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 "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months and then taken outside and run over with a
car."[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. In a 2005 interview Bob Seger claimed that Waits' music was an
inspiration in his songs. 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 the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles (at the time also home to musicians Glen Frey and JD Souther of the Eagles, Jackson
Browne, and Frank Zappa) 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, 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 vocalizing (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, rumbas, 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 AN
