The Tom Waits Cross-Country Marathon Interview

LOS ANGELES OCTOBER 5, 1979

Tom Waits' black '64 Thunderbird is parked in a used car lot, up against a graffiti-covered wall. That is, one imagines the T-Bird is black. Caked with an impenetrable layer of L.A. dirt, the broad-flanked sedan could be chartreuse for all anyone can tell. Inside floats a clutter of unmailed bills, unopened letters, wadded-up Kleenex, a portable AM radio (antenna broken), a cardboard box full of old, yellowing T-shirts, and a paperback wedged in the crevice where windshield meets dashboard. Its title, Invade My Privacy, is fading fast in the sun. The auto's left rear fender sports an elaborate decal -- Blue Valentine -- the very same left rear fender emblazoned on the cover of Waits' thusly titled 1978 album. As Waits comments later, sitting in manager Herb Cohen's cloistered offices, "I couldn't afford a billboard, so I wrote it on the car."

"Blue Valentine" has been gathering dust in the unpaved car lot every afternoon for three weeks in October '79, while inside the faceless, uninviting brick and concrete complex Tom Waits -- beatnik balladeer, jazz journeyman (the ad might read: "Have gravelly voice. Will stand up and sing.") -- has been readying his band for a tour that will take them across the country and through Christmas, visiting theaters and small halls. "I don't play many beer bars any more," Waits explains. "I used to play exclusively toilets, that's all I wanted to play. But the thing is, you play toilets too long and you start gettin' a little on you."

This time, Waits is stepping out with a new bunch of musicians, including among its ranks guitarist Terry Evans, late of many a Little Richard and Ray Charles revue. Waits discovered Evans playing in the dimly lit recesses of a Ventura motel bar. "Times are tough," Waits mumbles knowingly.

In spring of '79, Waits had commenced work on a record tentatively titled White Spades, but he got distracted, caught up in some other things. "I ended up changing the title to Heart Attack and Vine, and that's what I'm working on now. I'd say the sound's a little more rhythm & blues. Got a song called 'Drinkin' Whiskey in Church,' one called 'Breakfast in Jail,' another called 'Whose Sportcoat Is That?' Another, 'Pomona Lisa.' A lot of it I'm going to break in on the road.

For someone with the demeanor of an itinerant bum, the slouchy ambience of some Kerouac nomad, Waits has immersed himself in a demanding swarm of projects, committing his time and talents to a busy horde of movers and shakers. Apart from his current fall/winter tour and the Heart Attack and Vine LP (to be recorded with producer Bones Howe in early January), several motion picture forays are under way. One is a script co-written with writer/actor Paul Hampton called Why Is the Dream So Much Sweeter Than the Taste? "It's about a used car dealer in Southern California," he says, by way of explanation. Waits has already appeared on screen, as the inebriated, slovenly barroom pianist Mumbles in Sylvester Stallone's Paradise Alley (unfortunately much of Waits portrayal ended up on the cutting room floor). And, like a lot of pop music figures nowadays, Waits is open to starring in another venture for the silver screen, though he disdains being typecast. "The thing is, once you get any kind of image -- I've gotten countless calls to play a drunk Irish piano player which is, like, not very challenging. I'd much prefer to play an axe murderer."

Waits also spent a good portion of 1979 holed up in a Paris loft, collaborating with artist Guy Peellaert (Rock Dreams) on a book of portraits of American heroes, to which Waits has contributed the text. "You know, people like Marlene Dietrich, Mohammad Ali, Meyer Lansky, Pearl Bailey, Jimmy Durante, Adam Clayton Powell."

Why is he pushing himself so hard? Waits' every waking hour (beginning around noon) is devoted to his music, a book, a movie idea. "There's a certain reward," he says. "A very personal reward from all this. But I don't know, sometimes I just want to disappear. Poof! 'Excuse me while I disappear.' Deadlines, schedules, obligations, responsibilities. Sometimes the work just kinda drills. But then something comes along and boom boom -- everything's okay. So what are you going to do? Marry the girl or pay her off?'

Tom Waits doesn't dwell on the lofty mega-platinum pinnacle of success enjoyed by groups like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, or by solo artists like Jackson Browne, but his albums and his frequent tours (on last year's, each performance was opened by a Waits-auditioned local stripper) have sold consistently well. His songs have been covered by several million-selling artists (including the Eagles), which means that Waits has been on the receiving end of a few fat royalty checks. A self-described follower of "life on a beer budget," one can't help but wonder what Waits must have done with his extra cash. He answers: "My name is Morgan, but it ain't J.P., if you receive my meaning."

This past fall, rumors circled the Hollywood hot air mills purporting that Waits had returned from France a changed man. One story went so far as to suggest he had shed his thrift shop threads for Giorgio Armani suits and a clean-shaven, manicured Continental haute couture. Sitting in one of Herb Cohen's small offices and backdropped by a fountain and Spanish courtyard, Waits needn't have inquired "Giorgio who?" to debunk that fiction. One look was enough: pointed black shoes (leather cracked), tight, wrinkled straight black pants, a haphazardly-buttoned off-white white shirt, his goatee more under his chin than on it, and wavy brown hair jutted high on top, seemingly propped upright by a pair of oversized sideburns.

SALINA, KANSAS DECEMBER 7, 1979

En route to Kansas City from Denver, on the last leg of his year-end tour, the one-time pizza maker from suburban San Diego celebrates his thirtieth birthday. It's Pearl Harbor Day in this wintry, flat midwestern town.

Though he rolls his eyes and clears his throat in mock despair, Waits insists that the Big Three-O is nothing to sweat over. "The big ages are sixteen, thirty-three-and-a-third, forty-five and seventy-eight," he laughs. "Turning thirty -- everybody thinks about it, I guess. But it don't bother me, I feel pretty healthy." At which point Waits lets loose a painful succession of coughs, a peal of mucus swirling in the lungs.

And speaking of lungs, Tom Waits, the man who couldn't make a gesture on stage -- let alone tell a story -- without holding or toking on a Lucky Strike, has given up smoking. "It's a whole other world for me. I just didn't feel good, I felt like I was caving in inside. I couldn't walk two blocks without coughing and wheezing and out of breath, so I said, "What am I doing killing myself?' I don't want to live hard, die young and have a beautiful corpse. I really don't."

What about his much ballyhooed bouts with a bottle of Four Roses? "I ration myself. You know, it's good to discipline yourself in this area. As I turn the corner on thirty I'm fastly becoming concerned about personal hygiene. Drinkin' and smokin' and smokin' and drinkin' started slowing me down. One of these days I'll want to have a family, I've gotta think about that."

Tom Waits married? Settled into a nice suburban split-level? Little Toms and Tomasinas on the rug? "Sure. I'd like to have about seven of 'em." But Waits' idyllic homelife is still far off; he has yet to stumble starry-eyed upon Mrs. Right, though he's looking. "I'll take a white girl," he gleams, "about five-two with big tits and bad teeth."

Waits' pursuit of a happy homelife and a woman he can call wife squelches a year of talk about his much-publicized relationship with Rickie Lee Jones. Publications from People to Rolling Stone touted Waits and songstress Jones as an "item," with the British rock mag Melody Maker going so far as to call their marriage "imminent." Though Waits and Jones are undeniably close and inhabit a collective world of old cars, stale bars and life's generally seamy underside, sharing a coterie of self-styled low-lifers, whatever romantic interlude the two enjoyed seems to have waned. Rickie Lee Jones was the one subject Waits was intent on not discussing.

HOLLYWOOD DECEMBER 31, 1979

Tom Waits is standing by the door of a rented, run-down hall eliciting toothy smiles from short white girls with big tits. It's New Year's Eve at "Mambo Beat '80," a bizarre multi-media "happening" in the heart of Hollywood. Various comedy acts (including a pair of blind Lebanese tourists) and an awful cover band known as Sal Mimeo & the Duplicators keep the three hundred partygoers hopping until midnight. Then veteran R&B performer Roy Brown takes the stage with his group of crusty black musicians. Waits moves from the entrance way to the dance floor. This is what he came to hear. Roy Brown's sax player, Lee Allen, used to play with Fats Domino -- one of Waits' heroes.

It is on this eventful night, at the turn of a new decade, that Waits makes a New Year's resolution: "I told myself that I was going to leave Los Angeles and move to New York."

The signs of restlessness were there. After returning from the road, Waits moved out of his long-time abode at the Tropicana Motel, now the stopover spot for spiky-haired English punk bands. Waits exited the place after one too many magazine articles had mentioned his residence there, resulting in one too many adoring fans knocking on his door at four in the morning. He moved to an apartment on Crenshaw Boulevard. Then to a house in Silver Lake. From there he slept in a series of seedy motels until the day he headed for the Big Apple.

NEW YORK CITY JANUARY 28, 1980

"I grew up in Los Angeles and I just needed a new urban landscape," Waits explains, sprawled on an unmade bed in his room at the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street. "I've always wanted to live here. It's a good working atmosphere for me. So I packed up three suitcases and took off. Once I get located I'll go back to L.A. and get the rest of my stuff."

With his move from the Southland to the concrete terrain of Manhattan, Waits is looking to infuse some new blood into his life. No more 2 A.M. cruises down Santa Monica Blvd. with his pals. No more late breakfasts at Duke's. Tom Waits will be jostling with commuters on the crosstown bus or riding the subway late at night, exploring the dark underbelly of another kind of town.

And what about the Thunderbird, "Blue Valentine?"

"I'm lookin' to sell it," Waits grins. "Know anyone who's interested?"

HOLLYWOOD JULY 28, 1980

Not so fast.

In late March, Waits hands back his room key, moves out of the Chelsea and into an apartment a few blocks away. Then, out of the blue, a telephone call from filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola: he's in town and wants to discuss a movie. "We had a brief conversation about a nebulous project called One from the Heart," recounts Waits. "At that time the idea was a little half-baked. Now, it's starting to materialize."

Materialize, indeed. Tom Waits is back in Los Angeles, fixed up in an office on the old Hollywood General lot -- now known as Omni Zoetrope Studio and owned by Coppola. The walls in Waits' suite are made of old mahogany. A Yamaha grand piano fills half of one of the rooms. An elaborate tape deck shares a coffee table with magazines, cassettes and scripts. "There's a David Niven feel to the room which I rather enjoy," he says, his eyes scanning the rich wainscoting.

Waits sits there looking almost normal, his face just about clean shaven -- sideburns gone, a long, narrow goatee neatly trailing from his lower lip. His hair, showing its first sign of gray, is less unruly. At thirty-and-a-half, he appears to be in disarming good health and spirits. "I'm very confident right now. I couldn't be in better shape. Everything's going very well."

And 'everything' these days is One from the Heart. A romantic comedy/musical set in Las Vegas over one Fourth of July weekend, the picture stars Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr and Natassia Kinski, and will be directed by Coppola. "What's unusual is that most of the music will have been written before they shoot," he explains. "So I'm working closely with Francis on the story and on the development of the songs. It's a bastard musical in a way, not in the tradition of Dan Dailey and The Music Man."

Knee-deep in sheet music and charts, and surrounded by cinema heavyweights, Waits can't envision returning to his self-imposed exile in New York. "It's impossible now. One from the Heart is going to keep me a love slave till February."

So much for new urban landscapes. Has he abandoned all resolve and returned to his digs at the Tropicana? "No, I was staying in another motel -- a little Vietnam. I've found another apartment now."

What about "Blue Valentine?" "She went out one night without me and got in a fatal accident," he murmurs. "Luckily, no one was hurt." Instead, befitting his new line of work, Waits rolls down the boulevards in the safe anonymity of a rented sky-blue Monte Carlo.

As for Heart Attack and Vine, the songwriter did manage to shape up a few numbers while he was living in Manhattan. And he managed, in late April, while negotiations were still underway between his manager and Coppola, to record the LP at the RCA studios on Ivar, with long-time producer Bones Howe. "Pomona Lisa" didn't make it to his seventh album, but tracks like "Ruby's Arms," "Jersey Girl" and "Till the Money Runs Out" did. And another song -- "Downtown." A Waits' original or the Petula Clark classic?

"No. It's a long drive from Petula Clark's," he grins. And then sitting by the piano and plunking the ivories absently, his eyes look up. "Actually, I've been thinking about putting out an album called My Favorites. And instead of my cover versions of those tunes, it would just be an album of the actual cuts. Just songs that I enjoy and [in TV commercial voice] you can enjoy the same ones that I enjoy, but you'll know that those specifically are the ones that I like."