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Lowside Of The Road: A Life Of Tom Waits
Sunday, May 31, 2009
'Like Dylan, like Ry Cooder, like an old bluesman,'writes Des Cowley, 'Waits heads into his sixties as a musician still relevant for our times, making music for the ages'
Lowside of the Road: a Life of Tom Waits
By Barney Hoskyns pb $35.00
Though Barney Hoskyns ranks amongst my favourite writers – his history of LA music Waiting for the Sun remains a high-water mark of music journalism – I nevertheless approached this new book with some trepidation.
Word was already out that Waits had nixed any close friends talking to Hoskyns, always a bad sign for the prospective biographer (and Hoskyns, by way of open confession, includes a brief selection of well-wishing but negative email responses from the likes of Keith Richards, Rickie Lee Jones, and others at the end of the book).
But, the fact is, Waits has been a prominent, albeit cult, figure on the music scene for almost forty years, and there’s plenty of profiles and interviews already out there – many carried out by Hoskyns himself – along with numerous musical cohorts more than willing to part with their story.
Not that there’s anything bad about Waits in the offing. Hoskyns himself is an admitted fan and admirer, and his big book stands as the most substantial and balanced life to date about one of music’s great mavericks.
Hoskyns book is effectively divided into ‘two acts’, the Asylum years, and the Island/Epitaph years. It’s no co-incidence that the transition coincides with Waits’ marriage to Kathleen Brennan, the somewhat shadowy figure who has played an increasingly essential part in the development of his music and career, beginning with that indisputable masterpiece Swordfishtrombones.
The first half of the book equates more to the public Waits, when he was a hungry young singer and songwriter from San Diego, looking for a shot at the big time. Moving to LA, Waits songs came to the attention of David Geffen, whose Asylum records was cashing in on the new wave of singer-songwriters – Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell, JD Souther, Linda Ronstadt.
In hindsight, Waits looks like a fish out of water next to that company, though ‘Ol’ 55’, from his debut album Closing Time, did get covered by the Eagles. Ironically, some of Waits’ biggest paychecks would come from other people, from Rod Stewart to Scarlet Johansson, covering his songs.
Hoskyns devotes plenty of pages to Waits’ early development as an artist. To this day it’s hard to determine whether Waits was permanently ‘in character’ during that period – a strange amalgam of 1950s hipster attitude, Beat poetry, Edward Hopper paintings, alligator shoes, jazz, cigarettes and alcohol – or whether he was just damn well like that.
Whichever way you cut it, Waits was fundamentally a man going against the grain, stylistically out of step with his time – drinking to excess, playing nights at the Troubadour, living at the Tropicana Motel, hanging out with Rickie Lee Jones and Chuck E Weiss.
It’s the stuff of legend, so much so that it’s easy to forget the artistic maturity Waits forged through successive albums like Small Change, Foreign Affair, and Blue Valentine.
By the early 1980s, Waits was feeling artistically hemmed in by his audience, it was as if they wanted him forever chained to a piano, propping up a bottle of bourbon, singing songs like ‘The Piano has been Drinking’. Heartattack and Vine, with its jagged guitars and Howlin’ Wolf-like screaming, signaled his restlessness. It was time to move on.
Hoskyns covers the increasingly important role that film played in Waits’ career, working with directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Jim Jarmusch. It was on the set of One from the Heart, which Waits scored for Coppola, that he met Kathleen Brennan, and within a week they would be married. With that meeting, Act Two of Waits’ musical life, which included a shift to the Island label, would begin.
Forsaking LA, Waits moved to New York, where Brennan’s theatre and avant-garde connections led to collaborations with Chicago’s notorious Steppenwolf Theater (Frank’s Wild Years), and later with radical genius Robert Wilson (Black Rider and Woyzeck, the latter recorded as Blood Money). Gone were the old piano songs, replaced with a sound world made up of junk percussion, marimbas, trombones, banjo, bullhorns, pump organ. In the space of a few years, Waits had entirely re-invented himself. Truth be told, he couldn’t have heaped more credibility upon himself if he’d tried.
Hoskyns draws heavily on Waits’ own words, culled from the many interviews he’s given over the years. And while Waits’ yarns almost always veer a good mile from the truth, they reflect his brilliant wordplay and riffing humor – in fact, it struck me that the perfect companion volume to Lowside of the Road is the book of collected interviews Innocent When you Dream.
Wherever possible, Hoskyns has interviewed musicians who have worked closely with Waits, and their commentary on his working methods is enlightening. Recording ‘Gospel Train’, he tells the musicians: “What this piece needs is short-back-and-sides”. On another occasion, he limps around the studio shouting that the music needs to ‘limp’ more. While his instructions are often abstract and obtuse, they make sense in a Waits sort of way.
If the latter part of Hoskyns’ book falls away a little, it’s most likely because Waits, by then, had largely foregone his hell-raising ways, and instead been living the life of a happily married man and father of three somewhere north of San Francisco.
Despite recent friends and collaborators shying away from speaking to Hoskyns, chances are there’s not that much to tell. For the past twenty years, Waits has toured rarely, though always to sell-out crowds. Instead, he’s focused his energies on recording, on theatre work, and on charting the increasingly discordant sound inside him.
Hoskyns explores this music in detail – perhaps too much at times – and readers unfamiliar with Waits’ later work will glaze over during track-by-track discussions of albums like Real Gone and Orphans.
But for the rest of us – and I count myself among them – the book will inspire. Like me, you will find yourself ransacking shelves and cupboards for every Waits recording you own, playing them on high rotation as a soundtrack to Hoskyns’ book.
And while I know Waits would have preferred to relish his privacy, it’s fair to say that reading Lowside of the Road both informed and enlarged my understanding of Waits’ music and – here’s an irony – increased my liking for the man.
Like Dylan, like Ry Cooder, like an old bluesman, Waits heads into his sixties as a musician still relevant for our times, making music for the ages.
Available at the Greville Street Bookstore
grevbook@bigpond.net.au
(Phone 03 9510 3531)
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