Veins of blues, jazz and folk run through Tom Waits's sound and the former can be traced to his junior high days. "I was going to an all-black junior high*. I showed up at Balboa Stadium to see the Flames or else I didn't go to school the next day." Ray Charles remains his favorite singer. Jazz and folk entered his life when he was 20. He became involved in a strong social clique at the now defunct folk club, the Heritage, where he worked as a doorman. He got involved with jazz, ironically, after reading On the Road.
"Kerouac liked to consider himself a jazz poet, using words the same way Miles uses his horn. And it's a beautiful instrument. He had melody, a good sense of rhythm, structure, color, mood and intensity. I couldn't put the book down. And I got a subscription to down beat afterwards."
Waits and a friend, Sam Jones, undertook their own countrywide odyssey shortly thereafter. When he returned he decided to throw himself into entertaining and he took to the hoot circuits of San Diego and Los Angeles. He spent countless Mondays on the sidewalk outside the Troubadour for the chance to cast his ego to the Troubadour fates.
"It was frightening to hoot, to be rushed through like cattle. And at the Troubadour it's like the last resort. You see old vaudeville cats, bands that have hocked everything to come out here from the East Coast just to play the Troub one night. You also meet a lot of carnival barkers in polyester, smoking Roi-Tans and giving you some long Texas routine. They say, 'Hello sucker.' And I was a sucker. But you're desperate, you're broke."
Waits met Herb Cohen, manager of Frank Zappa, Tim Buckley and, at the time, Linda Ronstadt, at a Troub hoot one desperate and broke night in 1972. "I was disappointed. I had done my songs - I was still slumping in a semi-professional thing onstage at the time - and the audience had gone henna henna henna. And Herb came over to me, was very honest and upfront. And the next day I had a songwriting contract and $300 in my pocket. We've been together ever since."
Source: Rolling Stone magazine. January 30, 1975. Date: 1973/ 1974.
Photo: Jay Blakesberg
*Forgive me but can any of my American pals who visit me here enlighten me as to when he says he went to an “all-black junior highschool” !? How is that possible not least the logic tells me if he went it wasn’t all black but how rare would this be for a working class white boy end up at an all black school!? I don’t get it
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