Never One For The Conventional

Tom Waits has released two new albums simultaneously. James Nicholas Joyce meets him for a chat at the Flamingo Resort Inn.

Being given a second opportunity to talk to Tom Waits is a little like lightning striking twice, seeing as the California musician actor and producer isn't well-known for frequent interview sessions. This time around Waits is no less friendly than in 1999, but he does seem more a little distant - which may have a lot to do with the music. Mule Variations was a very domestic, a very personal album, whereas his new sets Blood Money and Alice⁽¹⁾ are comprised of theatre music Waits provided director Robert Wilson with in 2000 and 1992 respectively.. It's almost as if Waits had let people get too close to him with Mule Variations and is now retreating behind a screen of music which has less to do with him than his previous, Grammy-winning work. The fact that he's receiving interviews not in a Chinese diner but in an inn also proves to create a little distance. The Flamingo Resort inn in the small Californian town of Santa Rosa is more of a neutral ground, close to home, but definitely a temporary set-up.

- As you are releasing Blood Money and Alice simultaneously, people are bound to compare the two albums with each other. How do you see the differences between the albums as far as the music goes?
TW: Okay, all right. Gee I don't know. I guess Alice is probably more metaphysical or something, maybe more water, more feminine, maybe. It's like taking the pill. For me at least, you know, or a mushroom or something. And it kind of takes you on a little trip, something like that. Which I like. I guess Blood Money's more earthbound, more carnival, more the slaving meat-wheel that we're all on. More earthbound, yeah. More blood, more earth. So maybe one's a little more dream, one's a little nightmare maybe.

- The music for Alice is now nine years old. Has it changed a lot since you worked it up with the company of the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg? Or are there songs that weren't in the original production?
TW: "No it's all the same stuff, you know. It's like giving away a box of clothes and then you get them back, you know. "Hey, those pants, I like those pants, that shirt. I always liked that shirt. I never really recorded them, you know, we just did rough demos and then you give the songs to someone else to do. And they either do them in a delightful way or they particularly butcher them and you're not having much say one way or another about it. Except that we were involved in the production and you make suggestions. But essentially I can't do it for them. There 's a place where the singer and song kind of become inseparable, so they became orphans for a while and then I got them back. And I was glad to get them back. I had forgotten I liked the tunes. My wife had been dripping on me for years, let's record those, there's some good tunes, baby. And I said, 'well I don't know.' So it's a combination of the Chinese water torture and the general enthusiasm and encouragement. And it finally happened."

- I've read that the Thalia theatre actually owned them for a while is that not true?
TW: "The songs? I don't think so."

- So that even if you had wanted to record around the time you wouldn't have been able to because they were in the theatre's repertoire.
TW: "Oh, I wasn't aware of that. It didn't really matter really. Because I wasn't thinking of recording them until really recently, long after the show itself had its cycle. It's run. But you know, the trouble when you do two records at the same time is giving them their own distinct profile and colours and textures. And so that's a challenge. And the reason that no-one does two records at the same time and puts them out on the same day is that it's too much damn work. You know, you got two sets of musicians, you got two covers you got two mastering dates."

- Gun N' Roses did it
TW: "Who? Gun N Roses?"

-So how was it listening to the records?
TW: "You know, I've listened to the stuff for ever. With songs, when you're working on them, you never listen to them as many times and as carefully as when you're working on them. It's like this kind of fantastic voyage inside the corpuscles of the songs at once it's up and running and off, you don't visit it with the same intimacy as when you are working on it. So for us, we did different versions, different mixes and different arrangements of the tunes and finally, these are the version we selected."

- Nevertheless, they seem so easy, very intimate. They don't sound like you'd been playing them for years.
TW: "Oh, that's good."

- And they change with time as well, the more you listen the more different things you get out of the records: Blood Money seemed very tragic to me at first but by the third time or fourth time, it had become very beautiful too.
TW: 'That's cool, that's good. I'm curious, because no-one's experience with songs is in any way similar to anyone else's, you know. Because when you listen to a song, you are kind of blending your own dreams and experiences with the experience of the song. So it's completely unique, your experience of listening to a song. to your experience."

- Well, has the fact that you've encountered your audience on tour changed anything in your music?
TW: "Gee, I don't know. It's a good question. I get a kick out of it, going out, but I don't know. I appreciate having an audience: it's like kind of shocking sometimes. Like this group in Warsaw⁽²⁾ that wouldn't leave the theatre, and I was already back at the hotel getting ready for bed. They were just screaming and stomping and I was like, what do we do? Do we go back, you know, isn't the evening over? Or do we go back and play more? That was kind of an odd kind of moment, a tribute, I guess. They wanted to hang out and be in the place where it happened, that was cool."

- Isn't that kind of adulation a bit much"
Well, I don't have regular contact with that. It's more like unusual because I tour infrequently and my normal day-to-day life doesn't really include that, with my family and all that you know. So it's not like every time I go out I have to put on a hairpiece and a nose and a moustache. But you know, it's the performing arts, I'm a performer, no question about that. This is a performance, right now, you know? So I like what happens, there are always surprises that happen on stage. Plus you've got musicians that are much better suited for the studio and then you get guys that are much better suited for the road. Had a good band, but the hotels and the whole bit, after a while it wears you down. When I was in my twenties, I did nothing but tour in my twenties, you know. But know it's a little different".

- People feel this really strong link between you and the songs. Do you think that leads them to feel a certain closeness to you that isn't given?
TW: "Well, I guess, because songs are these vessels containers of emotional information. It's like getting a letter from me, maybe. It's understandable. Just like we were saying before, when you join your experience with the elements that are there inside the song in this kind of potion. That's why people say, hey, that's my song, man. Or you say with your girlfriend, that's our song. Because it IS your song. you know. Until these songs come out, they are only our songs, no-one's ever heard them. It's kind of like your kids' drawings on the refrigerator, because they're ours."

- But it does seem that the songs are inseparable from you. Because there's often something missing when other people do your songs.
TW: "Well, I don't know. maybe that's true to a certain extent when anybody does anybody else's tune. I don't know. Do you mean like Carl Sandburg, he's the only one who can sing his songs? Or Bob Dylan is he the only one that can sing his own songs? He writes such great songs, it's hard to avoid not wanting to sing them."

- I think the problem with doing your songs has more to do with phrasing and vocabulary. The actors at the Thalia theatre said they found the phrasing logical when you sing but elusive to reproduce. Whereas John Hammond said he had difficulty getting all the words in. Do you take these problems into consideration when writing for other people?
TW: "Well, see, I like syncopation. I like to use my voice like a drum, you know. I counterpoint and all that. And then of course I sub-vocalise, because I'm dyslexic, attention deficit disorder.⁽³⁾ I'm always making sounds for the sake of making sounds. Before you have words you just make sounds. In fact as soon as you make any kind of sound, you've got music, really. In the beginning there was the word. So you've got this kind of (begins to chant) deshaggabon, deshaggabon, deshaggabon, deshaggabon, deshaggabon, dehaggabn, deshaggabon, you've got something right there. Right there. you've got something. Whatever the hell a deshaggabon is. I don't know and I don't give a crap."

- It's like kids' talk.
TW: "They make the best songs. Nobody makes better songs than kids."

- And they have intrinsic rhythm. But they lose it.
TW: "Yeah, right. Then we lose it. We're born knowing everything. And our whole life is a process of forgetting everything."

Tom Waits Cool Vibrations

(Xpress magazine (Australia), by James Nicholas Joyce. Issue 795. May, 2002. Transcription as published on Xpressmagazine.com.au. Copyright 2003 Columbia Press)

Being given a second opportunity to talk to Tom Waits is a little like lightning striking twice, seeing as the California musician, actor and producer isn't well-known for frequent interview sessions. This time around Waits is no less friendly than in 1999, but he does seem a little more distant - which might have a lot to do with the music: Mule Variations was a very domestic, very personal album, whereas his new sets Blood Money and Alice⁽¹⁾ are comprised of theatre music Waits provided director Robert Wilson with in 2000 and 1992 respectively. It's almost as if Waits had let people get too close to him with Mule Variations and is now retreating behind a screen of music which has less to do with him than his previous, Grammy-winning, work.

The fact that he's receiving interviews not in a Chinese diner but in an inn also proves to create a little distance. The Flamingo Resort Inn in the small Californian town of Santa Rosa is more of a neutral ground, close to home, but definitely a temporary set-up. Blood Money and Alice are instore now.

By JAMES NICHOLAS JOYCE

As you're releasing Blood Money and Alice simultaneously, people are bound to compare the two albums with each other. How do you see the differences? 
I guess Alice is probably more metaphysical or something, maybe more water, more feminine, maybe. It's like taking a pill. For me at least, you know. Or a mushroom or something. And it kind of takes you on a little trip, something like that. Which I like. I guess Blood Money's more earthbound, more carnival, more the slaving meat-wheel that we're all on. More earthbound, yeah. More blood, more earth. So maybe one's a little more dream, one's a little more nightmare, maybe.

The music for Alice is now nine years old. Has it changed a lot since you worked it up with the company of the Thalia theatre in Hamburg? Or are there songs in there that weren't in the original production? 
No, it's all the same stuff. You know, it's like giving away a box of clothes and then you get them back, you know: Hey, those pants, I like those pants, that shirt, I always liked that shirt. I never really recorded them, you know, we just did rough demos and then you give the songs to someone else to do. And they either do them in a delightful way or they particularly butcher them and you're not having much say one way or another about it. Except that we were involved in the production and you make suggestions. But essentially I can't do it for them. There's a place where the singer and the song kind of become inseparable, so they became orphans for a while and then I got them back. And I was glad to get them back, I had forgotten I actually liked the tunes. My wife had been dripping on me for years, let's record those, there's some good tunes, baby. And I said, well, I don't know. So it's a combination of the Chinese water torture and the general enthusiasm and encouragement. And it finally happened.

Blood Money is both carnal and carnival, but in songs like The Part You Throw Away there's a real delicacy to the playing, even more so than on Mule Variations. Do you think you've developed your way of working with musicians further since then? 
Well, I hope so. You know, you can't really rule with an iron fist in the studio, you're really trying to capture something. It's more like sneaking up on a bird. So you really have to be careful and you have to choose your companions very carefully. I'm fascinated with the whole process, though. The first thing you do is look around at the studio when you get there, to look and see if there's anything anybody left there from the session before that you can use, you know. Or if anyone left an upturned trash-can that you can use. And then you evaluate all the equipment. We had a lot of vintage microphones, there were microphones that I'd only ever seen in Hitler documentaries. All these bizarre compressors. And the engineers came in there and said, "this is too much."

But when it comes down to it, your real gifts are the ones that you bring with you. Hopefully the tunes are strong enough, and I worked with really good people. You know, I try not to rehearse the song to death. In fact, we rarely rehearse it. We say, OK let's try it and then roll. And invariably, you get it on a first take. Or at least you get something you can use even if you have to do a little cutting and pasting. But I think songs are like anything else: once you get used to them or once they get used to you there's a certain level of complacency that you arrive at. So you want to continue to press forward with the element of surprise. And that's usually when it's new, when it's fresh.

Do these musicians contribute to the Tom Waits sound? 
Or do you make them play according to your vision? Well, I don't make them do anything, you know. It's like casting: you usually choose people that you have some kind of short-hand or rapport with. In some cases. Like Kathleen will bring in some sax player who's new, I've never worked with before, Colin Stetson. Multi-instrumentalist, plays bass sax, baritone sax, alto, tenor, all the reeds, clarinet, bass clarinet. And it goes well, and she says, "Gee, you don't have any friends do you? Anybody who plays guitar, you don't know a bass player, do ya?" And she starts picking his brain, and he goes, "Oh yeah, as a matter of fact, I do". So I usually start off with one person and you usually end up finding five. But I love it. I like it better than the road because you can always manipulate things, you're not a victim of physics.

People feel this really strong link between you and the songs. Do you think that leads them to feel a certain closeness to you that isn't given? 
Well, I guess, because songs are these vessels, containers of emotional information, it's like getting a letter from me, maybe. It's understandable. Just like we were saying before, when you join your experience with the elements that are there inside the song in this kind of potion. That's why people say, "Hey, that's my song, man." Or you say with your girlfriend, "That's our song." Because it is your song, you know. Until these songs come out, they're only our songs, no-one's ever heard them. It's kind of like your kids' drawings on the refrigerator, because they're ours.

This image of you also had to do with your film roles where you're always being asked to play unhappy people, criminals, dirty little drunks, even though it's changed a little over the years. Are you happy with that kind of type-casting? 
Well, I'm not the traditional leading man. And I'm not really an actor, I do some acting: that's a difference. It's not my chosen field to trudge the boards and all that goes on with it. That whole tradition of acting. I'm much closer to the tradition of music and all that that has to offer me. I get a kick out of acting but it's not something that I'm completely absorbed in or obsessed with. I'm treated more as a character actor - which is fine by me.

Do you think that having all this freedom to experiment has to do with the fact that you didn't grow to be big commercially? 
Often people who are very successful commercially don't feel free to change their music and develop artistically. Maybe they're better businessmen. You know what they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Just keep loading the wagon, you know. I don't know, you may be right. But the Beatles were huge and they went through all kinds of powerful changes, you know.

But that was the Sixties. I think it's different now. 
I don't know, but I pretty much do what I want. And I feel very privileged to be able to explore all these things and have people come along with them.

So you're saying it's a good time for second-hand technology because people are so fascinated with being modern that they're willing to chuck out all their old stuff? 
Well, at a certain point something just becomes useless. It's like I heard trash day in Japan is really amazing. Because every week everyone throws out everything that was new and gets a new one, whatever it is. Keyboards, all kinds of stuff. So you can furnish your whole house or your studio on trash day in Tokyo. I don't know why it is. Except that it seems to be part of the natural course of growth to go back. It's like when you go into the Salvation Army and you see the whole history of fashion. You know, everything: Grandma's clothes, up to platforms, everything. Music's kind of like that. We kind of bury everything just so that we can dig it up. Nothing really leaves. And nothing's ever new. It just gets brought back. Or gets told to leave, you know.

Do you like your songs being popular? Like Jersey Girl being picked up and getting an existence of its own... 
Well, it's like the migration of seeds. It's natural. And it's normal. And then you get in the pot like with everything else.

But it does seem that the songs are inseparable from you. Because there's often something missing when other people do your songs. 
Well, I don't know. Maybe that's true to a certain extent when anybody does anybody else's tune. I don't know. Do you mean like Carl Sandburg: he's the only one who can sing his songs? Or Bob Dylan is he the only one that can sing his own songs? He writes such great songs, it's hard to avoid not wanting to sing them.

I think the problem with doing your songs has more to do with phrasing and vocabulary. The actors at the Thalia theatre said they found the phrasing logical when you sing but elusive to reproduce. Whereas John Hammond said he had difficulty getting all the words in. Do you take these problems into consideration when writing for other people? 
Well, see, I like syncopation. I like to use my voice like a drum, you know. I counterpoint and all that. And then of course I sub-vocalise, because I'm dyslexic, attention deficit disorder: I'm always making sounds for the sake of making sounds. Before you have words you just make sounds.

In fact, as soon as you make any kind of sound, you've got music, really. In the beginning there was the word. So you've got this kind of (Chants) "deshaggabon, deshaggabon, deshaggabon, deshaggabon, deshaggabon, deshaggabon, deshaggabon," you've got something right there. Right there, you've got something. Whatever the hell a deshaggabon is, I don't know and I don't give a crap.

It's like kids' talk. 
They make the best songs. Nobody makes better songs than kids.

We were talking about your image before, about people's expectations of you, because Tom Waits has become something of a brand. Is it hard not repeating yourself when you make a new Tom Waits album? 
Yeah, it's hard. Because you've got something that you know how to do. And you don't have to bend your head to do it again.

It often happens to artists. 
Yeah. You don't have to invent the wheel again. Because you just did it.

What can one do against that? 
I don't know. You get married. And then your wife says, "That's such malarkey, that is the biggest load of crap I've ever heard in my life, that's so lame. Don't you have anything else? Come on, you've been doing that for so long." That's how it starts: someone is willing to stand up to you and say that's tired, old, crap.

She's been in the process for 22 years now, too. 
Yeah. And then I unload on her. But I think we kind of sharpen each other like knives. Sometimes we quarrel. But for the most part we kind of try to make each other better by not allowing each other to do anything we consider to be mediocre. Even though of course it's inevitable. But when there's two people working on something, it's always different.

She contributes a lot to what Tom Waits is. Is she happy that you're the one that goes out and talks to people? 
Oh yeah. She hates the spotlight, she don't want it. You mean, is she home crying and wishes she was here? You kidding me?

Notes:

⁽¹⁾ His new sets Blood Money and Alice: Alice (the play) premiered on December 19, 1992 at the Thalia Theater, Hamburg/ Germany. Further reading: Alice. Woyzeck (the play) premiered November 18, 2000 at the Betty Nansen Theatre in Copenhagen/ Denmark. Further reading: Woyzeck.

⁽²⁾ Like this group in Warsaw: May 25, 2000. Concert appearance at Sala Kongresowa, Warsaw/ Poland (as part of the TP S.A. Music & Film Festival)

⁽³⁾ Because I'm dyslexic, attention deficit disorder:
- Tom Waits (2002): "It's called sub-vocalizing. And eh, I don't know, I guess maybe it's part of the evolution of language. It's going backwards though. Back to when sounds had just basic shapes to them and had yet to be applied to anything truly meaningful. And I guess I'm. I don't know, I'm probably dyslexic and eh you know eh, attention eh deficit disorder." (Source: "Anti Electronic Press Kit/ We're All Mad Here" by Robert Lloyd. Epitaph/ Anti Inc. 86632-2P1. � 2002 Jalma Music (ASCAP). CD, 2002)
- Vicki Kerrigan (2004): "Do you still look forward to being an old man?" Tom Waits: "No, not now! See, I skipped all that and now I'm going back and picking up my teens now. I'm living upside down. So now I, you know, I jump out of airplanes, and I, you know, fall asleep on the beach. You know, I hold up liquor stores. You know, I do a 120 on the freeway. So, I'm getting it all done, but I'm just, I'm dyslexic and everything's out of sequence. So..." (Source: "The Deep End Interview": The Deep End (Radio National/ Australia) by Vicki Kerrigan. Date: Telephone interview. Aired: October 5, 2004)
- Tom Waits (2002): "Y'know, there's a reason they call theatre the fabulous invalid...Sitting in a dark theatre from 8:30 in the morning till midnight every day, for weeks. Boy, you realise then what they mean by work. But Wilson's a challenging guy, makes you dig really deep.' He sits back down with a grunt. 'And he's dyslexic and has an attention deficit disorder, just like me, so he's found a way to communicate that is very powerful.'" (Source: "Conformity is a fool's paradise": Time Out London (UK), by Ross Fortune. Published: April 24 (- May 12), 2002)