Wild Years (34 page)

In a sort of return tribute, Waits's ex-girlfriend Rickie Lee Jones took to sometimes performing Waits's early song “(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night” on her tour for her latest album, the politically charged
The Evening of My Best Day.
Jones has been famous for her reluctance to discuss their relationship, but in her own way she paid tribute to those days and her respect for his music.

Another artist that piqued Waits's interest was a singer named Norah Jones. Jones, who is the daughter of famous Indian musician Ravi Shankar, had released a jazzy album in 2002 that had, against all odds, become one of the biggest hits of the year. Waits was impressed by her debut album
Come Away with Me,
which ended up winning five Grammys in 2003, including Artist of the Year and Record of the Year. Waits's friend Keith Richards called her the best new singer he'd heard in twenty-five years in an interview in
Q
magazine. Waits thought that Jones may be able to do an interesting version of his song “The Long Way Home,” which Waits had recorded himself for the 2002 soundtrack album for the film
Big Bad Love.
Jones was also an admirer of Waits's music. “I met Tom and Kathleen at a concert he was doing. Tom asked me if I had listened to the demos he sent me,” Jones said. “I didn't even know he had sent me anything, but I assured him I would track them down.” She loved the song, a country-tinged lament that would show off her Texas roots. However, she admitted the idea of recording a Tom Waits song was a little intimidating. “We've
covered a couple of his tunes in concert, but it's hard to do because I like his versions so much. I'm a huge fan. We pretty much recorded it like he did.”
²⁵

Waits continues working with friends and artists he respects. He appeared on Mexican roots-rock band Los Lobos's 2004 album
The Ride,
returning the favor of Los Lobos member Steve Berlin for appearing on his albums. Waits sang on the song “Kitate,” cut together with additional vocals by singer Martha Gonzales of the band Quetzal. “We sent Tom a rough demo and he said, ‘I love this track and want to collaborate, but I want to do it my way,'” Berlin told
ICE
.
“He demanded that no one else be there, and he recorded it on this archaic, multi-track cassette… So we had to find one of those machines — of which there aren't many left. . . . The funny thing Tom said was, ‘You know, I've always wanted to sing in Spanish. My dad spoke Spanish.' So we were like, ‘Great! Awesome!' We got it back and it was just Tom chanting,
‘
Quitate
'
[‘Stop it']. That was the extent of his Spanish.”
²⁶

Also in early 2004, Francis Ford Coppola re-released
One from the Heart
as a two-disk
DVD
, and reissued Waits's soundtrack album. The whole idea came to being a couple of years before, when Coppola decided that he wanted to completely re-edit the film for
DVD
release. Coppola had the full right to do whatever he wanted with the film, because in the years of paying off the debts that came from closing his studio, American Zoetrope, (a closing caused greatly by the box-office failure of the film) he had regained the complete ownership of the film's rights. When recutting the film, Coppola and his editors realized that they needed the original music because the song snippets they had access to were specifically timed for the older cut. The problem was that the tapes had been lost somewhere along the line during the studio closing.

At this point, Coppola had lost touch with Bones Howe. He wanted to reach him because some of the
DVD
bonus items would include film footage about the making of the soundtrack, and he wanted to make sure that Howe was amenable to being included in the documentaries, particularly one called “Tom Waits and the Music of
One from the Heart.
” Luckily, a mutual acquaintance who lived near Howe in central California heard that Francis was looking to contact Bones. “Somebody mentioned to him that they couldn't find me,” Howe laughs. “He said, ‘Oh, he lives in Montecito, I see him every day.'” So Coppola gave the man a release for Howe to sign to use the film footage of Howe, Waits, Coppola, Bob Alcivar, and Crystal Gayle, that included their work in the studio and their first big meeting at
Coppola's house in Napa.

A few months later, Howe got a call from Kim Aubry, who was working with Coppola to produce the dvd. “He said, ‘We've been through the vaults here, do you know where the music is?'” Howe recalls. “I said funny you should ask me that, because in between when you called me I went back and looked… What happened was when Zoetrope went under and fell into bankruptcy, the studio [Wally Heider Recording] called me and said, ‘We have all these tapes from
One from the Heart
and Zoetrope is gone. What should we do with them?' They said we have to get rid of these tapes or destroy them, because we need the space in the library. I had a tape store room at Heider, so I said just move them into my storage vault.” They sat there until Howe left Los Angeles in the nineties, and then he moved all of his tapes to a storage facility called Iron Mountain.

Howe told Aubry that he had all of the demos, including some things that probably never saw the light of day. “He said, ‘Oh, God that would be wonderful. Because some of the stuff that we want is like there's an intro missing from one of the songs and we've made the thing longer and if we had the intro, we could put the intro in.'” Howe said he was glad to send the original master tapes to them, only asking in return that when they go through the demos they would burn all the songs on
DVD
for him. They burned everything for Howe who said, “It's a wonderful collection of stuff. Of course there is a lot of stuff there that isn't of any value, but it does have some nostalgic value.”

The new version of the soundtrack included two unreleased tracks from the original sessions, “Candy Apple Red” and “Once Upon a Town/Empty Pockets.” “That's where those two songs came from,” Howe continued, “and it was a great idea to do that, because it made it a brand new album.” The
DVD
gives bonus work-in-progress versions of the songs “The Wages of Love,” “Picking Up After You,” “I Beg Your Pardon,” “Candy Apple Red,” and “Take Me Home.” But perhaps the most eye-opening of these is a really raw live-in-studio version of “This One's from the Heart,” under its original title, “Cold Chisel.” This includes studio chatter between Waits and Bones Howe and shows the song coming to life as they massage it into shape. Coppola's son Roman also created a new music video for “This One's from the Heart,” using scenes from the film. “That album is still one of the best examples of [Waits's] work,” Howe says.

Howe also helped a bit in setting up the music in the new cut and tracking down the musicians who worked on the songs to make sure they received proper compensation and credit. “Francis is much happier with
[the new cut of the movie],” Howe says. “Again, it sort of got the same attention the movie got when it came out. People who love Francis's work loved it. People who hated the movie still hate it. But, the one thing that becomes obvious when people look at it now is how much influence that movie had on video filmmakers and music-clip filmmakers, mtv clip-makers and all. How far ahead of the times it was at the time we made it.”

In summer 2004, another older film that Waits had worked on was released to theaters. Waits's good friend, film director Jim Jarmusch released
Coffee and Cigarettes,
a long-planned melding together of a series of eleven related short films in which, as the title suggests, different personalities sit down together in funky diners and chat over java and smokes. Waits's segment had actually been filmed back in 1993 (back when he was still smoking; he finally gave up this last vice just a few years ago). In the short, Waits chats with punk-rock forefather Iggy Pop of the Stooges. “Iggy Pop and I play two characters in the short film. It was actually rather funny,” says Waits. “It's just a little bit that Jarmusch does called
Coffee and Cigarettes
. Using different people that you cast in it, you talk about coffee and you talk about cigarettes, and then it's over. Iggy and I did one, and it was really great.”
²⁷
He was right, Waits and Pop were truly entertaining playing themselves (well, highly stylized versions of themselves) as they meet over coffee and size each other up, engaging in a subtle game of career one-up-manship. Two segments starring Cate Blanchett and Alfred Malina with Steve Coogan were also terrific little slice-of-life vignettes — but the other shorts seemed rather slight, unfocused, and kind of boring. Other people who took part in the project are actors Steve Buscemi, Roberto Begnini, Joie Lee, and Bill Murray and musicians Jack White and Meg White (The White Stripes), rza and
GZA
(Wu-Tang Clan), and comedian Steven Wright.

In the meantime, the world was waiting patiently for Waits's next full-length studio album. An article in
Billboard
magazine in the summer of 2003 promised Waits's next album was to be released in March of 2004. But when that anticipated month arrived, there was still no word of a release date.
²⁸
That word came soon after; Waits was hard at work on the new album in his old
Down By Law
stomping grounds of New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta and the new album, to be called
Real Gone,
should be released in October 2004. Again, the information wasn't exactly on track — the idea of him returning to the bayous was a bit fanciful. Waits insisted to Barney Hoskyns, “People just assumed it was the
Mississippi Delta. But see, there's a Sacramento [California] delta, and that's where we were.”
²⁹
People took the release date with a bit of a grain of salt since earlier deadlines had been missed, but on October 5, 2004, the album was finally available for the patient fans. Not that the missed deadlines meant that Waits had been lazing around instead of working. “I'm up early every morning,” he insisted on
KFOG
radio. “I take the kids to school and all that.”
³⁰

Waits previewed the album, like he had several times before, by releasing one of the songs on a charity album. However, this was the only way that it was business as usual for Waits. As a singer, he had always been stubbornly silent about his politics, undoubtedly thinking that the political views of a singer/songwriter should only be of interest to himself. All of this had changed in the America of George W. Bush. Like so many others, he saw so many of the basic rights promised in the Constitution being trampled. So, while he did not seem to go out of his way to bring up politics, he would not back down in interviews when asked to discuss the 2004 Presidential Elections and what he thought of candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry. And most everyone was asking. “Well I'd say this is probably one of the most important elections that we've had in a long time,” Waits said on
The Dave Fanning Show
. “Not that they aren't all important, but I join the voices of a lot of Americans and hope that he's voted out of office… I can't say that Kerry is a logical and the most effective alternative, I think maybe we're kinda one party with two heads… I like what Bill Hicks said. I think when you are elected president in the United States they [should] take you into a small room. And they run a film clip of the Kennedy assassination from an angle no one has ever seen before. And then they turn to you and say: ‘
Are there any questions?
'”
³¹

He took it even further in an interview with Barney Hoskyns for the British magazine
Rock's Back Pages,
in which he stated, “This is an enormous global cartel. We're going 90 miles an hour down a dead-end street. Bush has probably set us back about 75 years.”
³²
It was really quite astonishing, in interviews leading up to the release of
Real Gone
(and the elections) Waits discussed George W. Bush almost as much as he discussed his own music. In the
Toronto Star
he bemoaned the “you're-either-with-us-or-against-us” idea that had sprouted in the Bush administration, the suggestion that if you were against Bush or against the Iraq War that you were anti-American. Waits charged that Bush wanted to go to war with Iraq from day one, comparing him to a doctor who smashed your foot and then tried to cast it.
³³
When a British newsman suggested that polls
seemed to indicate that Bush would probably win, Waits reacted with horror, begging him not to say that.
³⁴

More importantly, he put his money where his mouth was. One of the cornerstones of the upcoming
Real Gone
was the song “Day After Tomorrow,” a touching protest of the Iraq war told from the point of view of a soldier writing home. Weeks before the new album was released, Waits contributed the tune to a charity album called
Future Soundtrack for America.
The collection also included songs by R.E.M., Blink-182, David Byrne, Bright Eyes, Death Cab for Cutie, The Flaming Lips, Fountains of Wayne, Jimmy Eats World, They Might Be Giants, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. All proceeds for the album went to MoveOn.org, a political group that was dedicated to the ouster of George W. Bush. Waits was also long-rumored to play a part in the Vote For Change Tour, a group of concerts played throughout the U.S. in the months leading up to the election, with all of the benefits going towards John Kerry's election. Artists who did participate in the tour included Bruce Springsteen, R.E.M., John Fogerty, Pearl Jam, Bonnie Raitt, The Dixie Chicks, James Taylor, Neil Young, Bright Eyes, The Dave Matthews Band, John Mellencamp, and Death Cab for Cutie. The whispers that Waits would participate in the tour never came to be, though.