Wild Years (29 page)

Waits happily set about taking it easy. On any given day, he might go shopping — pick up old artillery shells or maps or rings made from spoon handles at the local salvage shop. He might impress the kids by bringing home the latest Primus or Beck or Rage Against the Machine
CD
. He might suggest to the family that they eat out, but no one would let him pick the restaurant anymore. Kathleen and the kids valued tasty and nutritious food over atmosphere, so there went Tom's beloved greasy spoons. Family life was something to contend with, Waits admitted to
Morning Becomes Eclectic
listeners. “Well, sometimes it's like log-rolling and if you see just a shot of it, a still picture of somebody log-rolling, it's one thing … but as a moving picture you see what's required. Yeah, we're keeping a good balance on it.”
²⁷

When asked by Hoskyns whether he now considered himself a home-body, Waits hedged. “Gee, I don't know. That sounds like a loaded question. If I say no, I'll get into trouble with my family, and if I say yes I get in trouble with everybody else. You know, I live in a house with my wife
and a lotta kids and dogs, and I have to fight for every inch of ground I get. Mostly my kids are just looking for any way I come in handy. Clothes, rides, money … that's all I'm good for. But I think it's the way it's supposed to be.”
²⁸

Music had become something that Waits would indulge in when the mood struck. He provided music for several film soundtracks. He performed at charity functions, devoting time to causes that moved him. He protested the death penalty at Tim Robbins's
Dead Man Walking
concert; he contributed a cover of “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” to the album
Brother Can You Spare a Dime Day
put out by the Harburg Foundation, which benefits the poor and the homeless; as well, his song “Filipino Box Spring Hog” appeared on the pro-choice fund-raiser album
Born to Choose,
and his cover of Cole Porter's “It's Alright with Me” graced the
AIDS
- research charity album
Red Hot and Blue
. Waits was happy. He had room to breathe. Inevitably, however, it wasn't enough. The old itch to be in the game began to act up. By 1998, Tom Waits was finally ready to get back to work.

One of the first things he did was leave Island Records, where he'd been a fixture for fifteen years. It was an amicable parting. Chris Blackwell, who had originally signed Waits to the label, had sold Island to Polygram years before, but he'd stayed on to run the company. When Universal Music Group snapped up Polygram, Blackwell departed to form his own new entertainment company, Islandlife/Palm Pictures. Universal went on to gut Island, merging it with rap label Def Jam and reducing the staff and talent rosters of both significantly. Waits didn't become a casualty of the corporate slash-and-burn campaign, but his contract was up for renewal with Island/Def Jam and he could see the writing on the wall. He was sure that if he stayed on he'd get lost inside a giant, impersonal superstructure, so he saved himself by declining a new contract. To fulfill his final obligation to Island/Def Jam, Waits helped to assemble a compilation of twenty-three songs from the seven albums he'd released during his Island Records tenure. The compilation would be called
Beautiful Maladies,
and it would symbolize the closing of another door for Tom Waits.

So why did it take Tom Waits six years to put out an album of new material? “I was stuck in traffic,” is his standard reply. If you push him on the point, he'll say that he was actually stuck in traffic school all that time. If you point out that one can graduate from traffic school in a few days, he'll say that he had a really bad lawyer and the judge wanted to hold him up as an example. He'd been doing hard time at the California Department of Motor Vehicles, chopping that cotton, toting that bale, and parking parallel. He might then go on to confess that all of this was a crock and what he'd really been up to was breaking in new shoes for people too busy to do it themselves. And he'd also dug a hole in his backyard … Well, this is what you get for expecting a straight answer from Tom Waits.

In early 1999, Waits surprised many people by signing with Epitaph Records, an independent label formed by former Bad Religion member Brett Gurewitz. Epitaph, specializing in punk and ska, boasted groups like The Offspring, Rancid, and Pennywise. It seemed like a weird fit — one scribe suggested that Waits's next album be called
Mohawks at the Diner
.
¹
Yet on one level it made perfect sense. Waits had always appreciated individuality above all else, and Epitaph steadfastly adhered to a do-it-yourself philosophy.

Waits was impressed by the fact that Epitaph was one of the few labels owned and operated by musicians. After meeting with Gurewitz and staff, he said he liked their musical diversity, he liked their eagerness — and, he joked, he liked the brand new Caddy they gave him. Waits gave Epitaph a “long-term lease” on the new album he
was working on, which was called
Mule Variations
. The label would release the album, but Waits would retain all rights. Their contract was for that album alone, though both Waits and Gurewitz would be pleased to extend their agreement if all went well.
²

Waits was positioned as the cornerstone act of Anti, Epitaph's off-shoot imprint for respected artists who did not share the punk/ska sensibilities of the label's other acts. By the year 2000, Anti was also home to bluesman R. L. Burnside, punk pioneer and former Clash leader Joe Strummer, and country outlaw Merle Haggard. The Epitaph people are “easier to be around than folks from Dupont,” Waits told David Fricke of
Rolling Stone
. “Not to generalize about large recording companies, but if you're not going platinum, you're not going anywhere.”
³

But before getting down to
Mule Variations,
Waits had another job to do, one that he felt strongly about. His pal Chuck E. Weiss had been a popular live performer for years but had only one album to show for it, a demo tape that was released against his wishes in 1981. It was titled
The Other Side of Town,
and it was pulled from the market soon after it appeared. In the meantime, Weiss had been writing and singing, but he never seemed to get around to recording his stuff. He claimed to have gotten sidetracked by his regular club gigs, the odd acting job, and some movie-scoring work. Furthermore, due to his fear of flying, his reputation had not extended much beyond the Los Angeles area — he'd hardly ever toured. Waits was anxious to rectify the situation. He felt that Weiss was far too talented to languish in obscurity any longer. His music had to be brought to a broader audience. Tom was at last able to drag Chuck E. into the studio and there Weiss concocted his first real album. It was called
Extremely Cool
. Waits coproduced and added vocals to the mix.

The album is a rib-tickling mixture of rock, blues, jazz, and zydeco. “I'd like [people] to see it as some kind of alternative jungle music,” comments Weiss. It kicks off with the infectious “Devil with Blue Suede Shoes,” followed by the love-triangle blues “Deeply Sorry,” in which a man finds his girlfriend having sex with his mother. Laughing, Weiss swears that this particular song is in no way autobiographical.
⁴

Other terrific cuts include the jazzy “Sonny Could Lick All Them Cats”; “Oh Marcy,” a zydeco love song as tangy as gumbo; and the straight-ahead rocker “Jimmy Would.” Waits produced, cowrote, and
sang on the sad lament “It Rains on Me” and the structurally intriguing “Do You Know What I Idi Amin?” Waits, Weiss insists, was the brains behind “Idi Amin,” which starts a cappella and gradually builds as instrumentation is added. Weiss is continually surprised at how few people seem to remember the murderous Ugandan dictator of the 1970s.
⁵

When the album was finished, Waits helped Weiss to land a recording contract, and
Extremely Cool
was released in early 1999.
Mule Variations
' moment had arrived. Tom and Kathleen managed to create a pool of about sixty songs. “I want to do a whole record of [Kathleen's] dreams,” said Waits. “She has amazing dreams … I think they should all be turned into songs.”
⁶

It was an exciting period, because the songs were coming on fast and thick but Waits had no sense of what the end product would be. It could be fish; it could be fowl. The thrust of the album could be painful introspection, death and decay, like
Bone Machine,
or the reflections of a contented family man. Each harbored its own mysterious potential. It was a piece of a puzzle, a picture that was slowly being revealed. At first, Waits wanted to name the album
Eyeball Kid,
after a song he'd cobbled together about a circus freak — literally, a walking, talking eyeball. After a while, that stopped feeling right, so he began sorting through other songs to find the key to the album. Eventually, Tom and Kathleen settled on the album title
Mule Variations,
because Kathleen would always tell Tom that she hadn't married a man, she'd married a mule.
⁷

Life tends to intrude on those who are caught up in a fever of creation and want to put everything else temporarily on hold. The writer needs to escape both mentally and physically, but for the writer who is a parent this is often impossible. When the writing team and the parenting team are one and the same, it becomes a matter of seizing the moments whenever they present themselves. Says Waits, “I usually keep a tape recorder with me all the time. It's little. The quietest place for me is in the car, driving on the road. Because at home, if I go into a room and close the door the kids all want to know what I'm doing in there. Then when Kathleen and I are in there together writing, then they really go crazy. It's like the whole bottom just dropped out. ‘What are you guys doing in there?' It's funny, but the car is a better place, really.”
⁸

By now, collaborating with Kathleen was second nature to Tom.
They had it down cold. “One person holds the nail, the other swings the hammer,” Waits commented to Hoskyns. “We collaborate on everything, really. She writes more from her dreams and I write more from the world. When you're making songs you're navigating in the dark, and you don't know what's correct. Given another five minutes you can ruin a song. So time's always a collaborator. Over the years [Kathleen's] exposed me to a lot of music. She doesn't like the limelight, but she's an incandescent presence on all songs we work on together. We've got a little mom-and-pop business. I'm the prospector. She's the cook. I bring the flamingo, she beheads it; I drop it in the water, she takes off the feathers. No one wants to eat it.”
⁹

The next order of business was to assemble the musicians. Waits wanted to hire a gang of the usual suspects, people who could decipher his musical shorthand, so he got on the phone. Longtime bassist (and brother-in-law) Greg Cohen committed. Guitarist Marc Ribot would lend a hand if he could spare the time away from his new band, Los Cubanos Postivos. Fortunately, Ribot was able to lay down some tracks for the album. Saxophonist Ralph Carney and blues bassist Larry Taylor, both Waits standbys, came along for the ride. Rounding out this solid crew were bluesman Charlie Musselwhite and John Hammond on harmonica and Les Claypool of Primus on bass.

Then Waits started casting around for people who could add a whole new sound dimension to his set of variations. Having become a big fan of hip-hop folk alchemist Beck, Waits invited multi-instrumentalist Smokey Hormel from Beck's band to sit in on many of the songs. Rap, Waits had come to believe, was the true folk music of the inner city, and he was deeply interested in the way sampling creates a sound collage, a pattern of diverse tones and textures. Waits himself had been striving to fabricate such collages for years through other means. Now he was ready to sample. He integrated
DJ
M. Mark “The
III
Media” Reitman's turntable work into three album tracks.

When the recording process was under way, Waits's hands were full. He was producing, bending and prodding the material, directing his team of old and new contributors, playing, and singing. He was in his element. Speaking to Hoskyns, he remarked, “You have to decide what your role is going to be. You farm out or subcontract the rest of the job. I don't always do my own electrical work at home. I usually
hire an expert. So we hired professional musicians — and I don't know if I can honestly consider myself part of that group. I am the creator of forms and I sometimes get my own way. The main thing is to have people working with you that will succumb to the power of suggestion. The whole thing is kind of a hypnotic experience, and when you say you want musicians to play like their hair is on fire, you want someone who understands what that means. Sometimes that requires a very particular person that you have a shorthand with over time.”
¹⁰

Mule Variations
was recorded at Prairie Sun Studios, a converted chicken ranch way out in the sticks. “If you set up right outside with the dogs and chickens,” Waits told the
Times
of London, “it's amazing how your surroundings will collaborate with you and be woven into the songs.”
¹¹
Shades of
Bone Machine
.

With
Mule Variations,
Waits wedded the two eras of his sound. Songs like “Filipino Box Spring Hog” and “Big in Japan,” wild sonic experiments, recall
Bone Machine
; smoother, piano-based cuts, like “House Where Nobody Lives” and “Hold On,” regenerate his Elektra period sensibilities. Strangely, it all comes together quite naturally.

“Big in Japan” starts things off with a thundering intonation. It shocks the listener with its violent musicality. Waits had actually made this intro years before in a Mexican hotel room by switching on his tape recorder and yelling and banging on a chest of drawers until it was reduced to kindling. He was trying to find the music in the chaos, attempting to make a simple savage act sound like the stylings of a hopped-up band.
¹²
The experiment was successful, and for the price of a cheap piece of furniture Waits had a little symphony of destruction. Every once in a while he'd pop the tape onto his cassette player and laugh. He had no plans to use it until it occurred to him that “Big in Japan” would benefit from an intro that could jolt the listener into sitting up and taking notice.