Wild Years (26 page)

David Geffen had tried to convince Stewart to record a Waits song for years, and Stewart had always balked at the suggestion. Finally, a producer played the
Rain Dogs
cut for him, and something clicked. Stewart's label, Warner Brothers, loved what Rod did with the tune and elected to release it as the box set's first single. It was a smash. In early 1990, you couldn't turn on a radio without hearing Stewart pining over Brooklyn girls who ride the train. While Stewart meticulously sanded down the song's original rough edges, his interpretation is a decent one — it doesn't approach Tom's version, but it far exceeds Patty Smyth's 1987 attempt.

A major rift developed between Stewart and Bob Seger, another extremely popular rocker of the seventies and eighties, over Waits's train
song. Seger insisted that he had been planning to record “Downtown Train” as a single himself, and that he'd told Stewart about his intention in confidence. At that point, Seger charged, Stewart had never even heard of the song. This led to a media war of words: Seger called Stewart a thief; Stewart returned fire by declaring that Seger was nuts. It took some time for tempers to cool on both sides.

Seger was a longtime Tom Waits fan. He once described a chance meeting he had with Waits to
Rolling Stone
. “I'm driving through Westwood [in L.A.], and I've got my Mercedes out there. I was working on a record, this is 1987 or '88. I've got a Hawaiian shirt on; it's real hot outside. I see Tom Waits, all in black, long-sleeved shirt and cowboy boots —it's 90 degrees — and he's walking through Westwood. So, I pull up next to him and I say, ‘Tom!' I've got these sunglasses on, he probably thought I was with the
CIA
— car phone and everything — and he says, ‘Heh?' and looks real startled, so I say, ‘It's Bob Seger.'

“He says, ‘Ooh, hi, Bob.' He jumps in the car and we start talking. I asked him what he's doin' and he says, ‘Uh . . . I'm walkin'.' I've loved his stuff down through the years, so I start asking him all these dumb questions about his songs. I said, ‘In “Cold Cold Ground,” Tom, you say, “The cat will sleep in the mailbox.” Yesterday I went and bought my cat one of those fuzzy mailboxes. Is that what you're talking about?' He looked at me like I was from Mars. ‘No, no. My cats sleep under the house.' So it goes on, this strange interlude, for about fifteen minutes. Finally, I asked if I could drop him somewhere and he says, ‘Tell you what, take me back where you picked me up.' So I drove around a bunch of blocks, dropped him exactly where I picked him up and he says, ‘And, uh, I'll just keep on walkin'.”
¹⁴

In the end, Seger and Stewart recorded three Tom Waits songs each. Aside from “Downtown Train,” Stewart did a credible version of “Tom Traubert's Blues” and an unsuccessful rendition of “Hang On St. Christopher.” Seger recorded heartfelt, meat-and-potatoes versions of “New Coat of Paint,” “Blind Love,” and “16 Shells From a Thirty-Ought-Six.”

Stewart's “Downtown Train,” specifically, made Tom a hell of a lot of money — quite possibly more than any of his own recordings ever had. This, coupled with the settlement of the Frito-Lay lawsuit, brought him a degree of financial ease he'd never known before. He could now focus more intently on being a father and a husband. He could putter around the house. And he could take on any acting project that struck his fancy.

In fact, Waits's acting career shifted into overdrive for a while. The puttering would have to wait. He was invited to play a parade of characters
in a range of vehicles, from oddball indie flicks to big-budget prestige productions. Waits jumped right in. But, for all the fun he was having, it was still hard work. “You have to put your makeup on in the car and stay sober,” he told David Sheff. “It's a lot of work to try and be natural, like trying to catch a bullet in your teeth.”
¹⁵
On some level, Waits actually did consider it all a trick that he was able to execute once in a while. He didn't even consider himself an actor in the strictest sense. “I wasn't drawn to it,” he said to Hoskyns. “I was asked . . . I like doing it, but there's a difference between being an actor and doing some acting.”
¹⁶

It seemed clear, though, that to many film-industry players this difference was a negligible one, at least when it came to Tom Waits. Between 1989 and 1992, Waits appeared in eight films and one theatrical production. He played a hit man in the oh-so-hip New Wave western
Cold Feet,
starring Keith Carradine, Bill Pullman, and Sally Kirkland, and he stole the show. He also had small parts in the films
Bearskin: An Urban Fairy-tale
;
Queens Logic,
with Joe Mantegna, Kevin Bacon, and John Malkovich (making Waits one degree in the Kevin Bacon game); the
Chinatown
sequel
The Two Jakes,
in which Waits was reunited with Jack Nicholson;
The Fisher King,
with Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges; and
At Play in the Fields of the Lord,
with Aidan Quinn, Kathy Bates, and John Lithgow, which was directed by
Ironweed
's Hector Babenco. Waits also played a dj who is heard but never seen in Jim Jarmusch's episodic film
Mystery Train
. Then Bill Pullman suggested to Waits that he tackle a purely comedic role. Pullman was set to appear in a L.A. stage production of Thomas Babe's new work,
Demon Wine,
a tribute to French playwright Eugene Ionesco, and he thought that Waits could contribute fresh humor to the piece. Waits won the role and found himself a member of a terrific ensemble that included, aside from Pullman, Bud Cort, Phillip Baker Hall, Carol Kane, and René Auberjonois.

“I loved working with him. I loved talking with him,” says Joe Mantegna, one of Waits's co-stars in the film
Queens Logic
. “Just hanging out with him. Tom was great. He's so bright, and so talented. I remember one day we were just sitting in my trailer, just talking, and he was talking about an opera he was writing. He was going to go to Germany and do it. He's such a renaissance kind of person.” Mantegna also was impressed by Waits's lack of vanity as an actor, a rare and impressive attribute in the movie world. “The poster of the movie . . . he didn't feel his role even warranted him even being in it. We were all saying, Tom, you gotta [pose for it]. He was really very self-effacing in that way. He certainly wasn't driven
by his ego. He was just driven by his work and what he did. I really, really, liked him as a person, let alone as a talent. I remember that fondly, working with Tom.”

As this period of abundant dramatic work drew to a close, Waits landed the most appealing role of all. The vehicle was
Bram Stoker's Dracula,
a new version of the classic horror tale, to be directed by Tom's old friend Francis Ford Coppola. It was scheduled for a 1992 release. Before Waits was recruited for the project, the leads were announced, and the list was stellar: Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves, and Sir Anthony Hopkins. Waits had his eye on the role of R. M. Renfield, a realestate solicitor whose relationship with the sinister count reduces him to raving lunacy and eternal slavery to the vampire. In Waits's eyes, Renfield was a plum role, and he wanted it badly. He attempted to explain why to Mark Rowland: “I got to go into this whole lurid, torrid tale, which was a metamorphosis for me, to go into your own dark rooms. I just thought, ‘Oh God, I have to stop recording and go get a bad haircut and eat bugs. And then come back home again.'”
¹⁷

Waits begged Coppola to let him read for the role, and in the end he snared it. From that point on, he lost himself inside Renfield's dementia, never shying away from the physical ordeals the role entailed. He told Chris Douridas of
Morning Becomes Eclectic
that while he didn't actually eat the insects, he did put them in his mouth — “like I gave them a carnival ride . . . like a fun house. I put them in the fun house and I let them move around in my mouth and then I brought them back out again. I didn't actually murder them with my teeth. But I had a good time. I had some frightening moments when I was both frightened and exhilarated —being hosed down in an insane asylum . . . dressed like a moth. I also had to wear these hand restraints that were really painful. They were based on a design they had for piano players, actually, in Italy — to keep your hands straight. They were metal braces, and they corrected anything that your fingers may want to do that's un-pianolike . . . [The device] was all metal, and [it had] these caps that went over your fingers, and [it was] really painful to your cuticles, and it looked really scary. That was the idea.”
¹⁸

Bones Howe, who hadn't seen Waits in almost a decade, finally hooked up with his old comrade during the filming of Coppola's
Dracula
. Howe had tried to reconnect with Waits once a few years earlier, but nothing had come of his efforts. “One of the guys who had been a coproducer of
Down by Law
took a job in business affairs at Columbia. We were talking about Tom one day and I said, ‘Do you ever talk to him?' He said, ‘Yeah . . .
every now and then.' [So I said], ‘Tell him I said hello. I'd love to see him.' I ran into this guy [again] a couple of days later and he'd talked to Waits.” When Howe asked what Waits's response had been, the man reported that Waits had said he wasn't ready to talk just yet. “This was, like, '87,” continues Howe. “It had been five or six years. I just went, ‘Okay. When Tom is ready to talk to me, he'll talk to me.' I had no idea what was going on with Kathleen and Herb and all this other stuff.”

A few years later, Howe says, he was “working at Columbia TriStar, and they were shooting [
Dracula
] on the lot. I had just given my resignation. I went down to the set and just told the publicity people, ‘Look, tell Tom I want to come by and see him on the set. If that's cool with him, I'll come down. If it isn't, then that's fine… I won't bother him.'” The publicists urged Howe to visit the set because, “‘Francis would love to see you.' So I went down and we all hung out between shots and talked about
One from the Heart
and
The Outsiders
and all the rest of that junk. And it was very friendly. It was like I hadn't seen Tom since last Thursday, you know? He's like, ‘You know, I moved to Northern California.' [I said], ‘Yeah, I've heard that. Don't get stuck behind a bus.'”

Five years had elapsed since Waits's last studio album. This time, Jim Jarmusch motivated his return to recording by asking him to score his latest episodic film,
Night on Earth
. One night on Earth, five cab drivers in five far-flung cities have memorable — yet, true to the Jarmusch aesthetic, low-key and offbeat — encounters with their passengers. In Los Angeles, young slacker Winona Ryder ferries talent agent Gena Rowlands. In New York, immigrant and former clown Armin Mueller-Stahl picks up a bickering couple played by Giancarlo Esposito and Rosie Perez. In Paris, militant Isaach de Bankole drives beautiful, blind Beatrice Dalle to her destination. In Rome, Waits's
Down by Law
costar Roberto Benigni shocks his passenger, a priest, with an uproarious and increasingly frank account of his life. Finally, in Helsinki, a cabbie chauffeurs a group of drunks who have just lost their jobs.

These episodes are slices of life, subtle little gems that resonate like short stories. Tom and Kathleen collaborated on all the songs, creating a mostly instrumental score that endeavors to capture the comedy and the tragedy, the American and European textures of the tales. They did an admirable job. At times their music has such presence, such a congruity with the visual and narrative component of the film, that it's almost a character in itself. By turns jaunty and melancholy — whatever is called for — the score blends sounds and styles and feelings into a wonderful, adventurous
suite. It is comprised of sixteen short tracks, three of which have lyrics; horns and accordion enrich the mix, and Kurt Weill's strange influence is again felt. The film
Night on Earth
found its way onto cinema screens in 1992, and Waits released the soundtrack album in April of that year.

Yet
Night on Earth
is not the type of album that most people would be moved to listen to over and over again. The tracks work well to set up and complement the shifting moods of the film, but few, if any, Waits fans would peg it as their favorite. Lacking two vital layers — Waits's strong lyrics and distinctive singing — it feels incomplete. The time had surely come for Waits to make a “real” new album.

It wouldn't take long for Waits to come through. Hot on the heels of the
Night on Earth
soundtrack, in August 1992, came
Bone Machine
. Waits was working on
Bram Stoker's Dracula
when he recorded it, and the spectre of death hangs over the album like a pall. Much like Lou Reed's
Magic and Loss,
which had come out in January of the same year, it is an extended meditation on mortality. Even the songs that don't deal directly with death exude a sepulchral quality, with their sparse arrangements and tortured vocals.
Bone Machine
is the type of album that sneaks up on the listener. Many of the songs, while not particularly melodic, compel you to return to them. Fascinating new aspects of these pieces reveal themselves with each listening.

Some musicians place a high priority on employing studio techniques to smooth the rough edges of their work. While Waits, particularly since moving to Island Records, was not so inclined,
Bone Machine
tested the limits of this aesthetic approach more aggressively than ever. Even compared to the
Frank
trilogy,
Bone Machine
is almost all rough edges. Most of the tracks are dauntingly minimalist. The overall effect is to direct the listener's attention to the basic structures of the songs. It was a daring thing to do, and only a very restless and committed artist would attempt it. In 1993, Waits said to Rowland, “You send [the songs] out there 'cause it's true that things kind of land in your backyard like meteorites. Songs can have a real effect on you — songs have been known to save lives. Some of them are little paramedics. Or maybe some will be killers. Some will die on the windshield. And some of them will never leave home. You beat them but they never leave. Others can't wait to get out of here, and will never write. They're ungrateful little bastards. There's only one reason to write more songs. It's what Miles Davis said. Because you're tired of the old ones.”
¹