{"id":2374,"date":"2020-04-25T04:28:55","date_gmt":"2020-04-25T04:28:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dailykemp.com\/?p=2374"},"modified":"2021-12-31T18:40:46","modified_gmt":"2021-12-31T18:40:46","slug":"tom-waits-weird-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailykemp.com\/2020\/04\/25\/tom-waits-weird-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Waits: Weird Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

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If you ever find yourself interviewing Tom Watis, don’t expect straight answers. Don’t even expect bent answers. He doesn’t really answer questions. He questions questions. Or, he turns questions into opportunities to go down his famous mole holes \u2014 those beautiful, surrealist, nightmare scenarious that you hear in songs like “Earth Died Screaming,”<\/a> from his 1992 album <\/em>Bone Machine<\/a>: “Well hell doesn’t want you \/ And heaven is full \/ Bring me some water \/ Put it in this skull.” It wasn’t always like this. In Waits’s earlier Beat-poet years, he would talk linearly about stuff like Jack Kerouac being an influence. “I guess everybody reads Kerouac at some point in their life,” he told <\/em>Los Angeles Free Press back in 1975. “I started wearing dark glasses and got myself a subscription to <\/em>Downbeat.” But by the ’90s, Waits had long given up answering questions like that. And by 2006, when I talked to him for this <\/em>Harp magazine cover story, he was already <\/em>way down the hole. And it was one of the most head-spinning dicussions I’ve ever had with anybody \u2014 ever.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

‘Do You Think I’m Whacked Out?’<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

By Mark Kemp, <\/em>Harp, December 2006<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whack
v.tr.
1. To strike (someone or something) with a sharp blow; slap.
2. Slang: To kill deliberately; murder.
n.
1. A sharp, swift blow.
2. The sound made by a sharp, swift blow.
Whacked-out (slang)
1. Exhausted.
2. Crazy.
3. Under the influence of a mind-altering drug.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Do you think I’m whacked-out, Mark?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tom Waits asks the question in the same rasp that he uses in his early, jazz-based Beat-poet work, not the croak and wheeze that he’s developed since he started banging on pots and pans and delivering lines like, “Bring me some water, put it in this skull.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hadn’t exactly called him whacked-out. My initial line of questioning involved a characterization of the range of music on his new three-disc collection, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards<\/a><\/em>, on Anti Records. Its 54 songs run the gamut from ancient-sounding ballads (the pedal-steel-fueled “Tell It to Me”<\/a>) and rockabilly barnburners (“Lie to Me”<\/a>) to the spitting, sputtering “Spidey’s Wild Ride”<\/a> \u2014 the kind of song I had described to him as his more “whacked-out avant-garde stuff.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I figured it was a safe enough depiction. After all, Waits’ music jibes with many of the whacked-out definitions: It strikes with a sharp blow; it slaps; it sometimes deliberately kills. It’s a little crazy, and some of it may even be under the influence of mind-altering drugs. But words like whacked-out, weird and strange don’t mean much to Tom Waits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What’s strange? What’s weird? That’s very personal,” says Waits, speaking by phone from his home “in the middle of nowhere,” somewhere among the wineries and marijuana farms of northern California. Waits himself doesn’t even drink anymore, much less smoke dope. He’s been sober for more than a decade and living a rural existence with his family ever since he returned to the West Coast from New York City in the late ’80s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He’d met his wife and longtime musical collaborator, Kathleen Brennan, in 1980, during the filming of Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart<\/em>. Waits had written the soundtrack<\/a> and performed it along with country singer Crystal Gayle; Brennan was the script analyst. It was love at first sight. The couple have since produced three children together \u2014 Kellesimone (born in 1983), Casey Xavier (1985) and Sullivan (1993) \u2014 and a handful of bona-fide experimental classics, including his ’80s Frank trilogy (Swordfishtrombones<\/a>, Rain Dogs<\/a><\/em> and Frank’s Wild Years<\/a><\/em>), 1992’s Bone Machine<\/a><\/em> and 2004’s Real Gone<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Orphans<\/em> is a hodgepodge of 24 “lost” songs and 30 new ones, and includes unlikely covers ranging from a croaking, accordion- and piano-fueled barroom sing-along of Leadbelly’s “Goodnight Irene,” to a terrifying take on troubled indie poet Daniel Johnston’s aching “King Kong.” Waits’ son, Casey, sits in on drums for one of the new tunes, a lo-fi, Stones-like rocker called “Low Down.” To be sure, Orphans<\/em> offers up plenty of Waits’ surreal lyrics and bizarre Beefheart-like narratives. In “Army Ants,” he reels off vivid descriptions of disgusting insect behavior. It’s all allegorical, of course \u2014 Waits is making a statement on humanity. Or maybe he’s just trying to find the right words for the right sounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n