Tom Waits on Writing Music (Blues Review)

 

Photo by Peter Vincent

Tom Waits: Grammys are kind of like the Food and Drug Administration. People like to be USDA-approved, with the little sticker on it and everything. It's safer. It's kind of people formulating their tastes for what they like. They like the company of others. But it's a good thing.

You know, we just buy music now. We don't make it any more. And that goes for just about everything. I think it's so important that people develop and subscribe to and have confidence in their own ability to make music, however rough it is. The rougher the better for me.

What have I been listening to? I've got all of those Lomax reissues, 'Southern Journeys', all that Library of Congress stuff that was recently released on CD, the Georgia Sea Island Singers and prison songs and field hollars and a lot of Leadbelly. I was born the day after Leadbelly died. I'd like to think we passed in the hall. When I hear his voice, I feel I know him. Maybe I was a rock on a road he walked on or a dish in his cupboard, because when I heard him first I recognized him.

You see, I'm like everybody else in music. I don't have a formal background. I learned from listening to records, from talking to people, from hanging around record stores and hanging around musicians and saying, "Hey, how did you do that? Do that again. Let me see how you did that." And then I kind of incorporated it into what I was doing. 

Everybody's still really involved in the folk process of listening to each other. Even if you really try to do exactly what you think someone else did the night before, you can't, unless you're some kind of impersonator or impressionist. When you hear breakthroughs in music, it was their attempt to replicate something incorrectly, and that's what puts a hole in the door and lets the light in. You know, Chuck Berry was trying to play guitar the way Johnnie Johnson, his piano player, played keyboards, with the same kind of stride feeling. When I was a kid picking up a needle and trying to learn how someone did something over and over again ... it's kind of how it gets passed along, and I'm proud to be part of that whole tradition.

Blues Revue magazine No. 59 (USA). July/August, 2000 by Bret Kofford.