Wild Years (14 page)

“Whistlin' Past the Graveyard” accelerates the beat, the bluesy, bragging rant of a hooligan who stumbles into town on a freight car and sticks around long enough to stir up a little ruckus and get into a fight before
blowing out of town. The hooligan's taunts are propelled outward in stutters and jerks, but he eventually concedes that his life's a hard and lonely one. “Romeo Is Bleeding,” another of Waits's clever, jazzy crime stories, rounds out the proceedings. A guy who sticks a shiv into the local sheriff is fatally shot in the chest — a familiar Waits image, with echoes of
West Side Story
— and he feels his lifeblood seeping into his shoes.

The album closes with the glum, subdued title track. A criminal has been forced to enter the witness-protection program and move far away from his Philadelphia home. It kills him that he has had to abandon the woman he loves. As he struggles to forget, to assume his new, manufactured identity, he receives a card from her. Out of the blue. He has no idea how she's managed to find him — all he knows is that if he gives into temptation and contacts her, he'll die. So he sits and drinks and tries to obliterate the memory of what he has sacrificed, but the bad dreams and the good recollections just won't go away.

Intent on evolving musically and never falling back on established formulas, Waits made a momentous decision. After recording two
Blue Valentine
tracks — “Romeo Is Bleeding” and “Wrong Side of the Road” — he cut his ties with The Nocturnal Emissions and brought some strong collaborators into the project. One of them was former Mother of Invention and Jean-Luc Ponty keyboardist George Duke (who used the alias Da Willie Conga while working with Tom). Duke was about to become a well-known jazz/R&B performer and producer, scoring a big hit with the ballad “Sweet Baby” as part of a band he formed with bassist Stanley Clarke called The Clarke/Duke Project. As well, Waits put together a new touring band made up of veteran New Orleans musicians. He was stimulated by the prospect of working with old pros like Herbert Hardesty, Fats Domino's longtime horn player; percussionist Big John Thomassie, who'd worked with Dr. John and Freddie King; and guitarist Arthur Richards.

Waits also took a chance on a young bassist named Greg Cohen, who would eventually become one of his closest collaborators and a pillar of his band for years to come. At twenty-five, Cohen was only a few years out of Sonoma College and the California School of the Arts. A mutual friend told Waits about him, and Waits called to offer him the chance to try out for the band. “Waits auditioned us all at once,” Cohen told journalist George Kanzler, “so he couldn't really tell how well each of us played, individually. He ended up hiring the whole band. At the time, I was playing with a lounge band in Los Angeles, doing the schlocky pop tunes of the day, so Tom rescued me from all that.”
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When Kanzler asked Waits to describe what he saw in Cohen, the answer he received was predictably interesting and over the top. The truth is in here somewhere: “Greg plays everything from dinosaur music to dinner music, from steakhouse to Stravinsky. He is a Renaissance man and a road hog. He will always be the most indispensable member of the band. He is an irreplaceable obstetrician in the birthing room of the recording studio. He knows arranging, conducting, composing, bow-making and electricity.”
²³

With a new band standing solidly behind him, Waits was ready to spice up his live act. His stage presentation became much more theatrical as he combined sets, props, lighting, and special effects to achieve a heightened visceral thrill. The club circuit was rapidly becoming a memory. Waits had a lifelike gas-station set constructed — complete with gas pumps and spare tires — to give an even more spartan and urgent feel to “Burma Shave,” which he was doing live as a medley with George Gershwin's “Summertime.” While performing the crime drama “Small Change,” Waits would stand beneath a streetlamp; as the number concluded a shower of glittering confetti would come down and Waits would open an umbrella. Reminisces Bones Howe, “That gig that he did at the James Doolittle Theater on Vine Street [in Hollywood] . . . Herb booked him in there for a week. That was when he had the umbrella and the sparkles came down and stuff like that. It was really, really wonderful. In the time I was with him, that was the best. That was the way he should have been shown. He should have been onstage, like a performer. Like a one-man show, in a way. That was really the best that I think he ever was . . . at least the best that I ever saw.”

Waits's acting career was finally jump-started when he became friendly with a former Philadelphia boxer named Sylvester Stallone. Sly had been bouncing around Hollywood for years, waiting for that elusive big break, taking a series of bit parts in B movies and doing odd jobs to stay afloat. Early on, he'd even been desperate enough to do a porn film. When it became obvious that he was just spinning his wheels, he took charge of the situation and wrote a script with a starring role for himself.
Rocky
tells the story of a Philly club fighter who gets a shot at the big time when he becomes involved in a publicity stunt: the heavyweight champion of the world fights an unknown contender.

The script was a strong one, and it generated a lot of interest within the film industry, but Stallone refused all offers because none of the potential purchasers would allow him to play the title role. He ultimately sold the script to United Artists at a significantly reduced price with the studio's
assurances that he would star.
Rocky
was shot on a shoestring budget. The critics raved, moviegoers were moved and inspired by this timeless tale of an underdog who triumphs over the odds, and
Rocky
won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1977. Riding high, Stallone got the green light to work on a new project, also based on a script he'd penned himself.
Paradise Alley
was about life and times in a tough Italian neighborhood, and it marked Stallone's directing debut.

Bones Howe remembers that Sly and Tom “got to be friends somehow or other. Maybe Sly saw him at the Troubadour or met him through somebody. I have no idea. He was suddenly there. But it wasn't unusual, because Tom had a way of accumulating people. Chuck E. Weiss. Rickie Lee Jones. People just sort of appeared all of a sudden.” Stallone offered Waits the small role of Mumbles and asked him to record some songs for the
Paradise Alley
soundtrack album. Tom jumped at the chance to act, and the part was perfect for testing his wings. Mumbles, a piano player at a neighborhood saloon, wasn't exactly a stretch for him.

Howe recalls that in the end he and Tom only contributed a couple of songs to the film's soundtrack — “Bill Conti was really upset because he wanted to do all the source music himself. He and Sly were very close, but Sly wanted Waits in that movie.” Conti, a jazz musician, had scored
Rocky
and he was thrilled when the movie's rousing, horn-based theme rose to the top of the pop charts. Of the five tracks that Waits and Howe recorded for
Paradise Alley,
only two made it into the soundtrack: “(Meet Me In) Paradise Alley,” a pretty piano ballad in which one of Waits's barfly lovers wards off desperation in the local taproom; and “Annie's Back in Town,” a sad love tune with just a touch of
West Side Story
grit.

The other tracks that Waits and Howe had laid down for Stallone were a new version of the
Small Change
song “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart” (which incorporated the old standard “As Time Goes By” into its intro and outro) and two different versions of a song called “With a Suitcase.” Neither version of the latter song was ever released. One was done with a rhythm section. The other — the “street” band version in which, says Howe, “we were banging on bass drums and all that kind of stuff” — reflected Waits's growing interest in experimental tones and instrumentation.

Paradise Alley
was released to scathing reviews, and it flopped at the box office. Tom, however, didn't experience the acute disappointment that Stallone must have felt. After all, the project had allowed him to become an actor, and he'd thoroughly enjoyed himself. And soon another interesting opportunity presented itself. Tom was asked to write the text for
Vegas,
a book of art reproductions featuring the paintings of Guy Peellaert, who had recently published another art book called
Rock Dreams
. Excited about this new undertaking, Waits told
Rolling Stone
's Mikal Gilmore all about it. He described
Vegas
as, “a set of emotional profiles and portraits of old heroes, like Marlene Dietrich, Jimmy Durante, Bugsy Siegel, Milton Berle, and Lenny Bruce.” Waits dabbled happily in his various projects and remained convinced that none of this was interfering with his song-writing. “Well, y'know, ya have to keep busy,” he remarked. “After all, a dog never pissed on a moving car, know what I mean?”
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With Tom's encouragement, Rickie Lee Jones had begun performing from time to time. One night in 1978, she played a gig at a little club in Hollywood, and in the audience was Lowell George, leader of the Southern rock ensemble Little Feat.

George had founded Little Feat in 1969 and now, nearly ten years later, he was bored with the enterprise. He wanted to do some solo work. Stifled by band life, by Little Feat's improvisational-jazz leanings, by his own towering reputation, by audiences that just wanted to hear retreads of “Dixie Chicken,” George was determined to break out of his old musical groove and try his hand at some different genres and styles. He hadn't actually disbanded Little Feat yet, but all signs pointed in that direction. George didn't seem in any hurry to head back into the recording studio with his bandmates.
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In fact, George had been plugging away at a solo album,
Thanks I'll Eat It Here
. He'd wanted to use this title for an earlier Little Feat album, but his suggestion was vetoed and the safer, more blurb-friendly
Sailin' Shoes
had been selected instead. On
Thanks I'll Eat It Here
George planned to concentrate more intensely on his singing and create something that sounded completely unlike anything he had done with Little Feat.

There were, however, two problems inhibiting Lowell George's solo project. One was that George was a perfectionist. He'd record a song over and over again in his quest to achieve just the right feel. Tracks were tweaked, instrumental parts were trashed, and vocals were redone. The second problem was cocaine. George, and many of the people he hired to work with him on the album, had frittered away most of the recording budget, and quantities of George's own cash, on Bolivian marching powder. With a hopped-up perfectionist at the helm, the album's release date receded into the mists of the future. George had been working on
Thanks I'll Eat It Here
since 1976, and the end still wasn't in sight.

Watching Rickie Lee that night in 1978, George was captivated by
“Easy Money,” her hipster story ballad. He had to have it on his album. It was to be one of the two
Thanks I'll Eat It Here
songs that George didn't write — the other was a remake of soul siren Ann Peebles' 1973 hit “I Can't Stand the Rain.” George told Lenny Waronker, an executive and producer at his label, Warner Brothers, about Rickie Lee Jones. Waronker, who knew a good thing when he saw it, checked her out and signed her to a recording contract. At the same time, permission for Lowell George to record “Easy Money” was obtained, and George got down to work. He committed “Easy Money” to tape with uncharacteristic speed and efficiency because he was worried that Rickie Lee would release her own version before his album came out.

Jones won that race hands down. She made her debut album,
Rickie Lee Jones,
and Warner Brothers released it in March of 1979. It was a resounding success. By the time
Thanks I'll Eat It Here
was released, later that year, George's health was failing. He was a heavy man with drug and alcohol addictions, and he'd been hospitalized with hepatitis and extreme back pain. Just weeks after his labor-of-love solo album hit the record stores, the thirty-four-year-old guitarist/songwriter/singer died of a massive heart attack while on a press tour.
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Witnessing
Rickie Lee Jones
become a smash hit, many music-industry insiders shook their shaggy heads in disbelief. This was the late seventies. The music scene was littered with arena rock bands like Toto and Styx, pissed-off punks like The Sex Pistols and The Clash, and disco units like Chic and (at this point, anyway) The Bee Gees. Rickie Lee's debut was a jazzy, delicate, funky-bebop symphony, and it stood out on the
Billboard
charts like a sore thumb.

What had actually propelled
Rickie Lee Jones
to the top of those charts was an earthy tribute to good friend Chuck E. Weiss, called “Chuck E.'s in Love,” inspired by a remark that Waits had once made. One night Jones was with Waits in his room at the Tropicana when the phone rang. It was Chuck E. calling from Denver to say that he'd just met a distant cousin and was quite taken with her. Tom and Chuck talked for a while, and when Tom hung up he looked over at Rickie Lee and said, “Chuck E.'s in love.”
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The line caught Rickie Lee's fancy and she constructed a song out of it. It wasn't the first song ever written about Chuck E. Weiss; Waits had sung about his buddy in the
Nighthawks at the Diner
tune “Nighthawk Postcards (From Easy Street),” and Chuck E. was also mentioned in two
Small Change
songs — “Jitterbug Boy (Sharing a Curbstone with Chuck E.
Weiss, Robert Marchese, Paul Body and the Mug and Artie)” and “I Wish I Was in New Orleans (In the Ninth Ward).”

The single “Chuck E.'s in Love” was a good-time finger-popper about the boho nightlife to be found in pool halls, diners, and clubs. It was unlike anything else in radio rotation at the time, and it became one of the biggest hits of the year. Tom didn't contribute directly to
Rickie Lee Jones,
but the album bore many traces of the trademark Tom Waits musical sensibility, and the delicate musical photographs “On Saturday Afternoons in 1963” and “The Last Chance Texaco” featured the type of hard-luck romanticism that was so dear to Tom's heart. The jazzy swing of “Danny's All-Star Joint” and “Young Blood” further enlivened the collection.