Time Line: 1981 - 1985

1981

1982

Jay S. Jacobs (2000): "Howe himself had seen the writing on the wall. He and Waits were clearly pulling in different directions. "After we did One from the Heart and the sound-track album came out" he recalls, "Tom and I sat down and had a glass of wine at Martoni's. He said, 'I'm trying to write the next record. The problem that I'm having is, I know you so well and everything that I write, I keep thinking to myself, I wonder if Bones is going to like this? Or, I can't write this tune because I don't think you'll like it.' I told him, 'Tom, I shouldn't have any influence on what you create. Yeah, we do know each other really well, and of course you know the things that I like.' He said, 'I really want to get away from composing on the piano, because I feel like I'm writing the same song over and over again'. While assuring Tom that he was in no such rut Bones did concede that if he truly felt that way, there was no "more rational reason for two people to stop working together than this. So, we sort of shook hands and said, 'Okay, that's it.' I just told him, 'Look, if you ever want to make another record with me, you know the kind of records I'll make. Call me, and wherever I am, whatever I'm doing, I'll stop it and make a record with you.' Because that was really, really fun. I miss doing that with him. I've never found anybody I've enjoyed doing that with as much as Tom." So, over an amicable glass of wine, a long and fruitful partnership was dismantled. Howe adds that Kathleen played a role in the demise of the relationship, as well. "She really separated him from everybody in his past. And, frankly, it was time for that for Tom. Kathleen has been very good for him. He was never as wild as many people have said, but he was living in a motel and not really taking that good care of himself. It really was time. She separated him from everybody. Unfortunately, I was in the cut. I was from the past." (Source: "Wild Years, The Music and Myth of Tom Waits". Jay S. Jacobs, ECW Press 2000)

Waits wins a lawsuit against the LA Police Department (May 27, 1977).

Tom Waits (1982): "Yeah, finally did. I was picked up at a restaurant by 3 cops and accused of challenging to fight, fighting in a public place, being drunk in public. It was insulting and embarrassing, so I felt it was my duty to make sure the record reflected the truth of the matter. It dragged on for 5 years before I got my day in court, with a little arbitration hearing, and I finally got a small settlement ($7,500)." (Source: "Tom Waits on One From The Heart". Steve Pond. Rolling Stone p. 44. April 1, 1982). Further reading: Waits And The Cops

1983

Brian Case (1983): "Now firmly established as television's most sheerly embarrassing chat show since they last allowed Eamonn Andrews to confuse a motley selection of guests on the air, Channel 4's "Loose Talk" clambered towards new peaks of unintentional hilarity last week when croaking old wordsman Tom Waits ran rings around sloth-witted presented Steve "Shakespeare" Taylor. Taylor had heard that Tom liked living in dives. "Ya mean places where they got swimmin' pools?" Waits groaned. Steve squirmed; no, he meant, well, you know, places that were, like, low-rent. "Low-rent? Ya mean somewhere like Rangoon or Iowa?" Poor old Shakespeare: this series alone he's been wound up more times than a shiftworker's alarm clock. In a later confrontation with Steve's co-presenter (some oily oik drafted in from Private Eye), Tom came perilously close to losing what little remained of his patience. Admitting that he was in Blighty just to promote his new LP, Waits was told by the PE lardpot that he should be promoting it more volubly. "I'll promote it my own damn way," snarled Waits." (Source: "Tom Waits For No Man". Melody Maker magazine, by Brian Case. Date: October 29, 1983)

Edwin Pouncey (1983): "Tom's storytelling technique suits the image many people have of him down to the ground. Mention him to many people and they will probably shoot back the image of a down-heeled alcoholic scraping for a bottle of cheap wine behind the keyboard of some smoke filled, dock-side bar. It was certainly the image chat host Steve Taylor was expecting when Tom turned up to promote his brilliant Swordfishtrombones album on Channel 4's ghastly, but masochistically watchable Loose Talk show recently. Taylor's "research" (ie: skimming through Face and NME interviews) went horribly awry as Tom proceeded to turn the gabbling cuckoo's beat-speak into the nonsense it ultimately was. For those of you who missed this conversation at cross purposes it went something as follows; Steve: "What part does this infamous image that we have of you over here play? This sort of low life, American..." Tom: "I beg your pardon?" Steve: "You've lived in some dives have you not?" Tom: "I don't know if I translate in my language. Do you mean a place with a pool?" Steve: "No not really. I'm thinking of more of the other side of the housing scale really, something pretty rough. Low rent? Is that an American expression?" Tom: "Low rent. You mean like Rangoon?" Steve: "I'm thinking of the seedier parts of LA probably." Tom: "You mean like a farming community?" Steve: (getting impatient now): "No, not that kind of seed. Have a go, have a guess. Try and guess what I'm getting at, yeah? Tom: "I think what you're trying to ask me is, uhhh, have I ever lived in a cheap hotel?" His cool thus blown, Steve's brain is far too fuddled to conduct a sensible, patient interview where much of Tom's true personality would have eventually trickled out. I suppose Tom Waits makes for a lousy young people's chat show guest. He is an artist and television moves too fast, before Tom had time to get his head out of his shell his slot was over and Steve's bandwagon had rolled on to its next fashionable guest." (Source: "Swordfish Out of Water: Tom Waits". Sounds magazine by Edwin Pouncey. November 15, 1983)

1984

Waits moves from LA to New York ("A burned-out loft off West 14th Street in Little Spain"). In New York Waits gets acquainted with: John Lurie, Mark Ribot, Jim Jarmusch (they apparently met at a party held in honor of Soho artist Jean Michel Basquiat, November, 1984) and Robert Frank. "I'd write and go down to the Westbeth building (Greenwich village) where I shared a room with John Lurie and his brother Evan. We'd go down there at night and write songs."

Barney Hoskyns (2009): “The Waitses first discussed the idea of moving to New York in early 1984. Three factors contributed to the decision. First, Tom was now signed to a label whose US offices were located on the East Coast. Second, the "Frank's Wild Years" musical stood a significantly greater chance of getting off the ground as an off-Broadway production than it did of seeing the light in Los Angeles. And third, Jersey girl Kathleen's parents lived just half an hour outside Manhattan... With baby Kellesimone in tow, Waits and wife installed themselves in a loft in "Little Spain," just off West 14th Street near Union Square. The neighbourhood was hip and happening, with an array of unassuming establishments Courmey's, the Ricky Ricardo Lounge, the Salvation Army Diner, the Babalu Bar and Grill to hold court in. "That's what we want here, that kind of diner ambience," Waits told an interviewer from London as he strolled into Fanelli's in SoHo on a snowy day in early 1984. That morning, he said, he'd been at the piano working on songs for the "Frank's Wild Years" musical. The demented energy of Manhattan took its toll on Waits, who never quite adjusted to the city's feverish pace and missed the inviolable space provided in California by automobiles. For a while he drove a Cadillac bequeathed him by Kathleen's dad, but "I was towed three or four times, just crazy ... $1,500 worth of tickets." (Source: “Lowside Of The Road: A Life Of Tom Waits" by Barney Hoskyns. Faber/ Broadway, 2009)

Jay S. Jacobs (2000): "Waits had met Marianne Faithfull when they were both working on producer Hal Willner's Lost in the Stars tribute to Kurt Weill (Faithfull's contribution was "The Ballad of the Soldier's Wife"). Waits was attracted to Faithfull's style; her voice, much like his own, had been ravaged by hard living and had evolved into a raspy croak. The two became phone friends, holding transatlantic musical debates. The idea of working together naturally came up. And, for the first time, Waits felt that he could produce the work of another artist. He offered to produce Faithfull's next album, a concept piece that he wanted to call Storeyville, after New Orleans's historic red-light district. Waits pictured Faithfull portraying an aging hooker who tells her story in song, a kind of Prostitute's Revenge. In her autobiography, Faithfull admits to having had mixed feelings about the concept. "It's always curious the way people see me, which is always in a much more sexual light than I see myself. Much as I'd love to believe the sexpot image of me, I don't really see myself as an unrepentant hooker belting out blues from the bordello." (Source: "Wild Years, The Music and Myth of Tom Waits". Jay S. Jacobs, ECW Press  2000)

Marianne Faithfull (1994): "A project like this requires weeks and weeks of sitting around listening to old records, and the person you usually end up working with is the one who has the time. Tom wanted to do it, but he was busy having a life: getting married, having children, making records." (Source: "Faithfull: An Autobiography", Marianne Faithfull/ David Dalton, 1994)

John Lurie: "Jean Michel Basquiat was a really good friend of mine, probably my best friend at this particular time and my band was about to go on tour so he throws this dinner party for me. Now, at the dinner party was Andy Warhol, Steve Ribel, Bianca Jagger, Julianne Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, Wim Wenders, Tom Waits, Jim Jarmusch and like 30 other people - everybody's a heavyweight in some area. This party was just a great party. So, Andy Warhol writes in his diaries that this party was THE BEST PARTY he's been to in, like, 5 or 10 years and he was going to stop hanging out with faggots and start hanging out with artists because they are just so much more elegant and interesting. Now, the woman who transcribed his goddamned diaries turned me and Tom Waits into "John Waite". Do you realize a person could retire from nightlife FOREVER if Andy Warhol said your party was THE BEST PARTY he's been to in 10 years!! I really got screwed, boy. Her name's Pat. If you put her in the article, misspell Pat." (Rebirth of the Cool - the Toast chat with John Lurie of the Lounge Lizards by Melissa Maristuen. Toastmag)

1985

Marc Ribot (1999): "The first tour was really brilliant - we did an entire week in London at this West End theatre at the beginning of the tour - and intensely creative, but one which also drove us crazy. Because Tom never had a set list. Normally if you're playing in a small club you can get by without a set list, but Tom changed it every single night. He was playing these fairly large theatres like he was playing in a tiny bar. We would rehearse intensely every day rather than soundcheck. I think Greg Cohen may have had a talk with him because on the second tour we more or less stuck to a set list. On the first tour there were a lot of brilliant mistakes because of that, when you don't quite know what to expect. Everybody gets stressed out on tours. On the Rain Dogs tour he didn't really know whether people would like his new direction. So he was really driving himself very hard, putting a lot of pressure on himself - productive pressure that went into perfecting the music. But it was fun. We were all in the bus together, we hung out and talked about music." (Source: "Tom Wait's Right-Hand Man" by Sylvie Simmons. Mojo Magazine. April, 1999)

Further reading
Performances 1981-1985
Pictures 1981-1985
Interviews