WAIT’S WISDOM!

MORE FROM TOM WAITS:

On song writing and the inspiration of marrying his Muse, Kathleen Brennan 

From the Tom Waits Facebook page: 

 

The 1980's were a great decade for Tom Waits. At the end of the seventies he decided to clean up his act a little. He left Rickie Lee Jones (who had started doing heroin several years before) and eventually met his wife, Kathleen Brennan, in 1979. Kathleen Brennan soon became a creative partner, getting writing credits on several of the songs from the three albums above. Tom Waits has described her like this:

“…a remarkable collaborator, and she's a shiksa goddess and a trapeze artist, all of that. She can fix the truck. Expert on the African violet and all that. She's outta this world. I don't know what to say. I'm a lucky man. She has a remarkable imagination. And that's the nation where I live. She's bold, inventive and fearless. That's who you wanna go in the woods with, right? Somebody who finishes your sentences for you.”

Tom Waits had already begun to leave behind his hard-drinking lifestyle as well as his boho scat-jazz sound – moving from a Charles Bukowski beatnick songscape to become more firmly rooted in a gentler view the American Experience. 1980’s Heart Attack and Vine (his last album for Asylum) began to show signs of this evocative exploration of American everydayness. “On the Nickel,” a song from that album that was about 5th Street in Los Angeles – a notorious street where “lost boys”-turned hustlers congregated is filled with sweet paens to boyhood::

Sticks and stones will break my bones
but I always will be true
and when your mama is dead and gone
I'll sing this lullaby just for you

So what becomes of all the little boys
Who never comb their hair?
They're lined up all around the block
On the Nickel over there

So you better bring a bucket
There is a hole in the pail
If you don't get my letter
Then you'll know that I'm in jail

So what becomes of all the little boys
Who never say their prayers?
They're sleepin' like a baby
On the Nickel over there

Kathleen Brennan’s influence was immediate and changed Waits’ creative arc. The three albums mentioned above, often referred to as the 1980s trilogy, and introduced the character “Frank.” The title track of that album follows the story of a soldier returning from an overseas war:

Well, he came home from the war

 With a party in his head

 And modified Brougham DeVille

 And a pair of legs that opened up like butterfly wings

 And a mad dog that wouldn't sit still 

 He went and took up with a Salvation Army band girl

 Who played dirty water on a swordfishtrombone

 He went to sleep at the bottom of Tenkiller lake

 And he said "gee, but it's great to be home"

(Tenkiller Lake is a lake that was created in 1947, and the creation of this lake necessitate the flooding of a large area including, as was often the case with these projects, a whole town. The line about sleeping at the bottom of Tenkiller Lake evokes the idea of not being able to go home again (or the irreversibility of experience), which is a constant Waitsian theme. It also suggests the dissociative effects that combat veterans often feel when they went back to their towns and neighborhoods.) As Apocalypse Now's Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) said of going back to the states: on leave "I'd been back home a few times, the only thing was that it was no longer there."

Frank’s odyssey is fleshed out more completely in the song “Frank’s Wild Years,” also from the album swordfishtrombones:

Well, Frank settled down in the Valley

 And he hung his wild years on a nail that he drove through his wife's forehead

 He sold used office furniture out there on San Fernando Road

 And assumed a thirty thousand dollar loan at fifteen and a quarter percent

 And put a down payment on a little two bedroom place

 His wife was a spent piece of used jet trash

 Made good bloody Marys, kept her mouth shut most of the time

 Had a little Chihuahua named Carlos

 That had some kind of skin disease and was totally blind

 They had a thoroughly modern kitchen, self-cleaning oven, the whole bit

 Frank drove a little sedan, they were so happy

 One night Frank was on his way home from work, stopped at the liquor store

 Picked up a couple of Mickey's Big Mouths

 Drank 'em in the car on his way to the Shell station

 Got a gallon of gas in a can

 Drove home, doused everything in the house, torched it

 Parked across the street laughing, watching it burn

 All Halloween-orange and chimney-red

 Then Frank put on a top forty station

 Got on the Hollywood Freeway, headed north

 Never could stand that dog.

Waits’ own father left the family when he was a teenager.

The album, Frank’s Wild Years, represents the highpoint of both the lyrical and musical evolution that Waits started on in 1980. The lyrics are shot through with tender snapshots of Americana:

Hang On St. Christopher:

Hang on St. Christopher with the hammer to the floor

 Put a highball in the crank case, nail a crow to the door

 Get a bottle for the jockey gimme a two-ninety-four

 There's a seven-fifty Norton bustin' down January's door

Cold Cold Ground:

Now don't be a cry baby when there's wood in the shed

There's a bird in the chimney and a stone in my bed

When the road's washed out they pass the bottle around

And wait in the arms of the cold cold ground

The cold cold ground, the cold cold ground, cold cold ground

There's a ribbon in the willow there's a tire swing rope

And a briar patch of berries takin' over the slope

The cat'll sleep in the mailbox and we'll never go to town

Til we bury every dream in the cold cold ground

In the cold cold ground, the cold cold ground

In the cold cold ground, in the cold cold ground

Train Song:

Well I broke down in East St. Louis on the Kansas City line

 Drunk up all my money that I borrowed every time

 And I fell down at the derby, the night's black as a crow

 It was a train that took me away from here

 But a train can't bring me home

 What made my dreams so hollow was standing at the depot

 With a steeple full of swallows that could never ring the bell

 And I've come ten thousand miles away, not one thing to show

 It was a train that took me away from here

 But a train can't bring me home

The last couplet of “Train Song,” it should be noted, picks up the previously mentioned theme irreversibility of experience. This is an ongoing theme. In swordfishtrombone’s “Shore Leave,” we see a sailor on a three day pass overseas contemplating how he is so far removed from his everyday life that he can’t imagine that he and his girlfriend are looking up at the same moon:

Well I was pacing myself

 Trying to make it all last

 Squeezing all the life

 Out of a lousy two day pass

 And I had a cold one at the Dragon

 With some Filipino floor show

 And talked baseball with a lieutenant

 Over a Singapore sling

 And I wondered how the same moon outside

 Over this Chinatown fair

 Could look down on Illinois

 And find you there

 And you know i love you baby

 And i'm so far away from home

And again, on Bone Machine's “That Feel” (co-written with Keith Richards) Waits considers that some things once experienced can never be “unexperienced”:

Well there's one thing you can't lose

It's that feel

Your pants, your shirt, your shoes

But not that feel

Throw it out in the rain, you can whip it like a dog

You can chop it down like an old dead tree

You can always see it

When you're coming into town

Once you hang it on the wall you can never take it down

But there's one thing you can't lose

And it's that feel

You can pawn your watch and chain

But not that feel

Always comes and finds you, it will always hear you cry

I cross my wooden leg and I swear on my glass eye

It will never leave you high and dry

Never leave you loose

It's harder to get rid of than tattoos

But there's one thing you can't lose, it's that feel

But there's one thing you can't lose, it's that feel

You can throw it off a bridge, you can lose it in the fire

You can leave it at the altar, it will make you out a liar

Fall down in the street, you can leave it in the lurch

Well, you say that it's gospel but I know that it's only church

So one last mention of Kathleen Brennan. They are still happily married – going on 40 years. And another song, Johnsburg, Illinois” (Kathleen’s hometown) written for her, from swordfishtrombones:

She's my only true love

She's all that I think of, look here

In my wallet

That's her

She grew up on a farm there

There's a place on my arm where I've written

her name next to mine

You see I just

can’t live without her

and I'm her only boy

And she grew up outside McHenry

In Johnsburg, Illinois

Beautifully written and I agree with every word sorry I missed the author but it may be Rob Barry over at the Facebook page TOM WAITS here

apologies and if you want it more correctly acknowledge please get in touch!

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