Tom Waits

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Tom Waits

Thomas Alan Waits (born December 7, 1949) is an American singer-songwriter, composer, and actor.

Waits has a distinctive voice, described by one critic as sounding "pretty ordinary."[1] With this trademark growl, his incorporation of pre-rock styles such as blues, jazz, and Vaudeville, and experimental tendencies verging on industrial music,[2] Waits has built up a distinctive musical persona.

Lyrically, Waits' songs are known for atmospheric portrayals of bizarre, seedy characters and places, although he has also shown a penchant for more conventional and touching ballads. He has a cult following and has influenced subsequent songwriters, despite having little radio or music video support. His songs are best known to the general public in the form of cover versions by more visible artists—for example "Jersey Girl" performed by Bruce Springsteen, "Downtown Train" performed by Rod Stewart, and "Ol' '55" performed by the Eagles. Although Waits' albums have met with mixed commercial success in his native United States, they have occasionally achieved gold album sales status in other countries. He has been nominated for a number of major music awards, and has won Grammy Awards for two albums.

Waits has also worked as a composer for movies and musical plays and as a supporting actor in films, including The Fisher King and Bram Stoker's Dracula. He has been nominated for an Academy Award for his soundtrack work.

Career

Early career

Tom Waits was born in Pomona, California. His father Frank was of Scottish-Irish descent and his mother of Norwegian descent.[3] Both were schoolteachers. Tom was working as a doorman at the Heritage nightclub in San Diego in the early '70s, where artists of every genre performed. An avid fan of many writers and musicians, among them Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Lord Buckley, Hoagy Carmichael, Marty Robbins, Raymond Chandler, and Stephen Foster, Waits began developing his own idiosyncratic musical style, combining song and monologue.

After an interlude with the US Coast Guard he took his newly formed act to Monday nights at The Troubadour in Los Angeles, where musicians from all over stood in line all day to get the opportunity to perform on-stage that night. Shortly thereafter, in 1971, Waits began his recording career after he relocated to Los Angeles and signed to Asylum Records with Herb Cohen, who was also the manager of Frank Zappa. He was 21 years old.

After numerous abortive recording sessions, Waits's first record, the melancholic, jazzy, folk-tinged Closing Time was released (1972). While it received warm reviews, he did not gain widespread attention until the album's opening track, "Ol' 55", was recorded by his label mates the Eagles in 1974 for their On the Border album.

He began touring and opening for such artists as Charlie Rich, Martha and the Vandellas and Frank Zappa. Waits gained increasing critical acclaim and a loyal cult audience with his subsequent albums. The Heart of Saturday Night, featuring the loping, classic, prime 1974 bar song, "Looking For the Heart of Saturday Night", which showcases Waits' distinctive, finger-plucked, old-west style of acoustic guitar playing, backed by a smooth, uninhibited upright bass and a sweet, weathered, pure vocal. The album revealed Waits' roots as a nightclub performer, with half-spoken and half-crooned ballads, often accompanied by a jazz backup band.

The 1975 album Nighthawks at the Diner, recorded in a studio with a small audience to capture the ambiance of a live show, exemplifies this phase of his career, including the lengthy spoken interludes between songs that punctuated his live act. The album also introduced to fans his newly-discovered, exaggeratedly gruff vocal delivery which would dominate many albums to come. Regarding his music from this era, Waits reported that "I wasn't thrilled by Blue Cheer, so I found an alternative, even if it was Bing Crosby."[4]

Small Change (1976), featuring famed drummer Shelly Manne, was, like his previous albums, heavily jazz influenced. Songs such as "The Piano Has Been Drinking" and "Bad Liver and a Broken Heart" cemented Waits's hard-living reputation, with a lyrical style that owed influence to Raymond Chandler and Charles Bukowski as well as a vocal delivery unquestionably indebted to Louis Armstrong. Foreign Affairs (1977) and Blue Valentine (1978) were in a similar vein, but showed further artistic refinement and exploration into jazz and blues styles. The song "Blue Valentines" features a desolate arrangement of solo electric guitar played by Ray Crawford accompanied by Waits' vocal. It was around this time that Waits had a high-profile romantic relationship with Rickie Lee Jones (who appears on the sleeve art of the Foreign Affairs and Blue Valentine albums). Heartattack and Vine was released in 1980, featuring a developing sound which included both balladeer tendencies (on "Jersey Girl", for example), as well as rougher-edged rhythm and blues.

Though not entirely unprecedented, Heartattack and Vine's grittier sound was different for Waits, and foreshadowed the major changes in his music that would take place in the following years. The same year, he began a long working relationship with Francis Ford Coppola, who asked Waits to provide music for his film One from the Heart. For Coppola's film, Waits originally wanted to work with Bette Midler, who previously sang a duet with him on the Billie Holiday-esque track "I Never Talk to Strangers" from Foreign Affairs, but due to previous engagements, Midler was unavailable. Instead, Waits ended up working with singer/songwriter Crystal Gayle as his vocal foil for the album.

Waits began his acting career with his appearance in Sylvester Stallone's 1978 film Paradise Alley.

1980s

In August 1980, Waits married Kathleen Brennan, whom he had met on the set of One from the Heart. Brennan is regularly credited as co-author of many songs on his later albums, and Waits often cites her as a major influence on his work. She introduced him to the music of Captain Beefheart: despite having shared a manager with Beefheart in the 1970s, Waits says "I became more acquainted with him when I got married."[5] Waits would later describe his relationship with Brennan as a paradigm shift in his musical development.

After leaving Asylum Records for Island Records, Waits released Swordfishtrombones in 1983, a record which marked a sharp turn in Waits's output, and which gave rise to his reputation as a musical maverick. The album advances all the musical experimentation of earlier recordings, including variations in instrumentation (e.g. the use of bagpipes in "Town with No Cheer" or the marimba on "Shore Leave") and vocalising (e.g. the spoken word monologue of "Frank's Wild Years" or the bark of "16 Shells from a Thirty Ought Six"), and much less of the traditional piano-and-strings ballad sound with which Waits had always previously balanced his recordings. Apart from Captain Beefheart and some of Dr. John's early output, there was little precedent in popular music for Swordfishtrombones or equally idiosyncratic albums, Rain Dogs (1985) and Franks Wild Years (1987).

Waits had earlier played either piano or guitar, but he began tiring of these instruments, saying, "Your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they've been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of their habits or you don't explore, you only play what is confident and pleasing. I'm learning to break those habits by playing instruments I know absolutely nothing about, like a bassoon or a waterphone."[6]

The instrumentation and orchestration in these and later albums were often quite eclectic.[7] Waits's self-described "Junkyard Orchestra" included wheezing pump organs, clattering percussion (sometimes reminiscent of the music of Harry Partch), bleary horn sections (often featuring Ralph Carney playing in the style of brass bands or soul music), nearly atonal guitar (perhaps best typified by Marc Ribot's contributions) and obsolete instruments (many of Waits' albums have featured a damaged, unpredictable Chamberlin, and more recent albums have included the little-used Stroh violin).

Along with a new instrumental approach, Waits gradually altered his singing style to sound less like the late-night crooner of the 70s, instead adopting a number of techniques: a gravelly sound reminiscent of Howlin' Wolf and Captain Beefheart, a booming, feral bark, or a strained, nearly shrieking falsetto Waits jokingly describes as his Prince voice. Tom Moon describes Waits's voice as a "broad-spectrum assault weapon".[8]

His songwriting shifted as well, becoming somewhat more abstract and embracing a number of styles largely ignored in pop music, including primal blues, cabaret stylings, rhumbas, theatrical approaches in the style of Kurt Weill, tango music, early country music and European folk music, as well as the Tin Pan Alley-era songs that influenced his early output. He also recorded a few spoken word pieces influenced by Ken Nordine's "word jazz" records of the 1950s.

Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years can retrospectively be seen as a trilogy of loose concept albums, following a sailor as he leaves the familiar comfort of home, sees the world, and returns. The last of these albums was also adapted as an off-Broadway musical, which Waits co-wrote with Brennan — and starred in, in a successful run at Chicago's famed Steppenwolf Theater. This continued Waits' involvement in other artistic forms; he developed his acting career with several supporting roles, and a lead role in Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law in 1986 which also included two of Waits's songs from Rain Dogs in the soundtrack. Further theatre collaborations would follow, and with his wife Waits also wrote and performed in Big Time, a surreal concert movie and soundtrack released in 1988.

1990s

In 1990 Waits collaborated with photographer Sylvia Plachy. Her book, Sylvia Plachy's Unguided Tour includes a short Tom Waits record to accompany the photographs and text.

Waits appeared on Primus' 1991 album, Sailing the Seas of Cheese as the voice of "Tommy the Cat", which exposed him to a new audience in alternative rock. This was the first of several collaborations between Waits and the group; Les Claypool (Primus' singer, songwriter and bassist) would appear on several subsequent Waits releases. Waits wrote and conducted the music for Jim Jarmusch's 1991 film Night on Earth, which was released as an album the following year.

Bone Machine was released in 1992. The stark record featured a great deal of percussion and guitar (with little piano or sax), marking another change in Waits' sound. Critic Steve Huey calls it "perhaps Tom Waits' most cohesive album ... a morbid, sinister nightmare, one that applied the quirks of his experimental '80s classics to stunningly evocative – and often harrowing – effect ... Waits' most affecting and powerful recording, even if it isn't his most accessible."[9] Bone Machine was awarded a Grammy in the Best Alternative Album category.

The Black Rider (1993) was the result of a theatrical collaboration between Waits, director Robert Wilson and writer William S. Burroughs.

Mule Variations was issued in 1999, and also won a Grammy, though to give an idea of how impossible it is to classify Waits' music, he was nominated simultaneously for Best Contemporary Folk Album (which he won) and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance (for the song "Hold On")–both different from the genre for which he won his previous Grammy. It was Waits's first release for Anti Records, and his first to feature a turntablist, though, predictably, the instrument is used in an offbeat manner. The album was also his highest-charting album in the US, reaching #30.

In a 1999 interview with USA Today ("Wider public greets Waits' Variations, July 18, 1999, p. 5E), Waits responded to his experience with various instruments that flopped by saying "Bagpipe players. With all due respect, forget about it. It's hard for them to play with anyone other than another bagpipe player. And they're so loud. I ended up telling them to play far far away." Waits also had a many humorous lines in his interview: "I don't have a TV. We threw it in the pool, and then we drained the pool and filled it with golf balls." "Some songs come out of the ground like a potato. Others you have to make out of things around the house like your mom's pool cue and your neighbor's ostrich and your grandma's purse." "Hey, we're all going to wind up at the Salvation Army. Popular music is all about burying you so they can dig you up later. The first thing a musician does is sift through old records at the Salvation Army."

2000s

Singer John P. Hammond's Wicked Grin was issued in 2001. Hammond and Waits are close friends, and the album is a collection of cover songs, originally written by Waits, who appears on most songs (playing guitar, piano or offering backing vocals). There is also a version of the traditional hymn "I Know I've Been Changed", which Hammond and Waits perform as a duet.

In 2002, Waits simultaneously released two albums, Alice and Blood Money. Both were based on theatrical collaborations with Robert Wilson, the former originally intended as a musical play about Lewis Carroll and the latter an interpretation of Georg Büchner's play fragment Woyzeck. The two albums revisit the tango, Tin Pan Alley, and spoken word influences of Swordfishtrombones, while the lyrics are both profoundly cynical and melancholy, as the titles "Misery is the River of the World" and "No One Knows I'm Gone" make clear.

Real Gone was released in 2004. While more refined than Bone Machine and perhaps more commercially viable than Alice or Blood Money, its sound is still experimental, and it is his only album thus far completely lacking in piano. Waits beatboxes on the opening track, "Top of the Hill", and most of the album's songs begin with Waits's "vocal percussion" improvisations. It is also more rock-oriented, with less blues influence than he has previously demonstrated, and it contains two explicitly political songs — a first for Waits. In the album-closing "The Day After Tomorrow" he adopts the persona of a soldier writing home that he is disillusioned with war and is thankful to be leaving. The song doesn't mention the Iraq war, and, as Tom Moon writes, "it could be the voice of a Civil War soldier singing a lonesome late-night dirge." Waits himself does describe the song as something of an "elliptical" protest song about the Iraqi invasion, however.[10] Thom Jurek describes "The Day After Tomorrow" as "one of the most insightful and understated anti-war songs to have been written in decades. It contains not a hint of banality or sentiment in its folksy articulation."[11]

A 54 song, three-disc box set of rarities, unreleased tracks and brand new compositions called Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards was released in November 2006. The three CDs are each given one of the words from the subtitle, relating to their content. CD 1, "Brawlers", contains rocky blues-type songs of a more upbeat tempo, CD 2, "Bawlers", features ballads and love songs, and the third CD, "Bastards", contains the songs that fit in neither category. An mp3 track from the album is available on the ANTI Records website called "Bottom of the World", as well as a video for the song "Lie to Me". The already critically acclaimed compilation has been receiving rave reviews from every publication that has reviewed it, with scores, more or less, solely in the 5-star region.[12]

In November 2006 Waits appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and performed "The Day After Tomorrow" from Real Gone, significant for being only the third performing guest on the show, the first being Tenacious D and the second being The White Stripes. While on the show, he said (of his songs being about lowlifes and grisly situations) "it's all an act." Waits now lives in Sonoma County, California with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, and their three children.

Tom Waits' albums Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards, Alice, and Blood Money are all included in metacritic.com's list of the "Top 200: Best-Reviewed Albums"[13] since 2000 at #11, #17 and #183 respectively. This demonstrates the high regard in which Tom Waits' recent output is held. The Orphans collection also continues Waits newfound interest in politics with a song about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ('Road To Peace') and a cover of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's "What Keeps Mankind Alive."

On May 4, 2007 Waits appeared on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. This was the last show of a week Conan spent in San Francisco. Waits performed "Lucinda" and "Aint Goin' Down to the Well" from the album Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards. There was a short interview after the last performance.

Lawsuits

Waits has steadfastly refused to allow the use of his songs in commercials and has joked about other artists who do. ("If Michael Jackson wants to work for Pepsi, why doesn't he just get himself a suit and an office in their headquarters and be done with it."[14]) He has filed several lawsuits against advertisers who used his material without permission. He has been quoted, "Apparently the highest compliment our culture grants artists nowadays is to be in an ad—ideally naked and purring on the hood of a new car," he said in a statement, referring to the Mercury Cougar. "I have adamantly and repeatedly refused this dubious honor."[15]

Waits has often switched to smaller independent record companies over the years: he signed to Asylum Records before they were bought out by Elektra Records and Warner Bros. During his time with Island Records, that label expanded from a small company to a music industry giant; he then signed to Anti Records, a division of Epitaph Records.

Waits's first lawsuit was filed in 1988 against Frito Lay. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of California awarded Waits a US$2.6 million judgment in his favor (Waits v. Frito Lay, 978 F. 2d 1093 (9th Cir. 1992)[16]. Frito Lay had approached Waits to use one of his songs in an advertisement. Waits declined the offer, and Frito Lay hired a Waits soundalike to sing a jingle similar to Small Change's "Step Right Up", which is, ironically, a song Waits has called "an indictment of advertising."[17] Waits won the lawsuit, becoming the first artist to successfully sue a company for using an impersonator without permission.

In 1993, Levi's used Screamin' Jay Hawkins' version of Waits' "Heartattack and Vine" in a commercial. Waits sued, and Levi's agreed to cease all use of the song, and offered a full page apology in Billboard Magazine.[18]

In 2000, Waits found himself in a situation similar to his earlier one with Frito-Lay: Audi approached him, asking to use "Innocent When You Dream" (from Franks Wild Years) for a commercial broadcast in Spain. Waits declined, but the commercial ultimately featured music very similar to that song. Waits undertook legal action, and a Spanish court recognized that there had been a violation of Waits' moral rights, in addition to the infringement of copyright.[19] The production company, Tandem Campany Guasch, was ordered to pay compensation to Waits through his Spanish publisher. Waits was later quoted as jokingly saying the company got the name of the song wrong, thinking it was called "Innocent When You Scheme".

In 2005, Waits sued Adam Opel AG, claiming that, after having failed to sign him to sing in their Scandinavian commercials, they had hired a sound-alike singer. In 2007, the suit was settled, and Waits gave the sum to charity. [20]

Waits has also filed a lawsuit in an instance unrelated to his music. He was arrested in 1977 outside Duke's Tropicana Coffee Shop in Los Angeles. Waits and a friend were trying to stop some men from bullying other patrons. The men were plainclothed police and Waits and his friend were taken into custody and charged with disturbing the peace. The jury found Waits not guilty, and he took the police department to court and was awarded $7,500 compensation.[21]

Discography

Major releases

Year Title Additional information Record label
1973 Closing Time Asylum
1974 The Heart of Saturday Night
1975 Nighthawks at the Diner Recorded live in the studio over two nights for small audiences
1976 Small Change
1977 Foreign Affairs
1978 Blue Valentine
1980 Heartattack and Vine
1982 One from the Heart Soundtrack for the Francis Ford Coppola film CBS
1983 Swordfishtrombones Island
1985 Rain Dogs
1987 Franks Wild Years Collaboration with Benoît Christie
1988 Big Time Live CD, movie, video release
1992 Night on Earth Soundtrack for the Jim Jarmusch film of that name
Bone Machine Won a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album
1993 The Black Rider Collaboration with William S. Burroughs and Robert Wilson
1999 Mule Variations Won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album ANTI-
2002 Blood Money Music to Wilson's version of the play Woyzeck
Alice Music to Wilson's play of the same name
2004 Real Gone
2006 Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards Three-disc collection of new and old recordings

Collections

Contributions

  • 2003 We're a Happy Family: A Tribute to the Ramones by various artists: Waits covers "Return of Jackie and Judy".
  • 2004 The Ride by Los Lobos: Waits does vocals on the track "Kitate".
  • 2004 The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Discovered Covered by various artists: Waits covers Johnston's "King Kong".
  • 2005 Blinking Lights and other Revelations by Eels: Waits screams on the track "Going Fetal".
  • 2006 Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain by Sparklehorse: Waits plays piano on the track "Morning Hollow".
  • 2007 Diamond In Your Mind - Digital Single by Tom Waits and The Kronos Quartet with Greg Cohen - Waits sings at benefit, CD (Healing The Divide: A Concert For Peace And Reconciliation - release on July 10, 2007) recorded on September 21, 2003 concert at NYC’s Avery Fisher Hall featuring Tom Waits and the Kronos Quartet with Greg Cohen, Philip Glass and his Holiness The Dalai Lama, among others.

Tribute albums

Filmography

Tours

Samples

Further reading

  • Jay S. Jacobs, Wild Years The Music and Myth of Tom Waits, ECW Press 2006 (ISBN 101550227165)
  • Mac Montandon (ed.), Innocent When You Dream: Tom Waits - the collected interviews, Orion 2006 (ISBN 0752873946)
  • Patrick Humphries, The Many Lives of Tom Waits, Omnibus 2007 (ISBN 184449585X)

See also

References

  1. ^ Graff, Gary. Musichound Rock: The Essential Album Guide. Omnibus Press. ISBN 0-8256-7256-2.
  2. ^ http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,11712,1358433,00.html
  3. ^ "Tom Waits". Bohemian Ink. 1997. Retrieved 2006-10-06.
  4. ^ http://www.tomwaitslibrary.com/quotes-influences.html
  5. ^ http://www.tomwaitslibrary.com/interviews.html
  6. ^ http://www.tomwaitslibrary.com/instruments-main.html
  7. ^ http://www.tomwaitslibrary.com/instruments-main.html
  8. ^ http://www.tomwaitslibrary.com/interviews/04-oct-harpmagazine.html
  9. ^ http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:xsyvad1kv8w6
  10. ^ http://www.anti.com/press.php?id=1&pid=501
  11. ^ http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:z7d5vwnwa9uk~T1
  12. ^ http://www.anti.com/news.php?id=231
  13. ^ MetaCritic
  14. ^ http://www.officialtomwaits.com/f_main.htm
  15. ^ http://international.eonline.com/news/items/0,1799,17374,00.html
  16. ^ http://markroesler.com/pdf/caselaw/Waits%20v.%20Frito-Lay%20Inc.%20_1992_.pdf
  17. ^ http://www.joe.trussell.com/waits/frito_lay.html
  18. ^ http://www.tomwaitslibrary.com/copyright-levis.html
  19. ^ http://www.anti.com/news.php?newsid=86715
  20. ^ Waits settles in 'imitation' case
  21. ^ http://www.tomwaitslibrary.com/thecops.html
  22. ^ http://www.billysband.ru
  23. ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088196/
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External links

Interviews

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