Wild Years (19 page)

While Waits had played around with the drums on previous recordings, particularly on Shelly Manne's songs, he rarely went further than layering on a snare drum or cymbals. “Until that point, I'd been paranoid about percussion,” he told the
Morning Becomes Eclectic
audience in 1988. “I'd been terrified of drums for some reason. I started becoming a bit more adventuresome . . . trying to bring things up and out . . . that I couldn't reach before. You get to an impasse. You kind of have to take a hammer to it — so I did.”
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Much of Waits's infatuation with various forms of sensual instrumentation came via Harry Partch. A groundbreaking composer whose career spanned several decades, beginning in the thirties and ending with his death in 1974, Partch played the harmonium. He also exploited “found” sounds. In his hands, household items and assorted pieces of junk became the tools for creating a collage of sound. Partch's project was nothing less than a reappraisal of the way we make and hear music. He broke down the octave into forty-three notes rather than twelve, unheard of in formal or classical music theory, thereby sparking heated debate among music theorists. Partch invented a series of instruments to suit his sonic experiments —the Ptolemy, the Chromelodeon
I
, and the Old and New Chromelodeon
II
— using them in the process of recording such revolutionary works as
Bewitched, Revelation in the Courthouse Park,
and
Bitter Music
.
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Waits was in awe of the iconoclastic Partch and his awe was evident when he spoke to
Playboy
.

PLAYBOY
: Who was Harry Partch, and what did he mean to you?

WAITS
: He was an innovator. He built all his own instruments
and took the American hobo experience and designed instruments from ideas he gathered traveling around the United States in the thirties and the forties. He used a pump organ and industrial water bottles, created enormous marimbas. He died in the early seventies, but the Harry Partch Ensemble still performs at festivals. It's a little arrogant to say I see a relationship between his stuff and mine. I'm very crude, but I use things we hear around us all the time, built and found instruments. Things that aren't normally considered instruments: dragging a chair across the floor or hitting the side of a locker real hard with a two-by-four, a freedom bell, a brake drum with a major imperfection, a police bullhorn. It's more interesting. You know I don't like straight lines. The problem is that most instruments are square and music is always round.
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Joining Captain Beefheart and Harry Partch as a
Swordfishtrombones
influence was an old friend of Waits's by the name of Francis Thumm. The two had known each other since their San Diego days; Thumm is still a music teacher at a public school there. The arrangements for several songs on the new album were Waits/Thumm collaborations, and it was Thumm, in fact, who first brought Partch's music to Waits's attention. Thumm, in the Partch tradition, would occasionally play an offbeat instrument of his own — the gramolodium.

It's not surprising, then — given what went into its formulation — that
Swordfishtrombones
turned out to be utterly unlike anything that Waits, or anyone, had ever created. And Waits was understandably proud. “We'd done something on our own,” he explained. “It just felt more honest. I was trying to find music that felt more like the people that were in the songs, rather than everybody being kind of dressed up in the same outfit. The people in my earlier songs might have had unique things to say and have come from diverse backgrounds, but they all looked the same.”
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When the people at Elektra finally got to hear tapes of a few
Sword-fish trombones
songs they were dumbfounded. Wasn't this music awfully out there? What were all these weird instruments? How were they going to market this stuff? When the label insisted that Waits start again from scratch bearing in mind the concept of accessibility, Waits refused. This, he countered, was his best work yet. He finished the album. Elektra was thrown into a quandary: Waits was one of its prestige artists, but he'd never sold all that well for the company. Finally, Waits ended the impasse by asking to be released from his contract, and Elektra was by then quite
willing to oblige.

Shopping for a new label, both Tom and Kathleen were confident that they had an important piece of musical property to offer. The head of Island Records thought so, too. “Chris Blackwell loved the album and said, ‘We'll put it out,'” Waits told radio interviewer Chris Douridas. “So that's what happened. He was very in tune with it. Blackwell has great ears, you know? Because he likes what I did, so I guess that means he has great ears.”
¹⁰

Island, an artist-driven label, was the ideal home for Waits. Blackwell was known for allowing the members of his stable great freedom to explore their musical visions. Growing up in Jamaica, he'd become enraptured with Rastafarian music, philosophy, and culture. The story goes that a boat the teenage Blackwell was sailing ran aground on a reef and he was forced to swim to the distant shore. Emerging from the sea, he collapsed from exhaustion. Some Rastafarians found him and took him to their camp, where they nursed him back to health, fed him, and shared their philosophies with him — a rare privilege for a white person.
¹¹

Blackwell's fascination with Rasta music — ska, rock steady, and reggae — deepened as the years passed, and in 1959 he founded Island Records with the mandate to bring Jamaican music to a larger audience. Most of the label's early offerings Blackwell produced himself; he also handled distribution and even performed on many recordings. Then, in 1962, Blackwell moved Island to London. A novelty ska number, “My Boy Lollipop” by Millie Small, vaulted the label out of obscurity in 1964, and then another Island reggae act put Blackwell's enterprise on the map forever. Bob Marley and the Wailers are, to this day, the definitive reggae group. Marley died of cancer in 1981, but his legacy lives on, and while he was at the helm of The Wailers the classics just kept coming: “I Shot the Sheriff,” “Jammin',” “Get Up, Stand Up,” “No Woman, No Cry.”

In England, Blackwell rapidly became known for having exceptional taste, taking real chances with his artists, and branching into new styles. Soon Island nurtured such acts as superstar Irish rockers U2, the innovative new-romantic outfit Roxy Music, and psychedelic pioneers Traffic. The label also took on rock acts like Free and The Spencer Davis Group, as well as the venerable English folk-rock group Fairport Convention. But Blackwell didn't forget his roots — just about every reggae act that ever mattered, including Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Black Uhuru, Desmond Dekker and the Aces, Toots and the Maytals, and Sly and Robbie, recorded for Island at one time or another.

By the eighties, the label was having a lot of success with U2 as well as the middle-of-the-road rockers Robert Palmer and Steve Winwood (who had been with Island for years as a member of both The Spencer Davis Group and Traffic before going solo in 1981). The curse of Island Records had begun to manifest itself by this point: with the notable exception of U2, whenever an Island act achieved major commercial success, it would attempt to maximize its earning potential by signing with a larger label. But maybe the curse was actually on the artists, because Palmer and Win-wood, for example, never did as well again after they left Blackwell's stable.

Tom Waits would remain unencumbered by this particular form of bad luck — or bad decision making. All he cared about was that he'd found a label that trusted him, and there he would stay. Having learned from past experience, he negotiated a fair contract with Island: he'd now enjoy complete creative control and be paid more generously for his work. He would own the rights to every song he wrote. As far as Blackwell was concerned, Waits had a strong musical vision, and that was good enough for him.

When Island released
Swordfi shtrombones
in September 1983, the reviews were ecstatic — the best Waits had ever received. The album had an otherworldly, slightly skewed feel that struck a chord in many people but was difficult to capture in words. (Perhaps crooner Tony Bennett put it best, once remarking that
Swordfishtrombones
sounded like “a guy in an ash can sending messages.”)
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Even Waits himself was compelled to reflect, after the fact, upon the nature of his new sound and in doing so he recognized an interesting irony: “My life was getting more settled. I was staying out of the bars. But my work was becoming more scary.”
¹³

“Underground,” the album's first track, is the result of Waits's desire to compose a piece that sounded like a group of mutant dwarfs performing a Russian march, stomping on a wooden floor, and banging on pipes. Yet this only hints at the eccentricity of the track. Here, on Waits's tribute to the Manhattan hobos who live in tunnels, his voice can only be described as a series of strangled yelps. The next song, “Shore Leave,” reels things in a bit; it's a minor blues frame garlanded with weird sound effects and a screeching falsetto. “Dave the Butcher,” an instrumental, feels like the soundtrack to a silent film playing in some bizarre alternate universe.

The first song on
Swordfishtrombones
that betrays a backward glance is Tom's second musical love letter to Kathleen. Like “Jersey Girl,” “Johns-burg, Illinois” takes a former home of Kathleen's as its lyrical springboard. Kathleen was born in Johnsburg and lived on a farm there before moving
with her family to New Jersey. The song is short — a single verse clocking in at a minute and a half — but that just adds to its poignant immediacy. It is one of Waits's most intimate piano ballads, a quiet pledge of devotion to the woman he can't live without. Waits has said that he wanted to make his profession of love quickly, the way a man does when showing someone a wallet photo of his wife before slipping it back into his pocket.
¹⁴

With “16 Shells From a Thirty-Ought-Six,” the album returns to the realm of experimental instrumentation. This blues is augmented with an array of clangs and thumps — Waits's conception of what a chain gang working beside a highway would sound like. The first time Kathleen heard “Town with No Cheer,” the lyrics touched her profoundly, and she remarked to Tom that he must have been very much in love with the woman he had been writing about. He explained that the song isn't about a woman at all: it's the story of a man who can't get any liquor. While on tour in Australia, Waits had read a newspaper article about a little town whose one saloon had gone out of business and been boarded up. He had clipped the story, figuring that one day he might write something about it.
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The album's first side closes with the single “In the Neighborhood,” in which Waits tries to evoke a Salvation Army band clanging out an old drinking song. The song conjures an image of a crazed, Fellini-esque marching band tramping down a dirt road (carrying a glockenspiel, apparently) and occasionally stopping to raise their glasses in a toast. It resembles “A Sight for Sore Eyes” from
Foreign Affairs,
but the new instrumentation gives it a more offbeat, jittery vibe.

Perhaps the most important song on
Swordfishtrombones
is “Frank's Wild Years.” At least it was for Waits — to a certain degree, the song would influence his musical creation for the next five years. “Frank's Wild Years” is a tragic monologue, although it does contain a substantial streak of twisted, black humor. In it, Waits annihilates the hallowed American conviction that if you put your shoulder to the wheel then nothing can stop you from having it all — a lovely wife, a stimulating job, a side-by-side refrigerator, a self-cleaning oven, and “a little Chihuahua named Carlos.” Performing the song as a spoken-word jazz piece, Waits explodes the idyll before we can believe in it and describes how one night Frank goes home, douses the place with gasoline, and sits in his car laughing as his old life burns down. The song closes with the bitter punch line, “Never could stand that dog.”

But Waits was anxious to ensure that no one construed “Frank's Wild
Years” as pure tragedy. “I didn't want to give the impression that [Frank's wife] went up in smoke through the chimney,” he told Barney Hoskyns of
New Musical Express
. “No, she was at the beauty parlor. The dog may have gone.” When asked what he was trying to accomplish with “Frank's Wild Years,” Waits paraphrased a Charles Bukowski story he'd once read, saying that it isn't the big things that destroy a man's psyche — it's the little nagging ones. It's your shoelace breaking when you haven't got the time to replace it that will drive you wild, not some major catastrophe.

If Waits's music was becoming more expansive, then his storytelling was becoming more intimate. Accounts of grand passion, like “Small Change,” were being eclipsed by subtle, devastating little tales, like “Soldier's Things.” In the latter, a man finds a little box of war mementos and medals in a pawnshop. An individual's experience of battle — sweat, blood, fear — has been reduced to a handful of odds and ends, tossed into a cardboard box, and sold for a dollar apiece. Is this what dying for your country amounts to? In its own quiet way, “Soldier's Things” is a more devastating indictment of war than such better-known protest anthems as Jefferson Airplane's “Volunteers,” Country Joe and The Fish's “I Feel like I'm Fixing to Die Rag,” and Bruce Springsteen's “Born in the U.S.A.”

In October 1983, about the time that
Swordfishtrombones
came out, Tom and Kathleen's first child was born — a girl named Kellesimone. “I didn't wanna be the guy who woke when he was sixty-five, and said, ‘Gee, I forgot to have kids,'” said Waits. “I mean, somebody took the time to have us, right?”
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