Instruments -

"I like to imagine how it feels for the object to become music. Imagine you're the lid to a fifty-gallon drum. That's your job. You work at that. That's your whole life. Then one day I find you and I say, "We're gonna drill a hole in you, run a wire through you, hang you from the ceiling of the studio, bang on you with a mallet, and now you're in show business, baby!"

Tom Waits (1983): "I tried to add some musical sound effects (Shore Leave) with the assistance of a low trombone to give a feeling of a bus going by, and metal aunglongs the sound of tin cans in the wind, or rice on the bass drum to give a feeling of the waves hitting the shore. Just to capture the mood more than anything of a marching marine or whatever walking down the wet street in Hong Kong and missing his wife back home." (Source: "A Conversation with Tom Waits (Swordfishtrombones)" Island Records music industry white label 12" promo. Date: September, 1983)

Tom Waits (1983): "Some of the stuff I think is a bit of a departure for me. Ehm... the instrumentation is all different, and no saxophones. I used the banjo, accordion, bass-marimba, ehm metal aunglongs ehm you know African squeeze drum, a calliope, a harmonium. Eh, so some of the stuff is a little more exotic." (Source: "Saturday Live Interview With Tom Waits Source: BBC Radio One (UK) by Richard Skinner. October 22, 1983)

Tom Waits (1983): "I've always been afraid of percussion for some reason. I was afraid of things sounding like a train wreck, like Buddy Rich having a seizure. I've made some strides; the bass marimbas, the boobams, metal long longs, African talking drums and so on." (Source: "The Beat Goes On". Rock Bill magazine (USA). October 1983, by Kid Millions)

Brake Drum & Bell Plate (Swordfishtrombones)

TW (1983): "I tried to get a 'chain gang work song'-feel holler (16 Shells From A Thirty-Ought-Six). Get a low trombone to give a feeling of a freight train going by. It's Stephen Hodges on drums, Larry Taylor on acoustic bass, Fred Tackett on electric guitar, Victor Feldman on brake drum and bell plate and Joe Romano on trombone." (Source: "A Conversation with Tom Waits (Swordfishtrombones)" Island Records music industry white label 12" promo. Date: September, 1983)

Tom Waits (1983): "16 Shells - I wanted a chain gang sort of a feel -banging a hammer on an anvil - Huuh - like a work song - Huuh, used brake drum and bell plate and tried to take it outside - certain instruments bring you indoors, other instruments take you outdoors, trying to get that kind of feel on it" (Source: unidentified Swordfishtrombones Interview. 1983/ 1984)

African Talking Drum (Swordfishtrombones)

Tom Waits (1983): "It's (Trouble's Braids) Victor Feldman on African talking drum, Stephen Taylor on parade bass drum and Larry Taylor on acoustic bass." (Source: "A Conversation with Tom Waits (Swordfishtrombones)" Island Records music industry white label 12" promo. Date: September, 1983)

Glass Harmonica (Swordfishtrombones)

Tom Waits (1983): "It's myself at the piano (Rainbirds) and Greg Cohen on acoustic bass. It's a real pleasure to work with him. We have a mutual intuition and it's really good to hear him again. Francis Thumm helped me with glass harmonica introduction." (Source: "A Conversation with Tom Waits (Swordfishtrombones)" Island Records music industry white label 12" promo. Date: September, 1983)

Chromelodeon (Swordfishtrombones)

Tom Waits (1983): "Lately I've found an appreciation of Harry Partch who built and designed all his own instruments and died several years ago in San Diego. His ensemble continues under the name of The Harry Partch Ensemble, a friend of mine, Francis Thumm, plays the chromelodeon." (Source: "Skid Romeo" The Face magazine #41, by Robert Elms. Date: Travelers Cafe/ Los Angeles. September, 1983)

Tom Waits (1983): "That's (Underground) Victor Feldman on bass marimba, Larry Taylor on acoustic bass, Randy Aldcroft on baritone horn, Stephen Hodges on drums and Fred Tackett on electric guitar. I had some assistance from a gentleman by the name of Francis Thumm, who worked on the arrangements of some of these songs with me. Who plays gramolodium with the Harry Partch Ensemble headed up by Daniel Mitchell. So he worked closely on most of these songs" (Source: "A Conversation with Tom Waits (Swordfishtrombones)" Island Records music industry white label 12" promo. Date: September, 1983)

Tom Waits (2000): "I have a good friend, Francis Thumm, who used to play the chromelodeum with The Harry Partch Ensemble and he has been a music teacher for a lot of years, he has been a profound influence on me. He is a river to his people." (Source: "Tradition With a Twist" Blues Revue magazine No. 59 (USA). July/August, 2000 by Bret Kofford)

Bass Marimba (Swordfishtrombones)

Tom Waits (1983): "The bass marimba is an instrument I've grown very fond of lately." (Source: "The Beat Goes On". Rock Bill magazine (USA). October 1983, by Kid Millions)

Bagpipe (Swordfishtrombones)

BC (1983): The lead in the "Town With No Cheer", uses a struck Freedom Bell and bagpipes to convey the lonesomeness and tumbleweed of a ghost-town. TW: "Yeah, Anthony Clark-Stewart played the bagpipes, looked like he was strangling a goose, had to record him separately." (Source: "Tom Waits For No Man". Melody Maker, by Brian Case. Date: October 29, 1983)

Tom Waits (1983): "It's hard to play with a bagpipe player. I had an opportunity to play with my first bagpipe player on this record. You can't play with them. It's like an exotic bird. I love the sound, it's like strangling a goose." (Source: "The Beat Goes On". Rock Bill magazine (USA). October 1983, by Kid Millions)

Tom Waits (1999): "Bagpipe players. With all due respect, forget about it. It's hard for them to play with anyone other than another bagpipe player. And even that is a challenge because they have their own scales. And they're so loud. I ended up telling them to play far, far away" (Source: "Wider public greets Waits' Variations" USA Today: Edna Gundersen. June, 1999)

Freedom Bell (Swordfishtrombones)

Tom Waits (1983): "That's a freedom bell (Town With No Cheer) upfront just trying to get a feel of a ghost town, tumbleweeds and that kind of thing." (Source: "A Conversation with Tom Waits (Swordfishtrombones)" Island Records music industry white label 12" promo. Date: September, 1983)

Harmonium/ Pump Organ (Rain Dogs/ Franks Wild Years)

MT (1985): There hasn't been a lot of piano in either of the two Island records really. TW: No... MT: Does that mean you have been writing more with the guitar? TW: I guess it was some guitar and eh... I rented a little pump organ. It's a little harmonium, and I've been playing the accordion a little bit. I don't know, I've been trying to... It's interesting to write on instruments you don't understand. You know, I pick up a saxophone and bang on a drum... or eh y'know... eh trombone. Anything that I'm unfamiliar with, that is always eh... it's always good for your process. Y'know? MT: You wind up with different ideas for melodies? TW: Yeah, yeah. And kid's toys, you pick up the little instruments that kids have y'know? Bang on those... and it's... The piano always makes me feel like I'm... (Source: "CBC Nightlines Interview" Nightlines on CBC Stereo (Canada). Michael Tearson. New York, late 1985)

Tom Waits (1987): "Little opera line, there (Blow Wind Blow). Got a little carnival thing in it. Glockenspiel, pump organ. Used the bullhorn on it." (Source: "From the set of Ironweed, Tom Waits talks with Rip Rense" New York Post: Rip Rense. Early 1987)

BF (1987): "Waits had his own arsenal of prehistoric keyboards, the type you don't find on records these days. There's his wheezing pump organ, his plodding Mellotron, his tacky Farfisa and, of course, the Optigon."(Source: "Better Waits Than Ever" Music & Sound Output: Bill Forman. Vol. 7, No. 11. October, 1987)

JJ (1992): "You have a harmonium, right? That was in the studio. TW: I have several." (Source: "Tom Waits Meets Jim Jarmusch" Straight No Chaser magazine (UK) Vol. 1, Issue 20 Jim Jarmusch. October, 1992 (published early 1993))

Kid's Toys/ Instruments (Rain Dogs/ Bone Machine)

Tom Waits (1985): "It's interesting to write on instruments you don't understand. You know, I pick up a saxophone and bang on a drum... or eh y'know... eh trombone. Anything that I'm unfamiliar with, that is always eh... it's always good for your process. Y'know?" Q: You wind up with different ideas for melodies? TW: "Yeah, yeah. And kid's toys, you pick up the little instruments that kids have y'know? Bang on those... and it's... The piano always makes me feel like I'm..." (Source: "CBC Nightlines Interview" Nightlines on CBC Stereo (Canada). Michael Tearson. New York, late 1985)

Tom Waits (1992): "Hey, you know, children's instruments - really, the stuff that's available for children - some of it sounds better than the grown up stuff. I bought a drum set for $49.00 and it was unbelievable the sound that we got from it. It's a toy drum set, kick drum, 2 toms, temple block, sizzle cymbal - and it's the tits. I thought it was just top notch. I would have paid more for it but they wouldn't take it. They only wanted $49.00. I said let me give you 100 for this thing just so I feel better." (Source: "KCRW-FM: Evening becomes Eclectic" KCRW-FM radio. Santa Monica. October 9, 1992)

Accordion/ Concertina (Rain Dogs)

JJ (1992): "You have several accordions. TW: One that Roberto Benigni gave me. I don't really play accordion. I can play one-handed passages, with the left hand, but the button side is, uh, I'm lost. JJ: It always seemed real complicated to me. TW: I always remember that accordion player in 'Amarcord' at the end, remember that blind accordion player on the beach? JJ: Yeah. TW: The way he played and threw his head back, the little smoked glasses." (Source: "Tom Waits Meets Jim Jarmusch" Straight No Chaser magazine (UK) Vol. 1, Issue 20 Jim Jarmusch. October, 1992 (published early 1993))

JJ (1992): "I think you have a little (bandoneon) in your house, too. A little squeeze box?" TW: "Concertina. Bandoneon I don't have." (Source: "Tom Waits Meets Jim Jarmusch" Straight No Chaser magazine (UK) Vol. 1, Issue 20 Jim Jarmusch. October, 1992 (published early 1993))

Bullhorn (Franks Wild Years/ The Black Rider/ Mule Variations)

Q (1987): Your voice sounds very different on this record. There are some kind of rather startling vocal effects here. TW: "I did all my vocals through a police bullhorn. Once you use a bullhorn, Rip, it's hard to go back. There's something about the power it commands and the authority it gave me in the studio over musicians." Q: Now you understand why people become police officers. TW: "When I finally discovered what a bullhorn can do to your whole sound, it was a big moment for me. I'd never sung through a bullhorn. I'd tried to get that effect in other ways. I tried cupping my hands, singing into tin cans, using those 7-dollar harmonica microphones, singing into pipes and there it was. A battery-operated bullhorn. Available at Radio Shack for $29.95." (Source: "From the set of Ironweed, Tom Waits talks with Rip Rense" New York Post: Rip Rense. Early 1987)

Q (1987): It's true you sang several of the new tunes through a police bullhorn? TW: "I've tried to simulate that sound in a variety of ways - singing into trumpet mutes, jars, my hands, pipes, different environments. But the bullhorn put me in the driver's seat. There's so much you can do to manipulate the image, so much technology at your beck and call. But still you gotta make choices. A lot of this stuff is 24-track; I finally allowed that and joined the twentieth century, at least in that regard." (Source: "Tom Waits is flying upside down (on purpose)" Musician: Mark Rowland. October, 1987)

MR (1987): "The current apple of his musical arsenal, for instance, is a police bullhorn, through which Waits fashioned many of the vocals you hear on Frank's Wild Years. Not just any horn, of course, but an MP5 Fanon transistorized megaphone (with public address loudspeaker). "It's made in Taiwan," Waits adds proudly." (Source: "Tom Waits is flying upside down (on purpose)" Sidebar. Musician: Mark Rowland. October, 1987)

BF (1987): "Another innovation on Frank's Wild Years is the prevalence of the bullhorn, which Waits sings through on at least four cuts. TW: "Well, I tried to obtain that same sound in other ways, by using broken microphones, singing into tin cans, cupping my hands around the microphone, putting the vocal through an Auratone speaker, which is like a car radio speaker, and then miking that. Practically even considered at one point making a record and then broadcasting the record through like a radio station and then having it come out of the car and then mike the car ... and then it just became too complicated, you know? So a bullhorn seemed to be the answer to it all."(Source: "Better Waits Than Ever" Music & Sound Output: Bill Forman. Vol. 7, No. 11. October, 1987)

PT (2000): "Hitting a hotel room and recording this into a boombox, as Waits did, is clearly a low-fi approach, just as recording a group of musicians outside with an old shotgun mic is. Waits also sang a few things through an amplified megaphone on Chocolate Jesus, and through a two-foot long PVC pipe on Get Behind The Mule." (Source: "California Screamin'" Audiomedia magazine (UK), by Paul Tingen. February, 2000)

Leslie Bass Organ Pedals (Franks Wild Years)

Tom Waits (1987): "Little Jamaican shoeshine music, there (Hang On St. Christopher). Kind of a depraved Vaudeville train announcer. Ummm. . . It was really great to see Bill Schimmel, classically trained at Juilliard, on his hands and knees, playing the pedals of the B-3 organ with his fists. Working up a sweat. It was worth it just for that. Has kind of a little bit of a North African horn action going on --- that's Ralph Carney and Greg Cohen." (Source: "From the set of Ironweed, Tom Waits talks with Rip Rense" New York Post: Rip Rense. Early 1987)

MR (1987): "Cohorts include guitarist Marc Ribot, percussionist Michael Blair, bassist and horn arranger Greg Cohen, Ralph Camey on saxophone and William Schimmel on a variety of equipment, from accordion to Leslie bass pedals. Waits' instruments include pump organ, guitar, mellotron, even something called the optigon." (Source: "Tom Waits is flying upside down (on purpose)" Musician: Mark Rowland. October, 1987)

Tom Waits (1987): "I want to take the Leslie bass pedals and raise them up to a kitchen table so you can play them with your fists (on stage). Which is what we did in the studio on "Hang On St. Christopher. " I'm trying to put together the right way of seeing the music. I worry about these things. If I didn't, it would be easier." (Source: "Tom Waits is flying upside down (on purpose)" Musician: Mark Rowland. October, 1987)

Q (1987): Still, a bassline played using the footpedals of a Hammond organ? TW: "I used upright bass for so long, it's hard for me to find an electric bass that I like," he explains. "So that was the closest I could get. It's like a drum with a note in it, you know, real fat and out of focus. Bill Schimmel, the accordion player, played them with his hands. I'm thinking of taking them on the road and raising them to the level of a marimba." (Source: "Better Waits Than Ever" Music & Sound Output: Bill Forman. Vol. 7, No. 11. October, 1987)

Tom Waits (1987): "Things that happened in those sessions were really good. Especially when people were playing instruments they weren't familiar with. I had Ralph Carney, the sax player, on several cuts where he played three saxes at once. And then Bill Schimmel playing the pedals, Greg Cohen playing alto horn... Sometimes approaching an instrument you're unfamiliar with, the discovery process is good."(Source: "Better Waits Than Ever" Music & Sound Output: Bill Forman. Vol. 7, No. 11. October, 1987)

Optigan(Franks Wild Years/ Mule Variations):

Tom Waits (1987): "Kind of a floor show --- yeah, that was a little Louis Prima influence there (Straight To The Top---Rhumba). Louis Prima in Cuba. A little pagan. Not so Vegas --- more pagan. Like a guy who is obviously not going straight to the top, but the fact that he feels as though he is makes you almost believe that he might be; that somebody like that is going to burn a hole in something - but certainly not the business. Probably himself. We used the Optigon on that." (Source: "From the set of Ironweed, Tom Waits talks with Rip Rense" New York Post: Rip Rense. Early 1987)

Tom Waits (1987): "It's (The Optigon) one of the early organs created for home use. Where you have a program disc that you put inside the organ, and it creates a variety of sound worlds for you to become part of. Like they have the Tahitian/Polynesian number complete with birds and waterfall. And you can be a 32-piece orchestra --- instant adagio for strings, you know. There's a cabaret setting, a little jazz thing with a kind of Charlie Byrd feel to it." Q: "How did you use it on "Straight To The Top---Rhumba?" TW: "I believe it was set on the outdoor tropical thing. Rainforest. Don't try this at home yourself . . . They have these little floppy discs, a little door, and you put one in, close the door and . . . the magic happens." (Source: "From the set of Ironweed, Tom Waits talks with Rip Rense" New York Post: Rip Rense. Early 1987)

MR (1987): "Waits also plays a variety of keyboards, including a Brunello de Montelchino pump organ, a Farfisa organ and the famous Optigon, a keyboard made between 1968 and 1972 and marketed by Penney's stores. The Optigon plays pre-recorded sounds, which can be selected from its library; Tom particularly likes "Polynesian village" and "romantic strings." (Source: "Tom Waits is flying upside down (on purpose)" Sidebar. Musician: Mark Rowland. October, 1987)

BF (1987): "Waits had his own arsenal of prehistoric keyboards, the type you don't find on records these days. There's his wheezing pump organ, his plodding Mellotron, his tacky Farfisa and, of course, the Optigon (Source: "Better Waits Than Ever" Music & Sound Output: Bill Forman. Vol. 7, No. 11. October, 1987)

Tom Waits (1999): "That's (The Optigon) a mid-'60s keyboard that used floppy disks with optical filaments. It's like everything else in popular music: It finally washes up in the Salvation Army 20 years later, and someone picks it up, brings it home and makes a hit record out of it. Bury me, then dig me up-that's like the code of popular music." (Source: "Tom Waits for no man" Time Out New York nr. 187: Brett Martin. April 22-29, 1999)

Glockenspiel (Franks Wild Years, Alice)

Tom Waits (1987): "Little opera line, there (Blow Wind Blow). Got a little carnival thing in it. Glockenspiel, pump organ. Used the bullhorn on it." (Source: "From the set of Ironweed, Tom Waits talks with Rip Rense" New York Post: Rip Rense. Early 1987)

Mellotron (Franks Wild Years)

Tom Waits (1987): "Kathleen started out with the melody on that (Please Wake Me Up). It's just a little lullaby of some kind. With mellotron, baritone horn, upright bass." (Source: "From the set of Ironweed, Tom Waits talks with Rip Rense" New York Post: Rip Rense. Early 1987)

TW (1987): "The mellotron, I've been hearing about over the years, and I've always been afraid of it. You know, when you hit a key, you actually get that particular note taped on a particular instrument. So when you hit the note, it feels like you're tapping somebody on the shoulder and they begin to play. It's very real. Dream real. Most of the instruments on the tracks, though, can be found in any pawn shop. I haven't completely joined the 20th century." (Source: "From the set of Ironweed, Tom Waits talks with Rip Rense" New York Post: Rip Rense. Early 1987)

Tom Waits (1987): "I've always liked the Mellotron as well. The Beatles used it a lot, Beefheart used it a lot. They're real old and they're not making them anymore. A lot of them pick up radio stations, CB calls, television signals and airline transmitting conversations. And they're very hard to work with in the studio because they're unsophisticated electronically. So it's almost like a wireless or a crystal set."(Source: "Better Waits Than Ever" Music & Sound Output: Bill Forman. Vol. 7, No. 11. October, 1987)

Tom Waits (1989): "I love that thing the Mellotron so much. I just used one yesterday. (Its owner) guards it with his life because it's such an exotic bird, it's a complete dinosaur, and every time you play it it diminishes. It gets old and eventually will die, which makes it actually more human, you're working with a musician that is very old, he's only got a couple more sessions left. It increases the excitement of it. And that great trombone sound... Those Mellotrons, the first time I actually played one, it really thrilled me. It's like you touched somebody on the shoulder, everytime I touch you on the shoulder I want you to play a note. It was that real." (Source: "Eavesdropping on Elvis Costello and Tom Waits" Option Magazine. July/ August, 1989)

PD (2002): To add to the songs' (Alice/ Blood Money) other-wordliness, Waits uses the Mellotron (an early synthesiser), which had its heyday in the 1970s in bands such as the Moody Blues, and his latest "found objects", such as a 1929 pneumatic calliope (an old circus instrument with 57 whistles) and a dried boomerang seed pod from a rare Indonesian tree." (Source: "Lying in Waits" The Age (Australia) by Patrick Donovan. Published: May 10, 2002)

Prepared Piano (Franks Wild Years)

TW (1987): "Oh, yeah, a little Edith Piaf attempt (More Than Rain). There's prepared piano on it". Q: How was it prepared? TW: "Lightly sauteed. Francis Thumm plays the strings with a nickel. Almost like you'd play a mandolin. It's in there somewhere." (Source: "From the set of Ironweed, Tom Waits talks with Rip Rense" New York Post: Rip Rense. Early 1987)

Prepared Guitar (Franks Wild Years/ Bone Machine)

Tom Waits (1987): "He (Marc Ribot) prepares his guitar with alligator clips, and has this whole apparatus made out of tin foil and transistors that he kinda sticks on the guitar. Or he wraps the strings with gum, all kinds of things, just to get it to sound real industrial."(Source: "Better Waits Than Ever" Music & Sound Output: Bill Forman. Vol. 7, No. 11. October, 1987)

Tom Waits (1992): "He's (Marc Ribot) big on the devices. Appliances, guitar appliances. And a lot of 'em look like they're made out of tinfoil and, y'know, it's like he would take a blender, part of a blender, take the whole thing out and put it on the side of his guitar and it looks like a medical show...that look. And the sound seemed to come from, the way it looked and the way it sounded seemed to be the same. (He works with) alternative sound sources, he turns his guitar into an adventure." (Source: "Tom Waits Meets Jim Jarmusch" Straight No Chaser magazine (UK) Vol. 1, Issue 20 Jim Jarmusch. October, 1992 (published early 1993))

Farfisa Organ (Franks Wild Years)

MR (1987): "Waits (also) plays a variety of keyboards, including a Brunello de Montelchino pump organ, a Farfisa organ and the famous Optigon, a keyboard made between 1968 and 1972 and marketed by Penney's stores." (Source: "Tom Waits is flying upside down (on purpose)" Sidebar. Musician: Mark Rowland. October, 1987)

BF (1987): "Waits' unconventional approach to recording doesn't end with his choice of instruments. "Telephone Call from Istanbul" goes rollicking along with banjo, guitar, bass, drums and the faint ghost of Waits improvising away on that cheesy Farfisa. When the track is nearly over, the Farfisa kicks in full strength, catapulting the listener into some hellish Turkish rollerskating rink. "I usually don't like to isolate the instruments," says Waits, explaining the appearance of the ghost early in the track. "On that song, I pulled out the Farfisa and then just put it in very hot at the end, just so it sounded kind of Cuban or something."(Source: "Better Waits Than Ever" Music & Sound Output: Bill Forman. Vol. 7, No. 11. October, 1987)

Conundrum (Bone Machine):

Tom Waits (1992): "I wanted to explore more machinery sounds." So Waits commissioned a percussion rack called the Conundrum. TW: "It looks like some kind of perverted giant Spanish iron cross or something." The results include "In the Colosseum," which sounds like someone's hammering and clamoring in the next room, and "The Ocean Doesn't Want Me," a Ken Nordine-meets-Sea Hunt recitation about a foiled suicide attempt, haunted by the muffled clang of a giant iron chain knocking against an underwater pier. (Source: "Composer, musician, performer, actor Tom Waits..." Pulse!: Derk Richardson. September, 1992)

Tom Waits (1992): "I have a lot of violent impulses. It gets channeled into music. I like to play drums when I'm angry. At home I have a metal instrument called a conundrum with a lot of things hanging off it that I've found - metal objects - and I like playing it with a hammer. I love it. Drumming is therapeutic. I wish I'd found it when I was younger." (Source: "Tom Waits at work in the fields of the song" Reflex, issue 28: Peter Orr. October 6, 1992)

Tom Waits (1992): "On this (In The Colosseum) we used the Conundrum. This was an instrument that was built for me by a neighbour of mine who's a sculptor and a welder. It's just an iron cross with a lot of metal hanging off of it. it sounds like a jail door closing behind you." (Source: "KCRW-FM: Evening becomes Eclectic" KCRW-FM radio. Santa Monica. October 9, 1992)

TW (1992): "Serge Ettienne built that (Conondrum), a friend of mine. It was, it's really... It's just a metal configuration, like a metal cross. It looks a little bit like a Chinese torture device. It's a simple thing, but it makes... It give you access to these alternative sound sources. Hit 'em with a hammer. Sounds like a jail door. Closing. Behind you. I like it. You end up with bloody knuckles, when you play it. You just, you hit it with a hammer until you just, you can't hit it any more. It's a great feeling to hit something like that. Really just, slam it as hard as you can with a hammer. It's good therapeutic, and all that." (Source: "KCRW-FM: Morning becomes Eclectic" KCRW-FM radio. Santa Monica. October 12, 1992)

JJ (1992): "And that metal frame with the metal pieces on it that you were playing yesterday? TW: The conundrum. JJ: The conundrum? It's something you built? TW: No, Serge Etienne, a guy that lives right here. (points out the car window) JJ: In fact is that Serge right there? TW: That's Serge. JJ: The guy in the t-shirt? TW: Yeah... JJ: He's got some motor bikes back there, too. TW: Yeah, he drives motorcycles. He created a car out of a motorbike. He built a car frame around a...motorcycle. Out of fiberglass and styrofoam, and it's very light. It looks like those cars that we saw at the carnival the other night going around on the little track. JJ: And the conundrum...did you find those metal pieces and have him make it for you, or did he build the instrument himself? TW: He built it and gave it to me as a gift. I said I need some sounds I can use in the studio that are just metal sounds, a variety and range of vibrations I can use. It really does sound like a jail door closing if you hit it right. JJ: Yeah. It sounded amazing. So many different sounds out of it." (Source: "Tom Waits Meets Jim Jarmusch" Straight No Chaser magazine (UK) Vol. 1, Issue 20 Jim Jarmusch. October, 1992 (published early 1993))

Tom Waits (1992): "I like things that weren't intended to be instruments being used as instruments. Things that have never been hit before. So I'm always looking for those things; things that have been out in a field somewhere, or that you find in the gutter. I bring those things home. Well, I had a couple of things built. The thing that's called a conundrum, it looks like a big iron crucifix, and there are a lot of different things that we hang off of it. Crowbars, Tijuana sabers, and found metal objects that I like the sound of. It's a sideline of mine. People have been doing that for years. If you don't like the sound of the drums, you hit the music stand or the chair, or the wall. Or put the microphone in the bathroom and slam the toilet seat down. This is older than dirt, you know. If the room is right, you can get a great sound out of anything."(Source: "Bone Machine Press Kit" Island press kit. Rip Rense. Late 1992)

RR (1992): "As it is, "Bone Machine" utilizes, among other items, clattering sticks, an ancestor of the synthesizer called a Chamberlain, violin and accordion (played by Los Lobos' David Hidalgo) and a device Waits commissioned called a "conundrum" - rusted pieces of farm equipment hung from a huge iron cross that are beat upon and otherwise "played." (Source: "Waits in Wonderland" Image: Rip Rense. December 13, 1992)

RP (1993): "Ever since his film score for Mr. Coppola's "One From the Heart" (1982) and his own ground-breaking album "Swordfishtrombones" (1983), he has been resolutely broadening his musical palette, gravitating toward odd instruments (including a wheezing old proto-synthesizer called the chamberlain and a percussive sound sculpture known as the conundrum) and sonic textures." (Source: "Tom Waits, All-Purpose Troubadour" Robert Palmer, The New York Times: November 14, 1993)

Sticks (Bone Machine)

Tom Waits (1992): "On 'The Earth Died Screaming,' we got sticks and we tried them everywhere. I wanted to try and get some of that sound of pygmy field recordings that I love so much, and we couldn't get it. We tried different places in the room, different microphones, nothing. Different kinds of sticks, sizes of sticks. And then we went outside and just put a microphone on the asphalt and there it was, boom, 'cause we were outside." (Source: "Composer, musician, performer, actor Tom Waits..." Pulse!: Derk Richardson. September, 1992)

Tom Waits (1992): "I like the Earth Died Screaming. We have a pygmy percussion unit on there called the Boners that we formed during the making of it and we recorded outside. Took the microphone outside onto the dirt and put it up and had everybody play sticks on the sidewalk cause we couldn't get the same sound in the studio. It's too resonant." (Source: "KCRW-FM: Evening becomes Eclectic" KCRW-FM radio. Santa Monica. October 9, 1992)

Tom Waits (1992): "That pygmy stuff that you sent me really flipped me! It really got me listening, because we struggled for a couple days with getting the sound of a stick orchestra inside the studio for "Earth Died Screaming". We tried every configuration and position of the microphone, and finally I said, "Well, why don't we go outside, isn't that where all these recordings are made?" And five minutes later we had a mike up, we were hitting it, it was there. It was that simple." JJ: Like out in the parking lot of the studio? TW: ...Right outside the door, yeah. JJ: What kind of sticks were you using? TW: Just 2 by 4's, anything we could find, logs from the firewood. About nine people. Just different people walking by. We'd say, "Come on, play some sticks!" But that pygmy music really sent me." (Source: "Tom Waits Meets Jim Jarmusch" Straight No Chaser magazine (UK) Vol. 1, Issue 20 Jim Jarmusch. October, 1992 (published early 1993))

Chamberlin (Bone Machine/ The Black Rider/ Mule Variations/ Alice)

DR (1992): One of the dinosaurs Waits reclaimed on Bone Machine is the Chamberlain, a pre-synthesizer keyboard that taps into analog tape loops of pre-recorded material. TW: "It's stunning, really, I have like 70 voices on the instrument, from horses to rain, laughter, thunder, seven or eight different trains, and then all the standard orchestral instruments. It's a good alternative if you don't like the sound of the more conventional state-of-the-art instruments - sometimes it's like they've had the air sucked out of them." (Source: "Composer, musician, performer, actor Tom Waits..." Pulse!: Derk Richardson. September, 1992)

JJ (1992): Explain the Chamberlain. The first keyboard sampling instrument. The Chamberlain 2000. TW: It's a 70-voice tape loop, it's a tape recorder, an elaborate tape recorder with a keyboard. JJ: What year was it made? TW: I think maybe '60, '61 or '62. Musicians were afraid it was gonna put 'em out of business, because it was too real. It was like, oh my god... And if somebody had one of these, why ever hire a band? It's too perfect... JJ: Yeah, but that's what they say about synthesizers now. And people would still rather hear the real instruments. TW: A lot of scores are done on a synthesizer. JJ: I like the Chamberlain because it sounds like it breathes somehow. Maybe it's the action of the keys that you once showed me that cause a delay, so that it changed the way you played. TW: It changes the physicality of your approach to the instrument, because the keyboard is not easy (to play). It goes down too far, your fingers get stuck down there and can't get back up. JJ: They were made in L.A.? TW: Yeah. By Richard Chamberlain. Not the actor (laughs). There's a bicycle chain in it, and if the tape gets on the other side of the chain it can damage the tape. Tchad Blake actually spent four or five hours working on it, repairing it. (That's why I say) there are no gamblers in 'Chamberlain Pass'. You get decorated for valor. It's like operating on a flamingo. You don't even know where the heart is, nothing. If you touch there, you know, the world will end. If you touch this tape here, I dunno, you may lose your hand. It has that kind of danger about it. JJ: How do you program tapes on it? TW: They just move to a different place on the tape. They give you about a 12-second sample that's the length of time it takes for the tape to move through the head, and give you about three feet of quarter-inch tape. JJ: You've got two of them, right? TW: I've got one Mellotron and one Chamberlain, and the Chamberlain I have is a prototype. So it's made with found electronic objects. JJ: How many were made? TW: Well, ultimately it was mass produced, and they were out there like Fender Rhodes, only on a much smaller scale. But they were marketed, advertised and sold in music stores, and they had displays, and everyone heard this name Chamberlain. JJ: Did you use it on 'Bone Machine'? TW: Only on two songs, on "The Earth Died Screaming" and "The Ocean Doesn't Want Me". JJ: What other stuff did you use it on previously? TW: I used it a lot on "Frank's Wild Years". (Source: "Tom Waits Meets Jim Jarmusch" Straight No Chaser magazine (UK) Vol. 1, Issue 20 Jim Jarmusch. October, 1992 (published early 1993))

JJ (1992): "You have a Mellotron, and of course, the Chamberlain 2000. TW: Ah, the Chamberlain. It has a full sound effects bank that's thrilling. It has the sound of Superman leaving the window. It has storms. It has wind, rain and thunder. There are three keys right next to each other. What I have is a prototype, so its got whatever he discovered. In fact on some of 'em even, at the end of the sample you hear, "Okay, that's enough." You hear the engineer. JJ: Seriously? Where did you find it? TW: I bought it from three surfers who lived in Westwood who had a full state of the art room filled with every current -- they had decambodeizers -- JJ: Deneutralizers. TW: They had the Tascam 299 with a 300 count back -- JJ: With a hertz shifter. TW: Yeah. JJ: Hooker Headers on it. TW: They were laughing at the Chamberlain. I would have none of it. JJ: Ridiculing it? TW: Ridiculing it. I said, "I will take this from you." I got it for three grand. JJ: They know who you were? TW: No. I was just a guy. They were playing it and laughing at all the sounds it made, and I let them laugh knowing it would soon be mine and I would treat it better. JJ: They probably laughed that you paid that much for it. TW: Yeah. JJ: Little did they know. But then, they'll never know. TW: They'll never know. It's got a variety of trains, it's a sound that I've become obsessed with, getting an orchestra to sound like a train, actual train sounds. I have a guy in Los Angeles who collected not only the sound of the Stinson band organ, which is a carnival organ that's in all the carousels, the sound from that we used on 'Night on Earth', but he also has pitched four octaves of train whistles so that I can play the train whistle organ, which sounds like a calliope. It's a great sound."(Source: "Tom Waits Meets Jim Jarmusch" Straight No Chaser magazine (UK) Vol. 1, Issue 20 Jim Jarmusch. October, 1992 (published early 1993))

MR (1994): "Yet here we are, in the control room where Mike Kloster, the second engineer, is patching in Waits' Chamberlain Music Master 600, a broken-lidded, organ-like contraption with over 70 sounds and voices on tape loops. Waits bought it from some surfers in Westwood who were making fun of the instrument. "I saw it and said, 'I'll take you home now, dear'," Waits recalls. Waits is hoping to coax a woman's voice from the machine, but its wooden pins and spinning chain-driven gears and tape loops are visibly dusty and brittle." (Source: "The music of chance" Spin Magazine: Mark Richard. June, 1994)

Train Airhorn (Bone Machine/ The Black Rider)

JJ (1992): "What's that instrument in your studio that looks like a vacuum cleaner with horns attached to it? TW: Airhorn from a train. JJ: It's one chord? TW: One chord, yeah. I pick up junk when I find it. I wanna get a thing that I can do a stick sound with like eight sticks mounted on a frame, almost like a pitchfork, only the forks would be wood, and on a spring base, so that when you hit it against the ground you get a flam, a stick flam of eight characters. You get the clack, clack, clack, but you'd be able to do it with just one stick, hitting the stick and hitting the sound of eight sticks. I dunno..." (Source: "Tom Waits Meets Jim Jarmusch" Straight No Chaser magazine (UK) Vol. 1, Issue 20 Jim Jarmusch. October, 1992 (published early 1993))

T-Rodimba (Bone Machine/ Alice Play)

Tom Waits (1992): "I'm also interested in alternative sound sources and I'm more and more exploring different things that aren't instruments but that sound great. I've met a lot of people up around where I'm living. There's a quarterly magazine that comes out called Experimental Musical Instruments. It's people who design, build and perform on their own inventions. Para ventricular decapitators and that type of thing. Harry Partch lived in Petaluma for a while and he was always hitting something that wasn't really an instrument but all the instruments that we know had to go through this evolution. There's skin and metal and wood and glass and wind. Basically you're dealing with the same physics that they were dealing with then but because the world is changing and people are finding that there are a lot of recyclable items that are fascinating sound sources. There's a guy up there named Tom Nunn in San Francisco. He built something called a T-rodimba and another thing called the Bug. It's a 3/4 inch plywood sound base and these enormous metal rods that come out of it. It sounds like - it's like metal and wood, somewhere in the middle of metal and wood. It has a great sound. So I'm always listening for that stuff." (Source: "KCRW-FM: Evening becomes Eclectic" KCRW-FM radio. Santa Monica. October 9, 1992)

RR (1992): "Moments prior to this interview, Waits was packing his suitcases with socks, underwear - and experimental musical instruments called Wind Wands, photon clarinets, PVC Membrane saxophones, a Waterphone and something called a T-Rodimba... The "Alice" instruments, Waits excitedly points out, were built by "real pioneers" of music living in the Bay Area: Richard Waters (the Waterphone, a polytonal metal instrument filled with water), Tom Nunn (the T-Rodimba, a conglomeration of plywood and hardware with a violin pick-up), Darrel DeVore (Wind Wands, "which sound like Orville and Wilbur"), Bart Hopkins (PVC Membrane saxophones, which are too complex to explain succinctly) and Reed Ghazala (photon clarinets, which are played by beams of light bouncing off light-sensitive keys)." (Source: "Waits in Wonderland" Image: Rip Rense. December 13, 1992)

The Bug (Bone Machine/ Alice Play)

Theremin (Alice Play)

Tom Waits (2002): "The best part about it (1992 staging of Alice) was that we had a woman from Moscow who played the theremin who was the granddaughter of Leon Theremin, the man who invented the instrument," Waits recalls of the original production. "She was like a little Russian doll, and she was just amazing. You'd think Leon Theremin's granddaughter would have a rosewood or ebony theremin with inlaid mother of pearl, but hers looked like a hot plate. It was painted in a drab color with somebody's initials carved into it, and a car aerial protruding from the box. Inside, all the electrical connections and circuitry were attached with cut-up pieces of a beer can, folded over the wires. She was a true Russian, the musical equivalent of the good butcher who uses every part of the cow." (Source: "2 albums at once? That's Waits' way Chicago Tribune (USA) by Greg Kot. Published: May 5, 2002)

Tom Waits (2002): "We tried to find a thereminfor Alice (the album), but we were unable to find anyone locally that was really accomplished. The woman that played in the original Alice orchestra we found was the granddaughter of Leon Theremin. She was really amazing. You would imagine someone like that would have some really sophisticated instrument, but she brought this thing that looked like a hotplate with a car aerial coming out of it. She opened it up, and inside, all the connections between the circuits were established with cut-up little pieces of beer can wrapped around the wires. All the paint was worn off, but when she played it, it was like Jascha Heifetz. They're doing experiments with the theremin now. The sound waves you experience when you play it have therapeutic value." (Source: "Tom Waits" The Onion online magazine (USA) by Keith Phipps. Volume 38, issue 20. Published: May 29, 2002)

Tom Waits (2002): "In the original orchestra for Alice, we used a theremin player, Lydia, the granddaughter of Leon Theremin. You figure someone like that would have this rosewood, ebony and mother-of-pearl theremin. Hers looked like a hotplate with chipped house paint and a car aerial coming up out of the corner. It was hilarious." (Source: "I hope more people misunderstand me" USA Today (USA), by Edna Gundersen. Published: June 17, 2002)

Waterphone (Alice Play):

Tom Waits (1994): "Your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they've been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of their habits or you don't explore, you only play what is confident and pleasing. I'm learning to break those habits by playing instruments I know absolutely nothing about, like a bassoon or a waterphone." (Source: "The music of chance" Spin Magazine: Mark Richard. June, 1994)

MR (1994): "The waterphone is from Waits' collection of exotic instruments. It looks like two pizza pans welded face together with a length of rope-wrapped muffler pipe fitted to the center. Varying lengths of steel rods are staggered around the edges. When water is poured down the muffler pipe into the pizza pans you rop the rods with a mullet or draw a bow across them to achieve deep-sea, science-fiction-movie sounds." (Source: "The music of chance" Spin Magazine: Mark Richard. June, 1994)

Wind Wands (Alice)

PVC Membrane Saxophone (Alice)

Photon Clarinet (Alice)

Tom Waits (1998): "Up where we live there's a lot of people that build their own instruments and that's Harry Partch country up there where we are. He lived in Petaluma for a long time and there seems to be a little enclave of his niche - artists up there that build - instrument builders and sculptors and all that. There's a very interesting guy who lives in Ohio, his name is Q Reed Ghazala and he made something called the Photon Clarinet that is a box with a light sensitive patch on the top and the tone responds to the intensity of light so if you aim a flashlight at it it goes crazy and it sounds like you just threw a lobster on a campfire and then if you bring the lights down it goes kinda hoooooo augghh - down in here. He takes apart toys and puts them back together and they're never the same. There's a lot more conventional guys up there that do like stuff from a hardware store, you know." (Source: "KCRW-FM: Morning becomes Eclectic" KCRW-FM radio. Santa Monica. March 31, 1998)

Swiss Hand Bells (Alice Play, Alice/ Blood Money)

Q (2000): And do you get to play with those European instruments that you enjoy so much? (for Alice theatre play). TW: "Yeah, the bass clarinet and hand bells. That's something I never experienced before, these hand bells. Mostly religious organizations use 'em. Tuned handbells. Everybody has one, and there's like eighteen of you and you ring consecutively and do Christmas music [laughs]. Like little carolers. We get those woven in there. Then there's usual stuff, the pump organ. So yeah, it's got that circus thing, waltzes." (Source: "Another Night At The Opera For Waits" Rolling Stone: Andrew Dansby. November 4, 2000)

JP (2002): "The music drags hymns and parlor songs, blues and ballads into a sonic menagerie that, on the new albums, includes Swiss hand bells, calliope and a four-foot-long Indonesian seed pod, which is "as wide as a Bible," he said, and has "seeds as big as CD's." (Source: "Tom Waits: A Poet of Outcasts Who's Come Inside" New York Times (USA) by Jon Pareles. Published: May 5, 2002)

West African Chumbus/ Dousengoni/ Dobro (Mule Variations)

Q (1999): You use some pretty strange instrumentation here. Where do you find a good chumbus and dousengoni player nowadays? TW: "Oh, that would be Smokey Hormel. He said he was coming up to play on the record and that he was going to bring a station wagon, and I said, "Well, throw some stuff in the back-stuff I've never seen or heard before." [Those are] West African guitars." (Source: "Tom Waits for no man" Time Out New York nr. 187: Brett Martin. April 22-29, 1999)

Tom Waits (1999): "I used to see Smokey (Hormel) when he played with The Blasters in Los Angeles. They'd play this little Chinese restaurant, and I'd go see 'em there. And then Larry Taylor said, Let's get Smokey in here. So Smokey came up to the studio and brought in these West African instruments that he played on 'Low Side Of The Road'. They're these strange instruments made out of branches and gourds." (Source: "Mojo interview with Tom Waits" Mojo magazine: Barney Hoskyns. April, 1999)

Q (1999): And you also brought in Smokey Hormel. There's a couple instruments he plays on this record that I never heard of, the chumbus and dousengoni. TW: "West African." Q: Did he bring those in? TW: "He brought them in. He brought his own." (Source: "Tom Waits '99, Coverstory ATN Addicted to Noise: Gil Kaufman and Michael Goldberg. April, 1999)

PT (2000): "The stark and wistful Pony, mainly just Waits on a pump organ, Smokey Hormel on dobro, and John Hammond on harp (harmonica) is a good example of this natural sound." (Source: "California Screamin'" Audiomedia magazine (UK), by Paul Tingen. February, 2000)

Mouse Tambourine (Mule Variations):

RF (2002): "Instruments utilised include piano, cello, pump organ, hand bells, circular violin, spring drum, marimba, calliope, timpani and mouse tambourine. l ask about the mouse tambourine and he laughs. 'Oh, you know what,' he says, bending over and rolling up his right trouser leg 'See these boots here, they have this buckle,' He wiggles a small silver buckle at the top of his black motorcycle boot. 'Well, during most of the songs I was tapping my foot and there was a lot of room mics in the studio, and so when we listened back to all the songs my wife's going, "What the hell is that?! That *tsk tsk tsk...*"' We just couldn't figure it out. Finally, she said, "Dammit it's those boots. I told you not to wear those boots. It's on everything!" And she got so upset!' He laughs. 'We tried to get rid of it and couldn't, so finally we just had to call it the mouse tambourine." (Source: "Conformity is a fool's paradise" Time Out London (UK) by Ross Fortune. February/ March. Published: April 24 (- May 12), 2002)

Stroh Violin (Alice/ Blood Money):

JB (2002): "On the albums (Alice/ Blood Money), the self-described "sound hound" used some odd instruments, including a Stroh violin (a violin with a horn appendage), a calliope (found by his brother-in-law on a flatbed truck in Iowa) and percussive Indonesian seed pods (with seeds the size of grapefruits)." (Source: "Tom Waits peers through the looking glass on two new discs" Star Tribune (USA) by Jon Bream. February/ March. Published: May 5, 2002)

JS (2002): "Recordings of both scores were made only recently, but ''Alice'' - haunting, jazz-tinged, exotic - came first, performed in 1992. Instrumentation includes Stroh violin (a violin affixed with a brass horn), cello, viola, piano, upright bass, clarinet, marimba, saxophone, trumpet, and drums... On ''Blood Money,'' which debuted in 2000, Waits lost the string section but added a 1929 pneumatic calliope - an old circus instrument with 57 whistles - harmonica, and a dried boomerang seed pod from a rare tree that grows only in Indonesia." (Source: "With morbidity on his mind, Tom Waits makes a double play" The Boston Globe (USA) by Jim Sullivan. Published: May 5, 2002)

GK (2002): To give "Alice" and "Blood Money" their distinctive characters, Waits introduced a few more oddities to his sound-making arsenal: a stroh violin (a violin crossed with a brass horn), a pod (a four-foot seed pod from Indonesia, used as a percussion instrument) and a 1929-vintage pneumatic calliope." (Source: "2 albums at once? That's Waits' way Chicago Tribune (USA) by Greg Kot. Published: May 5, 2002)

Tom Waits (2002): "The Stroh (violin) is a violin with a horn attached to the bridge. And you know, you're aiming at the balcony and it was designed before amplification so the string players could compete with hornplayers in the orchestra pit... They still make 'em. You know, you can get 'em out of a catalogue. But they're no longer as popular as they were, but they were essential and there were probably fist fights in the orchestra pit before the Stroh. Cause now a lot of people consider 'em obsolete but hey, when I see the word obsolete I get in line." (Source: "Interview with Tom Waits" Triple J's 2002 (Australia) radio show hosted by Richard Kingsmill. Aired: May 12, 2002)

Tom Waits (2002): "It's (Stroh violin) a horn attached to the bridge, and it has a hinge on it. It's like a brass flower designed in the same configuration or shape as the old 78 players. You could aim it at the balcony. The string players were disgruntled. They felt they were constantly competing with the brass. It gave 'em a little edge. I don't know, you don't hear it anymore. I guess because before the advent of amplification, you were dealing purely with physics all the time. It's an interesting solution to that problem." (Source: "Tom Waits" The Onion online magazine (USA) by Keith Phipps. Volume 38, issue 20. Published: May 29, 2002)

57-Whistle Calliope (Alice/ Blood Money):

Q (2002): Where does one buy a pneumatic calliope, with 57 whistles? TW: "In Iowa, actually. Back of a flatbed truck. It was a small, red-suspender band, their sleeves held up with elastic, wearing straw hats. Greg Cohen, who's married to my wife's sister and has been my bass player for many years, asks if it's for sale. `Absolutely.' So he gives me the phone number. Says his wife would kill him if he purchased a calliope. So he decided to let my wife kill me, instead. I paid 2 grand for it, and it needed work. It's just like buying a used car . . . a background in car repair would be more advantageous than a background in music in working with it, because it's all hoses and pipes. It took four guys to carry it . . . when we played it in the studio, people for miles around complained of the noise." (Source: "2 albums at once? That's Waits' way Chicago Tribune (USA) by Greg Kot. Published: May 5, 2002)

DC (2002): "Like all Waits' efforts since Swordfishtrombones ('83), it's stylistically varied, with an overall production "patina"--in this case a dry, raspy shibui (the Japanese word for dilapidation) sound personified by the pod (a 4-foot-long Indonesian bean shaker), marimbas and a 57-whistle pneumatic calliope that reverberated for five miles in the Sonoma shack where the CDs were recorded." (Source: "Blood on the looking glass" Chico News and Review (USA) by Dan Cohen. Published: May 7, 2002)

Q (2002): So, did that calliope have a volume control? TW: "No it does not. It's pneumatic, it's ear-bleeding loud. Greg found it. ... He gave me the number and told me to buy it. It took six guys to pick it up put it in the back of an El Camino. Don't ask why, but for some reason all these calliope people live in Iowa--there's a whole coven of calliope people. They congregate like circus people who have settled in Tampa, Flo. ... But [the calliope] is very loud, it's designed to be heard from five miles away. So if you can imagine that, but you're sitting next to it." (Source: "Blood on the looking glass" Chico News and Review (USA) by Dan Cohen. Published: May 7, 2002)

CW (2002): On Blood Money, he solos on a 57-whistle, 1929 circus calliope. Where did he get it? "All these calliope guys live in Iowa, for some reason," he says, "and they're a grumpy group. If you don't know your calliopes, they want nothing to do with you. I made the mistake of describing the whistles as 'pipes' -- and the guy hung up on me! (Source: "A double shot of Waits Globe and Mail (Canada) by Carl Wilson. Published: May 7, 2002)

Tom Waits (2002): "Playing a calliope is an _experience_. There's an old expression, 'Never let your daughter marry a calliope player.' Because they're all out of their _minds_. Because the calliope is so flaming _loud_. Louder than a bagpipe. In the old days, they used them to announce the arrival of the circus because you could literally hear it three miles away. Imagine something you could hear three miles away, and now you're right in front of it, in a studio...playing it like a piano, and your face is red, you're hair is sticking up, you're sweating. You could scream and nobody could hear you. It's probably the most visceral music experience I've ever had. And when you're done, you feel like you should probably should go to the doctor. Just check me over, Doc, I did a couple of numbers on the calliope and I want you to take me through the paces." (Source: "Play It Like Your Hair's On Fire" GQ magazine (USA) by Elizabeth Gilbert. June 2002. Published: May 2002)

Q (2002): You have a legendary love for exotic instruments, yet I'm still surprised you managed to incorporate something as unwieldy as a 1929 pneumatic calliope, which sounds merry and haunted at the same time. TW: "It's ear-bleeding loud. It has all these pipes that look like radiator hoses. If you call the whistles "pipes," by the way, a calliope player will hang up on you. I loved it. You can scream when you're playing it and not be heard. I'd like to see more of it in popular music." (Source: "I hope more people misunderstand me" USA Today (USA), by Edna Gundersen. Published: June 17, 2002)

Indonesian Seed Pod (Alice/ Blood Money):

CW (2002): "Blood Money lives mostly at the harsher end of the Waits emotional scale. From Wilson's adaptation of Georg Buchner's Woyzeck, which comes to New York next fall, it's the tale of a soldier who goes insane after he is played false by the army and his girlfriend. It screeches and roars through rhythmic arrangements for pump organ, sax, bells, bass, drums and a four-foot-long seed pod from the Indonesian Botang tree that Waits's musicians shake like a baby rattle from hell. And its message is brutally clear: Misery is the River of the World ("everybody row!"), Everything Goes to Hell, "life's a mistake all day long . . . you'll never get out alive." (Source: "A double shot of Waits Globe and Mail (Canada) by Carl Wilson. Published: May 7, 2002)

PG (2002): To add to the songs' (Alice/ Blood Money) other-wordliness, Waits uses the Mellotron (an early synthesiser), which had its heyday in the 1970s in bands such as the Moody Blues, and his latest "found objects", such as a 1929 pneumatic calliope (an old circus instrument with 57 whistles) and a dried boomerang seed pod from a rare Indonesian tree." (Source: "Lying in Waits" The Age (Australia) by Patrick Donovan. Published: May 10, 2002)

Q (2002): And where does one find a boomerang seedpod? TW: "On butang trees in Indonesia. The pods are four feet long and they twist like pasta when they dry. There are like 12 massive seeds inside, each bigger than a hockey puck. I love the sound of it, a big, mean, low rattling." (Source: "I hope more people misunderstand me" USA Today (USA), by Edna Gundersen. Published: June 17, 2002)

Microphones/ Recorders, Sampling/ Looping

MR (1987): "Not too surprisingly. Waits prefers "mostly tube stuff' to digital equipment. Microphones of choice include a Ribbon ("Dave Garroway") and RCA high-impedance mikes; Waits usually sings through a Shure Green Bullet (used mostly by harmonica players). Also an Altec 21D vocal mike- "because Sinatra used it." On guitar, Waits likes his Gretsch New Yorker "with old strings" played through an old Fender tweed basement amp. When recording, he says he uses a lot of heavy compression with room sound; to do that he'll sometimes push the track into the room through Auratone speakers, and then mike that. It's not his only technique, "but I don't want to give away all my secrets." (Source: "Tom Waits is flying upside down (on purpose)" Sidebar. Musician: Mark Rowland. October, 1987)

BF (1987): "Likening the sterile confines of the studio to an emergency ward, Waits seems intent on performing some very unorthodox operations. Take "Innocent When You Dream," which appears in two disguises on Frank's Wild Years. The "barroom version" puts across the melancholy melody (reminiscent of a mournful Irish drinking song) by way of pump organ, upright bass, violin and piano. A second version closes out side two, stripped down and scratched up enough to inspire visions of an ancient Victrola. Says Waits: "The '78 version' of that was originally recorded at home on a little cassette player ["the Tascam 244, the one with the clamshell holster"]. I sang into a seven-dollar microphone and saved the tape. Then I transferred that to 24-track and overdubbed Larry Taylor on upright, and then we mastered that. Texture is real important to me; it's like attaining grain or putting it a little out of focus. I don't like cleanliness. I like surface noise. It kind of becomes the glue of what you're doing sometimes."(Source: "Better Waits Than Ever" Music & Sound Output: Bill Forman. Vol. 7, No. 11. October, 1987)

BF (1987): "But don't expect '78 versions' of any of these new songs, for Waits' Tascarn four-track is gone, clamshell holster and all. "Stolen in New York," he shakes his head, suppressing a smile. "That's why I left - they beat me up." (Source: "Better Waits Than Ever" Music & Sound Output: Bill Forman. Vol. 7, No. 11. October, 1987)

Tom Waits (1985): "Nowadays, if you want a certain sound you don't have to get it now, you can get it later. When you're mixing, electronically. I wanted to get it now, so I felt I cooked it and I ate it. You can establish percussion sounds later electronically. But I ended up banging on things so I felt that it really responded. If I couldn't get the right sound out of the drum set we'd get a chest of drawers in the bathroom and hit it real hard with a two-by-four. Things like that. That's on "Singapore". Those little things made me feel more involved that sampling on a synthesizer." (Source: "Tom Waits For No Man" Spin Magazine: Glenn O'Brien. November, 1985)

MR (1994): "It is nearing midnight at the Sound Factory. Waits would like to add a guitar track to the song "Crossroads". He likes the feel of the hallway outside the studio so Kloster and Dawes set him up there. Waits doesn't have quite the sound he wants from the arrangement, so Dawes asks if he would like to try something called the transient distortion from an overloaded condenser microphone effect? Translated, this means Waits will play his guitar in the hallway on an old Fender amp recorded through the tiny mikes in a battered 20-year-old boom box." (Source: "The music of chance" Spin Magazine: Mark Richard. June, 1994)

Q (1999): The beginning of "Big In Japan" is one of the more startling sounds you've ever put on record. TW: "I was in Mexico in a hotel, and I only had this little tape recorder. I turned it on, and I started screaming and banging on this chest of drawers really hard, till it was kindling, trying to make a full sound like a band. And I saved that. That was years ago. I had it on a cassette, and used to listen to it and laugh. It sounded like some guy alone in a room, which it was, trying his hardest to sound like a big, loud band. So we stuck that in the front." (Source: "A Q&A about Mule Variations" MSO: Rip Rense. April, 1999)

Q (1999): "Big in Japan" is the first song on Mule Variations and there's some strange sounds the minute you put the CD on. Is that a sample of your own vocal percussion? What's happening there? TW: "It's just a contest I had with myself in a hotel room. I wanted to see if I could sound like a band all by myself, without any instruments. So I stood banging on the chest of drawers and the wall and headboard, just trying to, you know, get that sound -- like that full band sound. That's what I wound up with; looped it and sampled it. Or sampled it and looped it or whatever they call it. " (Source: "Mule Conversations" Austin Chronicle: Jody Denberg. February/ April, 1999)

Tom Waits (1999): "I just started playing around with samples, which is kind of a new world to me. Brought a guy in, DJ Mark "The III Media" Reitman. There's a gospel thing on 'Eyeball Kid', and some Balinese samples." (Source: "Mojo interview with Tom Waits" Mojo magazine: Barney Hoskyns. April, 1999)

TW (1999): "Yeah, they're good guys (Primus) and fearless adventurers. They love adventure. They will play anything, they will do anything. They like the unusual and the bizarre, they're game, they got zeal. We did another song with them called "2:19." It's about a train. We sawed a log in half and took the voomfa, voomfa sound and looped it. So we had voomfa, voomfa, which sounded like a train, like a steam-driven train. That song came out great but it didn't make the record." (Source: "Tom Waits '99, Coverstory ATN Addicted to Noise: Gil Kaufman and Michael Goldberg. April, 1999)

PT (2000): "The track Black Market Baby was filled with a Pro Tools loop of record needle noise of a 78rpm record, and guitar distortion pedals were used as effect units in the mix. King also had an old Sony reel-to-reel which was used as a mic pre-amp. mic pre-amps were overdriven and sometimes plugged into each other, and old crystal mics were used." (Source: "California Screamin'" Audiomedia magazine (UK), by Paul Tingen. February, 2000)

JK (2000). "I think Tom definitely feels that analogue has a better overall sound, although I don't think he looks down on digital. For this album he wanted to experiment with playing loops, and the possibility of changing the arrangements on the songs. I suspect he'd been hearing from friends and associates how powerful Pro Tools was and wanted to check it out. But the overall sound of the album is analogue. Pro Tools is just a component. I did some loops, such as Tom's metal dressing bashing on Big In Japan, the Optigon keyboard sound on Lowside Of The Road, and the vinyl needle sound on Black Market Baby. On Filipino Box Spring Hog I actually changed the arrangement of some of the overdubs, although the drum and vocal performance are true to the take. In the latter track there were also some small voices that Tom had recorded into a small toy sampler for kids, and that I sampled in Pro Tools, just like the turntable elements. All this was manipulated in Pro Tools and then laid back to tape." (Source: "California Screamin'" Audiomedia magazine (UK), by Paul Tingen. February, 2000)

Harry Partch

Tom Waits (1983): "Partch was an American hobo and the instruments he made were all built from things that he essentially found on the side of the road, not literally but figuratively. He dismantled and rebuilt his own version of the whole concept of music and its purpose, but I just like the sounds he makes." (Source: "Swordfish Out of Water: Tom Waits" Sounds magazine by Edwin Pouncey. November 15, 1983)

Tom Waits (1983): "The stuff on the new record (Swordfishtrombones) is more - there's no saxophones, tuba, trombone, trumpet, bass marimba, accordion, banjo, electric guitar, harmonium, bass boobams, metal ongulongs, African squeeze drums"(Source: unidentified Swordfishtrombones Interview. 1983/ 1984)

KN (1987): "Harry Partch, sadly deceased, was an American original. An eccentric, that is; a tinkerer, a free spirit, an inventor of instruments and of himself. A nut, in other words. A Californian, like Tom Waits, and like Tom Waits, a man who lived the hobo's life long before he captured it in music. He invented his remarkable 43-tone musical scale, and he invented gorgeous and monumental instruments specifically for playing his odd and glorious music. You may have to grant him a certain grandiosity, a certain tendency toward the making of Major Pronouncements, a certain self-centeredness, a certain extreme certainty. Harry Partch received so little recognition during life, and he required so much of it. He called his musical scale "just intonation," and he felt entirely justified in doing so." (Source: voice over by Ken Nordine for Blow Wind Blow video as published in "Boho Blues" Spin Magazine: Bart Bull. September 1987)

Q (1988): "Who was Harry Partch, and what did he mean to you?" TW: "He was an innovator. He built all his own instruments and kind of took the American hobo experience and designed instruments from ideas he gathered traveling around the United States in the Thirties and 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. He's more interesting. You know, I don't like straight lines. The problem is that most instruments are square and music is always round." (Source: Tom Waits 20 questions" Playboy magazine: Steve Oney. Published: March, 1988)

Tom Waits (1989): "He (Harry Partch) was an American hobo that developed most of his ideas for instruments and tonal inflections from things that he saw and experienced along the road. The diamond mariba, the eroica, the krumelodeon. These were kind of salvage instruments. I think he was part of an old tradition, he was an inventor and innovator and I think the sounds that he made were inherently American because they were made on things people throw away, I guess. That's a real, very useful thing to do." (Source: "Neither Vinyl Nor Film Can Contain Waits" Film Threat magazine 18 (USA), by Steve Dollar. 1989)

Tom Waits (1992): "I'm also interested in alternative sound sources and I'm more and more exploring different things that aren't instruments but that sound great. I've met a lot of people up around where I'm living. There's a quarterly magazine that comes out called Experimental Musical Instruments. It's people who design, build and perform on their own inventions. Para ventricular decapitators and that type of thing. Harry Partch lived in Petaluma for a while and he was always hitting something that wasn't really an instrument but all the instruments that we know had to go through this evolution. There's skin and metal and wood and glass and wind. Basically you're dealing with the same physics that they were dealing with then but because the world is changing and people are finding that there are a lot of recyclable items that are fascinating sound sources." (Source: "KCRW-FM: Evening becomes Eclectic" KCRW-FM radio. Santa Monica. October 9, 1992)

Tom Waits (1999): "He'd (Harry Partch) worked as a migrant worker and had been on the road for half his life, and he was one of those rogue academics who worked outside the matrix. So they feared him and pretended to admire him. Like most innovators, he become gravel on the road that most people drive on. So he was the first one through the door and he gets trampled by the crowd. But nobody has done anything like that since. The idea of designing your own instruments, playing them and then designing your own scale, your own system of music. That's dramatic and particularly for the time that he was doing it. It was rather subversive. It's always fascinating to hear something being played that doesn't sound polished or evolved as an instrument. It still sounds a little bit like you're hitting tractor parts or dumpster door. Or you're still in the kitchen, to an extent. The music has that extra texture to it. And then of course he's very sophisticated and well versed in mythology so it's got that other side to it." (Source: "Tom Waits artist choice" HearMusic.com. October, 1999)

Tom Waits (2002): "He (Harry Partch) was a great forgotten American composer. Like everybody else, I'm captivated by his story. Like how I assume people became captivated with my story. He was a hobo and he found things on the road and turned them into instruments. He created his own instruments, created his own scales, his own music, his own paradigm really. In that sense, I don't rival him. He was very eccentric. He had these industrial water bottles that he called "Cloud Chamber Bowls." You hang them from the ceiling and hit them with a mallet...He did things that no one had ever done and I like that." (Source: "Tom Waits" SOMA magazine (USA) by Mikel Jollett. July, 2002)

Victor Feldman:

Tom Waits (1983): "He (Victor Feldman) suggested instruments I wouldn't have considered - squeeze drums, Balinese percussion, marimba - things I'd always been timid about."(Source: "Tom Waits For No Man". Melody Maker, by Brian Case. Date: October 29, 1983)

Tom Waits (1987): "I used to just write songs and think that was enough. I used to be frightened of the studio. But there's a lot you can do if you don't allow it to intimidate you. It's a laboratory, whatever you bring into it you have to know what you want to do with it. I worked with a lot of good people that helped me. Victor Feldman, the percussionist who just passed away a few months ago, helped me a lot with instruments. I kinda wanted to get away from the standard fare and experiment with some other instruments- Balinese instruments and things like that, boobams and onwongs and African drums, that type of thing. So he helped me a lot." (Source: "Better Waits Than Ever" Music & Sound Output: Bill Forman. Vol. 7, No. 11. October, 1987)

Francis Thumm

Tom Waits (1985): "I have a friend called Francis Thumm who played the Partch chromelodeon. He lives down by the beach in a place called Leisure World. He drinks the Ballantines, loves the Scotch, the 12-year-old single malt. He drinks plenty of it and it's got him into plenty of trouble. Anyway, he showed me Partch had an instrument called the blowboy, it sounded like a train whistle, it was a train whistle only it was his train whistle. It blew from out of bellows, reeds and organ pipes, he could play it with his foot like a pump organ and go 'hooway, hooway'. I swear it was a sound that would break your heart. They said in a little documentary that the instruments he made were so beautiful, they looked like skeletons." (Source: "Hard Rain" New Musical Express magazine. Gavin Martin. October 19, 1985)

Tom Waits (1987): "Oh, yeah, a little Edith Piaf attempt (More Than Rain). There's prepared piano on it". Q: How was it prepared? TW: "Lightly sauteed. Francis Thumm plays the strings with a nickel. Almost like you'd play a mandolin. It's in there somewhere." (Source: "From the set of Ironweed, Tom Waits talks with Rip Rense" New York Post: Rip Rense. Early 1987)

Miscellaneous

Tom Waits (1986): "I'm more interested in things that make noise, I had a pile driver by my window last summer that worked all day, every day and Sundays, and I started making tape recordings of it, and my wife says, 'Jeez Christ, not only do we have to listen to this unnatural sound, now at night, he finally knocks off and you have to play tapes of it!" (Source: "Tom Waits: The Drifter Finds A Home" Rolling Stone: Elliott Murphy. January 30, 1986)

Tom Waits (1992): "I'm exploring more and more things that make a sound but are not traditional instruments. It's a good time to do it, too, because there's a lot of garbage in the world that I can use that is just sitting out there rusting. I can't believe it. I think something is gonna come out of this garbage world we're living in, where knowledge and information are becoming so abstract and the things that used to really work are sitting out there like big dinosaur carcasses, rusting. Something's gonna have to be made out of it that has some value. What can we do? Bury it and live on it?" (Source: "Composer, musician, performer, actor Tom Waits..." Pulse!: Derk Richardson. September, 1992)

Tom Waits (1998): "I always loved that - what I think is a Marxophone is the central instrument on this cut (the Portishead song Sour Times) and I had a Marxophone and I only talked to one other person who also owned a Marxophone - that was Mitchell Froom. It's kind of an adapted futuristic autoharp. It gives you a plectrum sound that comes from vibrating a metal strip with a hammer on the end. So it's kind of like a very narrow strip of metal that functions as a vibrating hammer on the string and it gives you a great sound and they used that and I didn't realize it was a Lalo Schifrin sample but I recognized the sound because every time I move things out in the garage I knock this thing over and it does that when it hits the floor."(Source: "KCRW-FM: Morning becomes Eclectic" KCRW-FM radio. Santa Monica. March 31, 1998)

Tom Waits (1999): "Everything is a potential instrument, it depends on how you use it. I remember I was doing Swordfishtrombones and somebody took a stool -- a metal stool -- and started dragging it across the studio floor to move it out of the way. And I said, "That's really thrilling. Do that again and abundantly and carefully and repeatedly, please." It sounded like bus brakes on a big city bus. So I like things that fall outside of the spectrum of what we consider traditional instruments and acceptable sound. I love all that." (Source: "Tom Waits '99, Coverstory ATN Addicted to Noise: Gil Kaufman and Michael Goldberg. April, 1999)

Tom Waits (1999): "I do all my furniture shopping here (Sonoma County salvage shop)," he says as he wanders through the dusty aisles. He points to a zebra-striped telephone, but appears most excited by a foot-high artillery shell, which he taps robustly with his finger. He likes the sound and says he would like to use it on his next album. Watching this, you wonder if Waits is really interested in all this stuff or if he's just trying to provide colorful atmosphere for the story. The answer comes when the shop owner spots Waits and waves to him with the enthusiasm reserved for one's best customers. "How ya doin' Ray," Waits responds. "Got anything good today?" The owner directs Waits to a New Year's Eve horn from the turn of the century, and Waits' eyes brighten. He gives the horn a few toots and smiles at the sound. He buys it--as well as the artillery shell, a pocket knife for himself and a toy car for one of his three kids." (Source: "Pop music: Tracking an Elusive Character" Los Angeles Times Home Edition, Calender p. 6: Robert Hilburn. June 6, 1999)

DF (1999): He participates in outside projects of exquisite taste and eccentricity... the recent experimental-music collection Orbitones, Spoon Harps & Bellowphones, to which Waits contributed "Babbachichuija," a composition for squeaky doors, a 1982 Singer sewing machine and a washer set on SPIN CYCLE. "I'm the kind of bandleader," says Waits, a keen student and collector of bizarre instruments, "who when he says, 'Don't forget to bring the Fender,' I mean the fender from the Dodge." (Source: "The Resurrection of Tom Waits" Rolling Stone, p. 37-40: David Fricke. June 24, 1999)

Tom Waits (1999): "If you can't pronounce an instrument's name, it's essential. If you never heard of it, if you don't know where it's from, if you don't know how to play it, if you can't even open the case. . . . What's that you say? There are too many strings? Bring it over, we can use it. I'm a collector of instruments, so I'm always looking for something that I haven't experienced." Q: What's the favorite lately? TW: "It's a mechanical autoharp that has a button apparatus that vibrates a hammer on the strings. I haven't used it on one of my records yet, but I will. My attitude is if you're stuck in the studio for a particular sound, chances are you can go out into the yard and find something that will sound better than the drum you've been using. But I don't see that there's anything new about that." (Source: "Reapers and weepers" Metromix Chicago: Greg Kot. August 21, 1999)

Tom Waits (2002): "I like to imagine how it feels for the object to become music. Imagine you're the lid to a fifty-gallon drum. That's your job. You work at that. That's your whole life. Then one day I find you and I say, "We're gonna drill a hole in you, run a wire through you, hang you from the ceiling of the studio, bang on you with a mallet, and now you're in show business, baby!" (Source: "Play It Like Your Hair's On Fire" GQ magazine (USA) by Elizabeth Gilbert. June 2002. Published: May 2002)

Tom Waits (2002): "I like sounds that are not conventionally considered music. We were in the studio doing 'Swordfishtrombones' and we were already trying to find our own musical galaxy. While I was there, someone was fixing a mic, and dragging a chair across the floor and it made the most beautiful sound like, [in a high pitch] "eeeeeehhh". And I was thinking, jeez, that's as musical as anything I heard all day, and I'm here to make music. So maybe I should be paying more attention to the things that are outside what we think we're here to do." (Source: "Tom Waits" SOMA magazine (USA) by Mikel Jollett. July, 2002)

Further reading:
Interviews (complete transcripts)
Instruments (glossary and pictures)