Wild Years (17 page)

Waits and Howe would have “musical summit meetings” with Coppola at the director's Napa Valley home. As Waits hunkered down at the piano, Coppola would articulate his ideas, describing the series of little dramas that coalesced to form the whole story. The musical dialogue began to take shape, and the brainstorming continued. It was a cooperative exercise all the way through. Coppola had enough respect for Waits's talent to avoid telling him what to do. He did, however, push him to be as prolific as possible — Coppola wanted a large pool of ideas to pick and choose from.
²⁰

Diligently filling that pool, Waits maintained the day-job rhythm he'd established for himself before the
Heartattack and Vine
hiatus. He seemed to enjoy the normalcy of it all. “I'd get up in the morning,” he later remarked, “have a cup of coffee, read the paper, get in my station wagon and then drive to work along with millions of other Americans.” At Zoetrope, he'd get down to it in his spartan little office located in the story department. He'd launch into a stream of consciousness, taping or taking note of everything. He'd tinker with a melody, throw out some words, splice things together, blend ideas. “If one line didn't work in a song, I might stick it in somewhere else,” he explains. “I never threw anything away. Because I never knew, when I was writing, what Francis might end up using. What, a year and a half ago, might have been a scratch track, could have conceivably been used in the final cut of the film.”
²¹

Since Tom had begun scoring
One from the Heart
before shooting commenced, he was working at Zoetrope during the set-building stage. He claims that he liked to hear the distant racket of hammers and drills as he went about his business. It was an inspiration to him, but it was also a goad: the project was moving steadily forward. With progress being made on all fronts, a festive, carnival-like atmosphere developed — carpenters, designers, actors, composers
met, mingled, interacted. Then, when shooting was about to begin, Coppola gathered together the entire cast and crew to listen to the songs Waits had written so far.
²²

They were still, however, lacking a vital component.
One from the Heart
's female voice had yet to be recruited. Midler wasn't an option, so Waits and Howe put their heads together. They got nowhere. It was Kathleen who put forward the surprising suggestion of Crystal Gayle, the younger sister of country-music legend Loretta Lynn. Crystal Gayle herself had recently hit the country big time, and her songs “Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” “Talking in Your Sleep,” and “Half the Way” had rocketed to the top of the pop and country charts. Her voice was undeniably gorgeous, but her polished, country-lite offerings were completely at odds with the jazzy urban squalor of Waits's compositions, particularly the gin-soaked Vegas blues pieces he was coming up with for
One from the Heart
. This didn't faze Kathleen. She'd recently heard Crystal's rendition of the Julie London standard “Cry Me a River,” and she was impressed with the strength and purity of the young singer's voice. During a meeting at Zoetrope, Bones and Tom were sweating the female-voice issue when Kathleen asked if they'd ever heard Crystal Gayle's “Cry Me a River.” They hadn't, so Bones sent an assistant out to buy a copy. “Tom and I listened to it, and it was a great suggestion,” Howe recalls. “I called down to William Morris in Nashville and got in touch with her manager, who was also her husband.” He learned that Crystal Gayle was going to be in Hollywood the very next week to appear on
The Tonight Show
. Over a large lunch served with wine at Coppola's bungalow on the Zoetrope lot, Crystal Gayle, her husband, Howe, Waits, and Coppola discussed
One from the Heart
. Howe says that the two visitors from Nashville were totally seduced by the charismatic director. Crystal Gayle agreed to work on the soundtrack. Tom would send her songs to learn, and she'd travel to Hollywood periodically to record them. “She sang them exactly the way he wanted,” says Howe. “She never changed a word, changed a note, changed anything.”

Tom told Zimmer that “Crystal Gayle had worked out real well. She was nice and easy to work with.”
²³
Although it was a challenge for Waits to write for a female voice, some of the songs that he penned for the film were heartbreakingly beautiful. “Once Upon a Town/The Wages of Love,” a smoky medley of Crystal Gayle/Tom Waits duets, sets everything in motion. It's followed by “Is There Any Way
Out of This Dream?” — a simply ravishing piano ballad in which the singer reflects upon the ways in which her life has fallen short of her expectations. Crystal Gayle's honeyed vocals, through the medium of Tom's music and lyrics, capture the vague discontent that suffuses the movie.

“‘Is There Any Way Out of This Dream?' and ‘Take Me Home' were written for Crystal to sing,” Waits explains. “‘Old Boyfriends' was originally for me, then for her, then it turned into a duet. [Crystal Gayle's solo version was used on the soundtrack album.] ‘Picking Up After You' and ‘This One's from the Heart' were written as duets. I found that it was hard writing for a woman. There are certain words they're uncomfortable with. I can get away with a certain vernacular, while a woman singing it would have trouble. I had to change things around, put everything onto her words. It was tough. I felt like I was writing lines for an actress.”

The film's core story is set out in the duet “Picking Up After You,” which is as trenchant a breakup song as Waits has ever recorded. It is essentially a full-length musical argument. Each singer casts blame, identifies the other's unbearable habits, vents anger, yet the melody all of this is couched in is so sweet and tender that the potential for healing seems to exist even as the rift widens.

In “Old Boyfriends,” Crystal's longing vocals make romantic disappointment palpable. The song is a reflection on former lovers who “look you up when they're in town, to see if they can still cut you down.” Waits originally wrote it for himself, but sung by a woman it takes on more power. The songs that Waits did sing himself were just as redolent of emotional pain. “Broken Bicycles” uses busted-up bikes left outside to rust as a symbol for love grown cold. Tom has said that the tune “was an orphan for a while, until Francis shot a separate scene with Freddie [Forrest] in the junkyard, despondent. We tried that song against the scene; it worked and stayed in the film.”
²⁴

Waits also sang “I Beg Your Pardon,” a humbled lover's plea for reconciliation. Wearing his heart on his sleeve, he begs his woman to take him back, offering to give her “Boardwalk and Park Place and all of my hotels.” The pace of the ballad-heavy soundtrack then picks up with the jazzy “Little Boy Blue.” Waits sings this hopping tune on the album, though it was performed (half-spoken) in the film by Nastassja Kinski. “That was originally a song I was singing,”
said Waits. “Just another song in the movie. Then they cut it, sliced it up, and adapted it for [Kinski] to sing.”
²⁵
“Little Boy Blue” was the only number in
One from the Heart
that wasn't performed by Waits and/or Crystal Gayle, with the notable exception of “Used Carlotta.” Waits had been toying with the idea of doing a piece like this for several years — an instrumental suite for car horns and motors. It was used as part of a fantasy sequence in which Forrest shows Kinski around the salvage yard where he works. In a bid to impress her, he conducts an orchestra of smashed autos. It's not surprising that this piece didn't make it onto the soundtrack album.

On the spooky, percussion-laden “You Can't Unring a Bell,” Waits indulges his new infatuation with offbeat instrumentation. Next up is, arguably, Waits's most beautiful love song ever: “This One's from the Heart.” To a muted sax and piano accompaniment, Tom and Crystal muse on the splendor and the suffering their relationship encompasses; they know that without each other life is mundane and colorless and needs to be tempered by the occasional stiff drink. Tom and Crystal's voices melded beautifully, sandpaper and honey, but that didn't stop Tom from worrying. “Toward the end, Tom started getting cold feet,” says Howe. “Saying, ‘Well, you know, [Crystal's] really vanilla and all.' I said, ‘Tom, you know something? Everybody knows what great lyrics you write. But nobody knows the great melodies you write because you just don't do them justice. You have somebody who really sings those melodies so you can hear them.'” Howe believes that Crystal Gayle's “best contribution was that she sang those songs exactly the way Tom taught them to her. We would go into the studio and he would sit with her on the piano and work the songs out. She would learn them and he would tell her exactly how he wanted to phrase the words. Tom had total control of the way they were performed.”

The last session Waits and Gayle had together was, in Howe's estimation, the most incredible one of all. They posed for the album-cover photos, and then they performed two duets, the centerpieces of the score: one was the angry lover's spat, “Picking Up After You”; and the other was “This One's from the Heart.”

Yet the perfect session came very close to being scuttled. While in L.A., Crystal learned that her mother had become gravely ill. She called Howe to say that she was too upset to come to the studio. “The rap on Crystal Gayle in those days was she had this beautiful
voice but no soul,” Howe recalls. “I thought she sounded really vulnerable and figured if I could get her to the studio now, I might really get something.” He urged her to reconsider, saying that working might prove therapeutic for her — at the very least it would keep her mind off her mother's condition, a situation she couldn't control. “She came into the studio, and she and Tom sang those duets together that day. They sat at the piano together and sang those duets. It was such a wonderful, wonderful day in the studio.”

During that final session, Crystal also recorded the redemption piece of the score, a beam of sunlight that penetrates the dark, smoky atmosphere. Said Waits, “Toward the end of shooting, Francis said, ‘Everything's so sad, we need something with hope in it.' That's when ‘Take Me Home' came about. The musical idea came early on, but the words were some of the last ones I wrote. I tried to sing it and it sounded real soppy, so I gave it to Crystal. I sat down at the piano, played it three or four times for her, then she cut it. I liked the way she did it.”
²⁶
The soothing “Take Me Home” is a gentle call for reconciliation, an acknowledgment that no one is perfect and that only through the eyes of love do our flaws become invisible. In this touching moment the musical story comes full circle.

Bones Howe had negotiated a one-off deal with
CBS
Records to release the
One from the Heart
soundtrack, but the idea didn't sit well with Tom. Bones remembers that Tom called him and said, “‘I don't want to give them the soundtrack album.' I said, ‘Why?' He said, ‘I think it's too commercial Hollywood. I think what I should do is I should just sit at the piano and just sing all those songs. The soundtrack album should just be me singing the songs from
One from the Heart
by myself at the piano.' I said, ‘Well, Tom, that's not what
CBS
bought.' So Tom went to Francis, and Francis said, ‘No, I don't think that's what we should do. We should put all the sound effects into the soundtrack album from the place where they are in the movie. The soundtrack album should be like a little audio minimovie.' So it turned into this huge brouhaha about all that, and finally
CBS
just kind of threw up their hands and said, ‘Well you guys just figure out what you're going to do.'”

Soon enough, though, the decision was made for them. Coppola had set up a New York preview screening for
One from the Heart,
and the critics in attendance gave it a big thumbs down. The word was that Francis Ford Coppola had followed up
Apocalypse Now,
a modern
masterpiece, with a stinker. The love story was confusing, the characters were cyphers, and the happy ending felt tacked on.
One from the Heart
was rushed back to Zoetrope for some hasty surgery, but the damage was done. By the time it was released,
One from the Heart
was doomed to failure. Says Howe, “Then, of course, the guy from
CBS
called me and said I'm not going to put out a soundtrack album from a stiff movie. So there that soundtrack album sat for six or eight months.”

During that interval, Elektra/Asylum released an odds-and-ends Tom Waits collection.
Bounced Checks
was an assortment of established songs —they couldn't really be called hits — from earlier albums, among them “Tom Traubert's Blues,” “Heartattack and Vine,” and “Burma Shave.” Mixed in with these were a few alternate versions and live recordings — of “Jersey Girl,” “Whistlin' Past the Graveyard,” and “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me).” A bluesy track called “Mr. Henry” was the only previously unreleased song on the album.
Bounced Checks
was, essentially, the product of a record company becoming impatient for new material.

One from the Heart
turned out to be a bomb of epic proportions and was soon being mentioned in the same sentence as the previous year's epic failure — Michael Cimino's
Heaven's Gate
. While
Heaven's Gate
nearly sank Columbia Pictures,
One from the Heart
actually did torpedo American Zoetrope. Coppola was forced to give up the lot, thereby sacrificing his dream of presiding over a mecca for independent filmmaking. What made this defeat even more bitter was the fact that
One from the Heart
didn't deserve such a blanket condemnation. The quirky romantic drama had a current of truth to it, a lived-in feel that so many Hollywood romances never even approach. Plus, the cinematography and the art direction combined to give the film a remarkable visual impact.