Wild Years (18 page)

While the film itself was almost universally panned, few had a bad word to say about the soundtrack. Many felt that what Waits had achieved was truly amazing. “Picking Up After You” and “This One's from the Heart” were rightly heralded as small masterpieces. Critics and music execs alike praised the score — the only problem was that only those who bought a ticket to see the movie could hear it and few, apparently, were willing to go that far.

About eight months after the film had fallen on its face, Bones Howe finally saw an opportunity to deliver the music directly to the people. When he discovered that
One from the Heart
was about to
be released in Europe, he quickly got in touch with Coppola's attorney, who had worked out the original contract with
CBS
, and said to him, “Francis Ford Coppola in Europe is like Truffaut is here. He's a God. You call [
CBS
] and you tell them that [
One from the Heart
] is going to come out in Europe. If the foreign division of
CBS
finds out that there's a soundtrack album in the can and they're not going to release it, there's going to be a lot of heat.”

So the attorney put in a call to
CBS
and asked them if, given the circumstances, they were going to release the
One from the Heart
soundtrack in Europe. The answer was, “We don't know,” so Howe announced that he would contact
CBS
in England and tell them all about it. “And it's amazing,” he says. “It worked! You know, you just kind of dream these stupid things up and figure, well, if this is the show-business game, I'll play the show-business game. But fear really works . . . They said, ‘Well, how do we do this?' I said, ‘You have a Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle album. That in itself should be worth something to you.' That's what they did. They just flipped the covers, put the front on the back and the back on the front. Called it
Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle Sing Music from One from the Heart
.”

The album came out, and when the 1982 Oscar nominees were announced, Waits was among them. “We lost [the Academy Award for best score] to
Victor
/
Victoria,
as I remember,” says Howe. Henry Mancini's faux-jazz score for Blake Edwards' cross-dressing comedy bagged the coveted statuette; but Waits had gotten some major exposure. Its effects, however, were short-lived. While the
One from the Heart
soundtrack was released on cd in 1989, it was never widely available for any length of time. It was a crying shame that such stellar work was allowed to sink so rapidly into obscurity. Finally in 2004 the soundtrack was returned to the stores, complete with a couple of never-released bonus tracks.

Waits emerged from the extended
One from the Heart
adventure a little older, a little wiser, and very eager to move on. At times during that undertaking, he'd hit a wall. “I wasn't used to concentrating on one project for so long,” he explained — “to the point where you start eating your own flesh.” Kathleen coaxed him through his periods of writer's block, and he refreshed himself by doing a few shows back East and in Australia.
²⁷
He also accepted a cameo role in the big-budget 1981 horror flick
The Wolfen
; Waits portrayed a drunk and distracted piano player who plows through
a ragged rendition of “Jitterbug Boy.” And in 1982 he was thrilled to contribute to
Poetry in Motion,
a documentary on the Beats directed by Ron Mann and starring the likes of William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, John Cage, and Allen Ginsberg.

Then Tom married Kathleen. The powerful Tom Waits sense of style dictated that the wedding take place in an all-night chapel that was listed in the Yellow Pages — Tom was pleased to discover that Marriage Chapels came right before Massage Parlors. Kitsch, of course, ruled the day. Waits told Elliott Murphy, “We got married in Watts, at the Always and Forever Wedding Chapel, twenty-four-hour service on Manchester Boulevard.” He then added, quite soberly, “She's my true love.”
²⁸
(Love must have been in the air during the “Always and Forever” nuptials of Tom and Kathleen: bassist Greg Cohen met Kathleen's sister Marguerite, an artist and a potter, at the ceremony, and they were wed a couple of years later.)
²⁹

As a married man, Tom had a new set of responsibilities, and it was time to take a hard look at certain things he'd been taking for granted —personal finances, for one. Having pulled together and recorded a respectable body of work over the years, and having toured hard, Waits fully expected the figures to show that he was riding well within the comfort range. They didn't. In fact, as Tom and Kathleen discovered, Tom barely had any money at all. Like so many other entertainers, Waits had become a victim of his own shortage of business savvy. The contract he'd signed, in all innocence, with manager Herb Cohen ten years earlier had bound him to earning much less than most other artists of his stature, and, even worse, it gave Cohen the rights to all of his songs. Not only did Waits receive no income from them, but he also had very little control over their commercial use. Tom and Kathleen knew what they had to do. They took over all of Tom's business affairs, severing their ties with Cohen. Over the years, they've launched a series of lawsuits against Cohen in a bid to ensure that the Tom Waits catalog is treated with respect.

The next aspect of his life that Tom subjected to scrutiny was his approach to recording. He'd obtained a professional divorce from Cohen, and now he wanted to let go of Bones Howe for good. He was ready to produce his own work. Seven Tom Waits albums had been bolstered by Howe's talents, and now Tom needed to find out if he could do it on his own. “When you're working with the same producer,” he told Barney Hoskyns, “and you're kind of collaborating
on the records, it's a little harder to go your own way. You kind of wanna take everybody with you. For me, eventually I just wanted to make a clean break. Those records [
Blue Valentine, Heartattack and Vine,
and
One from the Heart
] I did with Bones, and I was kind of rebelling against this established way of recording that I'd developed with him. I don't know if I'd call it particularly unhappy, but I was at the end of a cycle there.”
³⁰

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 soundtrack 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.”

I'm no longer a bachelor. I'm very happily married. I've also gotten “rid of my ex-manager, and a lot of the flesh peddlers and professional vermin I'd thrown in with. My wife and I are taking care of all my affairs now. But I am looking for a new manager.” Speaking to Dave Zimmer of
Bam
in 1982, Tom was flying high. Marriage, it seemed, had liberated him. With a smile he concluded, “I believe in happy endings. More now than I ever have.”
¹

Heading into 1983, he was further energized by the fact that he was working on a new project. The ideas for his next album were flying fast and thick — he was even toying with the notion of making it a full-length video album and calling it
Flesh Peddlers,
in honor of his newfound independence. That independence was, after all, already having a powerful effect on Waits's art. It was inducing him to take chances that he had been afraid to take before. The warning of others, self-doubt, commercial considerations — all of these things now seemed to carry less weight. Kathleen had convinced Tom that he didn't need to find someone to replace Bones Howe. He could produce himself, taking full control over the finished work, because he knew his own music better than anyone else.

So the new Tom Waits album, entitled
Swordfishtrombones,
would be a Tom Waits production right down the line; with a little help from his friends and some esoteric creative influences, he'd conceive it, write it, arrange it, produce it, and consult on the artwork. He told Zimmer, “I used to think that after I was done writing and singing, I'd already done all that I was supposed to do. I left the rest in someone else's hands. I didn't want to deal with the rest of the production. Now I'll get more involved.”
²
The prospect was scary — Tom was entering a steep learning curve — but it was also exhilarating.

Howe, then, would have no successor, but neither would Herb Cohen,
the man Waits considered responsible for the sorry state of his personal finances. “I thought I was a millionaire,” said Tom, “and it turned out that I had, like, twenty bucks.”
³
He and Kathleen would take on the task of managing his career. It was an arduous task, involving mind-numbing forays into the universe of rights and residuals and several energy-sucking court battles, but at least it was under their control. There would be no more nasty surprises at the bank.

Setting in to work on his new project,
Swordfishtrombones,
Tom was thinking about Captain Beefheart. Known as Don Van Vliet to his mother and to the irs, Beefheart was a high-school chum of Waits's former touring partner (and recurring nightmare) Frank Zappa; both hailed from Glendale, California. As a child, Beefheart had been a musical prodigy and a gifted sculptor. He and Zappa had played together in a few R&B cover bands before putting together a short-lived unit called The Soots. Zappa eventually left Glendale and made his way to Los Angeles, where he formed The Mothers of Invention. Van Vliet took the stage name Captain Beefheart from a Soots song and founded his own group, Captain Beef-heart and the Magic Band.

That's when the fascinating Captain Beefheart odyssey began. Too obstinately off-the-wall to ever achieve much popular acceptance, Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band set about inventing a brand-new sound, melding the twelve-bar blues with avant-garde jazz and a touch of classical. With his gruff voice and multi-octave range, Beefheart gained a reputation for being one of the most soulful white singers of all time, and he and his Magic Band (which went through many personnel changes over the years) released a string of eclectic and brilliant albums. But while they were so strenuously pushing the musical envelope they were attracting only a very small following. Captain Beefheart himself was undeterred by this lack of endorsement. In fact, he was rumored to have been rather miffed when his single “Mirror Man” became a fluke hit in England. He'd become bored with it all just a few years before Waits recorded
Swordfish trombones,
and moved to the Mojave Desert to concentrate full time on painting.
⁴

Swordfishtrombones
was going to be, among other things, something of a tribute to Captain Beefheart. Waits was burned out on his own trademark sound. He wanted to experiment more extensively with the blues, to create a calliope swirl of sound. New outfits, new moods, new noises — Tom would try it on and see how it fit.
Swordfishtrombones
would feature some obvious Captain Beefheart echoes and manifest an original, risk-taking musical viewpoint. “I felt like one of those guys playing the organ in a hotel lobby,” Waits told David Fricke of
Rolling Stone
. “I'd bring the
music in like a carpet, and I'd walk on it.”
⁵

One major difference that
Swordfishtrombones
would feature was the banishment of the saxophone. For the first time in his career, the saxophone was not used on a Tom Waits album. Waits had almost needed an intervention to kick the habit. It was easier for him to quit smoking. But he struggled mightily against the impulse — motivated by the suspicion that his material had developed a velvety, Italian-crooner aspect — and won. Into the saxophone void Waits poured all manner of offbeat and obscure sounds. Among the instruments he used to make them were metal aunglongs, marimba, bass drum with rice, bass boo bams, brake drum, bell plate, harmonium, freedom bell, bagpipes, parade drum, dabuki drum, African talking drum, and glass harmonica. Experimental percussion was clearly the order of the day, and most of that magic was performed by respected percussionist Victor Feldman.