigarette burns, forgotten keys, old paint cans and no pedals. You'd walk in, close the door, and all the rehearsals were so loud you couldn't get any work done, so you'd just stop and listen, and that musical goulash was wonderful. Clarinet scales, tango, operetta, tear-jerking string quartets, singing lessons, someone belting out "Everything's Coming Up Roses," garage bands, piano lessons. The floor vibrated, the walls were thin. It was like ten radios all playing at once in the same room. It was the train station of music, with all the sounds piling up on top of each other... To me, it was wonderful.

What would you have liked to witness, but were born too late for?

Vaudeville. A mix of cultures and bizarre hybrids. Delta blues guitarists alongside Hawaiian musicians and their way of playing slide guitar, turning it into a whole language of its own. It was cross-pollination, like all cultures, really. George Burns was a vaudeville performer I especially loved. Dry and unflappable, curious and funny, no matter what he said. He could dance, too. It was him who said, "Isn't it a shame that the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair."

What do you wonder about?

1. Do bullets know who they're meant for?

2. Is there a power outlet at the bottom of the ocean?

3. What do jockeys say to their horses?

4. What does it feel like to be a tree on the side of the highway?

5. There are times when the sound of a violin resembles that of a Siamese cat. Were the first violin strings made from cat gut? Is there some correlation there?

6. When will the world rise up and scratch us off its back?

7. Will we humans ever marry robots?

8. Is a diamond just a piece of coal with a lot of patience?

9. Ella Fitzgerald really did shatter a wine glass with her voice.

What sounds do you like?

1. The sound of a wet finger run around the rim of a wine glass.

2. Street-corner evangelists.

3. Drivers jammed together in Manhattan.

4. My wife's voice when she sings.

5. Approaching horses and approaching trains.

6. Children when school lets out.

7. The hungry crowd.

8. The orchestra tuning up.

9. The pianos in the saloons of old Westerns.

10. Roller coasters.

11. Streetlights shot out by a bullet.

12. Melting ice.

13. The mimeograph machine.

14. Ball games broadcast on a transistor radio.

15. Piano lessons drifting from an apartment window.

16. Old cash registers.

17. Tap dancers.

18. Football crowds in Argentina.

19. The kitchen of a packed restaurant.

20. Newsrooms in old movies.

21. Charging elephants.

22. Bacon frying.

23. Marching bands.

24. Clarinet lessons.

25. Old Victrola gramophones.

26. The bell at a boxing match.

27. An argument in Chinese.

28. The sound of a pinball machine.

29. An orchestra made up of children

30. The bell of a tram.

31. A Zippo lighter.

32. A steel bass drum.

33. Tractors.

34. The Stroh violin.

35. The Theremin.

36. Pigeons.

37. Seagulls.

38. Owls.

39. The thrush.

40. Doves.

41. The world playing music all at the same time.

What scares her?

1. A dead man in the back seat of a car with a fly crawling across his eyeball.

2. Turbulence. On any airline.

3. Sirens and flashing lights going off at the same time.

4. Gunshots in the night in a rough neighborhood.

5. When the car battery is dead and won't start, it's getting dark, and it's starting to rain.

6. The prison door slamming shut.

4. Being in the backseat of a car taking a hairpin turn on the Pacific Coast Highway when the driver has a heart attack.

5. While delivering the mail, coming face to face with a rabid Doberman that's growling and baring its teeth. You don't have any dog biscuits on you, and you know it fully intends to bite you to chase you off.

6. In a movie, which wire you have to cut to stop the bomb's timer. The green one or the blue one.

7. McCain winning the election.

8. Germans with machine guns.

9. Police officers, in their offices, acting official. [The exact words, for your enjoyment, were: "Officers, in offices, being official."]

10. When you fall into a frozen stream and the current drags you away under a solid roof of ice.

What was it like working with Terry Gilliam?

I play the Devil in "Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus." Not a devil, the Devil. I don't know why he thought of me. I had a Catholic upbringing. Gilliam and I met working together on "The Fisher King." Among men, he's a giant, and his films fill me with awe. "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" is a film I've watched hundreds of times. "Brazil" was his crowning achievement, and "The Brothers Grimm" was my favorite film of last year.

I shot my main scenes mostly with Christopher Plummer, who plays Doctor Parnassus. Plummer is one of the finest actors in the world! I made a point of watching and learning. He's a true star and a gentleman.

Gilliam is a showman, a captain, a magician, a dictator (a kind one), a genius, and a man you'd want with you on a boat to the ends of the earth.

What's your idea of a gentleman?

A man who knows how to play the accordion, but doesn't.

Can you give us a hint about any song titles you're currently working on?

“Ghetto Buddha”, “Waiting For My Good Luck To Come”, “I’ll Be an Oak Tree Some Day”, “In the Cage”, “Hell Broke Loose”, “Spin The Bottle”, “High and Lonesome”.

You'll soon be touring theaters. What can you tell us about it?

We're heading to PEHDTSCKJMBA (Phoenix, El Paso, Houston, Dallas, Tulsa, St. Louis, Columbus, Knoxville, Jacksonville, Mobile, Birmingham, Atlanta). I've got a band made up of stars: Larry Taylor (upright bass), Patrick Warren (keyboards), Omar Torrez (guitars), Vincent Henry (horns) and Casey Waits (drums and percussion). They play with mechanical precision and they're true magicians. With them I'm presenting songs I've never played outside the studio. They're all multi-instrumentalists and they dress like real men. We're the Borman Six, and as Putney says: “The Borman Six absolutely must have a soul.” [A reference to the film “Putney Swope”]

Ride the wave of great music

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