Tom on those Old Field Recordings, Wolfman Jack and the Radio (Tom Waits)

Tom Waits:  

"When I listen to old field recordings, maybe you’ll hear a dog barking way off in the background. You realize the house it was recorded in is torn down, the dog is dead, the tape recorder is broken, the guy who made the recording died in Texas, the car out front has four flat tires, even the dirt that the house sat on is gone—probably a parking lot—but we still have this song. Takes me out when I listen to those old recordings. I put on my stuff in the house, which is always those old Alan Lomax recordings. 

When I was first trying to decide what I wanted to do, I listened to Bob Dylan and James Brown. Those were my heroes. I listened to Wolfman Jack every night. The mighty ten-ninety. Fifty thousand watts of soul power. My dad was a radio technician during the war, and when he left the family when I was about eleven, I had this whole radio fascination. And he used to keep catalogues, and I used to build my own crystal set, and put the aerial up on the roof. And I remember making a radio on my first crystal set, and the first station I got on these little two-dollar headphones was Wolfman. And I thought I had discovered something that no one else had. I thought it was comin' in from Kansas City or Omaha, that nobody was getting this station, and nobody knew who this guy was, and nobody knew who these records were. I'd tapped into some bunker, or he was broadcasting from some rest stop on a highway thousands of miles from here, and it's only for me. He was actually broadcasting from San Ysidro near the border. What I really wanted to figure out is how do you come out of the radio yourself."

Photo for MAGNET by Christian Lantry