Wild Years (13 page)

At the trial, Waits — whom
Rolling Stone
accused of being “uncharacteristically well groomed”
⁶
— responded to the charge that he had uttered profanities at police during the showdown at Duke's, admitting that he'd “growled a little under my breath. It was somewhere between a harrumph and a Bronx Cheer.”
⁷
These strange proceedings lasted three days. Waits's lawyer, Terry Steinhart, called to the stand eight eyewitnesses who corroborated Waits's and Weiss's stories and confirmed that the police report was largely fabricated. They also described the abuse that Waits and Weiss had suffered at the hands of the deputies. One of these witnesses was Mike Ruiz, a member of a rock band called Milk N' Cookies. Ruiz told the jury that the cops had put Waits in a headlock and rammed him into a phone booth. District attorney Ronald Lewis asked Ruiz to help him reenact this particular moment, with Ruiz acting as Waits and Lewis himself playing the cop. Ruiz retorted, “No, you be Waits and I'll be the cop.” The courtroom
erupted and Judge Andrew J. Weisz yelled for order.
⁸

The jury was unanimous: Waits and Weiss were found not guilty. The two immediately filed suit against Los Angeles County for false arrest, false imprisonment, assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, malicious prosecution, and defamation of character. Each requested $100,000 in general damages and reimbursement of attorney's fees and court costs. The lawsuits dragged on for almost five years. Weiss and Waits again emerged victorious, but they were ultimately obliged to settle for a mere $7,500 apiece. Speaking to Steve Pond of
Rolling Stone
in 1982, Waits was clearly relieved that the whole ordeal was behind him. Still, he never regretted taking action: “It was insulting and embarrassing, so I felt it was my duty to make sure the record reflected the truth of the matter.”
⁹

Waits was back on the road again, and he was sensing that things had changed. He'd begun to play a lot of college-campus gigs, and they weren't working for him. A lecture hall filled with rich daddy's girls and hair-sprayed disco boys sporting coke-spoon jewelry wasn't exactly the definition of Waits's dream venue — he knew beyond a doubt that kids like these would never understand what he was singing about.
¹⁰

Tom's travel routines were changing, too. His custom of checking into the worst hotels available had, of necessity, fallen by the wayside. The Nocturnal Emissions didn't share his adventurous lodging preferences.
¹¹
The tours just seemed to drag on and on, and Waits often seemed listless and tired onstage. The exuberance that drove his
Nighthawks at the Diner
–era shows had evaporated, and he was relieved when all the tour commitments had been fulfilled and he could return to the old Tropicana.

Life on the road also seems to have undermined Waits's love life. He was never in one place long enough to focus on it. He did meet women he liked from time to time, but nothing ever seemed to work out. Itinerant lifestyle aside, Tom attributed his lack of success with the ladies to a basic image problem. One of his most famous quotes from the seventies was, “I've never met anyone who made it with a chick because they owned a Tom Waits album. I've got all three, and it's never helped me.”
¹²

By late 1977, Chuck E. Weiss was making some extra bucks between gigs by working in the Troubadour kitchen. One night a guy named Ivan Ulz was playing the Troub, and he introduced Chuck E. to his companion, a local waitress named Rickie Lee Jones. Ivan had asked Rickie Lee to come by and do a couple of songs with him — an Ulz tune called “You Almost Look Chinese” and a song that Jones had penned herself called
“Easy Money.” It had come to her as she was sitting in a Venice Beach coffeehouse called Suzanne's (now long gone) during the summer of 1976. The song was the first, and at that point the only, thing she'd ever written. Rickie Lee and Chuck hit it off, and, another night at the Troubadour, Chuck introduced Rickie Lee to Tom. The three started hanging out together.
¹³

Rickie Lee Jones had come to Hollywood to escape from home and find herself, as have countless other restless kids over the years. She had first run away in 1969, at the age of fourteen, with a girlfriend. The pair had stolen a Pontiac gto in their hometown of Phoenix, Arizona, and headed for San Diego. They were caught the next day, but Rickie Lee hit the road again later, eventually making her way to L.A. in 1973. Jones didn't succumb to the young-girl-gets-devoured-by-wicked-city syndrome: she didn't hit a wall; she didn't get dragged into drugs or prostitution. Managing to keep her head slightly above water, she toiled as a waitress at a greasy spoon. Sometimes things got tough. Chuck E. said that at one point Rickie Lee was so broke that she had to sleep under the Hollywood sign. Rickie Lee herself recalled being fired from her job at a sleazy Italian restaurant near Echo Park, going home to find that the guitar player she was living with had split, taken the car, and skipped out on the rent.
¹⁴

Waits told Timothy White of
Billboard
that the first time he saw Rickie Lee she reminded him of Jayne Mansfield. It's not surprising. The fifties' blond bombshell was a kind of low-rent Marilyn Monroe whose sex- kitten va-va-va-voom act had enticed legions of male moviegoers. But Mansfield was a tragic figure, too. As beautiful as Monroe and even bustier, but not as talented an actress, she was never taken seriously in Hollywood. Toward the end of her career Mansfield was reduced to taking small roles in such puerile fare as
Las Vegas Hillbillies
. Mansfield died in 1967, in a car accident. She was just thirty-four. The story goes that she was on her way to see a lover and that she was decapitated in the crash, but these are just mythical embellishments. With or without the mythic dimensions, Jayne Mansfield was an incarnation of the ideal so many Tom Waits heroines were striving for — that, or the fantasy lover of his cockeyed male dreamers. Waits's table dancers or tragic whores would view the life of a Hollywood sex bomb as the absolute limit: what could beat getting paid for your beauty and adored for it, too? It's a classic setup for crushing disappointments and even tragic outcomes.

Tom was instantly smitten with Rickie Lee, describing his initial reaction
to her as “primitive.” They embarked on a rocky romance. Sometimes they were lovers. Sometimes they were bar buddies. Rickie Lee loved the shady nightspots and dark corners of Hollywood as much as Tom did; Tom liked “Easy Money” and encouraged Rickie Lee to pursue her singing and songwriting. He was also impressed by her performing style, telling Timothy White that she came across to the audience like a “sexy white spade” — a glowing compliment in Waits's book.
¹⁵

At the time, Waits would sometimes reduce the dynamic of their relationship to a very basic formula: she was drinking a lot then; he was, too; so they drank with each other. He'd add that one of the best ways to really get to know a woman is to get plastered with her. One of his favorite memories of their time together was the night that Rickie Lee showed up at his window and yelled to him, insisting that he come out and paint the town with her because she was wearing a brand-new pair of high-heeled shoes! He didn't have to be asked twice. They eventually found themselves staggering along Santa Monica Boulevard, smashed, with Rickie Lee barely able to stay on top of her heels. Waits really respected that kind of behavior in a woman.
¹⁶

Part of Rickie Lee's powerful appeal was that she was always up for whatever Tom and Chuck could suggest. If they wanted to steal those cheesy ceramic jockeys from the lawns of Beverly Hills mansions, she was game. Rickie Lee was equally willing to hop a freight car. She had no fear. Once Waits invited Rickie Lee and Chuck E. to a high-powered music-industry party, and as soon as they entered Rickie Lee sat down with an avocado placed strategically between her legs. This embarrassed Tom a little, but he loved her moxie. When the trio finally realized that they were social outcasts at this soiree, they lathered their palms with chip dip and started shaking hands with people.
¹⁷

Sometimes Tom's fascination with Rickie Lee turned to fear for her well-being. She was so much more streetwise than he was. She'd been living on her own for years; she'd experimented freely with drugs and withstood many hard knocks. If she could sometimes seem like a wise old goddess surveying life on Earth, then on other occasions, to paraphrase the immortal words of Bob Dylan, she could break like a little girl. Chuck E. described her as, by turns, tough and soft, nurturing and playful.
¹⁸

While he was still caught up in his adventure with Rickie Lee, Waits prepared to record his next album. His momentum still hadn't abated: he'd record an album, tour on the strength of it, and then head right
back into the studio to record another one. Waits told Mikal Gilmore of
Rolling Stone
that
Blue Valentine
was “contemporary urban blues, sort of like the music of Ray Charles or Jimmy Witherspoon.” What instigated the album was the realization that “you can get away with murder if you sing the blues. I heard a Roosevelt Sykes album not long ago that had a seven-minute song on it called, ‘I'm a Nut.' For seven minutes, he sang, ‘I'm a nut . . . I'm a nut . . . I'm a nut.' So I sat down and wrote a song called ‘The Lunchroom Closed Down, The Newsstand Folded Up and the Rib Joint's Gone Out of Business.' But I've got a lot of sophisticated stuff on there, too.”
¹⁹

Unfortunately, that tune with the promising title never saw the light of day. Nor did another that Waits told Gilmore he'd written for the album. It was called “Conversation in a Car between Two Suspects After Having Knocked Over Yonkers Race Track with Three-and-a-Half Million Dollars, Riding in a '62 Nova, Headed in the Direction of East St. Louis.” Explained Waits, “Titles can be very important. If you can turn one into your opening stanza, it can save you some work.”
²⁰
Even if evocatively titled tunes such as the two Waits mentioned didn't make the final cut,
Blue Valentine
's song list is studded with gems like these: “A Sweet Little Bullet from a Pretty Blue Gun,” “Red Shoes by the Drugstore,” and “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis.”

Blue Valentine,
Waits went on to remark, would display a tougher edge than his previous efforts had. “I'm playing the electric guitar for the first time, and shit, I know three chords, just like every other guitar player. But really, there's more blood in this record, probably more detective-type stories. It just comes from living in Los Angeles, hanging out where I hang out. I kind of feel like a private eye sometimes. I'm just trying to give some dignity to some of the things I see, without being patronizing or maudlin about it.”
²¹

There was blood, there was an infusion of the dignity Waits was so uniquely capable of perceiving in the battered and broken lives around him, and there was a new kind of energy fueled by Rickie Lee Jones.
Blue Valentine
reflected Waits's relationship with Rickie Lee in several ways. There was the album's artwork. Rickie Lee is the mysterious back-cover blond lying across the car parked outside the open-all-night gas station; her back is to the camera as Tom leans in for a passionate kiss. And
Blue Valentine
opens with a tribute, of sorts, to Rickie Lee. Waits liked to serenade her when the mood struck with songs from
West Side Story
. Rickie Lee loved it, so Tom decided to include a tune from the Romeo and
Juliet–themed tale of gang warfare in fifties'-era New York City on his latest release. He chose the showstopper “Somewhere,” the song Maria sings to Tony as he lies bleeding to death from a gunshot wound.

Waits's version of the song — written by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim — is as powerful as those versions performed within the context of the tragic musical. His voice cracked and ravaged, he transforms the song into a prayer for absolution. Somewhere, “There's a place for us / A time and a place for us . . .”

The next track, “Red Shoes by the Drugstore,” has a lustful, jittery jungle pulse to it. The song skitters through the listener's consciousness. Frustration and neediness come welling out of the narrator, communicating through Waits's sly vocals, as he watches a good-time gal waiting on her man at a soda counter, wondering where he is, unaware that he is fast becoming a statistic in a botched robbery. “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis,” constructed on Waits's recital of a note from a prostitute to an old boyfriend named Charlie, follows. She insists that her life is coming together — she's going to have a baby, and she's finally got a nice place to live, on Ninth, above a dirty bookstore. She's met a nice jazz musician who is gonna take care of her and her baby, even though it's not his. She's off the bottle. She's off the dope. She's finally happy. But she eventually has to confess to Charlie that this is all just wishful thinking. “I don't have a husband / He don't play trombone.” The hooker's back in jail and needs money to pay for a lawyer.

“Kentucky Avenue” is a bittersweet childhood memoir in which Waits recalls his boyhood home and his old pal Kipper. Two dead-end boys, one of whom is stuck in a wheelchair, look for adventure in their hometown. They smoke Luckies, watch the fire truck going about its business, avoid mean old Mrs. Storm, and dream about the local fourth-grade hottie, Hilda (who plays strip poker and even lets Joey Navinski French-kiss her). The memories compound and Waits sings his longing to set his wheelchair-bound friend free so that they can ride the rails together to New Orleans. “All these things are real,” says Bones Howe. “‘Kentucky Avenue' still brings tears to my eyes. I fought him for those cellos, by the way. In the end, he relented. He just said okay. Because I think there's another version of him doing it just sitting at a piano. It doesn't have the power. To me, it doesn't have the emotional feel.”