Misfit King

A love letter to Tom Waits

Photo by Simone Cecchetti

“I wanna pull on your coat about something ...”

I was 15 years old — a moody, swooning teen hiding in a fern-papered bedroom, spinning tunes and parsing Kerouac — when I discovered Tom Waits. I was weaned on jazz and blues by my sweet poet daddy. The culture gave me dreamy Jackson Browne, mischievous Tull, psychedelic Floyd, and a funk backbeat. Throw in Tchaikovsky and some Barber, big band and bebop, and you have a rough sketch of the soundtrack of my childhood.

Then, like a foghorn from a new country, I heard Tom.

“An inebriated good evening to you all.”

Here was the one, the only, the growl from the belly of the brilliant beast. Misfit voice. It shook me, broke me, built me up new and showed me the parallel reality that I had suspected all along.

Nearly 50 years later, I’m still on the ride.

〰️

Tom is humor and pathos, bathos and brine. Huckster magician, snake oil salesman, carnival barker. Downtown Shakespeare, a dreamer gone to ground. Trains and tears, crows and crooners and always the moon. Tom is vaudeville and broadway, burlesque and bowery, all thrown in a blender with a dictionary and some good dirt. Tom is a walking bass line and an upright piano, bullhorns and tin cans, whiskey and a cigarette. Grunge and lullabies, cabaret, crooning and scat. Bard and balladeer, wailing and warbling, pitching his whole broke heart at the thing.

Tom Waits taught me that language is pliable; it sits in the mouth waiting to be popped like gold dusted grapes. He taught me you can marry words like hooligan night, dragstrip courage, grapefruit moon. Words are pictures.

It’s raining hammers

The piano has been drinking

I’ve hawked all my yesterdays

Dye your hair yellow and raise your hem

Tomorrow morning there’ll be laundry

Tight-slack clad girls on the graveyard shift

Tom taught me the music of language. And the language of music.

“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”

He showed me that unabashed romanticism can be tough and that the underbelly is beautiful. He taught me to look under rocks and to listen to the world’s great noise — saws and glockenspiels, doors and rain, roosters and bumblebees, car horns and bullhorns. Percussion is the heart of the machine and the machine is sentimental, in the right light.

He showed how to stitch all the words with all the others, excess is success.

Sometimes.

Sometimes, he taught me, the power is in the reduction.

“I love you, can’t you see?”

He makes me want to write a poem and sit in it with gin and a good hat.

He makes me want to point my small light at the ground.

He makes me want to eat the stars, and he makes me unapologetic about the cheesiness of that sentiment.

〰️

You’ve probably bumped into Tom without knowing. You thought it was Springsteen (“Jersey Girl”), the Eagles (“Ol’ 55”), Rod Stewart (“Downtown Train”), Norah Jones (“Long Way Home”), Queens of the Stone Age (“Goin’ Out West”), on and on. But it was Tom who built it.

“They say that I have no hits and that I’m difficult to work with. And they say that like it’s a bad thing.”

He’s worked with Bette Midler and Keith Richards, John Hammond and Philip Glass. Crystal Gayle, Rickie Lee Jones, and Bonnie Raitt. He’s channeled Bernstein, Sondheim, Burroughs and Bukowski; Kurt Weill, Berthold Brecht, Lord Buckley, and Cole Porter. He’s made movies with Francis Ford Coppola, Jim Jarmusch, Terry Gilliam, Robert Altman, and the Coen brothers. On IMDb, he currently has 249 soundtrack credits, 61 actor credits, and 54 composer credits. He was Shrek’s Captain Hook and went Fishing with John. He’s been active in theatre, contributed to literary projects and tribute compilations, and others have mined his catalogue to pay tribute to him. In 2011, Waits was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Neil Young. And in 2016, he and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, received the PEN/Song Lyrics Award. Brennan is the woman behind the curtain, his closest collaborator in all things, it seems. She deserves her own gushy homage.

The man is prolific in an explosive, cross-genre way rarely seen in this modern, one-trick-pony world. He’s a showman, an artiste, a maverick, an outsider crashing the staid inside.

A jester in a trilby, genius in disguise. And funny as fuck.

“Popular music is like a big party, and it’s a thrill sneaking in rather than being invited. Every once in a while, a guy with his shirt on inside out, wearing lipstick and a pillbox hat, gets a chance to speak.”

〰️

His songs are lush and raucous, by turns. Ballads and barnstormers.

His songs are poetry and prose, posies in a locket.

… and then I broke her heart …

His songs are often stories, with the best first lines in the business;

Well I pulled on trouble’s braids and I hid in the briars …

Dot King was whittled from the bone of Cain …

Hey Charley I’m pregnant and living on 9th street …

Now, George was a good straight boy to begin with …

Romeo is bleeding but not so as you’d notice …

Well, he came home from the war with a party in his head …

“I think all songs should have weather in them. Names of towns and streets, and they should have a couple of sailors. I think those are just song prerequisites.”

〰️

What I really want to do is sit down with you and some wine in a low lit room and make you listen to Tom. I want to take you on a musical journey through fields of sonic disorder and forests of stringed romance. Let Tom tell you every good story. Gently grab you by the collar and show you the goddamned truth.

“You gotta meet me by the fall down tree …”

But I can’t. I could sprinkle a thousand links in this little mash note, but it seems contrary to the character. Antithetical to his throwback mission.

“I’m one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.”

If you don’t know him, or haven’t yet embraced his sideways vision, I suggest you sidle up. He’s brimming with surprises, a changeling, and may have something up his sleeve just for you.

“I’ve always been afraid I was going to tap the world on the shoulder for 20 years and when it finally turned around, I was going to forget what I had to say.”

Happy December!
Lisa 🥂