Tom Waits: Tales from a Cracked Jukebox

Iiiit's showtime!

Tom does not want to be obvious.

# Blow, wind blow... #

And that's what lures us into his music.

It's not simple. It's not complete.

There's room for us to get lost in it.

# Wasted and wounded

# No, it ain't what the moon did... #

-When he sings...

-SHE GROWLS

..he goes into that completely monstrous, demon voice.

Like he's possessed.

# Well, when I'm lying in my bed at night... #

THROATY GROWL

Nobody writes in so many characters so effectively

and gets away with it.

Can I get a hallelujah?

# I'm going straight up to the top... #

And somehow, he put all that under the banner Tom Waits.

# Will I see you tonight

# On a downtown train?

# Where every night

# Where every night, it's just the same... #

How does a guy with a voice like that

decide to be a singer and succeed?

Well, it was a choice between entertainment and

a career in air-conditioning and refrigeration.

LAUGHTER

I was just so impressed with his stage persona.

Because that's what it was, really.

How much of that is real? I don't know.

They say that I have no hits, that I'm difficult to work with.

And they say that like it's a bad thing.

LAUGHTER

# 16 shells from a thirty-aught-six... #

It's experimental music, in the context of pop music.

# And a black crow snuck through a hole in the sky...#

I think I'm drawn as much to melody as I am to dissonance, you know?

I'm always trying to cross the wires a little bit.

SONG: Heartattack And Vine

This programme contains some strong language

Do you have any philosophies about writing?

Yeah, never sleep with a girl named Ruby

and never play pool with a guy named Fats.

I was born at a very young age,

and I was born in the back seat of a yellow cab

in Murphy Hospital parking lot.

And it was kind of a Thunderbird moon

that crawled across a muscatel sky there.

So I decided what I was going to do very young.

My father's a teacher.

And my mother's also a teacher.

They split up when I was about ten years old,

and I kind became the man of the family, you know?

When I was 14, I started working.

When I left home, I got in a little trouble.

Staying out after dark a lot.

-What doing?

-Huh?

-What doing?

Oh, you know.

# I'm going to Californ'

# I'm gon' live on Beverly Hill... #

He's an extraordinary painter of pictures,

as well as a teller of stories.

He's very focused on Los Angeles.

That's the kind of city that he's trying to make sense of.

# Well, you gassed her up

# Behind the wheel

# With your arm around your sweet one

# In your Oldsmobile

# Barrelling down the boulevard

# You're looking for the heart of Saturday night... #

On the one hand, you could listen to it,

it sounds like a guy talking about,

"Hey, it's Saturday night,

"let's go out and find some fun,"

you know, kind of thing.

But then, as Tom Waits always manages so brilliantly to do,

he's uncovering other layers there.

There is a romance to it

and you don't know with Tom exactly whether

it's the night he has a romance with,

or whether it's a pretty girl.

You just don't know with Tom.

# You're looking for the heart of Saturday night

# Tell me, is it the crackle of pool balls, neon buzzing...? #

Loneliness is so much at the heart of so much of his music,

it's just a longing for something.

And being alone and how do you live with that? How do you deal with it?

# Magic of the melancholy tear in your eye... #

I think Waits is a poet of doomed LA no-hopers.

People who are almost like characters from a noir novel,

they're getting their last chance at love.

# Stumbling onto the heart of Saturday night. #

I mean, everybody needs a different climate in order to create.

Mine usually comes if I'm talking to somebody in a bar or something.

I get a couple of lagers and try to stretch out a conversation,

I try to open things up, and then I try to remember it all later,

and then write it down, you know?

We got in a taxi, and he started talking to a taxi driver right away,

like he was his next-door neighbour or something.

By the time we got out of the taxi, he knew all about the guy.

Whatever was in the street,

Tom scooped it up and made something out of it.

We all fancied ourselves as these characters that Tom was conjuring.

Well, who isn't looking for

cinematic romance in their everyday lives?

There's a real romance to hanging around these places.

It's where you go to meet girls,

but it's also where you go to invent yourself in strangers' eyes.

And his right hand would say, come on, boy, go down, across the ground.

Go moan for man. Go moan.

Go groan.

Go groan alone.

Go roll your bones alone.

Go down and be little beneath my sight.

Go down and be the minutest seed in the pod.

Go down, go down, die hence.

Have this world report you well and truly.

Yeah.

We're about to talk about Jack Kerouac here.

I started reading Jack Kerouac when I was still in high school.

And...

So, I guess that's over ten years ago.

I think he understood the same things that Kerouac

and writers of his generation were talking about.

I see Tom Waits as being able to visit that.

So I guess I will always...

..owe a debt to Jack Kerouac for finally opening my eyes.

And making me feel like it's all right to sleep till

four in the afternoon and go out all night and...

..and take a good, hard look

at the underbelly of the bowels of a major urban centre.

LIVELY JAZZ SAX

Tom loves tenor saxophones.

That was the sound of loneliness, and that was the sound of love.

I think that's one of the things that drew us together,

that I'd made a lot of jazz records,

and improvisation was very much at the meat of those things.

We talked a lot about that kind of music,

where it just comes right out from your gut.

# Bwaaaah

# Baduh

# It's all about the kind of cat

# Who would sell you a rat's asshole for a wedding ring

# All you got to do is bend right over and step right up

# Step right up, step right up...

Step Right Up is kind of a Kerouac-esque

stream of consciousness,

in the way that Kerouac wrote on typewriter,

he had a huge reel of paper, so he could just continue

throughout the night,

and whatever came out of his head made it onto the paper.

# How about perfume? We got perfume

# How about an engagement ring?

# Something for the little lady, something for the little lady

# Something for the little lady... #

You can tell he's written it quite spontaneously.

Having fun with the idea of a carpetbagger.

A door-to-door salesman, or somebody at a carnival.

# Go, and now the penny go, and now the penny go, and now the penny go

# And now the penny go and not a penny less

# 50% off original retail price... #

All these brilliant phrases from,

not even modern advertising parlance,

it's '40s and '50s advertising parlance.

# Bawah! #

APPLAUSE

I never enjoyed reading in school until I got out of school,

and then I really, you know,

started hanging out in used bookstores and stuff, you know?

What kind of things do you read?

You know, I like...

I like detective novels and stuff.

Oh, my, my, my...

The prostitutes and the pimps and the different, odd characters

who inhabit all these songs and the world that

Tom Waits has created, there's a sort of tenderness,

but there's a slight edginess and a danger as well, at the same time.

# Costello was the champion

# At the St Moritz Hotel

# The best this side of Fairfax

# Reliable sources tell

# Now, his reputation is at large

# He's down at Ben Frank's every day

# Drinking coffee, waiting for the one that got away... #

He's got such a flair for the theatrical.

With his love of cinema and his love of noir.

He has fun with the whole thing.

Achoo.

SNIFFS

Ah, what the hell? You win some, you lose some.

You're searching for something, and you're fearless and

willing to experiment, sometimes you find yourself going back in time

just to locate something that you can't find in the future.

You know, you're trying to discover that which

has been overlooked by moving forward.

# I once wrote about a small little town in northern California

# All about hot summer nights

# And as the trucks roll by with about a forest of trees... #

MAKES THE SOUND OF A CAR DRIVING PAST

I mean, a song like Burma Shave,

really has got a sense of the Badlands about it.

It's a doomed relationship.

It's a couple on the lam.

It's a beautiful narrative.

# And they say dreams are growing wild

# Every night

# Just this side of a little town I know

# Called Burma Shave... #

Burma Shave, of course, is also an advert. It's the American dream.

There's something out there that you need, you require,

that will change your life for the better.

You need Burma Shave.

Why Burma Shave?

He's very into using advertising as metaphors

for the dreams that these people have.

And a cheap, accessible way, they think,

of getting hold of their dreams.

# She sends me

# Blue Valentines

# All the way from Philadelphia... #

He was just a man out of time, clearly.

And he knew it, I think, obviously!

And he played with it.

The craft and young genius of someone who was coming up with

lyrics that were on a par with someone like Johnny Mercer

or Hoagy Carmichael or any of the songwriters that had been

the backbone of the classic American Songbook.

# That's why I'm always on the run

# It's why I changed my name... #

The great American Songbook is something that either

gets to you or it doesn't. And it got to Tom.

Because there was a lot of intelligence

in the lyrics of those songs.

I would go to my friends' houses, and go into the den

with their dads and find out what they were listening to.

I couldn't wait to be an old man.

I was about 13, I didn't really identify with the music of my

own generation, but I seemed to like the old stuff.

Cole Porter, Gershwin, Frank Sinatra.

-SINATRA:

-# What is this thing

# Called love? #

Tom had that wonderful talent to absorb all these things that he saw.

It's like storing up paints

and being able to dig out the colours you want

when you get ready to paint a picture.

This is what he does, he paints pictures.

I grew up on a street called Kentucky Avenue.

I was born at a very young age.

And...

When I was about five years old,

I used to walk down Kentucky Avenue collecting cigarette butts.

And I finally got me a paper route.

I used to get up at one o'clock in the morning

so I could deliver my papers and still have time to break the law.

When I first heard that song, it broke my heart.

When he talks about taking the spokes from the wheelchair,

of the kid he's with, and putting them on his shoulders

as if they're wings.

# I'll take the spokes from your wheelchair

# And a magpie's wings

# And I'll tie them to your shoulders and your feet

# And I'll steal a hacksaw from my dad

# And cut the braces off your legs

# And we'll bury them tonight

# Out in the cornfield... #

What other songwriter would include the image of cutting off the

braces on a polio victim?

# Slide all the way down the drain

# To New Orleans in the fall. #

The sad, sweeping, melancholy songs are probably the real Tom Waits.

We get an insight into his actual, real personality.

At a time that Tom was busy writing songs about LA,

if you wanted to find it, you could find some really sleazy parts of LA.

And the people that went with it.

And Tom often went looking for it.

Many times, he went looking for it with a bottle of booze in his hand.

The biggest enemy of this kind of world is the sunrise.

It's like the world outside of morals and normality.

So the women he portrays are from that world.

The album cover of Small Change depicts this,

what looks to me like the back stage of a strip joint.

These are people who are working,

trying their best to get through life, doing what they have to do.

He's not judging.

-REPORTER:

-Waits and all his worldly goods have been crammed into

two rooms in a fairly seedy motel in Hollywood's red light district.

It's ankle-deep in clutter.

Waits says, if they clean up around him,

they might just clean out his head as well.

Your songs are about waitresses and bartenders and bums.

Why do you celebrate these people in song?

For the same reason that a lawyer hangs out in a pool room,

or you find a lot of photographers at a wedding, you know?

Because I find a lot of ideas here,

and there's a lot of life going on around here.

And so I'm bit of a private investigator.

Yeah, my dad spent a lot of time in the bars.

My dad drank in the afternoon in really dark bars.

So I was drawn to dark places.

The barfly was something that very much seeped

into Tom Waits' character.

So he became the crumpled suit, you know,

going to bed in the suit, shaving two days before the performance,

so you've got a five o'clock shadow.

He created a character that people could recognise.

But he made it his own.

Before, I was being a character in my own stories.

I remain in all of the stories.

But, at the same time, I think the creative process is a combination

of imagination and experience and memories and, you know...

So, by the time the story's finished or the song's finished,

it may or may not resemble where the story came from.

He said, "I went down to Skid Row,

"I drank a bottle of whisky, threw up and wrote Tom Traubert's Blues."

That's the way Tom operated.

# Wasted and wounded

# No, it ain't what the moon did

# Because I got what I paid for, no... #

Wasted and wounded, it ain't what the moon did, I got what I paid for.

It's just an incredible way to start a record.

# Hey, Frank, can I borrow...? #

Because he sounds completely broken in that song, to me.

But it's so uplifting at the same time.

# To go

# Waltzing Matilda

# Waltzing Matilda

# You'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me... #

Every song is like a little creation of the moment.

Somewhere, at four o'clock in the morning,

in between four bottles of whisky and three packs of Gauloises.

# I'm tired of all these soldiers here... #

It's trying to find some truth.

And the only way he can find it is to go deep

and kind of abase yourself.

And then you find out what's there.

To me, he's a mixture

of Satchmo Armstrong and Humphrey Bogart.

So would you welcome the curious and the very talented, Tom Waits.

APPLAUSE

How are you, Tom?

Oh, I'm better than nothing.

You got an ashtray there?

When he was first going on some of the talk shows,

that's when you could smoke on TV shows, and he was smoking.

At 29, you write about all these things that happened to you,

this sort of a lowlife thing that happens, you know?

-There's so much...

-You read that right off the page there.

-No, I didn't!

-Yeah, you did!

-It says lowlife, right there.

-Where?

I was just so impressed with his stage persona.

Because that's what it was, really.

I mean, how much of that is real, I don't know.

Do you worry about achievement?

No, I worry about a lot of things, but I don't worry about achievement.

I worry, primarily, about whether there are nightclubs in heaven.

LAUGHTER

In some ways, he was not that person at all.

Tom came to dinner at my house lots of times.

And he was just, you know,

an ordinary guy with a great sense of humour and a gruff voice.

-Put a little hair on your chest.

-He's coming along then, huh?

Oh, you count on it, man.

Well, if he's bringing friends then, you fucking queers...

Watch your language over there, watch it.

Break it down, break it down, cool it off.

I'm writing now.

I'm writing an album, Tales Of Woe From Heartattack And Vine.

It's going to sound a little more like James Brown and the

Famous Flames, that kind of...

feel to it.

I got to shake this whole wino image, you know?

This is a little song dealing with urban problems.

Heartattack And Vine, this mythical street corner,

where there's a bar or a diner.

It's the very inkiest his writing gets.

And the most frightening. But it's...

..ridiculously cool.

# Liar, liar, with your pants on fire

# White spades hanging on a telephone wire

# Well, gamblers re-evaluate along a dotted line

# You'll never recognise yourself on Heartattack And Vine... #

He uses his voice as a gorgeous instrument

for getting across the meaning of these lines.

And, you know, the gravel in his voice is the gravel these

people are having to walk along.

-When he sings...

-SHE GROWLS

..he goes into that completely monstrous, demon voice.

Like he's possessed.

I'm the gravelly voiced singer.

Invariably, that's how I'm referred to.

Gargling with various cleaning products, that type of thing.

They're trying to be funny.

I'm OK with that.

My wife said,

"I've never really listened to him, because he scares me." You know?

And I said, "What if I quote the lyrics while the song's on?"

And now she's a huge fan, because she loves great words.

# Boney's high on China white Shorty found a punk

# Don't you know there ain't no devil?

# There's just God when he's drunk... #

You know that ain't no devil, it's just God when he's drunk.

It's fantastic.

It's the duality of man,

it's the duplicity of the character in the song.

And it's also, we're all capable of being great,

we're all capable of being truly awful.

So let me, let me start moving...

Yeah, you count out a drunken three...

Yeah.

It was kind of a step backwards for me, a little bit, because I

had already tried to break out of my mortuary piano and cocktail hairdos.

That whole session with liquor

and my own perverted enjoyment of all that.

He said, "I was sitting there playing the piano last night,

"and there was a knock on the door, and the prettiest girl came in."

And she said, "What are you doing here?"

And he said, "I'm writing songs for One From The Heart, for Francis."

And that was the beginning of that romance.

And how did you meet this guy?

-Accidentally.

-Where?

Actually, I was a nun, and he fell asleep in the church,

and I woke him up.

LAUGHTER

Now, that's not true.

It depends... No.

We were both, I was working for Coppola Studios, Zoetrope Studios.

And you saw him perform musically several times, presumably?

-Never, never.

-Never?

Had no idea who or what he was.

And, in fact, he frightened me.

Tom was leading a very on-the-edge life.

And Kathleen saved his life.

Because she got him to stop drinking.

I'm the other half of what I consider to be

a really great songwriting team.

She has dreams like Hieronymous Bosch

She writes more from her dreams,

I write more from the world or from the newspaper.

And somehow it all works together.

# I plugged 16 shells from a thirty-aught-six... #

A swordfishtrombone, what the hell is that?

Is it a trombone with a swordfish attached?

I've got absolutely no idea, but it gives you an image.

It's going to be sharp, edgy, brassy and strange.

And it's going to really screw up your head for a while.

# And I made me a ladder from a pawnshop marimba... #

When you don't realise where it comes in the lineage,

Swordfishtrombones is even more spectacular.

If you just heard it and didn't know anything else about what had

happened before with Tom Waits' music,

you'd know it was a great record.

But that it came out of nowhere, in the way that it does.

It's so inventive.

# I'm gonna whittle you into kindling

# 16 shells from a thirty-aught-six... #

It's complete artistic reinvention.

He sort of went from black-and-white film noir

to some completely garish Technicolor.

# 16 shells from a thirty-aught-six... #

You know, he's having a lot of fun with this ragtag band,

that sound like they're only just holding it together.

And these almost stream of consciousness lyrics,

and the howling, the howling blues voice.

# Just gon'

# Gon' drink... #

The influence of Kathleen, his wife, she was a story analyst

and a screenwriter. It brings a real cinematic quality to his music.

There's something very theatrical about his instrumentation.

It changed the way I hear music.

Made me more rhythmic, more fearless, more percussive.

The idea of, make your own instruments,

you don't have to play that if you don't like it, make one yourself.

Make one that sounds better.

# In the neighbourhood

# In the neighbourhood

# In the neighbourhood... #

He moved on from talking about everyday life and blue-collar

nightlife to absolute madness and dementia, in a way.

He sees the beauty in the freakish, and the outcasts and the outsiders.

# Butch joined the Army, yeah

# That's where he's been... #

Suddenly, on Swordfishtrombones, within individual songs,

he's jumping from a kind of an escaped criminal.

But then suddenly, he's a leprechaun.

OK, Tom.

Some of the stuff's a little more exotic.

I used a banjo, accordion, bass marimba.

African squeeze drum, calliope, harmonium.

One of the problems that a lot of musicians have is that their

hands can get very used to playing certain instruments.

So you're no longer, kind of, necessarily feeling,

you're actually observing your hands doing this.

Tom Waits became very aware of this, and with Swordfishtrombones,

he actually said, I want to move away from that,

and he started playing unusual instruments.

He started to try to rediscover his spirit.

Harry Partch was a composer.

He used to make his own instruments.

These instruments were amazing-looking.

They looked like outer-space sculptures.

And you can see how something like that would appeal to Tom Waits.

In Shore Leave, you can hear a chair being dragged across the floor

as an instrument, you know?

And that's pretty amazing, that he did that.

He probably heard it and went, "Hey, let's put that in a song."

Eight o'clock, show's about to start, come on in.

Shore Leave is a song, another one of those tied neatly with a bow.

You have a character, you have a situation, he tells you

exactly what you need to hear, right down to the tiniest detail.

I think I could probably recite the whole song from the top.

Do you want me to have a go?

With bloodshot eyes and a purple heart

I rolled down the National Stroll...

I've jumped a load, haven't I?

With bloodshot eyes and a purple heart...

# With bloodshot eyes and a purple heart

# I just rolled down the National Stroll... #

I worked at a restaurant in a sailor town for

a long time in National City.

It was next to a tattoo parlour and a country-western dance hall.

# And I sat down and wrote a letter to my wife

# I said, Baby

# I'm so far away from home... #

And then it gets towards the end, and he says,

"I wondered how the moon that shines down over this Chinatown fair

"Could look down on Illinois and find you there."

# And I wondered how that same moon outside

# Over this Chinatown fair

# Could look down on Illinois

# And find you there... #

An aching bit of classic, Waitsian romance at the end of this,

sort of, portrait of a sailor on his shore leave.

# Outside, another yellow moon

# Has punched a hole in the night-time, yes

# I climb through the window and down to the street

# I'm shining like a new dime... #

I feel that Rain Dogs was probably very much influenced by Tom,

Kathleen and their kids living in New York City.

New York is so concentrated, it's like in your face, nyah, nyah, nyah.

# Will I see you tonight

# On a downtown train...? #

That had to be a huge influence on him, just being there.

# All of my dreams just fall like rain

# All on a downtown train. #

In direct experience of anyone walking down the street in New York,

you hear a lot of influences

of different cultures, simultaneously.

America's like the melting pot, but in Waits' work,

it works more like a juxtaposition.

I went to a rehearsal building on Times Square in New York,

and you could hear every kind of music coming to you through

the walls, through the windows, underneath the door.

There were African bands, and you had comedians, and I think

I just liked the whole melange of it, you know?

The way it all kind of mixes together.

I like hearing things incorrectly.

I think that's how I get a lot of ideas, by mishearing something.

I was just messing around, we were just jamming,

and I just stuck the alto and tenor in my mouth,

just playing, he walked in the room and he goes...

"What are you doing? What is that? What are you doing?"

Like, I don't know, I was messing around. "Let's use that."

Well, I ain't going back to Detroit, that's for damn sure.

You are not the only innocent asshole in here.

I was set up too.

All of his cinematic work, Down By Law, Rumble Fish,

all of these films, he's always come across as an outsider.

# Shadow music... #

Zack, my man.

What the fuck you doing out here in the garbage?

Just leave me alone, Preston.

I'm in a bad mood.

He's a brilliant actor, he's a brilliant performer.

I think there are some people who think Tom was a fake because

he's a great actor. But a great actor is not necessarily a fake.

Yeah, sure.

It helped me get outside myself a little bit,

and it helped me shape shift a little bit,

or take on the persona of someone other than myself.

Even though you say I, you're not necessarily the I in your song.

You sing a song, you are kind of like acting, you know?

HOWLING

# Inside a broken clock

# Splashed the wine

# With all the rain dogs

# Taxi, taxi, taxi

# We'd rather walk

# Huddle a doorway with the rain dogs

# For I am a rain dog too... #

When I started playing with Tom,

not only was he doing the more avant-garde stuff,

but he was also getting into European stuff, like Germany.

SINGS A NONSENSE OOMPAH MARCH

You know, those kind of tunes which nobody else was doing.

# And she whispered to me... #

Kurt Weill, Threepenny Opera and those things were

a huge influence at that time for him.

# Oh, show us the way to the next whisky bar

# Oh, don't ask why

# Oh, don't ask why... #

Somebody told me, hey, you sound like this guy Kurt Weill.

So I was thinking I was kind of moving in that direction

without knowing how or why.

He took melodies that were very alluring,

and he said things very disturbing inside of them.

And I think I'm drawn to that.

# For I am a rain dog too... #

He was always a showman, but now he was sort of saying,

it's vaudeville, and I'm going to dress up almost like

a vaudeville performer, and I'm going to be entertaining you with

bleak songs that, in some cases, are done in quite a jaunty style.

# We'll never be going back home. #

He loves to crawl into a kind of wicked, clown-esque personalities,

and express through that something very urgent and strong,

that almost, I find, he would be too shy to do as himself.

So I think the role-playing, for him,

is definitely a way of being able to express himself more extremely

than he would dare as Tom Waits.

Welcome to Miss Keiko's Chi Chi Club.

Iiiit's showtime!

# Blow, wind blow

# Wherever you may go

# For I don't know the code

# Take me away... #

If I started dressing up and singing in different voices and

pretending I was from different centuries,

I'd get kicked out me band for a start.

But, Tom Waits, that's all he's ever done.

# Blow me away... #

This mid-period Tom Waits is much more stylised.

There's much more artifice.

He's clearly saying all this contrivance is to an end.

This is a whole aesthetic,

and that this is essential to the way I make music.

# Put my Raleighs on the dashboard... #

One of the things that connects me and Tom so closely

is the circus, the freak shows, were my childhood.

# Take me into the light... #

The carnival was always, you could just descend into hell.

And come out.

# Blow me away. #

Frank settled down, out in the Valley.

And he hung his wild years on a nail

that he drove through his wife's forehead.

He sold used office furniture out there on San Fernando Road,

and assumed a 30,000 loan at 15.25%,

put a down payment on a little two-bedroom place.

He just found a way of introducing his whole concept of storytelling.

..most of the time, had a little Chihuahua named Carlos...

People say it's connected to his relationship with his dad,

with his dad, Frank.

One night, Frank was on his way home from work.

He stopped at the liquor store.

Picked up a couple of Mickey's Big Mouths.

Drank 'em in the car on the way to the Shell station.

Got a gallon of gas in a can.

Drove home, doused everything in the house, torched it.

Parked across the street, laughing, watching it burning.

All Halloween orange and chimney red.

And Frank put on a top-40 station.

Got on the Hollywood Freeway, headed north.

Never could stand that dog.

The American dream is to have lots of money and to be a success.

And you don't get many songs about people who've got lots of money

and are a success in Tom Waits' songs.

They're desperados.

Charles Bukowski had a story that essentially was saying that

it's the little things that drive men mad.

It's the broken shoelace when there's no time left

that sends men completely out of their minds.

And so this is kind of in that spirit.

And I think there's a little bit of Frank in everybody.

# Rusted brandy in a diamond glass

# Everything is made from dreams

# Time is made from honey, slow and sweet

# Only the fools know what it means... #

There's a spirit, whether it's a spirit of desperation

or a spirit of determined self-delusion.

There's still, to all these characters,

a sort of fractured, broken nobility to their indignity,

to their unseemly demises.

# Temptation... #

All right.

You're beautiful.

No, no, I know, I know - you hear that all the time, you know..

# You are beautiful

# To me... #

Frank's Wild Years is my favourite.

I love his Frank Sinatra character.

You know, "Roll over, big town."

So there's only one place to go.

# I'm going straight up to the top

# Oh, yeah... #

He plays with the arrangement of those things,

not unlike Charles Mingus.

Where he brings in these slightly jarring tonalities,

that take what sounds like a swinging,

early '60s kind of lounge number,

and turns it into a disorientating,

swirl of sounds that...

..evokes a descent into some sort of moral dissolution.

# Someone made me that way

# Top! #

He was just trying to go for, not making it straight,

but just slightly warped. I mean, that's the thing

I was able to add, because I'm kind of warped myself.

But that was an unspoken word, you did have to say it.

# Where the air is... #

It's images of desolation and hopelessness.

# Fresh

# Fresh and clean. #

And by the end of it, he's broken and on his knees,

and it's all gone terribly wrong.

# When you walk with Jesus

# He's gonna save your soul

# You got to keep the devil

# You got to keep him down in the hole... #

They're just such great stories.

The subculture or underbelly of life that Tom Waits goes into,

this screaming, dramatic, hellfire and brimstone preacher.

# Praise the Lord

# I don't know what it is, two dollar...? #

His carnival sideshow man,

is not that different to his whisky preacher.

# See if you can come up with a figure

# That matches your faith... #

Frank's Wild Years, that record was actually...

It was like the huckster preacher.

It was a lot about hucksters, you know? Fakes, you know?

That's where he was coming from.

# And blast him out

# People, can I get an amen?

# All the Angels... #

Whether Tom Waits is trying to convince us that

he believes that he's going to hell if he doesn't be careful,

or whether there's a part of him that actually fears it,

in that performance, there's a fragility and a scaredness to it.

# Can I get a hallelujah? #

-CROWD:

-Hallelujah!

There are a lot of preachers in my family.

Preachers and teachers.

My family was a little disappointed when they found out I was

going to be neither. They were a little like,

"Oh, man, we aren't things be able to help you then."

# I'm moving out west where the wind blows tall... #

By the time Waits gets to Bone Machine - just think of that

as a title, Bone Machine - I mean, what is it?

It's human beings. Or animals.

It's life, but stripped to its absolute bare minimum.

It kind of takes away everything we think of as being human.

There's no soul.

There's no fun, there's no anything, it's just a machine.

# I'm going to do what I want

# And I'm gonna get paid

# Little brown sausages, lying in the sand... #

We were hanging around the same kitchen table where we'd been

listening to Closing Time and Blue Valentine and all the romantic,

balladeering stuff.

We were listening to all that when Bone Machine came out,

and it scared us all to death.

I think we perhaps listened it all the way through once,

and then were like, "Shall we put the romantic ones back on?"

# With my Olds '88

# And the devil on a leash... #

When Mom heard the title Bone Machine, she said to me,

"Tom, why do you always have to degrade?"

I think after hearing that title, she was worried about my soul.

She said, "Don't forget, Tom,

"that the devil hates nothing more than a sane Christian."

That would also make a good song title.

# I don't lose my composure in a high-speed chase... #

Tom is obsessed with death.

There's always decay, the end of things,

and it's all pulling him down into the Earth.

It feels like it's been recorded outside,

using the skulls of dead animals.

In the middle of the woods somewhere.

And he's gone completely insane.

# I don't need no make-up... #

We all just hit a bunch of sticks in a parking lot.

And I was like, "man, this is just the greatest experience ever",

you know?

Would you care for an hors d'oeuvre, Dr Seward?

Or a canape?

No thank you, Mr Renfield.

It's interesting that Bone Machine came out in the same year

that he played Renfield in Dracula.

I just didn't get it initially,

but when I thought about the character he was playing,

stuck in a jail, feeling controlled, again, like a freak.

The master will come.

And he's promised to make me immortal.

How?!

There's something very stylised and very circus-like and kind of

cabaret-like about the way he plays Renfield.

It felt totally congruent with everything else he was doing.

Here's looking at you, babe.

# I don't go to church on Sunday

# I don't get down on my knees to pray... #

Tom started playing more country-blues, I call it.

It's a very spooky...

Another Tom Waits thing where you just feel like you're there.

Like, man, I can feel I'm a guy in the Mississippi somewhere,

as opposed to some really blues posers,

that you don't feel it at all.

# I fall down on my knees every Sunday

# At Zerelda Lee's candy store

# And it's got to be a chocolate Jesus

# Make me feel so good inside

# It's got to be... #

I think he gets to the heart and the essence of blues

with Mule Variations.

It's got something that really feels like it's reaching back into time,

and finding something that's so different.

And yet, is totally him.

It's his identity within all that.

# I say only, only a chocolate Jesus

# Could ever satisfy my soul

# Wah! #

There's definitely a Southern Gothic connection with Tom's music.

Whether you grow up in San Diego, California

or Jackson, Mississippi

or whether you grow up in a ghetto or a middle-class suburb,

it's all about your perception.

How you view the world.

I mean, that's what makes a good artist.

Let's dance.

When it came to doing The Imaginarium Of Dr Parnassus,

and we had the devil himself,

and I couldn't think of anyone better than Tom.

Especially because of his voice.

-GRAVELLY:

-I mean, I just love that voice,

to be able to talk like Tom is really a joy.

Can I offer you a stick of gum, or a breath mint?

It's the theatre of the thing, for him.

He's a grand illusionist, and always has been.

Damn!

I've won.

# I had a good home and I left

# Right, left

# That big fucking bomb made me deaf, deaf

# A Humvee mechanic put his Kevlar on wrong

# I guarantee you'll meet up with a suicide bomb

# Listen to the general, every goddamn word

# How many ways can you polish up a turd...? #

These are my feelings.

You know, I'm just trying to imagine

that it's a soldier writing home from any war.

I mean, as soon as you're at war, you've lost.

We're killing off our children, we're sending our children to war.

They're sending their children to war.

# How was it that the only ones responsible for making this mess

# Got their sorry asses stapled to a goddamn desk?

# And hell broke luce... #

He's genuinely concerned about where the world is going.

I mean, he's a man who loves everything,

and he knows there's damnation and doom waiting.

APPLAUSE

It's a great honour to induct Tom Waits

into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

You know, songs are really just very interesting things

to be doing with the air.

And they say that I have no hits,

and that I'm difficult to work with.

And they say that like it's a bad thing.

LAUGHTER

# Well, when I'm lying in my bed at night

# I don't wanna grow up... #

It's a really odd career path, the way he's done it.

He wrote the simplest ballads in the most recognisable form,

right at the beginning.

And he excelled at it.

And then he starts exploring.

And then he starts looking for a different voice.

# And when I see the price that you pay

# I don't wanna grow up... #

It's a dark vision,

but it's an ennobling spirit that permeates all these characters.

He gives them all a chance to say, "Well, I did it my way", you know?

# I don't want to have to learn to count...#

It doesn't matter whether he's singing about

the darkest stuff happening in the world.

But the actual sense of showmanship and the sense of

theatre and musicianship means that you can't help smiling or grinning.

You've got to give in and say, I'm happy to live in Tom Waits' world.

# I been thinking all night

# And I don't wanna grow up... #

It's rather mystifying, when you think about songs,

where they come from. You don't really go to songwriting school.

You learn by listening to tunes.

And then you try to understand them and take them apart and see

what they're made of, and you wonder if you can make one too.

# Comb their hair and shine their shoes

# I don't wanna grow up... #

I can't get into his brain, but I'm just glad I was a part of it.

Just be in a room with all that stuff.

# I don't wanna grow up... #

Looks like the press conference is about to begin.

He's a complete outsider, and he was faithful to himself.

Calm down, calm down, hold your horses.

The more he delves into himself as an artist,

the less he cares what other people think.

And when we're all lost, what do we do?

We look up to the night sky.

If you're going to go after who is Tom Waits within all these

characters that he conjures for us, he's all of them.

Are there any more questions?

I want to know what he's going to do next, is all I want to know.

"What's he doing in there?"

"Come on, Tom, come out. Don't go into that barn, Tom!"

# I don't wanna grow up. #

CLAMOUR OF A FULL ROOM

CLAMOUR STOPS

Thank you.

Say hi to your mother.

# You got to lie to me, baby

# You got to lie to me, baby

# Lie to me, baby

# Lie to me, baby, move on

# You've got to lie to me, baby

# You have to lie to me, baby

# You've got to lie to me, baby

# Lie to me, baby, move on

# You have to lie to me, baby

# Lie to me, then move on

# Lie to me, baby, move on. #