Since the early 1930s at least, when the bluesman Robert Johnson “sold his
soul to the Devil”, popular musicians have understood the uses of a personal
mythology. Sometimes, as seems to have been the case with Johnson, the myths
are foisted on their subjects, by managers, promotional departments,
journalists in need of a story. Just as often, musicians do it for
themselves. Some of the most ostensibly “honest” stars around, from Bob
Dylan to Neil Young, have relied on a carefully cultivated mystique.
Confessional songwriting usually reveals just what the songwriter wishes it
to reveal, and there are as many perils in mapping the lives of singers onto
their songs as there are in reading writers through their novels. Tom
Waits’s musical life has been played out in two distinct halves, though in
both he has been more of a storyteller in song than a memoirist, closer to
Randy Newman than to Dylan. But what attracts his devoted following, among
whom Barney Hoskyns would be happy to be numbered, is the sense that the
broken-up world he evokes is something Waits has experienced himself. The
fact that Waits, who turns sixty this year, has refused to cooperate in this
biography, and has made a pretty good fist of warning off those around him
from giving Hoskyns any help either, only places more weight on the matter
of interpreting those songs.
Waits would be the first to admit that if he writes about the mean streets, he
“is not himself mean”. Until the age of eleven, he lived in Whittier, a
middle-class suburb of Los Angeles, which was also the birthplace of Richard
Nixon. Tom’s father, Frank, was a Spanish teacher, and his mother, Alma,
brought Waits and his two sisters up with little help from her husband, an
alcoholic whose absences developed into a permanent split when Waits was
around ten years old. Nonetheless, Frank Waits, on whose side of the family,
according to his son, were “all the psychopaths and alcoholics”, had a
lasting influence on Tom. The first half of Waits’s musical career, in which
he produced booze-soaked, piano-led tales of late nights and unrequited
love, could be seen as the son inhabiting an exaggerated version of the
world his father had introduced him to. “I remember my father taking me into
bars when I was very young. I remember climbing up a barstool like Jungle
Jim, getting all the way up to the top and sitting there with my dad. He
could tell stories in there for ever.” Waits’s bravura version of the tall
tale of a ghost-trucker, “Big Joe and Phantom 309” (“At the wheel sat a big
man, / I have to say he must have weighed two-ten / And he stuck out a big
hand and said with a grin / ‘Big Joe’s the name, and this here rig’s called
Phantom 309’”), might almost be a musical tribute to this small-hours
storyspinning.
Another childhood habit that stayed with Waits was a desire to act older than
he was: “I was real repressed . . . . I wanted to skip growing up and rush
all the way to forty”. Hoskyns reproduces a photograph of Waits reunited
with his father backstage at a concert in 1975. The twenty-five-year-old
son, ostentatiously calamitous in flat cap and old man’s suit and tie, can
of beer and cigarette in hand, is doing his best to pull seniority on his
father, who has the half-proud, half-embarrassed look of any parent when
their beloved is showing off. But for Tom, the attraction to the old school
went beyond his wardrobe. He had by this time produced two albums of
melodic, pining songs that sounded more like productions of the 1950s than
the 1970s. The fact that he was strong-armed by his management into touring
this material as an opening act for Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention
gives some indication of quite how out of step Waits was with his times. But
songs like “Martha”, “Ol’ 55”, “(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night”
or “Grapefruit Moon” have weathered rather better than Zappa’s “Hungry
Freaks, Daddy”, or “Billy the Mountain” (which went on for half an hour).
For a time, as Hoskyns relates, Waits seems to have tried to live the low life
he was describing in his songs. He rented a room at a famously louche West
Hollywood motel, where the late nights and heavy drinking “became a stage,
because I became associated with it and people came looking for me and
calling me in the middle of the night”. Waits read Kerouac, drank Bourbon
and played his upright piano, while his contemporaries were snorting cocaine
and rocking out. People knew that he was partially in character, but it
would be hard to find a rock musician who wasn’t also a poseur. Waits would
defend himself by pointing out that “I don’t normally wear Bermuda shorts
and white socks and wingtips and read Khalil Gibran. I’m the closest thing
to myself that I know”. Meanwhile, the voice got more gravelly, and the
songs by turns more sweepingly heartfelt (“Tom Traubert’s Blues”, a
beautifully unexpected incorporation of parts of “Waltzing Matilda” into a
hobo’s lament; “Kentucky Avenue”, a memoir of childhood scrapes that becomes
a fantasy of healing a crippled pal: “I’ll steal a hacksaw from my Dad / And
cut the braces from your legs”); or more seedy (“Step Right Up”, a
salesman’s patter for everything, delivered to the insistent backing of an
upright bass; “Pasties and a G-String (at the Two O’Clock Club)”, a similar
schtick for a strip joint).
The increasingly theatrical side of Waits’s music found one natural endpoint
in a suite of songs for a Francis Ford Coppola film, One from the Heart
(1982). The music far outlived the film, but by this time, Waits was growing
tired of self-pastiche. With a new album, Swordfishtrombones (1983), he
found another way of staging himself. His voice took on a new rasp, and
sometimes an almost hysterical quality, while the instrumentation relied
heavily on less familiar percussion (Waits’s love affair with the marimba
began here). Waits himself is credited with “playing” a chair on the
demented “Shore Leave”. From now on, although he was still able to produce
mainstream pop songs (the best-known of which, “Downtown Train”, was covered
by Rod Stewart), he was more interested in the freakish, souped-up carnival
tunes that dominated his albums. Hoskyns is persuasive in arguing that,
although Waits himself was ready to try something new anyway, he was greatly
influenced by his new wife, Kathleen Brennan, who has worked with him on all
his albums since Swordfishtrombones. Brennan also managed to pull the
drawbridge up on Waits’s public life. He does his fair share of promotional
interviews, but the days of knocking on Tom’s door at three in the morning
are definitely over.
Waits’s “new” style is now almost thirty years old, and if occasionally one
longs for more of the bitter-sweetness of his early output, it has to be
admitted that there are still few songwriters working today who can match
him for creativity and originality. A rare false move, where Brennan’s
influence seems to have shaded into Yoko territory, is her reported hand in
Waits’s clunkingly straightforward take on the Israel–Palestine question,
“The Road to Peace”.
Hoskyns is a seasoned rock writer who gets around the non-cooperation of Waits
and his circle by doing a thorough cuttings job, and combining it with those
interviewees who would talk to him, and his own intelligent observations. If
the result is more a meditation on Waits’s work than his life, that is
surely the better direction in which to tip the balance. The book is too
long, because Hoskyns can’t resist analysing every song that Waits has ever
recorded, and a few he hasn’t. But it provides a genuine insight into a
great songwriter and unique performer who has nevertheless done his best to
remain enigmatic. For Hoskyns, the two songs that provide the best clues to
Waits’s persona are “Eyeball Kid”, a satire on fame about a freakshow
attraction who “was born without a body / Not even a brow”, and “What’s He
Building in There?”, a paranoid fantasy about nosy neighbours that seems a
bit more sinister to me than Hoskyns allows. For the listener to Waits’s
music unencumbered by fears of invading his privacy, it is easier to focus
on a streak of sentiment running all the way through from “I Hope that I
Don’t Fall in Love with You” (recorded in 1973) to “Coney Island Baby”
(2002). Waits might now be most often heard with his recommendation to “Keep
the Devil / Way down in the Hole” (from the song that has become the
signature tune of the cult television series The Wire), but perhaps his
secret is the opposite of Robert Johnson’s. He seems to have made a deal
with the angels.
Barney Hoskyns
LOWSIDE OF THE ROAD
A Life of Tom Waits
609pp. Faber. £20.
978 0 571 23552 0
David Horspool is History editor of the TLS. His new book, The English
Rebel, will be published later this year.
