Wild Years (22 page)

When
Down by Law
wrapped, Waits played a small role in a low-budget feature called
Candy Mountain,
directed by the innovative Robert Frank, who had revealed to the world the internal workings of The Rolling Stones with his astonishing documentary
Cocksucker Blues
.
Candy Mountain
featured an array of musicians in acting roles — aside from Waits there was Dr. John, Leon Redbone, David Johansen (aka Buster Poindexter), Rita MacNeil, and Joe Strummer. The film was well reviewed, but it was never widely distributed, and relatively few people saw it.

It was time for Tom and Kathleen to get back to their pet project,
Frank's Wild Years,
a musical based on the
Swordfishtrombones
tale of the suburbanite who torches his split-level home. Kathleen would write most of the dialogue and Tom would write most of the music and lyrics. They would concoct the thing from scratch. But they were still lacking several crucial components. They needed money, a director, and a producer who could pull the whole thing together. So Tom and Kathleen entered the fray. It was difficult not to get discouraged. Schedules couldn't be juggled and space couldn't be secured. The mainstream New York theater world started to seem impenetrable. Its scions had lived so well so long off such crowd-pleasing fare as the old-fashioned roof-raiser musical (
Oklahoma, My Fair Lady
) and the theme-park-ride extravaganza (
Cats,
Miss Saigon, The Phantom of the Opera
) that they tended to regard newcomers and their untested ideas with a cool eye. As Waits put it, “the ritual around it is very well established. When you come in here from some other place, there's not always a place to sit down right away. So you wait for a table.”
³

The wait seemed as though it might be indefinite.
Frank's Wild Years
was one tough sell in this milieu. It featured no dancing girls, no big set pieces, no hummable showstoppers. Its musical numbers served to illuminate
— Threepenny Opera
–style — a gritty story involving thieves and murderers. Waits joked with Hoskyns about it, saying, “I would describe [the play] as a cross between
Eraserhead
and
It's a Wonderful Life
— because it seems to carry both sides. It's bent and misshapen and tawdry and warm. Something for the whole family.”
⁴

But Waits would not let go of Frank. The character continued to intrigue him. He'd begun by envisioning Frank's act of arson, encapsulating it in that one-minute-and-fifty-second piece of jazzspeak, and only then did he begin to wonder what had prompted it. What had driven Frank to light that fire? The more Waits pondered Frank, the more Frank took on a vivid life of his own. It occurred to Waits that Frank could embody an artistic breakthrough for him. Here was a character capable of encompassing a range of seminal Waits ideas and presenting them through music, storytelling, acting. With Frank, the sky was Waits's limit.

Describing his play to Barney Hoskyns as early as 1985, Waits was clearly excited by it. His tenses shifted, his recounting of the story sequence
was elliptical, but his creative energy was pumping: “There's like five principal characters in it. Just to simplify the whole thing, it's a story about failed dreams. It's about an accordion player from a small town called Rainville, who goes off to seek his fame and fortune and ends up hoisted with his own petard, as they say . . . Frank's been altered a little bit. He burns his house down and he leaves it all behind and he goes off to be an entertainer in Las Vegas. He becomes a spokesman for an all-night clothing store, after winning a talent contest. He won a lot of money at the crap tables. He got rolled by a cigarette girl, and he was despondent and penniless and found an accordion in the trash. One thing led to another and before you know it he's on stage. And his parents ran a funeral parlor when he was a kid. He played the accordion. His mother did the hair and makeup for the ‘passengers' and he played ‘Amazing Grace' during the ceremonies. So he had already started a career in show business as a child so this is sort of a chance to get back in the business, back on the boards.”
⁵

The whole thing actually unfolds like this. As
Frank's Wild Years
opens, Frank lies, dejected and freezing, on a park bench in East St. Louis. It starts to snow. Thinking he's going to die of the cold, he looks skyward and yells, “Remember me? I ordered the blond, the Firebird . . . Somebody's made a terrible mistake.” This initiates a series of hallucinations and memories. Frank is seemingly rescued and taken to his favorite bar in Rainville, his hometown. He entertains with his story of traveling to Las Vegas to make it big in show business. For a single, white-hot moment, his song “Innocent When You Dream,” makes him famous. Then, tragically incapable of building on his good fortune, he gambles away most of his earnings and is relieved of the rest by a cheap floozy he meets. Eventually, he is reduced to hawking suits for a local clothing store. He turns his song into a jingle called “In a Suit of Your Dreams.” As the play ends, Frank huddles on the same East St. Louis park bench, buffetted by fate and by the elements, enduring another lost and lonely night.

Tom and Kathleen were still knocking on locked doors in New York City when something opened up in Chicago. The Steppenwolf Theater, a renowned actor's studio, had got wind of the project. And Steppenwolf was very interested. “It was a long journey to get to where we finally put the whole thing on in Chicago with Steppenwolf,” says Waits. “We really landed in the right place after a lot of dead ends. I was really glad to be there . . . They're a good theater group. Kind of garage-band-style theater . . . three chords, turn it up real loud. It worked.”
⁶

Terry Kinney was set to direct
Frank's Wild Years,
but just a few weeks
before it was scheduled to open, Kinney resigned (or was fired) over creative differences with Waits. Steppenwolf's head was actor Gary Sinise (who would later win an Oscar nomination for his supporting role in
Forrest Gump
and turn in strong performances in
Apollo 13, Mission to Mars,
Ransom,
and
Of Mice and Men
). Sinise stepped into the breach and became
Frank
's director. There was some talk of retooling the production — building new stage sets — but by this point both time and money were in short supply. Waits remained calm. He told O'Donohue he felt that such turmoil was “normal. Sometimes the spark comes from a conflict of ideas. It's just wood and lights and people walking around until you somehow bang up against something, and something breaks, and something sparks, and something catches and then it has a life. Until then it's just on the page.”
⁷

The cast included Steppenwolf regulars Gary Cole, Moira Harris, Vince Viverito, Randall Arney, and Tom Irwin. Waits's touring band played Frank's band, and Teller (of Penn and Teller) worked up some magic tricks for Frank to perform. Frank, of course, was played by his creator, and Waits carried the production solidly on his shoulders. But the play remained in a state of flux; they tinkered with it constantly, even during its run. The reviews were decent, but there were no raves.
Frank's Wild Years
played Chicago's Briar Street Theater for three months.

Looking back, Waits has mixed feelings about the undertaking. “Well, you have to be a little foolish to do something because a play takes a lot of energy — emotionally, financially,” he told Hoskyns in 1999. “And the other thing is that it only lives when you're in it. But Steppenwolf was the right way to go.”
⁸

When
Frank's Wild Years
closed, the Waits family found themselves faced with another move. Now the itinerant lifestyle was getting old, and Tom and Kathleen were becoming very attracted to the notion of putting down roots someplace private. Privacy was integral to the kind of comfort and stability Tom and Kathleen were seeking for themselves and their kids. “Yeah, I'm private,” Waits said at about this time. “Someday I'll be a lieutenant, but right now I'm just a private . . . Half of you is saying ‘Notice me.' The other half is saying ‘Leave me alone.' It's a bit ambiguous. You want people to recognize what you do. At the same time you don't want to have to do it all the time every day.”
⁹

On the work front, however, Waits's next order of business was to record his
Frank's Wild Years
album, so that meant relocating to not-so-private Los Angeles, at least temporarily. Speaking to Mark Rowland,
Waits could only speculate about future living arrangements. “I don't know where I'm living. Citizen of the world. I live for adventure and to hear the lamentations of the women . . . I've uprooted a lot. It's like being a traveling salesman. There's a certain gypsy quality, and I'm used to it. I find it easy to write under difficult circumstances and I can capture what's going on. I'm moving toward needing a compound, though. An estate. In the meantime I'm operating out of a storefront here in the Los Angeles area.”
¹⁰

Waits's first priority in recording
Frank's Wild Years
was to ensure that the album worked as a piece of music and wasn't just a recorded souvenir of the play. This wouldn't be too difficult. In the studio he could give free rein to his imagination; the possibilities were limited in the theater setting for technical reasons and because it was imperative that the audience fully understood the songs, which moved the story forward.

So Waits entered the studio and pushed, pulled, sculpted, and battered his songs into shapes that more closely resembled the structures in his head. He sang several songs through a bullhorn. He used lots of “pawnshop instruments,” including a Farfisa organ and an accordion. He even asked his musicians, most of whom were multi-instrumentalists, to play instruments they weren't used to. The drummer blew a horn, the guitarist played keyboards, and Waits perceived a new vigor and impulsiveness in their performances. Waits trusted the members of his band. Many of them had contributed to
Rain Dogs
and worked on the play, and he had faith that they could make the leap into the unknown with him.

For his entire career, Waits had issued his records on vinyl. Compact-disc technology had been making its imprint on the music world for about a year before
Rain Dogs
was released, but it hadn't radically altered the landscape. In the two years after
Rain Dogs
came out, though, the compact disc had caught up to vinyl, both in sound quality and in popularity, and it was now squeezing the life out of the lp.

The
CD
was lauded for its pristine quality. Waits wasn't particularly interested in pristine. He considered it uncomfortably close to sterile. He responded to music that felt lived in, that sounded like dirt was being shaken out of its grooves. In fact, many of Waits's earlier albums sound better on vinyl — the occasional hissing and popping add a desirable grittiness to the musical tale. So why did he record
Frank's Wild Years
on compact disc? Mainly because the new technology could do more to showcase the divergent instrumentation that he found so fascinating, and because, when it came right down to it, the new technology could boost
the energy level of his sound.

The slightly woozy dreamworld of
Frank's Wild Years
comes into sharp focus with the album's first cut. “Hang On St. Christopher,” a driving rocker, is thrown off its axis by North African horn lines that intrude pointedly on the melody — they actually chase the melody like a police cruiser after a speeder, a beat behind. Waits's already offbeat vocals have a tinny, echoing ring here; he's singing through a police bullhorn. The melody swerves, careens, rushes on like a car with no brakes descending a mountain, like a frantic, lost traveler in need of St. Christopher's intervention.

Waits was pleased with the distorting effect of the bullhorn, which he used on several other tunes, too. It lent a certain menace to his vocals and imbued the proceedings with a somewhat unnatural, dreamlike quality. “It was your MP5 Fanon transistorized bullhorn with the public address loudspeaker in it, available down there at Radio Shack,” Waits told the
Morning Becomes Eclectic
audience. “For about $29.95 you can pick one of those up. I've tried for a long time to get the same effect through other means — singing into cups and pipes and trumpet mutes and singing in my hands. Just trying to get my voice to sound like at the bottom of a pool. Just to tamper with the qualities it already has, to bend it a little bit, 'cause I get sick and tired of the way I sound.” He claimed that he was trying to make his voice “skinnier, so it would fit in the song. 'Cause I was going to plant all these things around it and sometimes it flattens out and it gets too thick and I can't put anything else in there. So it changes the size of my voice so that I can put more in the song. That's kind of the theory around it anyway. Biff Dawes, my engineer, got me a bullhorn for my birthday and I haven't been without it since. And it's real good around the house when you want to get somebody's attention.”
¹¹

Waits's falsetto gets a workout in “Temptation,” a percussive number that explores the weaknesses of the flesh — “A little
Pagliacci
” is the way that Waits himself describes it.
¹²
In the play, the song is performed when a man on a billboard advertisement for Las Vegas comes to life and urges Frank to give Sin City a whirl. Removed from that context, the tune is still a wonderful admission of human frailty. Sex, alcohol, drugs, and money beckon; man responds; these forces build him up and they tear him down. He sees the error of his ways but he is powerless to stop himself.

The prettiest and certainly the most devastating song on
Frank's Wild Years
is “Innocent When You Dream.” It actually appears twice on the album, once as a barroom ballad played on a pump organ, and again as a replica of a tune you might find on an old 78 recording, complete with
crackles and pops. Waits says the song — a drinking-man's anthem about life's unfairness and the escape that only sleep can provide — is a tip of the hat to Irish tenor John McCormack, to whose music Waits had been introduced by Kathleen's father.
¹³