`Variations' On a Twisted Persona
Tom Waits talks about his new album, rats' teeth and Yma Sumac's hairdresser
James Sullivan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, April 18, 1999
©1999 San Francisco Chronicle
URL:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/04/18/PK21006.DTL&type=music
``All life interests me,'' lisps Renfield, the feverish asylum inmate Tom Waits plays
in Francis Ford Coppola's film ``Bram Stoker's Dracula.'' Then he eats a worm.
That small scene might best capture the singer-actor's trademark affinity for life's
strange beauty.
Waits has cultivated an image that's slightly out of whack, and it has served him
well. A cult phenomenon by the early 1980s, the scat-singing raconteur recast himself
as rock 'n' roll's ingenious rag man with a masterful series of experimental yet
deeply traditional albums. He took swatches of immigrant music -- secondhand tangos,
pub ballads, Weimar- era cabaret songs -- and made them uniquely American, uniquely
his own.
Next week, Waits releases his 12th studio album. They came in bunches in the '70s, but
this is his first, not including soundtracks, since 1992's Grammy-winning ``Bone
Machine.'' Anticipation is high.
His first release for the punk label Epitaph, ``Mule Variations'' will be Waits' most
public project in ages. In recent years he has earned a reputation as a bit of a
recluse, playing only the odd benefit concert while working on plays and soundtracks
at his family's home in the Sonoma countryside.
He's planning select live dates, as well as a concert taping for VH1, which recently
named him one of the ``Most Influential Artists of All Time.''
Not that he buys it, exactly.
``I don't know what it is I do yet,'' Waits rasps on a recent afternoon, hunching over
a plate of sweet-and-sour chicken at an old-fashioned, dark-paneled Chinese restaurant
on Grant Avenue. ``I guess if you figure it out, you're kind of all done.''
------
True to form, Waits is dressed in rail-yard garb -- scuffed black boots, stiff jeans,
a tight denim jacket buttoned up like a shirt. When he takes off his ever-present
battered fedora, his kinky hair springs up like a wire garden. It's the same look he
took onstage at one of his first concerts in years, in Austin, Texas, at the South by
Southwest music conference last month.
Waits is reluctant to do interviews and will do only a handful to promote his album,
but he is less socially uneasy than simply preoccupied.
One thing about Waits is certain: He's the sort of guy who will answer a question with
a question. Asked about his long stretch be tween albums, he replies: ``Did you know a
rat's teeth will grow through the roof of its mouth into its brain if it doesn't keep
eating?''
There's a clear lesson to be learned from that zoological tidbit, Waits claims,
suppressing a smile: ``Always keep snacks around.'' He cranes his neck for an
imaginary waiter: ``Could we get a little something over here as a starter, really
quick?'' he hollers. ``My teeth are growing.''
------
Waits has lived in rural Sonoma County for several years with his wife and longtime
collaborator, Kathleen Brennan, and their three children. ``Mule Variations,'' he
suggests, is his attempt to get back to the land. ``You know, Robert Johnson started
writing about automobiles, and from then forward people stopped writing about
animals.''
He says the title phrase of the slow-roasting blues ``Get Behind the Mule'' comes from
something the late bluesman Johnson's father told his shiftless son: ``You gotta get
behind the mule in the morning and plow.''
For years Waits lived out the gutter-trawling lifestyle of his characters. ``There
have been plenty of days when I've gotten up too late in the morning and the mule is
gone,'' he says. ``Or somebody else is behind the mule, and I have to get behind the
guy who's behind the mule.''
The album, recorded last year, features contributions by Bay Area musicians including
harmonica veteran Charlie Musselwhite, brass and woodwind player Nik Phelps of
Clubfoot Orchestra, drummer Andrew Borger of the Beth Lisick Ordeal and guitarist Joe
Gore and multi-instrumentalist Ralph Carney of the Oranj Symphonette. Primus serves as
Waits' backing band on the rambunctious lead track, ``Big in Japan.''
It was Brennan, Waits says, who urged him back behind the mule. They met almost 20
years ago, while working at Coppola's Zoetrope Studios. Among her many songwriting
credits with her husband, Brennan co-wrote Waits' music for ``Bunny,'' the short
animated film that just won an Academy Award.
In between words of devotion, Waits takes great joy in making up a past for his wife:
He claims she's been an elevator operator and an anchorwoman, among other things.
``She was Yma Sumac's hairdresser for a very short period of time.'' His slate-colored
eyes twinkle devilishly. ``They had to let her go -- too much overhead!''
Such absurdities peppered Waits' performance in Austin, a midnight show that was the
festival's most coveted ticket. At one point he offered Brennan's description of his
music. ``My wife says I have two kinds of songs -- grand weepers and grim reapers,''
he said.
Like all his records, ``Mule Variations'' is exquisitely paced. The tender numbers --
the ones on which you can hear the piano pedals creak (``Picture in a Frame,'' ``Take
It With Me'') -- arrive at regular intervals between Waits' rattletrap, anything-goes
stomps and his craggy falsetto hymns.
That pacing goes all the way back to his days in a high school band called the
Systems, when aspiring musicians learned to play ``three fast ones and then one slow
one,'' he says. ``That's still the shape of most records.''
It might be argued that Waits is revisiting those high school years. Epitaph, the Los
Angeles label that launched Rancid and the Offspring, seems like a curious home for a
man who turns 50 in December.
But Waits says the label has been a good fit thus far. ``The fact is, if I told them I
wanted to do Cuban gospel disco cartoon music, they'd say, `When are you going into
the studio?' ''
As proof of the company's unflagging support of its artists, Waits cites the case of
the die-hard punk band NOFX, which demanded that one of its songs be removed from
commercial radio stations. ``They got their song taken off the air,'' he marvels. ``I
like that. Most people are trying to get on the radio.''
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Once touted as another ``new Dylan'' along with a young Bruce Springsteen, Waits has
long since abandoned any desire to achieve mass acceptance. ``I've heard myself on the
radio once or twice,'' he says. ``It's kind of a thrill.''
He hasn't always been such a skeptic. ``There was a time when I was a kid and I had my
little crystal set and my aerial on the roof, listening to Wolfman Jack, Tennessee
Ernie Ford, Johnny Horton, Floyd Cramer. The radio was a pretty great thing.''
He won't find himself on today's airwaves, other than on some adventurous college
stations. But Waits has been blessed by the admiration of a wild array of performers.
He's made considerable publishing money with the help of Rod Stewart, for instance,
who has covered at least three Waits songs, including ``Downtown Train,'' a No. 3 hit
single in 1989.
At the height of the Eagles' fame, they covered ``Ol' 55,'' the first song on Waits'
first album. Springsteen did ``Jersey Girl''; Holly Cole did a whole album of
reinterpreted covers (``Temptation''). Waits' ex-girlfriend Rickie Lee Jones has sung
his songs; so has his former touring partner Bette Midler.
``Johnny Cash did a song,'' he says. ``That felt particularly validating.''
He's also fended off dozens of requests from advertisers. Waits is adamantly opposed
to songs being sold as jingles, and he won a $2.5 million court decision some years
ago from Frito-Lay, which had hired a sound-alike for an ad campaign.
More recently, he battled his ex-manager, Herb Cohen, who sold Screamin' Jay Hawkins'
version of Waits' ``Heartattack and Vine'' for use in a Levi's commercial.
Advertising aside, Waits is philosophical about sending his songs out into the world
to be reinvented by other artists. ``You might not like the version they do, but I may
do the same thing with somebody else's song -- bend it around, change it,'' he says.
``If the arm's sticking up, I'm gonna break it so it'll fit in the box.''
------ Like every record Waits has done since 1983's revelatory
``Swordfishtrombones,'' ``Mule Variations'' teems with weird sounds: plunking
xylophones, wheezing pump organs, makeshift percussion instruments, roosters.
``Everything finds its way onto the records in some form or another,'' he says, ``if
you allow yourself to be open to the experience.
Always on alert, Waits can be excitable and high-strung. It's one reason he all but
dropped out after ``Bone Machine.'' By all accounts, he needed a break from his own
mythology.
``You're constantly saying, `Notice me, notice me,' and then `Leave me alone,' '' he
says.
Sometimes it's annoying living up to cult status, he acknowledges, ``but sometimes
it's annoying to be a taxidermist, or a train conductor. And there are times when,
hey, this is about the coolest thing there could ever be to be.''
