Waits had taken the job because he intended to eventually play there himself, which he did, giving himself valuable stage time to hone his craft. This antipathy was obviously lost on the agency working for crisp manufacturer Frito Lay , whose advert used an approximation of the song that was so convincing even Waits thought the person singing it was himself. After a protracted legal battle, the courts ruled his voice was his own property.
This hooker with a heart of gold narrative is certainly less patronising than most, a darkly funny scenario that also stirs in us a sense of pity. The singer had no objections to the cop show; he did, however, take umbrage with Levis, forcing the brand to make a grovelling apology in Billboard magazine after he took them through the European courts.
Car manufacturers Audi in Spain and Opel in Scandinavia have also found themselves embroiled in costly litigation over the use of his music. Johnsburg, Illinois has no intention of reinventing the wheel, however, and what a treat it is, one so tantalisingly short that you want to put it on again and again. In however, Tom released his first album, Closing Time, which received good reviews but did not make him popular yet. He left for Island Records from Asylum records where he released Swordfishthombones, which made a positive impact on his musical career.
He played less common instruments like bassoon, marimba, percussion and pump organs in this album. From then on, he produced soundtracks of many movies. He solely composed the instrumental music tracks for the film Night on Earth.
Tom subsequently released other albums. Tom Waits is known to have suffered bipolar disorder. At a point, he took to heavy drinking as he was trying to cure his depressive moods.
Brennan became co-conspirator in the world of Waits, credited as co-writer on albums including Alice, Real Gone and Blood Money and inspiring her husband to go in a new direction in the s.
That might be counterintuitive under this subhead, but so much of what makes Tom Waits great is counterintuitive. Apple Music Spotify. Having been convinced by producer Bones Howe to write on the piano rather than guitar, Small Change is the sound of a thirsty poet finding his muse in the bottom of a bottle and his voice via a five-packs-a-day smoking habit. The sentimental Waits dripped like a tap during the 70s, but Brennan fixed that tap when they met in Or, he contends 'a slaughterhouse' is his chosen environment in which to write.
He says 'DJ Pancake' is his favourite writer and notes he's been focussing on air-conditioning units and light fixtures these days. He coughs up the words 'I don't know' a hundred times.
But the most telling moment is when I ask - since all his characters are dreamers - if he thinks dreams are really a good thing. We sit in silence while Waits studies my face for several seconds. May , Francis Thumm on his longtime friendship with Tom Waits, " It is divided between a mutual love of music and a compulsion to engage in elaborate and colorful histories of events and personalities that never existed.
We would attend a concert by Arthur Rubinstein and follow it with an improvised conversation between two late-arriving plainclothes security guards who were blaming their incompetence on blocked chakra while stationed at Club Nahqui - a legendary watering hole with drawing rooms named The Hall of Yells, Rat Landing, and The Cherry Room.
October, Virgin were trying to figure out what sort of record Keith should make, which just struck me as absurd, and hearing Franks Wild Years set us all free about the integrity of the project. As producer apart from himself as writer and singer and guitar player he brings in his ideas, but he's very open to sounds that suddenly and accidentally occur in the studio. I remember one verbal instruction being, 'Play it like a midget's bar-mitzvah.
Listen to Rain Dogs and find out. It wasn't a mechanical kind of recording at all. He has a very individual guitar style he sort of slaps the strings with his thumb. If it wasn't going in a direction he liked, he'd make suggestions. But there's damn few ideas I've had which haven't happened on the first or second take.
Option Magazine USA. Francis Thumm on Night On Earth, " Going mano a mano with Tom's quick mind and refined musical sensibilities is something I would compare to going 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali. There were several quick exchanges, a few haymakers and some of them were knockouts Tom is one of the most creative and fearless musicians I've ever met.
He continually astonishes me with his new ideas and his rare ability to absorb a fragment, whether it be musical or literary, and transform it into his own unique voice. And his wife, Kathleen, has been instrumental in encouraging and inspiring his constant development over the past 10 years. For the past three years, they've been writing songs together, including co-writing all of the material for Tom's next album. While I can't divulge the musical direction of the album, I can say that listening to it is like driving to Las Vegas in the middle of July, in a Cadillac El Dorado, with your hair on fire.
The San Diego Union-Tribune. May 6, Jim Jarmusch April, on Waits and the Gambinos ca. In fact I had a strange encounter with them once with Tom Waits. It's sort of a long story Tom had this big Cadillac that was being repaired, so they gave him a loan car - a little Honda Civic, which was driving Tom nuts because he likes big cars.
Some wiseguys were talking to a guy in one of those cars and we were behind them. Tom, who's a hothead, starts honking the horn and screaming out the window, [adopts hoarse Waits growl] "Let's move along here. We got to drive through. Leave them alone. That's the Gambinos. So this thousand dollar suit guy walks over to us really slowly, leans in the car and says, "You got a problem here?
I want to drive through here. The light's been red, green, red, green, rah, rah, rah. We're cool. Take your time," while Tom blurts out, "Take your time! All the while, Tom's honking the horn.
Finally we drive by and Tom gives him some brusque gesture. And I thought, "Oh, Jesus! Later I got it into his head, "Y' know, that's the Mafia, Tom.
You should have told me! Culture Vulture, by Chris Campion. I don't know how to describe Tom Waits, because to me he's like some strange, very rare mushroom or something, growing out in the forest and there's no other species like him. You know, he is a kind of poet, troubadour musician and there's almost something like, carny about him too.
I don't know; it's very hard to describe Tom Waits. I could tell you an anecdote that sort of explains When he was living in New York in, I guess, , he was living in a kind of burnt-out loft on 14th Street and I went up to visit him. He had a black suit laid out on newspapers on the floor and a spray can of yellow paint and he was spraypainting yellow stripes on the suit. And while he was doing that, his little daughter Kelly Simone was drawing all over the walls.
So all around the loft, whatever her height was at that time, there were drawings up to that height. And I remember walking in and Tom spraypainting yellow stripes on a black suit that he bought on 14th Street, and his daughter saying, "Look, Daddy, I made a horse," or a dog or something, and "Oh, that's good, Honey.
I'm making stripes on the suit. In one of his songs, a line is: "I bought a second-hand Nova from a Cuban-Chinese and dyed my hair in the bathroom of a Texaco. I don't know how to describe him. You have to just listen to him and it becomes very apparent that it's a very rare kind of perspective on the world.
February 12, Lisa Robinson on calling Waits for an interview, " He's also got a hell of a way with a telephone. That serves him right for moving back there from a three-year attempt to settle in New York. The next attempt produced the desired effect, Waits was able to talk, although can you imagine talking to someone on the phone who has a truly sharp sense of humor and not being able to see the glint in his eye or the tongue in his cheek?
Date: October 13, Paul Grein on Waits attending a Frank Sinatra show, " Frank Sinatra drew a lot of celebrities to his recent Greek Theatre shows, including at least one you might not expect: whiskey-voiced balladeer Tom Waits. Waits, who said he's been a Sinatra fan "forever," told Pop Eye he enjoyed the show: "It was magic.
He waves his hand over the crowd like a wand when he sings. Waits noted that he's written a song, "Empty Pockets," that he wants to get to Sinatra but he hasn't tried yet. Has Sinatra been a big influence on Waits? Column Pop Eye, by Paul Grein. August 30, Bob Seger on encountering Waits in ca. I was working on a record, this is or ' I've got a Hawaiian shirt on; it's real hot outside. I see Tom Waits, all in black, long-sleeved shirt and cowboy boots it's 90 degrees - and he's walking through Westwood.
So, I pull up next to him and I say, 'Tom! I asked him what he's doin' and he says, 'Uh I'm walkin' , ' I've loved his stuff down through the years, so I start asking him all these dumb questions about his songs. Is that what you're talking about?
He looked at me like I was from Mars. My cats sleep under the house. Finally, I asked if I could drop him somewhere and he says, 'Tell you what, take me back where you picked me up.
As told by Bob Seger for a Rolling Stone interview. He's wonderful, he's America's best lyricist since Johnny Mercer. He came down to the studio on the ''Mississippi Lad'' album, that's the first one I did for PolyGram, and he sang two of my songs, wouldn't accept any money, just trying to give me the best boost that he could. Remembrance Of Swing Past. Clark Suprynowicz on the Night On Earth sessions, " It was a fairly egalitarian situation, though Tom was definitely leading things.
I really think I learned something from the experience, because Tom's way of directing the ensemble was very much as a theatre person. He would go into the recording booth and listen back to a take we'd done of something. Then he'd come out and look at Ralph [Carney] and say, 'It just sounds too friendly!
Can't we make it more anti-social?! Sometimes to get the result you want from music, that's the only way to get it. There are things that just aren't captured by terms like crescendo or diminuendo. Terry Gilliam on Waits' cameo for The Fisherking , He said, "You ought to meet Tom". It's funny because when I met him and even in the course of making the film, I'd never heard a Tom Waits record.
I'd never listened to them at all. I just met him and liked him immediately. So into the film he went, and he was great. The studio was trying to cut him out. They felt it wasn't advancing the narrative in any significant way so they thought that was things that could go. They were totally wrong. There are two I made with Tom Waits that I like a lot. But it's very different [from movies] because you're using the music as your guide, as a track. Music videos are supposed to hit the audience and they are almost like commercials for the song.
I had a big fight with Tom Waits -- and we're really close friends. I made one video and I was editing it in L. It was a very, very positive fight too. We ended up in the parking lot of Denny's in East L. I learned, 'This isn't a film I'm making, I'm making this for him for his music. He knew the form. He knew what it was for and I was just learning that.
I'm grateful for that experience even though I locked him out of the building at one point. IF Magazine. Issue March 17, Jim Jarmusch on fighting over the video for I Don't Wanna Grow Up , " Jarmusch has also cast musicians in his film, and in turn directed videos for musicians who have acted for him.
But he dismisses the idea that a video he has directed is a film of his in miniature. He said: 'Look, it's not your film. It's a promo for my song. But he was right. And it wasn't a fight. It wasn't anything that disturbed. It was an argument, just one night. I remember I locked him outside in the parking lot, and he's hammering at the door, and he's shouting through 'Jim!
I'm gonna glue your head to the wall! But they're not really films of mine, they're films for a song. I learned that a long time ago. The Guardian. June 9, Jim Jarmusch on his friendship with Waits, " I have known Tom Waits now for over eight years. Tom is not only someone whose work has always, for me, been a source of inspiration, but a man for whom I have a very deep, personal respect. I admire him because he remains true to himself in both his work and his life.
He follows his own code, which is not always the same one prescribed by laws, rules or the expectations of other people. He is strong and direct. There is no bullshit surrounding the man. Tom is, obviously, also a man whose use of language and ability to express himself are completely unique. I spent half the time while with him laughing uncontrollably, and the other half in amazement at the seemingly endless flow of very unusual ideas and observations pouring out of him.
The guy is a wild man. Tom lives with his family in a big, strange house hidden away somewhere in California. I think of it as the Tom Waits version of a gangster hide-out; a world in and of itself. Date: October, published early Rip Rense on Waits's voice for Dracula, " Renfield was a masochist's nirvana.
Waits wore a straitjacket for much of it, as well as manacles that imprisoned each finger individually based on an actual apparatus used in Italy two centuries ago to teach young pianists to keep the proper position at the keyboard , thick glasses and one of those Supercuts-from-Bedlam haircuts. For a good deal of the movie, he was wet.
I got to have a really meaningful scene with Winona Ryder. Not how I imagined it would be, though. Bug juice dripping from the corners of my mouth. Totally gray. Screaming behind bars. Not how I saw our scene together. But I tried to rise above it. Gary Oldman was unable to get the desired horrific element into the lusty animalistic grunts and snarls of the character, so Waits was enlisted: "There's the lady in the back of the room with the bifocals on the chain, and the sweater, and the hair up, coffee and a cigarette, looking at the script," says Waits with bemusement, "and they're telling me, 'Tom, it's deep growl - you're killing her, and yet you're drinking of her'.
And she looks up from her coffee and says, 'Tom - savor it! It was actually demeaning. But I think it will be good. Date: December 13, Keanu Reeves on staying at Francis Ford Coppola's house during the recording of Dracula, " It was great to be in that environment: going for a run in the morning, looking at the stars at night, going into Francis's research library, spending time with him. It was a beautiful life. Les enfants du paradis. Peter Silverton on interviewing Waits in Paris, October " To converse with Tom Waits is to be lied to, consistently, determinedly, entertainingly.
Take that livid comma of a scar in the middle of his forehead. He doesn't know how he got that scar. He can't remember. He pauses, gives his eyes time to roam and his body to twist and untwist itself as he thinks. And then he can remember.
A bullet went right in there. The scar marked the entry point and the bullet continued its journey through the Waits cranium until it emerged in the outside world from the back of his skull. Date: Paris, October, Peter Silverton on interviewing Waits in Paris, October " After we'd finished we walked across the square and had coffee with Kathleen. She and I chatted about this and that and Paris and art. Then I said, 'How about talking about Tom? To me it was clear she was his salvation, the Zimmer frame for his genius.
She was smart and bright and fun and interesting and amused by Tom's shtick, seeing it for what it was - a clever performance that refracted parts of Tom and left other parts untouched and private. We had just shot a video the day before for "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" and he had been doing a lot of press. He was kind of in a surly mood as he is sometimes, but he's also very warm.
He came in late that morning - I had given him the script the night before - and I was with Iggy. Tom threw the script down on the table and said, "Well, you know, you said this was going to be funny, Jim. Maybe you better just circle the jokes 'cause I don't see them".
He looked at poor Iggy and said, "What do you think Iggy? I knew it was just early in the morning and Tom was in a bad mood. His attitude changed completely, but I wanted him to keep some of that paranoid surliness in the script.
We worked with that and kept it in his character. If he had been in a really good mood, I don't think the film would have been as funny. Village Noize, by Danny Plotnick. It was probably one of the most sublime musical experiences of my life. We were recording my piece, Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, an orchestral arrangement based on a field recording of a tramp singing in London.
Tom and I were first in touch at the time of his last tour of the UK - in the s. He had lost his copy of the original vinyl LP released on Brian Eno's Obscure Records in , an album that had quietly disappeared. This, he said, was his "favourite record", which seemed to me to be the highest praise. As it happened, there were a couple of pristine copies in my manager's office so I had one sent to him. I was given a couple of tickets for his London concert but in the event was unable to go.
I still feel guilty at the thought of those two empty seats. Sunday Herald Online. Joshua Camp on trying to sell Waits a Claviola, ca. He [Mark Linkous] has a band but it's just him.
Lone genius in the studio. And he got a deal with Capitol records and he became the critics' darling, everyone thought he was a genius. This was around And I got to know him fairly well because they were really close brothers and every now and then, before his fame, he would come play bass or whatever with our band.
And of course all of us are huge Tom Waits fans and I think somehow, through his manager here in New York, he was trying to get in touch with Tom Waits now that he was gaining popularity. Or maybe it was that his manager gave Tom Waits his CD, and somehow it got back to him that Tom Waits really liked the Sparklehorse CD, so maybe that was what gave him the courage to ask. Or whatever. So roundabout that time we got the claviolas in, and I was excited about this crazy weird instrument and I told [Mark Linkous] about it because I knew he would think it was really cool, too, and he said, [very excited fan voice] "Wow, man, maybe I'll send this literature to Tom Waits!
He sent the standard literature they send out to record stores to Tom Waits, 'cause he got his address from his manager. So it was probably a couple months later, and I get this hand-written letter from California.
And inside is this letter saying, "I've heard of this instrument, the claviola. Where can I purchase it in the northern California area? Tom Waits" With his phone number! And it's in pencil! And as my job, I answer all the letters that come in. Product inquiries, et cetera. So Mike and I debated. And I was like, "Do you think it's really him?
And I said, all right, I'm going to dial the number. I'm just going to do it, it's my job, I have to do it anyway. So I call and it's a girl on the answering machine saying you've reached this number, so I start to leave this message, "I'm from Hohner, blah blah blah, claviola," and suddenly the phone picks up and he goes [JC does dead-on Waits growl] "Yeah, this is Tom Waits.
I mean, I was literally on the phone for fifteen or twenty minutes with him He just asked the questions anyone would ask, like what's the range on it. But then it got more interesting. Apparently he was working on "Mule Variations" at that point, and [he asked me if it would sound good if you ran it through an amplifier, and I said yes. And I was saying "Yeah, it sort of has a flute quality to it, a mellotron flute. But it has sort of a reed-y clarinet to it quality as well.
It would be so wonderful if you could do that. And I didn't know if that be a little too much. So I just played something vaguely minor and circus-like. Like One Ring Zero [laughs]. And he said, "Oh wow, that's really interesting. And at that point I had to go ask our manager, what the price would be for Tom Waits, you know, who's famous, and if he could get a deal.
And at that point [the claviolas] were new. The ones we eventually got were after they had discontinued them and they were supercheap. But originally they were dollars. And the endorsee deal at Hohner is just half price. Even Bob Dylan has to pay half price. Neil Young, all those guys.
Even though nobody would be playing those things if it weren't for them. And my manager said we could give him dollars.
So I came back and said "Tom, we can give you a claviola for dollars. And then he goes, "Josh. No, he didn't buy it. But he lingered on the phone for awhile, he was very interested. I told him I was a musician and played accordion and knew Mark Linkous and he was like "Oh, tell that boy that all of us love his record, we play it all the time, the kids love it.
I told him at one point that the claviola sounds like a Melodica and he said "Yeah, I had one of those but I think my kid lost it. He'll be going through the security X-ray machine and I'll be coming out of it, and we'll just pull over and talk about welding for a couple of minutes. He's definitely one of the luminaries, and one of those rare products of Los Angeles who has an interest in the history and background of the place.
LA's a city that kind of hates itself, so the past is never really maintained for posterity. Tom represents a part of LA that died a long time ago, and he keeps it alive for us. Beefheart also totally makes sense to me as someone coming from LA. He's like that collective of people a few years ago called The Cacophony Society, who did things like douse themselves in mud and parade up and down Rodeo Drive.
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