Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
Speaker 2: that brings you the secret histories and little known, fascinating
Speaker 2: facts and figures behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows
Speaker 2: and more. Where your two swordfish, trombones of Scintille, your
Speaker 2: rain dogs of random facts, your mule variations of magnified
Speaker 2: views on stock, I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan Roun
Speaker 2: talk and today, as the nerdy among you may have
Speaker 2: picked up on, we are talking about America's original steam powered,
Speaker 2: part tree, part tombstone, Carnival Barker playing a piano made
Speaker 2: out of mammoth fossels, an old era almost didn't get
Speaker 2: to the end of that sense, that's right. We are
Speaker 2: talking about Tom Waite and his epical nineteen ninety two
Speaker 2: album Bone Machine, maybe a runner up right after Eraserhead
Speaker 2: for like least commercially popular thing we've covered on here. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's up there, like critics loved this album, and writers
Speaker 2: love this album and nerds love this album. But researching it,
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, yeah, this has got the Grammy,
Speaker 2: and then nothing else, like no significant sales to speak of.
Speaker 2: The single went nowhere. I mean, but you know, I
Speaker 2: am one of the biggest Tom Wait's nerds you will
Speaker 2: ever meet in this or any other life, and I
Speaker 2: love that about you. I was thinking about this a
Speaker 2: lot prayer to tabing this episode. I am fairly certain
Speaker 2: that I was introduced to him by MTV two. Do
Speaker 2: you remember when MTV two first launched.
Speaker 1: I don't, but I love how that was really your
Speaker 1: entry point for so many bands because it was also
Speaker 1: the box, right.
Speaker 2: Well, so that's exactly what it was on the cable
Speaker 2: slot in that the box used to have in Central Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2: MTV I guess. I don't know if they took over
Speaker 2: the box, which was request only, but they took over
Speaker 2: the slot as MTV two, which, for a while, bless
Speaker 2: its pointed Little Heart or Head or whatever that Jefferson
Speaker 2: Airplane album is just showed music videos and there was
Speaker 2: no like time restrictions on those music videos. So one
Speaker 2: second you would see like the nineteen ninety three video
Speaker 2: for Rage Against Machines Freedom, then you would see the
Speaker 2: old Penny Lane promotional clip, then you would see Last
Speaker 2: Night by the Strokes, and then you would see and
Speaker 2: in my case, God's Away on Business by Tom Waits.
Speaker 2: But the point was is that you had no idea
Speaker 2: what era of stuff it was gonna throw at you.
Speaker 2: And it was like at Christmas or something, and I
Speaker 2: was channel surfing. One of my cousins came in and
Speaker 2: was like, oh, Tom Waits, And I was like, is
Speaker 2: that what this is? And they were like yeah, the
Speaker 2: cookie Monster and God's Away in Business is like the
Speaker 2: funniest possible song for that, because that's really one of
Speaker 2: his ones where he like devolves into self parody and
Speaker 2: is literally just.
Speaker 3: Like oom boh oom bah God's oh wait, God's oh
Speaker 3: way on business business uh.
Speaker 2: And so I was like, Okay, that's hilarious. So I
Speaker 2: do a range of weights. There's the uh you know,
Speaker 2: Tom Waits giving interview, his voice just a little bit
Speaker 2: more laid back and then devolves into Gordeworst. Have you
Speaker 2: ever interviewed him? No, I'd be terrified. He hates giving interviews.
Speaker 2: He does not want to be Tom Waits at this
Speaker 2: point in his life at all. He wants to be
Speaker 2: like Dad Waits Chile Mountain, Sonoma County. I actually heard
Speaker 2: that he came to like this tiny DIY Experimental music
Speaker 2: festival or space in Oakland, like just by himself, like
Speaker 2: drove down from Sonoma because it was a night. It
Speaker 2: was a tribute night to some obscure experimental instrument maker
Speaker 2: and like random guy and I did door there, volunteered
Speaker 2: tog door there occasionally, and like showed up like the
Speaker 2: following week to run door and someone was like, oh,
Speaker 2: Tom Waits was here last week, and I was like,
Speaker 2: ah no, So that crushed me. Also, I'll never get
Speaker 2: to see him live. He hates playing live. He probably
Speaker 2: never will again, which is great it fits his whole personality,
Speaker 2: but it does kill me at all times. Anyway, So
Speaker 2: I saw I saw that video and my two like
Speaker 2: cool music cousins were like, oh yeah, Tom Wade's like
Speaker 2: blah blah blah blah. And so I went to I
Speaker 2: want to say LimeWire or Kazah, one of the green ones,
Speaker 2: and I downloaded Going Out West from this very album.
Speaker 2: And I didn't know any of them about bit rates,
Speaker 2: but I knew that certain things sounded like dogshit when
Speaker 2: you would get them from like a pirate site in
Speaker 2: the early days. So I downloaded it and I was like, ooh,
Speaker 2: it's kind of cool, like noir surf guitar intro. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like makes me feel like I'm a detective, but I
Speaker 2: have a stun gun and I don't know if it's
Speaker 2: the thirties or blade Runner. And then it just that
Speaker 2: guitar riff kicks in is just like and then like
Speaker 2: him singing like through a megaphone or something. I was like, Wow,
Speaker 2: this sounds terrible. So I went to the CD warehouse
Speaker 2: locally and bought a copy of Boone Machine and then
Speaker 2: like brought it back home. I was like, Oh, this
Speaker 2: is this is how it's supposed to sound. This is incredible.
Speaker 2: And then I just right down the proverbial rabbit hole.
Speaker 2: I just went back there like every week and was
Speaker 2: just like, Hey, what's the next of these albums I
Speaker 2: should get? And I was like, well, you gotta do
Speaker 2: rain Dogs, you gotta do Swordfish Trombones, and then and
Speaker 2: then filling in the gaps with some of the more
Speaker 2: obscure stiff like but not obscure but like less canonized
Speaker 2: stuff like you got to go back and you got
Speaker 2: to go to like Billy Joel tom Waits, which like
Speaker 2: I don't I think maybe not maybe, I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think that's like an insult to both people but like,
Speaker 2: you know, the log line on Tom Waits's this early
Speaker 2: stuff is like I always just say he's like a
Speaker 2: drunker billy Joel, Like it's all very uh because you know,
Speaker 2: he was pounding around it with the Melo Mafia. He
Speaker 2: was like buds with you know when the ron stat
Speaker 2: that's yea nuts So and Ricky Lee Jones and like
Speaker 2: the Eagles and all those guys they dated for a while, right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: him and Ricky Lee. Yeah. Weirdly enough, in the Classic
Speaker 2: League Annals of how rockstar Relationships dissolve, it was her
Speaker 2: heroin habit that actually caused them to break up. Anyway, Yeah, man,
Speaker 2: And I you know, I think about it. I thought
Speaker 2: about it a lot in contextualizing it in like my life,
Speaker 2: and I thought it was just I think it was
Speaker 2: what drew him to me, What drew me to him
Speaker 2: was that, like, you know, about two years prior, I
Speaker 2: had gotten into like punk rock, right And and when
Speaker 2: you're in getting into punk rock in anywhere in like
Speaker 2: a small town, that means you like go to it
Speaker 2: intimidating club and there's five people there wearing a black
Speaker 2: flag shirt, five people there wearing the Dead Kennedy shirt,
Speaker 2: five people wearing the misfit shirt and five people wearing
Speaker 2: the ramone shirt, and you're like, okay, I have homework.
Speaker 2: And also everyone is dressed the same way, and all
Speaker 2: of these people are very intimidating, and then I get
Speaker 2: screamed at it. So for someone like me who was
Speaker 2: a little bit insecure about entering that world and also
Speaker 2: a big nerd, when I got to Tom Waits, I
Speaker 2: was like, oh, like, you guys think like Rancid is transgressive,
Speaker 2: or you think like the Dead Kennedy's are transgressive, Like
Speaker 2: this man sounds like a broken radiator, you know, like
Speaker 2: and then sadly manifested in a brief period where I
Speaker 2: was wearing like tweed jackets and fingerless gloves and fedoras
Speaker 2: around to like punk shows. But it was really like
Speaker 2: such a shot in the arm of like self confidence
Speaker 2: of being like, oh cool, Like you guys are like
Speaker 2: Ramon's weird and like Ramon's punk, but like I'm into
Speaker 2: Tom Waits and he's the weirdest man alive. And also
Speaker 2: he sings like an actual monster and not in like
Speaker 2: an adenoidal so col wine the way that like you know,
Speaker 2: blinquin a two or green Day did or any of
Speaker 2: that stuff. And I was like, so this man is
Speaker 2: real as hell and like more punk rock than any
Speaker 2: of you will ever be. And uh, yeah, I've just
Speaker 2: been obsessed with him for my entire life. And he's like, oh, so,
Speaker 2: you know, there's a lot to be obsessed with. I
Speaker 2: think I get into this topic later, but he is
Speaker 2: such a I mean, the guy is like, if you
Speaker 2: spend as much time with his body of work as
Speaker 2: I do, and the truly obsessed among us do, like,
Speaker 2: he's such a repository of the detritus of like America's
Speaker 2: twenty of the twentieth century, you know, and you just
Speaker 2: find out all these weird little old turns of phrase
Speaker 2: and lyrical like references and tropes, and it's just an
Speaker 2: endlessly interesting series of rabbit holes to just fall down into.
Speaker 1: And that way, I always got the sense that it
Speaker 1: was almost like the American Elvis Costello in terms of
Speaker 1: just being, like you said, this repository of not only
Speaker 1: a continuum of music, but just phrases culture.
Speaker 2: I mean, the linguistics is probably the big part of it. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's funny. I mean, he's it's really interesting being as
Speaker 2: obsessed with him as I am, because you do start
Speaker 2: to notice some of his ticks, and you start to
Speaker 2: notice some of his like that the box set Orphans
Speaker 2: that came out at one point is so fascinating because
Speaker 2: it is because of these songs were never officially released.
Speaker 2: You really hear how his like studio approach of just
Speaker 2: kind of being like, well, I have this song that
Speaker 2: is me and piano singing, and then we're just gonna
Speaker 2: try it seventeen different ways and see what happens. Like
Speaker 2: there's an outtake on that one of this song called
Speaker 2: never Let Go where I think they fully like miss
Speaker 2: there's like an extra bar, like, so you hear the
Speaker 2: drummer do this big like role and then it like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, there's just all these little mistakes and
Speaker 2: stuff that you listen to, and he repeats lyrics and
Speaker 2: has different repeat themes and so it's like, I think
Speaker 2: I'm just more deeper into him than any other artist,
Speaker 2: with the exception of maybe Miles Davis, and so like,
Speaker 2: I just have such an inside, like a disturbingly deep
Speaker 2: view of his like processes and little quirks and sessions.
Speaker 2: So it's like, yeah, it's like me and the Beatle
Speaker 2: it's like my Beatles. He's my Beatles. Oh and the
Speaker 2: Beatles are your Beatles?
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, I mean you know, it may not surprise
Speaker 1: you to know that Tom Waits is not one of
Speaker 1: my go tos, because you know, considering how much Brian
Speaker 1: Wilson and Paul McCartney I listened to, I have to
Speaker 1: admit that I do find his voice a little hard
Speaker 1: to take at times.
Speaker 2: Well which voice? Which voice? Okay, though, because you've got,
Speaker 2: like I said, you've got early raspy voice, and then
Speaker 2: you've got like the Prince falsetto, and then you've got
Speaker 2: like there's a period I think from like Blue Valentine
Speaker 2: to small change where he just is kind of doing
Speaker 2: like Louis Armstrong or like like Blues shouting, and then
Speaker 2: right around brain Dogs and Swordfish from Bones and that
Speaker 2: trifecta into Bone Machine is where he just really goes
Speaker 2: off the deep end. And that's anyway, what are his
Speaker 2: vocal influences. I'm so curious. We'll get to that, Okay,
Speaker 2: all right, Well get to that.
Speaker 1: I mean I do love him almost more from a
Speaker 1: literary standpoint. I sort of always thought of him as
Speaker 1: like the musical Covid of like Bukowski or something.
Speaker 2: Well, that's an interesting relationship. One of my earliest defeats
Speaker 2: as a writer came when I was freelancing for no
Speaker 2: money for Pop Matters and I pitched them like a
Speaker 2: listicle of Tom Waite's songs. And this is one of
Speaker 2: the things that's made me such a fact checking nerd.
Speaker 2: There's this like oft repeated logline that Christmas Card from
Speaker 2: a Hooker in Minneapolis, which by the way, is like
Speaker 2: one of the best has There's a performance of this
Speaker 2: song that he does on solo piano on some Australian
Speaker 2: TV show or English TV show where he starts with
Speaker 2: Silent Night, goes into Christmas Card from a Hooker Minneapolis,
Speaker 2: interpolates little anthemyy Imperials, and then finishes it again at
Speaker 2: silent Night. That is like one of the most incredible
Speaker 2: things I've ever seen stagecraft and like theatrically musically wise,
Speaker 2: that song, like on the Internet was a commonly repeated
Speaker 2: fact that it was based on a short story from
Speaker 2: a Charles Pokowski collection, and one of the first comments
Speaker 2: I ever got as an Internet writer was that that
Speaker 2: is incorrect. There is no such Charles bukowskis short story
Speaker 2: and this is a commonly repeated lie on the internet,
Speaker 2: and I do not know where it started. There's like
Speaker 2: something to that effect. I think this short story collection
Speaker 2: is like Rooming House Madrigals. And the big problem with
Speaker 2: Bukowski is that he wrote seventeen hundred poems a night
Speaker 2: when he was hammered between the hours of like four
Speaker 2: thirty pm until he passed out. And so particularly when
Speaker 2: you get into the Dolphin Press or Echo or whatever
Speaker 2: the like the people who handled his latter day stuff,
Speaker 2: there's dreams of new poems, but then there's also all
Speaker 2: the like archival stuff, and I think Rooming House Magic
Speaker 2: Goals is one of the earlier collections, and that is
Speaker 2: where this poem that Tom Waites based the song on
Speaker 2: supposedly appears, and it doesn't. And it was so it
Speaker 2: spurred me forever to be a researcher and a nerd.
Speaker 2: And that's my origin story for this podcast. And so
Speaker 2: in a way I could take it all back to
Speaker 2: Tom Waits and Bukowski. Yeah, I mean, Beukosko is a
Speaker 2: big influence on him, but I think he also comes
Speaker 2: from a very pre Bukowski sentiment, which is just like
Speaker 2: the beats. I mean, it's important to know that he
Speaker 2: grew up in San Diego and so pretty much everything
Speaker 2: he does is filtered through like native Californian lens, you know,
Speaker 2: So like the beats in San Francisco were like a
Speaker 2: huge thing for him, he idolized. You know, there's a
Speaker 2: song on one of his I think it might be
Speaker 2: a foreign affair that it's just called I'm going to
Speaker 2: California to meet up with Jack and Neil, which is
Speaker 2: like the most nakedly beat fetishizing garbage I could ever
Speaker 2: think of. Do you want to tell the folks that
Speaker 2: Jack and Nail are? Do I have to his education
Speaker 2: really fallen that far in this country? I guess I do.
Speaker 2: Why I ask that question? Jack Carrorac and Neil Cassidy
Speaker 2: the protagonists and writers of On the Road. So yeah, that,
Speaker 2: like I, he was also really into this guy named
Speaker 2: Ken Nordaan whose whole thing was a word jazz. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: I think we've covered him before. Ken Nordan was if
Speaker 2: Jack Carrek's whole thing was trying to write like he
Speaker 2: conceived of jazz musicians playing, Ken Nordon was kind of
Speaker 2: trying to reverse engineer it. And do like spoken word poetry,
Speaker 2: like improvising live to jazz music. And so there's all
Speaker 2: these Ken Nordin albums and he does. There's an appearance
Speaker 2: of him on the on the Steve Allen Tonight's show
Speaker 2: where Steve Allen's playing piano, and I talk about this later,
Speaker 2: Like Tom Waits and Bob Dylan are only like seven
Speaker 2: or eight years apart. And so if you look at
Speaker 2: the two of them and their sort of lyrical preoccupations
Speaker 2: and a lot of the places that they overlap, the
Speaker 2: biggest difference is that Tom Waits is like is from California.
Speaker 2: That's really how how I've pinned it down. So he
Speaker 2: starts from this era of like beat worship and like
Speaker 2: Hogy Carmichael, and he supposed he has this joke about
Speaker 2: only learning the black keys on the piano because they
Speaker 2: were the only ones that worked on like a piano
Speaker 2: that he had at home, which is such a bit
Speaker 2: of like Tom Waits myth making. So yeah, a lot
Speaker 2: of his early stuff is coming from this whole you know,
Speaker 2: ten Panelley forties fifties beat nick preoccupation. I don't know
Speaker 2: where to stop. You're going to have to give me
Speaker 2: some pauses because I will just continue going.
Speaker 1: Okay, Okay, I know that this man is very steeped
Speaker 1: in lore, and what little of it I know, I
Speaker 1: know through you, So I fully expect that I'm going
Speaker 1: to learn a lot of this episode I'm really looking
Speaker 1: forward to because I know how much you love him well.
Speaker 2: From the storage room and or shed on a chicken
Speaker 2: ranch that Bone Machine is recorded in because some of
Speaker 2: the best off kilter musical instructions Weights provided to his
Speaker 2: studio musicians, to the invented instruments he played on it,
Speaker 2: to the abysmal chart performance of this album which did
Speaker 2: win him a Grammy. Here's everything you didn't know about
Speaker 2: Tom Waits's Bone Machine. Tom Waitson had a hell of
Speaker 2: a nineteen eighties. At the top of the decade, he
Speaker 2: was broke and I believe he had just been kicked
Speaker 2: off of asylum. Why for poor sales or drugs or well,
Speaker 2: it's quite funny, yeah, I mean he had one of
Speaker 2: these artist trajectories that will never happen again, just full
Speaker 2: on will never happen again. He made a career initially
Speaker 2: as like I said, part of in the Circle of
Speaker 2: This like Mellow Mafia in La you know, he was
Speaker 2: i think working he was living in the Tropicana Hotel
Speaker 2: and working at like at the Troubadour, and that's how
Speaker 2: he met Linda Ronstat Ricky Lee Jones the Eagles, who
Speaker 2: later covered one of his songs. And so he cuts
Speaker 2: his early albums Closing Time, Heart of Saturday Night, and
Speaker 2: there's a bunch of demos out from this time period
Speaker 2: that are all pretty like it's basically singer songwriter stuff.
Speaker 2: And he's got a producer who's a jazz guy named
Speaker 2: bones How. He's doing all of these like string laden
Speaker 2: kind of jazzy arrangements, and that's kind of what they're
Speaker 2: they're pairing him with. I mean, you get also get
Speaker 2: Nighthawks the Diner, which is a great faux live album
Speaker 2: where they just like trucked a bunch of people and
Speaker 2: a stripper into a like a big studio live room
Speaker 2: and just had him do his like live set.
Speaker 1: You mentioned bones How. I mean Bones How was a
Speaker 1: big deal in like sixties pop. He did stuff with
Speaker 1: like The Association and the Turtles and like the Fifth Dimension.
Speaker 2: Like that's a.
Speaker 1: Really I mean, he's like like one of the architects
Speaker 1: of what's called Sunshine Pop, which is like, yeah, sixties,
Speaker 1: that's that's a weird pairing with Tom Waits.
Speaker 2: Well exactly, And I think that's what's so interesting. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's this there's a one of the early compilations I
Speaker 2: got was the Early Years, and it's a lot of
Speaker 2: him demoing on just piano and guitar. And you know,
Speaker 2: his early songs like Old fifty five was covered by
Speaker 2: the Eagles, Martha is a really beautiful song covered by
Speaker 2: Tim Buckley. So like, if you think about like Cookie
Speaker 2: Monster Tom Waits writing songs that were covered by like
Speaker 2: Tim Buckley and the Eagles, that's very weird. But it
Speaker 2: was just because of this part of la that he inhabited,
Speaker 2: and he had a managined named her Cohen, who basically
Speaker 2: mismanaged him into the toilet. I mean, he put Tom Waits,
Speaker 2: like doing this piano ballad stuff on a tour with
Speaker 2: Frank Zappa, and it was hell because he was Zappa's manager,
Speaker 2: so he paired his two clients together. Didn't make any sense.
Speaker 2: But he sort of starts leaning towards like Blue Valentine
Speaker 2: and Heart Attack and Vine and Small Change of these
Speaker 2: albums where he starts toying with his voice a little
Speaker 2: bit more and getting into a little bit more CD
Speaker 2: noir rather than like California kind of balladerie. And so
Speaker 2: basically at the top of the eighties though he's been
Speaker 2: kicked off of Asylum and doesn't have any money because
Speaker 2: of herb Cohen. So Electra and Asylum had been absorbed
Speaker 2: by Warners and Asylum was originally founded by David Geffham
Speaker 2: with the idea of being the only like artist friendly
Speaker 2: major right, That's why he called it asylum, And so
Speaker 2: I always thought it was short for lunatic asylum. Maybe
Speaker 2: it was like the idea of like the inmates riding asylum,
Speaker 2: but like you know, so so Warner Brothers and Warner
Speaker 2: Electra Asylum now had like Grateful Dead, Van Morrison, Eagles,
Speaker 2: Queen Carly Simon, pre Merger, Electra and Asylum had like
Speaker 2: Judy Collins and Jackson Brown. And so Tom Waits is
Speaker 2: in there too, and and his A and R guide
Speaker 2: Joe Smith actually told Barney Hoskins at one point, right, biographer,
Speaker 2: Yeah for the Low side of the Road, which is
Speaker 2: a great Tom Waits bio. I was trying to keep
Speaker 2: Freddie Mercury from falling apart. I was trying to get
Speaker 2: Don Henley and Glenn Fry into a studio together, or
Speaker 2: I was trying to sign new acts like the Cars.
Speaker 2: My promotion and marketing staff would roll their eyes when
Speaker 2: I announced we had a new Tom Waits record. I'm
Speaker 2: playing Queen and Jackson Brown and we have a meeting
Speaker 2: and I play weights, and that's when everyone goes to
Speaker 2: the bathroom. Yeah. And it was interesting because like Tom
Speaker 2: was like a COGNISEETI kind of pick, but he didn't
Speaker 2: have any real mainstream audience at that point. And Smith says, like,
Speaker 2: you know, Joni Mitchell can say I want to go
Speaker 2: record a jazz album with Charles Mingus, and that's because
Speaker 2: it was Joni Mitchell ten years into being Joni Mitchell.
Speaker 2: Tom Ways didn't have any of that. So at the eighties,
Speaker 2: at top of the eighties, he is poor and at
Speaker 2: the proverbial transitional phrase, and you could say that he
Speaker 2: is at crossroads. I indeed later on, I know, well,
Speaker 2: you've been jumping around so much. I don't know where
Speaker 2: it's oh yeah, but this is fifties word jazz baby,
Speaker 2: you know, bebop, rich, fireworks, bang boom, whimper, not a bang.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't really like beat poetry. I
Speaker 2: think it's dumb. They need an editor. Uh, okay, enough
Speaker 2: grammar punctuation, there's no m dashes. The biggest change in
Speaker 2: Tom Waye's life at this point comes via his slow
Speaker 2: sort of entrance into Hollywood. He'd been asked by Francis
Speaker 2: Ford Coppola to write the music for One from the Heart,
Speaker 2: which is not a film that I bet you can
Speaker 2: tell me anything about. Yeah, it's up there in sort
Speaker 2: of a Coppola's like semi fallow period of the eighties
Speaker 2: when he did this. He did Rumblefish, he did like
Speaker 2: Outsiders and stuff like.
Speaker 1: That, all building up to Jack starring Robin Williams.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is all building up to bram Stoker's Dracula
Speaker 2: in two and which I will then get into. There's
Speaker 2: a long sidebar on Bramstoker's Dracula, all right. Anyway, So
Speaker 2: on One for the Heart actually waits picks up a
Speaker 2: nomination for Original Music Score, which he did with Crystal Gail.
Speaker 2: And so it's on that at American Zoatro Pictures, which
Speaker 2: is Copola's production company, that he meets Kathleen Brennan. Kathleen
Speaker 2: is a script editor for Zoatrope, and Waits had been
Speaker 2: given the old time composer treatment of getting an office
Speaker 2: on the lot, like on the at the offices where
Speaker 2: he was writing these songs. And he meets Kathleen Brennan there,
Speaker 2: and he is the other thing. This is the other
Speaker 2: thing about Tom Waite's. Nearly anything Waits as quoted as
Speaker 2: saying is either charitably a yarn, good old fashioned American
Speaker 2: West male buucherie, or a straight up lie. So you
Speaker 2: do have to take certain things of what he's saying
Speaker 2: with certain incredible amounts of salt. But he basically meets
Speaker 2: Kathleen Brennan, and not only does she open his eyes
Speaker 2: to all of this other music. At what he told
Speaker 2: the Guardian once, I didn't just marry a beautiful woman.
Speaker 2: I married a record collection that's amazing. But she she
Speaker 2: also sets him on his path like out of the gutter.
Speaker 2: I think I did find a excited source. I think
Speaker 2: it's in the Hoskins book that he went into AA
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety two. But she was really like, you
Speaker 2: got to quit this drink and if you want to
Speaker 2: be with me two ninety two but she like put
Speaker 2: the clamps on it, because there's a hilarious story at
Speaker 2: one point in the nineties about him hanging out with
Speaker 2: the Replacements. I think this might have been for police
Speaker 2: to meet me or maybe Tim where he was like
Speaker 2: in the building with them, and he had admitted to
Speaker 2: liking them, like I think he had seen them live
Speaker 2: at some point and was like, yeah, I like those kids,
Speaker 2: the Replacements. And so he just shows up at the
Speaker 2: studio with Kathleen and it's very like, kind of buttoned
Speaker 2: down and respectful, like, hey, you know, I like what
Speaker 2: you kids are doing, Like it's real good rock and roll,
Speaker 2: you know, back to basics. And then he's like, okay,
Speaker 2: honeywell I think I'm gonna you know, I think I'm
Speaker 2: gonna hang out with the Replacements for a little while
Speaker 2: and see what they can get up to in the studio.
Speaker 2: And and so Kathleen's like, all right, take a cab home,
Speaker 2: I'll see you. I'll see you boys later. And I
Speaker 2: think it's Paul Westerberg, or it's either Paul Westerberg or
Speaker 2: the bassist Tom Tommy Stinson, who says like and it
Speaker 2: was like a he turned into a were wolf, like
Speaker 2: he he like grabbed one of their bottles of Jack
Speaker 2: Daniels and started slugging it. There's all this hilarire, drunken
Speaker 2: outtakes of like them just doing like basic backing while
Speaker 2: Tom Waits plays like a B three organ and is
Speaker 2: like doing all these like preacher like tent revival riffs.
Speaker 2: Like you have to let him use you just anyway.
Speaker 2: But so she's like she puts a curba his drinking.
Speaker 2: She exposes him to all this kind of stuff, everything
Speaker 2: from you know, Puccini to Captain Beefheart, Alan Lomack's field
Speaker 2: recordings and Harry Parch And what this does is kind
Speaker 2: of give him all of these context clues to fill
Speaker 2: in the gaps into everything that he says he's like
Speaker 2: been into before, from like you know, Hogy Carmichael and
Speaker 2: Tin Panale stuff backwards into like real gut bucket blues
Speaker 2: and like real strange stuff. All of this is to
Speaker 2: say that way, it's essentially reverse engineered his soft jazz metal,
Speaker 2: mafia cool boho beat nick sound into something that more
Speaker 2: resembled and as madic Werewolf driving a slowly dying model
Speaker 2: t forward through a junkyard filled with skeletons improvising a
Speaker 2: score out of antique instruments and it rules. And so
Speaker 2: the first one that sets this path out is Swordfish Trombones,
Speaker 2: and that that's followed by rain Dogs and Frank's Wild Years,
Speaker 2: and that's kind of a loose trilogy that cements like
Speaker 2: the new Tom Waits sound. And also, you know, he
Speaker 2: keeps acting, which is really quite interesting. He has like
Speaker 2: roles in three Copola films in nineteen eighty three alone,
Speaker 2: and he like really hit it off with Coppola, which
Speaker 2: is actually funny. And there's he's like talked about like
Speaker 2: going over to spaghetti dinners like at the at the
Speaker 2: Coppola's while he was doing all these movies with them
Speaker 2: and like listening to Puccini and all of this stuff.
Speaker 2: So they get married Waits and Kathleen, and they have
Speaker 2: their first child, a daughter, and they moved to New York.
Speaker 2: Waits had made a stab at living in New York before.
Speaker 2: He didn't exactly like it. Like I mentioned, he's a
Speaker 2: California boy through and through, but he makes a number
Speaker 2: of important connections and collaborations in New York. He meets
Speaker 2: Jim Jarmish, who later casts Waits in down By Law.
Speaker 2: He meets Robert Wilson, who is a theater guy who
Speaker 2: had just done Einstein on the Beach with Philip Glass.
Speaker 2: And he meets John Lourie, who at the time was
Speaker 2: an also Jarmish pal who was leading the Lounge Lizards,
Speaker 2: And that is where he meets Mark Ribo. I still
Speaker 2: don't know how to pronounce that guy's name, Ribot Rebot.
Speaker 2: I don't think I've ever heard it. I've seen him
Speaker 2: live twice, I don't think I've ever heard it pronounced anyway.
Speaker 2: He's this downtown kind of New York eighties jazz loft
Speaker 2: seen guitarist who is all over rain dogs and a
Speaker 2: lot of wait stuff, and it's awesome. He plays guitar
Speaker 2: like it's a slowly dying stun gun that he doesn't
Speaker 2: have an instruction manual for. Your analogies for this are incredible.
Speaker 2: You've hadtice, I practice a lot of them. You've had
Speaker 2: twenty five years. Yeah, I've had my whole life to
Speaker 2: prepare for this.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes, yes, Well, during his time in New York,
Speaker 1: Tom Waits met up with somebody that I've actually heard of,
Speaker 1: little British guitarist songwriter, an occasional singer named Keith Richards.
Speaker 2: This is I love this story so much. I'm so
Speaker 2: glad you included this. Waits recall The Island Records asked.
Speaker 1: Them for a list of who we'd like to work
Speaker 1: with on the album rain Dogs, and he was a
Speaker 1: huge fan of the Stones, as you put it, dirt
Speaker 1: Bag Magnum Opus Exile on Main Street, which is probably
Speaker 1: the most Keith centric Stones album ever, And so Waits
Speaker 1: throughout Keith's name, and the label said, great, we'll call him,
Speaker 1: to which an absolutely aghast Waits responded, Jesus, please don't
Speaker 1: do that. I was just kidding around, and supposedly a
Speaker 1: few weeks later, this is something the only bit of
Speaker 1: Tom Waits Laura I've heard of. Tom gets a letter
Speaker 1: from Keith in the mail that reads, the weight is over,
Speaker 1: Let's dance.
Speaker 2: I love that. I love that so much. He has
Speaker 2: so many great lines about about Keith Ridchards. He's like
Speaker 2: he comes into the studio with his head at ten
Speaker 2: and his next it too. I don't know, I don't
Speaker 2: know how he does it. He's like he just comes
Speaker 2: in and hits the guitar and everything falls into place
Speaker 2: around that he says like he's someone who music likes
Speaker 2: to be around, which is like one of the most
Speaker 2: poetic phrases I've ever heard about someone talking about a collaborator. Wow,
Speaker 2: that's great.
Speaker 1: Waits also apparently contributed to The Stones nineteen eighties, not
Speaker 1: a high point for the band Dirty Work.
Speaker 2: I did not know that before researching this, Oh, rote
Speaker 2: Tom Waits fanas, I did not know he's supposedly somewhere
Speaker 2: on Dirty Work of all places.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not the best Stones album, But Waits and Richards
Speaker 1: hit it off so well that Richard's actually thanked wait
Speaker 1: for quote spiritual encouragement on his own solo debut, Talk
Speaker 1: is Cheap. Years later, at NPR's Fresh Air, Waits talked
Speaker 1: about co writing with Richard's own rain Dogs. We wrote
Speaker 1: songs together for a while and that was fun. But
Speaker 1: Keith doesn't really remember anything or write anything down. So
Speaker 1: you play for an hour and he would yell across
Speaker 1: the room scribe, and I looked around scribe, who's the scribe,
Speaker 1: and he'd say it again, now pointing at me. I
Speaker 1: was supposed to have written everything down that we said
Speaker 1: and dreamt of and played. And I realized we needed
Speaker 1: an adult in the room, which is dangerously close to
Speaker 1: the John Mulaney Mick Jagger guesting on SNL and just
Speaker 1: saying diet coke and then a diet.
Speaker 2: Coke appearing in his hands from one of the many assistants.
Speaker 2: You're dealing with people who have had their entire life.
Speaker 2: There have been millionaires since they were like nineteen. What
Speaker 2: do you want? Yeah? Yeah? Is he nice? No? In
Speaker 2: my world, you say, may I please have a diet coke? Please?
Speaker 2: And maybe you will get one? Yeah. Waited also at
Speaker 2: this point become enamored of the work of the adult
Speaker 2: blacked Les. That makes sense, Yeah, all of which goes
Speaker 2: into rain Dogs. And rain Dogs is a bit of
Speaker 2: a bigger hit than Swordfish. Crombones got Record of the
Speaker 2: Year from NME and Songwriter of the Year from Rolling Stone,
Speaker 2: and then so from rain Dogs. He just sort of
Speaker 2: explodes in all directions. And I think it's really interesting
Speaker 2: considering how much his output has slowed in latter years,
Speaker 2: because he's really working at a very fevered pace at
Speaker 2: this point in the eighties, and much of it, I mean,
Speaker 2: I don't know. He doesn't really talk about his personal
Speaker 2: life or his marriage that much beyond its impact on
Speaker 2: his artistic thing, but I feel like she was probably
Speaker 2: making more money than he was when they met, and
Speaker 2: he was like, Okay, I've got to leverage these different connections,
Speaker 2: and I've got to leverage all this stuff and do
Speaker 2: a bunch right away. All right, Well, I have two questions.
Speaker 1: One, I think in your piece that you sent me earlier,
Speaker 1: there was a great description of where the title rain
Speaker 1: Dogs came from. And I also I don't believe you
Speaker 1: included this in that, But I also want to know
Speaker 1: where does Swordfish Trombones come from?
Speaker 2: Right? So, rain dogs is refers to the phenomenon of
Speaker 2: dogs going out to pee after it rains and all
Speaker 2: their scent marks have been washed away, so that they're
Speaker 2: all confused, and they.
Speaker 1: Go up and look to you as if asking you
Speaker 1: can you please take me home?
Speaker 2: I thought that was very sweet. Swordfish Trombones, I want
Speaker 2: to say, just off the top of my dome, I
Speaker 2: think it might be a Captain beef Heart thing, because
Speaker 2: that was one of the biggest people that Kathleen had
Speaker 2: introduced him to it. And one of Beefheart's stupid trademarks
Speaker 2: is like putting animal things with like non animal things
Speaker 2: like trout mask replica, trout Mask replica. What's the fun.
Speaker 2: There's like a bit of fasta the Masquatta snake faster
Speaker 2: than bulbous. Uh. Just yeah, anyway, that's like some of
Speaker 2: his lyrical concerns. But let me check that out actually
Speaker 2: real quick. How do you feel about Captain bee Fart.
Speaker 1: I get a sense that it's it's similar to Frank's
Speaker 1: app but nothing wrong with a little beef art.
Speaker 2: But a long a lot of beef far. I like
Speaker 2: beef Heart. I will admit that I had to do
Speaker 2: the classic like listen to this like five times and
Speaker 2: then finally like get it. But that record is really wild.
Speaker 2: I don't see a concrete thing at least on wiki
Speaker 2: about the Swordfish Turnbones name. But I mean, have you
Speaker 2: heard about how they made that record? Pieces He like
Speaker 2: tortured that band. He put them all in a remote mansion.
Speaker 2: They only had his car, and he stole all their
Speaker 2: mail and their money and like rationed food out to
Speaker 2: them and was just generally like a horrible tyrant. And
Speaker 2: they rehearsed at all hours, and he put them through
Speaker 2: all of his whimsical beef Heart bullshit. Like there's great
Speaker 2: bits of like studio outtake chatter where he's like forcing
Speaker 2: them to do these like dialogues like fast and bulbous,
Speaker 2: the mascout of Snake, and you see the guy who's
Speaker 2: supposed to be reading this dialogue just go oh Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: But you know that records bonkers and you do hear
Speaker 2: like it's like looking at a you know, it is
Speaker 2: like looking at a Kandinsky or a Pollock or something
Speaker 2: where like the longer you look at it and you
Speaker 2: start to see like different micro structures in it. And
Speaker 2: because it was so tightly rehearsed, they did the backing
Speaker 2: tracks for that whole album, which sounds for the uninitiated
Speaker 2: like random. It sounds like you just threw a bunch
Speaker 2: of random backing tapes into a big machine that threads
Speaker 2: them all onto a tape machine and spits out a
Speaker 2: master mix, and then Captain Beefheart is singing over it.
Speaker 2: But they were so locked in and so well rehearsed
Speaker 2: making that that when Zeppa was producing and trying to
Speaker 2: sort through different takes to find stuff for beef Heart
Speaker 2: to sing the vocal lines over, he couldn't tell the
Speaker 2: takes apart. So it's just like absolute emotionally abused, lockstep
Speaker 2: rehearsed like watch tight version of chaos that just sounds
Speaker 2: like nothing else. But then there's stuff like too much time,
Speaker 2: like this beef Heart's song, too much Time, it sounds
Speaker 2: like a motown song. And anyway, so that's my take
Speaker 2: on beef Art. Where was I going with this?
Speaker 1: I just want to know the origins of the name
Speaker 1: Raine Dogs and sort of fish dn Bones.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and now I have them. I rule, I rule.
Speaker 2: I don't think we can mention that. I know. I
Speaker 2: love that you picked what that was from. Yeah. So
Speaker 2: the next thing that he does is kind of create
Speaker 2: a musical, a narrative arc out of the songs on Swordfish,
Speaker 2: Trombones and Rain Dogs, and he presents it as a
Speaker 2: musical with Chicago's famed Steppenwolf Theater, home of Gary Sonise
Speaker 2: and John Malkovich. And then he releases that as an
Speaker 2: album in nineteen eighty seven, still acting in eighty six
Speaker 2: and eighty seven, and then he moves back to la
Speaker 2: with Brennan and their kids. And it's really important to
Speaker 2: note at this point that like ninety percent of what
Speaker 2: he does is then credited to Brennan Waits she's like
Speaker 2: his producer. She writes lyrics with him. They like source
Speaker 2: material together. And then in nineteen eighty nine, Waits begins
Speaker 2: his collaboration with the aforementioned Robert Wilson, who had done
Speaker 2: Einstein on the Beach with Philip Glass, as I mentioned,
Speaker 2: which the stage direction for that is already like ridiculous.
Speaker 2: Look that up if you haven't. But the other thing
Speaker 2: you need to know about Robin Wilson Robert Wilson is
Speaker 2: that he once directed a ballet for iron lung patients,
Speaker 2: which was the enormous this manual breathing machine that they
Speaker 2: used to insert polio victims into when they couldn't manually
Speaker 2: breathe on their own. And so his way of staging
Speaker 2: a ballet for them was to have them he put
Speaker 2: streamers in their mouths that they would blow and it
Speaker 2: would move, while the janitor in their hospital ward danced
Speaker 2: around dress like Miss America anyway.
Speaker 1: The streamers like the party, like those things that yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah anyway. So Robert, So these two, this charming pair,
Speaker 2: joined up with William S.
Speaker 1: Burrows of all people before or after he killed someone after.
Speaker 2: In Hamburg or The Black Writer, which is a musical
Speaker 2: in stage production that premieres in nineteen ninety. Meanwhile, Waits
Speaker 2: is in The Two Jakes, the late era Chinatown sequel
Speaker 2: starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, Terry Gilliams, The Fisher King,
Speaker 2: Steve Rash's Queen's Logic, and Hector Ankles at Play in
Speaker 2: the Fields of the Lord. Those last three were all
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety. And then he wraps up this Hollywood
Speaker 2: run with his role as Renfield in Francis Ford Coppola's
Speaker 2: bram Stoker's Dracula in nineteen ninety two, which is probably
Speaker 2: where he got the most like that sold him as
Speaker 2: like a character actor. He's so great in it. He's
Speaker 2: wearing like steampunk goggles and like long Union jack like
Speaker 2: a union suit like underwear, and eating bugs and he
Speaker 2: has all these like weird steampunk contraptions on his hands.
Speaker 2: It's awesome. And then he also does an instrumental soundtrack
Speaker 2: for a Jim Jarmish fund called Night on Earth. And
Speaker 2: so all of this is to say that when Tom
Speaker 2: Waites began work on Bone Machine, he was you do
Speaker 2: the honors, no you at He was at a crossroads.
Speaker 2: So when he sets out on Bone Machine, one of
Speaker 2: his inspirations is industrial music. Weirdly enough, and here's not
Speaker 2: one though that I think is very funny. He's never
Speaker 2: I don't think, acknowledged the fact that Pixies coined the
Speaker 2: phrase bone machine five years earlier on Surfa Rosa, which
Speaker 2: the opening track of that record is your Bones Got
Speaker 2: a little MESSH got a bone machine? Ah, I got
Speaker 2: a boom she. I mean, I don't know how much
Speaker 2: he would actually heard them. That is the record that
Speaker 2: they blew up on, but the song is I thought
Speaker 2: it was too little.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 2: Gigantic was their first big hit, and that's what that's
Speaker 2: what ironically set the stage of that like destroyed the
Speaker 2: band because Frank Black was a very unstable uh weenie
Speaker 2: and he was like so horrifically threatened by the fact
Speaker 2: that their big single had been written by Kim Deal
Speaker 2: that it like essentially doomed the band from the start.
Speaker 2: There's there's a point, and I don't remember where I
Speaker 2: saw this, but like they were like backstage at some event.
Speaker 2: They were getting a festival, and they were getting ready
Speaker 2: to go on and perform Gigantic and Iggy Pop comes
Speaker 2: up and he's like, oh, Frank Black you're like you're
Speaker 2: in the Pixies, you know. Oh I love that song. Gigantic,
Speaker 2: great song man and like mag Fike dies just a
Speaker 2: little inside. So anyway, I don't know how much he
Speaker 2: actually knew about them.
Speaker 1: But so it was Sinatra saying that something is a
Speaker 1: spavent line of no Cartney song.
Speaker 2: It's like, yes, yeah, but they got to the phrase
Speaker 2: before him. But anyway, I feel like Tom Waits would
Speaker 2: have arrived at that on the own anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: And this is what goes. The title of the record
Speaker 2: is its best evocation of what you would put on
Speaker 2: douchebag hat, referred to as a sort of fin de sicle, melancholy,
Speaker 2: and possibly Waits his own mortality as evidenced by his
Speaker 2: his his burgeoning careers, head of a household, bread winner,
Speaker 2: et cetera, late American male masculinity crisis, and so forth
Speaker 2: epidemic of male loneliness in cell. Al Right, proud boys,
Speaker 2: I'm doing more word jazz here. We're free associating. I'm
Speaker 2: like Jack Herrak in this way. I'm a modern day
Speaker 2: beat poet. If I didn't have this podcast, I don't
Speaker 2: know what I'd be. One of those things I'd just
Speaker 2: be wondering around talking to myself in the streets, which
Speaker 2: I still do actually, So it's why my voice doesn't
Speaker 2: get that sore until we're into three hours of the Titanic. Anyway,
Speaker 2: there's a really hilarious press kit that he put together
Speaker 2: for this album that has like a lot of factual
Speaker 2: information with a lot of like Tom Waite's bullshit, but
Speaker 2: it's like many pages long, and so in the press kit,
Speaker 2: he says most of the principles for most machines developed
Speaker 2: in the machine age, where principles that were found in
Speaker 2: the human body. We're all like bode machines. I guess
Speaker 2: we break down eventually and were replaced by other models,
Speaker 2: newer models, younger models. See all of those things that
Speaker 2: I said before, Is that true? I mean, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I guess you're thinking about. I think about like Vitruvian
Speaker 2: man and all those learn and she like like gears
Speaker 2: and like shoulders and the you know, your a cl
Speaker 2: and your shoulder harness and maybe your hamstrings. I want
Speaker 2: to say, all right, I don't know much about the
Speaker 2: human body. I know where to point to things and
Speaker 2: say that they hurt, points to heart, points to head,
Speaker 2: points to tummy and back anyway. Actually, my back's okay,
Speaker 2: it's okay, you know that's everybody. Everybody listening right now.
Speaker 1: Take a stretch break, everybody right now, everybody right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, shoulders back and up. You know, I go back
Speaker 2: to Alexander techniques interestingly every now and again, which I
Speaker 2: did not invent, but really good stuff about like like
Speaker 2: you know, like you know, we fetishized like Ramrod straight posture,
Speaker 2: but the actual like your spine is kind of actually
Speaker 2: curved because you know, we're not that are descended from
Speaker 2: apes evolutionarily speaking, and like so when you sit and
Speaker 2: force your back like rigidly straight, it actually pushes you
Speaker 2: off your sit bones because they're curved. So like the
Speaker 2: ideal posture is actually like not Ramrod straight, like shoulders back,
Speaker 2: because that's going to like put all this tension into
Speaker 2: your intercostal muscles between your ribs, but it's actually like
Speaker 2: slightly shoulders forward, like a little bit back round it.
Speaker 2: If you look at like the natural curvature of the spine,
Speaker 2: it's it's a little bit rounded. My spine spent from
Speaker 2: carrying your ass up and down the court forty five
Speaker 2: minutes a night.
Speaker 1: I do something called the Alexander Heigel technique, where I
Speaker 1: scream into my pillow for about twenty minutes every morning
Speaker 1: and twenty minutes in the evening.
Speaker 2: Mostly through editing. I find it centers me as you
Speaker 2: meditate on that. We'll be right back with more too
Speaker 2: much information after these messages. Wow, okay, so discounting the
Speaker 2: soundtrack to Night on Earth, which is instrumental, and Black Rider,
Speaker 2: which has written before but released after Bone Machine. Bone
Speaker 2: Machine was Wade's first album of original music since nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty seven, five years. At the time, it may have
Speaker 2: also seemed like his last half of the lyrics directly
Speaker 2: referenced the end of the world, and it is also
Speaker 2: concerned with many smaller acts of death and dying, such
Speaker 2: as infidelity, moral compromise, maiming. He told the French magazine
Speaker 2: Telerama in nineteen ninety two. My mom heard the title
Speaker 2: and hated the title. She said it sounds so degrading,
Speaker 2: sounds like something hellish or devilish. She also said there's
Speaker 2: nothing the devil hates more than a singing Christian, which
Speaker 2: is quite funny and maybe true Christian music sucks though
Speaker 2: discuss anyway, Although Funnily enough, the Blind Boys of Alabama
Speaker 2: I covered Jesus going to be Here, which is like, oh,
Speaker 2: that makes sense, and like took it completely straightforwardly, as
Speaker 2: opposed to the sort of hilarious like weights in postmodern
Speaker 2: twists on it. I don't know. I think that's funny.
Speaker 2: It's like when Rod Stewart covered Downtown Train and made
Speaker 2: it super because he doesn't understand. He knows good songs
Speaker 2: but occasionally has trouble understanding that he doesn't have to
Speaker 2: sing them. Ah, I love us. What a clown, God's
Speaker 2: perfect buffoon. Also in that interview, he made this point
Speaker 2: we're all going to the same place. Some of us
Speaker 2: are taking different routes, and some of us are leaving
Speaker 2: earlier and arriving later, but we're all going to the
Speaker 2: same place. Seems like a legitimate topic to uncover once
Speaker 2: you get to a certain point. That don't mean it
Speaker 2: to be morbid. I'm not morbid. I think if you
Speaker 2: talk about it then it disarms, It makes it seem
Speaker 2: a little more easier to handle. Someday we're all going
Speaker 2: to be in a little box. It's going to be
Speaker 2: real dark, and they put the lid on, put you
Speaker 2: six feet down and that's where we'll spend the rest
Speaker 2: of what there is of time.
Speaker 1: Is that in the press kit or an interview for
Speaker 1: French magazine? Oh that's for Oh okay, either way, I
Speaker 1: guess that feels appropriately French.
Speaker 2: Though that feels very very soft. So we touched on
Speaker 2: this earlier.
Speaker 1: But as you mentioned, Captain Beefhart is a common comparison
Speaker 1: for Tom Waits's voice, but the relative approaches to making
Speaker 1: records are fascinating to compare as well, because they're very different.
Speaker 1: Captain Beefeart's landmark tout Mask Replica album is a bonker's
Speaker 1: sounding chaotic record that was so so rigorously rehearsed within
Speaker 1: an inch of its life to sound that way, and
Speaker 1: apparently they rehearsed it so so completely and thoroughly that
Speaker 1: it was recorded in just six hours, with all of
Speaker 1: the backing tracks virtually indistinguishable from one another because they
Speaker 1: just had it down. Tom Waits, meanwhile, was still pursuing
Speaker 1: a studio approach like you mentioned Miles Davis or Bryant Eno.
Speaker 2: You had sketches for songs, but.
Speaker 1: Assembled player in the studio and put them into odd
Speaker 1: configurations with deliberately obtuse confusing directions, like any favorites.
Speaker 2: Well, there's play it like a midgets bar mitzvah was
Speaker 2: one that I've seen pretty famously. Play it like your
Speaker 2: hair's on fire is another. Okay, that one.
Speaker 1: I sort of understand that intensity. Play it like a
Speaker 1: midget's bar mitzvah. I'd like you to unpack that, or
Speaker 1: help me unpack that well, like klezmer a little bit, or.
Speaker 2: Like you know, I know. I think it's like I
Speaker 2: would have had if he had said a Jewish midget's wedding.
Speaker 2: I would have leapt handily to the image, would have
Speaker 2: sprung fully formed from my mind, like like Athena from
Speaker 2: a Jewish Zeus's forehead. I would have had that explanation ready.
Speaker 2: But he said bar mitzvah. So I don't know. Maybe
Speaker 2: I don't know. Yeah, maybe Jewish klezmer, but small but
Speaker 2: small men, small klesmer, small diet diet klezmer. Now we're
Speaker 2: getting somewhere.
Speaker 1: Half a boat machine's grim end of day sound is
Speaker 1: effect due to the studio. But when we say studio,
Speaker 1: it's not quite a studio. Tom Waits, by this point
Speaker 1: had moved his family out to Sonoma, County, well outside
Speaker 1: of San Francisco, and he'd recorded the soundtrack to Night
Speaker 1: on Earth at Prairie Sun's studios in the small town
Speaker 1: of Ronert Park in.
Speaker 2: Tati Kotati, California. Do you know Katati? I know Ronert
Speaker 2: Park because the that's where AFI is from before they
Speaker 2: I think and punk band of Note. I don't even
Speaker 2: know they're still together order if they're still considered punk,
Speaker 2: but Ceremony the band that blamed themselves after a Joy
Speaker 2: Division song there from Ronert Park. It might be Ronert
Speaker 2: I don't know. People out here talked them spiders. Spiders.
Speaker 1: Prairie Sun Studio co owner Mark Muka Rednick founded the
Speaker 1: studio near Sonoma State University in the late seventies before
Speaker 1: relocating it to a twelve acre chicken ranch in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty one.
Speaker 2: As you do.
Speaker 1: It's a quote turnkey style studio, which means that no
Speaker 1: one lives on the property, and for a long time
Speaker 1: the only permanent resident was a cat named Bubba. Prairie
Speaker 1: Sun Studios has among its facilities a large live room
Speaker 1: where Weights recorded Night on Earth, but once Waits got
Speaker 1: set up there for Bone Machine, he relocated and said
Speaker 1: that what's been variously referred to as a shed or
Speaker 1: closet adjacent to the studio, now called the weights Room.
Speaker 2: Higel tell us about the weights Room, I believe it
Speaker 2: is technically a storage room. It's been called a shed.
Speaker 2: But without having been there myself and maybe I'll go,
Speaker 2: who's to say, something like an hour and a half drive.
Speaker 2: I was so disturbed the studio we got was totally wrong.
Speaker 2: Waits til journalist Mark Rowland. Fortunately we stumbled upon a
Speaker 2: storage room that sounded so good, plus had already had
Speaker 2: maps on the wall. So I said, that's it. We're sold.
Speaker 2: What of the idea, make of that what you will.
Speaker 2: That's the that's just Tom for you. The weights room,
Speaker 2: which is just it had its wood panel walls and
Speaker 2: a concrete floor, which accounts for its sort of weird
Speaker 2: acoustic properties. But it's become the bone machine like sound
Speaker 2: has become so famous as a shorthand that there is
Speaker 2: a preset after it, modeled after the sound of that
Speaker 2: room on a five thousand dollars digital rack reverb called
Speaker 2: s ERCASTI M seven. So he found a storage room
Speaker 2: in a studio on a chicken ranch, and decades later
Speaker 2: people programmed it into a rack reverb that cousted more
Speaker 2: than any car I've owned. And then he added it
Speaker 2: rained a lot when we were recording, and we worked
Speaker 2: in a shed, just a cement floor and water heater.
Speaker 2: We ran wires down the hill in the rain. It
Speaker 2: wasn't soundproofed. And he adds, I've got great singers Chad
Speaker 2: Blake and Biff DAWs and Joe Marquez, and they can
Speaker 2: get a great sound out of anything. They don't flinch.
Speaker 2: If you say you want to put a mic up
Speaker 2: that bull's ass over there and you want to slap
Speaker 2: him on the stomach, they'd say, well, uh, I guess
Speaker 2: we could use an SM fifty seven, which is actually true.
Speaker 2: You can put those things on anything. Guarantee you for
Speaker 2: all your you know, if anyone out there wants to
Speaker 2: get into a home recording, ninety percent of your favorite
Speaker 2: record was recorded with an s M fifty seven. I
Speaker 2: was working with Tom Waites on his album Bone Machine.
Speaker 2: Producer and engineer Chad Blake told Sound on Sound he
Speaker 2: wanted to go to a flea market one day when
Speaker 2: we were working, and we got there, we said we're
Speaker 2: gonna split up and just go look for something. We
Speaker 2: like to do that. We would go to places and
Speaker 2: find one little thing that you could use on a session.
Speaker 2: I went looking around and ended up with a microphone
Speaker 2: from a submarine and the Sure level lock to a
Speaker 2: volume limitar compressor unit. I paid five dollars for each
Speaker 2: of those things. I just got the level lock because
Speaker 2: I liked the name. I had no idea what it was,
Speaker 2: Blake continued. When I took it back to the studio,
Speaker 2: I plugged it in on the desk and ran something
Speaker 2: through it from an OX and it made one little
Speaker 2: cap sound and then nothing, And I said, I think
Speaker 2: I just blew it up. Tom just said I know
Speaker 2: a TV repairman up in Santa Rosa, just up the road.
Speaker 2: I don't remember what he said. I blew, but the
Speaker 2: guy had to replace something and he didn't have the
Speaker 2: right things and he had to improvise. So five dollars
Speaker 2: used Sure compressor limitter fixed by a TV repair guy
Speaker 2: with whatever he had laying around the shop. That's the
Speaker 2: Tom White sound. Baby, take that to the bank.
Speaker 1: Another great Blake Boone machine moment from my dear friend
Speaker 1: Morgan Enos's roundup of Tom Waite's session musician interviews at.
Speaker 2: Title Great piece. That is a great piece. He did
Speaker 2: a lot of really, he talked to most people who
Speaker 2: are living and trackable from the piece.
Speaker 1: Blake was also inspired by a tripy tick into India
Speaker 1: where he fell in love with another very specific sound,
Speaker 1: an entire silver band than a car blaring their music
Speaker 1: through a twelve olt.
Speaker 2: Pa mounted on top.
Speaker 1: He ended up buying one of those systems, bringing it
Speaker 1: home and applying at the bone machine. We have that
Speaker 1: set up out the horn about one hundred feet away,
Speaker 1: then the microphone recording the horn, and then Tom off
Speaker 1: the side of the building with a microphone yelling into
Speaker 1: the outdoors.
Speaker 2: This is a stupid question. What is a silver band?
Speaker 2: I don't know. Actually I looked that up and I
Speaker 2: and I couldn't find any like pinned down references. I
Speaker 2: assume it's a horn band of some kind. But yeah,
Speaker 2: a lot of this album was recorded outdoors, like just
Speaker 2: in and around the ranch. He was using a lot
Speaker 2: of feud recordings that he made of like cars going
Speaker 2: by and stuff. But they would just like the guitarist
Speaker 2: on it, smoky horn. All all of these guys have
Speaker 2: names like Raymond Chandlers. It's kind of hilarious. I'm trying
Speaker 2: to figure out who said this. One of the guitarists
Speaker 2: on there was talking about like they weren't getting the
Speaker 2: sound that they wanted in the shed, so they just
Speaker 2: opened the doors. And he was like, yeah, and I
Speaker 2: would just be playing guitar into like a ten thousand
Speaker 2: dollars noyman mike and there would just be a dog
Speaker 2: walking by then.
Speaker 1: Is that Bob Dylan recorded some of Blood on the
Speaker 1: tracks like Tangle Up Blue and was in the outside.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I'm not sure about that, matter of fact.
Speaker 2: I know, like I mean, basement tapes is obviously like
Speaker 2: much of it was done in a basement, even though
Speaker 2: a lot of it was over dubbed in a big,
Speaker 2: fancy Columbia studio. Anyway, what scronk Heigel assertive dissonance As
Speaker 2: one of my favorite YouTube guitarists, Eric Hougan put it,
Speaker 2: skronk is when you sound like you don't know what
Speaker 2: you're playing, but you mean it. That's beautiful. Wow. I
Speaker 2: like that. Anyway. Waite and Brennan assembled Bone Machine from
Speaker 2: about sixty sketches for songs, a process he likened to cannibalism.
Speaker 2: That's part of the's that's part of the process. Frankenstein
Speaker 2: that number over there, take the head off him and
Speaker 2: sew it on to this guy, immediately keep him alive
Speaker 2: until the head has been severed. Kathleen is great to
Speaker 2: work with, he said. She's elapsed Catholic from Illinois. She's
Speaker 2: loaded with mythology and has a great sense of melody.
Speaker 2: I spin the chamber and she fires it. It's Russian roulette.
Speaker 2: Sometimes you get great things. Much of the album's roulette
Speaker 2: like nature came down to the fact that Waits was
Speaker 2: occupied more on this record than anyone previous with percussion sounds.
Speaker 2: He plays percussion of different kinds on nearly every track,
Speaker 2: which I think is an outgrowth of his sort of
Speaker 2: interest in of all things hip hop. He's actually mentioned
Speaker 2: how like, in interviews around this time he was like
Speaker 2: much of what he was listening to was hip hop
Speaker 2: because his son, Casey I think, was born around rain
Speaker 2: dogs and I think was like growing up listening to
Speaker 2: hip hop. So he talks a lot about getting like
Speaker 2: the sounds of that percussion and stuff. He's like in
Speaker 2: many interviews have been like, oh no, I like hip hop, Like,
Speaker 2: I think it's like the most interesting form of pop music.
Speaker 2: Happening right now anyway. For the cheery opener, the Earth
Speaker 2: Died Screaming, Waits grabbed the title from a nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: four British sci fi movie that he'd never actually seen,
Speaker 2: and then set about recreating a field recording that Jim
Speaker 2: Jarvion had sent him of a tribe of pigmies playing
Speaker 2: stick percussion. Now here's the depths I go through for
Speaker 2: you people. The pigmy thing is a noted Weights quote,
Speaker 2: right Like, He's talked about this with Jarmish. He's talked
Speaker 2: about saying like playing pygmy percussion like a tribe of pygmies,
Speaker 2: blah blah blah. He says he got it from Jarmish
Speaker 2: because there's an interview I think in Q magazine or
Speaker 2: something where they're interviewing each other and he says to Jarmish,
Speaker 2: like that recording of pigmies that you sent me like
Speaker 2: really flipped me out. I wanted to get that sound
Speaker 2: on bone machine. So in researching this episode, I said
Speaker 2: about finding what recording that may have actually been the
Speaker 2: closest I was able to get to it was a
Speaker 2: Jim Jarmish interview at the Creative Independent where he recommended
Speaker 2: the nineteen ninety three book Song from the Forest, My
Speaker 2: Life among the bob Benjelly Pigmies by Louis Sarno, And
Speaker 2: this book is about how Sarno went to Central Africa
Speaker 2: to research the music of these pigmy tribes and he
Speaker 2: wound up marrying one of them and like staying there
Speaker 2: the rest of his life. But because that came out
Speaker 2: in nineteen ninety three, I don't know that that if
Speaker 2: there was a CD that accompanied that recording, or Jarmish
Speaker 2: had an advanced pressing, because the other thing that you
Speaker 2: get when you look for, you know, Pigmy stick recordings,
Speaker 2: is this nineteen ninety two recording that is linked which
Speaker 2: you should punch in, that came out ninety two from
Speaker 2: Smithsonian Folk Ways. So well, I can't say for certain
Speaker 2: what the actual recording that Jim Jarmus sent Tom Waits
Speaker 2: that inspired the percussion sounds on Earth Died Screaming. I
Speaker 2: can say for certain that there was at least a
Speaker 2: year or two long period in the nineties during which
Speaker 2: Jim Jarmish was really into Pigby music.
Speaker 1: When you think about it, wasn't there a time in
Speaker 1: the nineties when all of us were really into big
Speaker 1: thing music.
Speaker 2: I remember being a big influence on in Utero. So anyway,
Speaker 2: Wade's told so.
Speaker 1: Quick, sir, can you tell us a little more about
Speaker 1: how they're making that sound?
Speaker 2: It sounds either yeah, well, so like marimba's are are
Speaker 2: xylophones made of wood, right, and they're they're also basically
Speaker 2: because they came first, they're one of the more like
Speaker 2: ancient forms of musical instruments that we have. And there's
Speaker 2: a great documentary called Throw Down Your Heart with Baila
Speaker 2: Fleck of All People, which is like because he's a
Speaker 2: banjo verrsuo, so he goes on this like musicological tour
Speaker 2: of Africa because that's where the banjo comes from. That's
Speaker 2: his whole thing. He's like, I'm just gonna go to
Speaker 2: all these different countries in Africa that has like musical
Speaker 2: traditions related to the banjo, and I'm gonna just go
Speaker 2: jam there with them. And it's really incredible. And there's
Speaker 2: one where he goes to a village where they build
Speaker 2: a marimba that is like thirty feet long by just
Speaker 2: digging a giant trench and shoving a bunch of logs
Speaker 2: into it that create pitches based on how long and
Speaker 2: wide the logs are relative to the depth of the hole.
Speaker 2: And then like ten or fifteen kids all just get
Speaker 2: together and start hitting the different pieces with wood or
Speaker 2: rocks or whatever. And so that's how you get this
Speaker 2: kind of tonal, polyrhythmic thing out of this massive sound.
Speaker 2: Because it's like ten people playing a thirty foot long
Speaker 2: instrument dug into the ground. So I have to assume
Speaker 2: it's like wood on wood of some kind. Wow. And
Speaker 2: so when Wade's and Jarmish you're talking to each other
Speaker 2: in this interview for a straight no chaser, he tells
Speaker 2: Jarmish we struggled for a couple of days with getting
Speaker 2: the sound of a stick orchestra inside the studio for
Speaker 2: Earth Dyed Screaming. We tried every configuration and position of
Speaker 2: the microphone, and finally I said, well, why don't we
Speaker 2: go outside? Isn't that where all these recordings are made?
Speaker 2: And five minutes later we had a mic set up,
Speaker 2: we were hitting it. It was there, just two by fours,
Speaker 2: anything we could find, logged from the firewood, about nine people,
Speaker 2: just different people fucking by. We'd say, come on, play
Speaker 2: some sticks, and then hilariously you b four D has
Speaker 2: a song called Earth Dives Screaming, based after the same movie,
Speaker 2: and it sucks. It really sucks. Ah, So I hate
Speaker 2: on a scale I won the Red Red one. How's
Speaker 2: it right, Probably worse because it's it's like this incredbling
Speaker 2: metal title and it's like dreams. This is the worst
Speaker 2: I've ever heard in my life, Like this whole like
Speaker 2: British when they like, I know the British are really
Speaker 2: into reggae, right, but like once it got out of
Speaker 2: the clashes hands and into the hands of the softest hands, imaginable,
Speaker 2: My god, I don't want to all the Specials. What
Speaker 2: about the Specials? Specials were biracial. I mean they were,
Speaker 2: and it was and it was like more on the
Speaker 2: ground floor of SKA. They were closer. They were like
Speaker 2: ten years from actual sky, whereas like UB forty is
Speaker 2: like eighties. So it's like it's like synth ska. You know,
Speaker 2: there's synth tones on there, and I hate that the
Speaker 2: guitar sounds that bad on that though. You shut up,
Speaker 2: you shut your mouth, ah, what do you know? Suddenly
Speaker 2: enraged much of the percussion that time. One of my
Speaker 2: all time favorite Steve Bailey moments of stage bands or
Speaker 2: was there were there and he was like, this next
Speaker 2: one's a slow song, and I went, oh, I know
Speaker 2: this one, and and suddenly he goes.
Speaker 3: Do you.
Speaker 2: Oh? I love that guy. Much of the percussion that
Speaker 2: Waits used. Much of the percussion that Waits used on
Speaker 2: this album's inspired by Harry Partch was tremendously fascinating figure
Speaker 2: in twentieth century music. He's one of these classic outsider artists.
Speaker 2: There is a actually you know now that I mentioned
Speaker 2: I'm not sure if he's in songs in the kiev Z,
Speaker 2: which is sort of the like outsider music tome that
Speaker 2: like Wesley Willis and Dennis Johnson are into. Like pre Internet,
Speaker 2: that was like where you'd find out about the bulk
Speaker 2: of these guys. Didn't We talk about Harry Partch on
Speaker 2: the Planet of the eight Side, So probably we've talked
Speaker 2: about it somewhere and I'm gonna do it again. Harry
Speaker 2: Partch was born in Oakland in nineteen oh one. His
Speaker 2: parents were Christian missionaries in China who fled during the
Speaker 2: Box of Rebellion, and then once they came over to
Speaker 2: the state, they moved around quite a bit from Arizona
Speaker 2: to Albertquerque to La and so Harry Partch grew up
Speaker 2: hearing everything from Chinese lullabies that his mother would sing
Speaker 2: to him and Mandarin to the Yaqui Indian tribes in
Speaker 2: the Southwest, and he began studying piano and playing a
Speaker 2: bunch of different instruments when he was a teenager, but
Speaker 2: he was an orphan by the time he was nineteen.
Speaker 2: His father died of I want to say, tuberculosis, and
Speaker 2: then his mom died in a car accident. And he
Speaker 2: spent like two years in college in LA and then
Speaker 2: moved to San Francisco. And San Francisco at this time
Speaker 2: had this interesting influx of white guys being enamored of
Speaker 2: non Western music, which was because of San Francisco's Chinatown,
Speaker 2: which had been rebuilt after the Great Fire, and in
Speaker 2: the wake of that is when you get sort of
Speaker 2: the I hate to say this, but like disneyfied version
Speaker 2: of Chinatown. Like pre the Fire, San Francisco's Chinatown was
Speaker 2: terrifying because the Triads owned it and it was like
Speaker 2: where they did all their opium trafficking and sex trafficking
Speaker 2: and other trafficking, food trafficking. The least love member of
Speaker 2: the Trafficking Apocalypse. Anyway, listen to Steve Winwood's band Traffic,
Speaker 2: the most loved of the four traffics of the Apocalypse, sex, drug, food,
Speaker 2: and traffic trafficking. Mister fantasy, Yeah, that's if you're a
Speaker 2: real I'm a traffic trafficker. I got a real extensive
Speaker 2: collection of board feeds from the nineteen sixties. That's a
Speaker 2: really absurd like mister show said, the traffic Traffickers. They
Speaker 2: pan over and there's Steve Winwood playing a B three
Speaker 2: and like a dog crate. Mao? Did he mao? Anyway?
Speaker 2: So yeah they So the rebuilt San Francisco Chinatown had
Speaker 2: all of these nightclubs where people would play, and tea
Speaker 2: houses where people would play traditional Chinese music, and including
Speaker 2: the guy who was heading my employer, the San Francisco
Speaker 2: Conservatory Music. Oh, he would go see Chinese music there
Speaker 2: like five nights a week, and so would these guys
Speaker 2: named Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, both of whom are
Speaker 2: considered foundational figures and avant garde sort of experimental twentieth
Speaker 2: century new music as opposed to like your romantic and
Speaker 2: maller and all that stuff, and what they were really
Speaker 2: interested was getting away from Western tonalities, and Lou Harrison
Speaker 2: particular was really inspired by Gamalan music from Indonesia in
Speaker 2: the way that that's like has all of these non
Speaker 2: it's anything that isn't in like the twelve tone Western
Speaker 2: scale and has all of these quarter tones and the
Speaker 2: little different half tones. And you get that in Chinese
Speaker 2: melodies because they have a lot of non fixed pitch
Speaker 2: instruments like the auru and I think it's called the
Speaker 2: just the chin, the big slide. I think that looks
Speaker 2: like a big lap steel guitar, but it's like twelve
Speaker 2: feet long and made out of wood. So they use
Speaker 2: a lot of microtones. And so there's this weird confluence
Speaker 2: in the in San Francisco in particular of these three
Speaker 2: guys and many others Lou Harrison, like I said, Lou
Speaker 2: Harrison and Harry Cowell Ernest Block from the Conservatory at
Speaker 2: Harry Parch and they are all like totally transfixed by
Speaker 2: these sounds. And Parch becomes obsessed with the idea of
Speaker 2: just intonation, which I've talked about previously on this podcast
Speaker 2: and I will do again. Just intonation is a method
Speaker 2: of tuning that goes back to the early pre Pythagorean
Speaker 2: forms of musical tuning. The Pythagorean tuning is when it's
Speaker 2: based on the ratios of intervals to one another, right,
Speaker 2: and so in the Western temperate scale you get uneven
Speaker 2: ratios because you're cramming twelve semi tones into an octave,
Speaker 2: so the ratios are like three to two. They'll be
Speaker 2: uneven in different places. But if you actually drill down
Speaker 2: into the way that the overtones of any fundamental pitch work,
Speaker 2: they stack up in fits and they create more perfect
Speaker 2: sensical ratios to each other one to one. That's the
Speaker 2: shorthand version of just intonation. And so for Parch he
Speaker 2: basically decided to burn everything that he'd written in Western
Speaker 2: intonation in an actual stove in New Orleans in nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty and was like, I'm only doing my stuff now.
Speaker 2: And the first thing that he did was he went
Speaker 2: to a New Orleans luthier and he brought him a
Speaker 2: cello neck and a viola body, and he was like,
Speaker 2: put these together for me, and the guy did, and
Speaker 2: that turned it into an instrument that had twenty nine
Speaker 2: tones per octave. Wo and Western music is all twelve tones. Proactive,
Speaker 2: but like Indian music, Chinese music, Gamalo music, all the
Speaker 2: other musics of the non West have microtones in them
Speaker 2: where it'll be like a quarter of a tone, or
Speaker 2: a third of a tone, or three quarters of a tone.
Speaker 2: That stuff sounds really really alien to people. I've talked
Speaker 2: with a lot of composers of Iranian or Persian or
Speaker 2: otherwise Middle Eastern descent who talk about how difficult it
Speaker 2: can be to notate those pitches. For Western musicians who
Speaker 2: haven't grown up with them, it must be impossible. I mean,
Speaker 2: it must be like they have to sit down and
Speaker 2: sing them, and they can really and and the best
Speaker 2: people doing it are people and non obviously non fixed
Speaker 2: pix instruments. So like this, when composer came back and
Speaker 2: had premiere at the Conservatory and it was it was
Speaker 2: like a string quartet, but he was making them all
Speaker 2: sit and play like quarter tones and stuff that came
Speaker 2: out of his background and what was before it became
Speaker 2: iron Persia. And he was like, yeah, I'd have to
Speaker 2: sit down and sing this stuff to them because I
Speaker 2: would put like three quarters of a pitch, and in
Speaker 2: some places they have to invent new notation for it. Anyway,
Speaker 2: Parch got some money to go study in England, but
Speaker 2: then he returned to the States in nineteen thirty five
Speaker 2: at the height of the Great Depression, and for the
Speaker 2: next nine years he was basically a hobo. He would
Speaker 2: like travel around with his collection of scores and like
Speaker 2: plans for these different instruments and all the music that
Speaker 2: could be made on them that he was writing. But
Speaker 2: he would basically just stop anywhere that he could have
Speaker 2: space to set up and create new instruments and compose
Speaker 2: and then move on. For example, his instrument called the
Speaker 2: Chromelodeon was a forty three tone read organ that sounds,
Speaker 2: if you'll click on this link, exactly like a Tom
Speaker 2: Waits record. Ah. But he would set up in places
Speaker 2: as various as like a forge on a ranch in Wisconsin,
Speaker 2: a chicken farm, and Petaluma, an abandoned shipyard in Sasolito,
Speaker 2: and he would just keep building these instruments when he
Speaker 2: had the resources to it, and writing this music, and
Speaker 2: finally some of it got released in like I think
Speaker 2: The World of Harry Parks was the first record that
Speaker 2: this stuff was recorded on and thus inspired the creation
Speaker 2: of this Harry Parks Ensemble, which is still out there
Speaker 2: performing his music and maintaining these instruments, of which there
Speaker 2: are only like one version of many of them. And
Speaker 2: I think Waits heard the sound of Harry parts from
Speaker 2: Kathleen Brennan and was obsessed with all of these different
Speaker 2: percussion instruments and just the idea of like making your
Speaker 2: own crap. And so he had met a guy named
Speaker 2: Francis Thom who owns the Chrome melodeon. Did you play
Speaker 2: that thing? You got to punch in a clip of it.
Speaker 1: It's funny because there's a little kid I had. I
Speaker 1: think it was called a melodica. Oh yeah, And it
Speaker 1: sounds just.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And it's sort of like
Speaker 2: you can get microtnes out of read instruments, like you
Speaker 2: get blues heart players who bend notes and stuff. But
Speaker 2: like this is actually split into forty three tones.
Speaker 1: Actually it doesn't sound as alien as I would have
Speaker 1: expected given.
Speaker 2: How many tones. What's interesting about it is that like
Speaker 2: you hear out of tune stuff or out of Western
Speaker 2: tune stuff, Like if you play an old piano, there
Speaker 2: are gonna be parts of it that are intonated, closer
Speaker 2: to just intonation than Western temperament. Right, So it just
Speaker 2: sounds like a saggy old or like or like bad
Speaker 2: reads in a reed instrument, Like it just sounds like
Speaker 2: a baggy old, saggy organ because it sounds like it's
Speaker 2: falling out of pitch. But it was actually elaborately designed
Speaker 2: from the jump to not play in the pitches anyway.
Speaker 2: Good luck Editing that waits. His contribution to the spiritual
Speaker 2: canon of parch instrumentation is something he calls the Conundrum.
Speaker 2: Get it. This is like the word conundrum, but it's
Speaker 2: also a percussion instrument. That's good. That's good. You get it,
Speaker 2: You get it. I googled this earlier.
Speaker 3: This is cool.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, yeah, various quotes about it follow. It looks
Speaker 2: like a big iron crucifix, and there are a lot
Speaker 2: of different things that we hang off of it, crowbars,
Speaker 2: tijuana sabers, and found metal objects. I like the sound
Speaker 2: of I like to play drums when I'm angry at home.
Speaker 2: I have a metal instrument called a conundrum, A lot
Speaker 2: of things hanging off of it, metal objects. I like
Speaker 2: playing it with a hammer. It's just a metal configuration,
Speaker 2: like a metal cross. It looks a little bit like
Speaker 2: a Chinese torture device. It gives you access to these
Speaker 2: alternative sound sources. Hit him with a hammer sounds like
Speaker 2: a jail door closing behind you. I like it it
Speaker 2: you end up with bloody knuckles when you play it.
Speaker 2: So many thoughts in that. Yeah. Oh, he's such a
Speaker 2: champion interviewer, man, I wish you would do more. Bone
Speaker 2: Machine is packed with the usual rotating cast of uh
Speaker 2: Waits collaborators, but with a couple of far Field picks.
Speaker 1: Yes, there's Primus drummer Brian and Tia credited as Brain
Speaker 1: because Primus sucks, which is their official logo and my
Speaker 1: statement on them, as well as the band's singer and
Speaker 1: bassist Les Claypole. They show up as a favor for
Speaker 1: Waits guest vocal on Tommy the Cat in nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 2: I've never heard that song, So maybe do you want
Speaker 2: to let down with me? So maybe do you want
Speaker 2: to let down? By my side?
Speaker 3: A baby?
Speaker 2: Do you want to let down with me? It's great
Speaker 2: he talks about like sending them well, I mean he
Speaker 2: read this next.
Speaker 1: Part much like Tom Waits and Keith Richards.
Speaker 2: It was kind of a record label hookup.
Speaker 1: Les Claypole mentioned Tom as a possible voice for the song,
Speaker 1: and his label was like, well call him. Primus came
Speaker 1: up from the studio and found a voicemail from Weights
Speaker 1: on his answering machine saying he do the part and
Speaker 1: this is cute. Let's Claypool still has the answering machine tape.
Speaker 2: He's like, he like does a little imitation. You can
Speaker 2: punch it, and he's like, and I get this, you know,
Speaker 2: and I get this. Uh try to how to go
Speaker 2: from a less Claypool voice. So I punched play on
Speaker 2: my voicemail machine. I hear Tom going, well, it's great
Speaker 2: to have got your demo tape from the boys to
Speaker 2: the label, and I think it's really great when your
Speaker 2: kids are up to him glad you're you know, hip
Speaker 2: to the scene and this.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like a it's kind of like a
Speaker 1: California Bruce Springsteen when I hear you do.
Speaker 2: It at least yeah, I mean it's a little of that,
Speaker 2: like you know that David Cross skit where he's like
Speaker 2: uh uh heo, man, I'm from Butte, Montana. Yeah, man,
Speaker 2: I'm from Pomona, Pomona, California. Oh man, I'm from Texar, Canada, Texas.
Speaker 2: It's just like the American hick voice. Yeah, that spans
Speaker 2: the entirety of the country. Yeah, there's a good bit
Speaker 2: of that. Also on the Machine.
Speaker 1: There's Los Lobos founding member David Hill Dago, who plays
Speaker 1: accordion and violin. He also shows up on grace Land.
Speaker 1: We talked about in a Graceland.
Speaker 2: Episode yep, possibly having songs stolen. Yep. There's Sacks and
Speaker 2: Reid specialist Ralph Carney, who's best known to me as
Speaker 2: being the uncle of the drummer for The Black Keys,
Speaker 2: Patrick Karney, who sucks. He's like if all the jokes
Speaker 2: about Ringo were true, he's like the worst drummer to
Speaker 2: ever achieve. Oh my god, he's awful. Listen to those
Speaker 2: early Black Keys records. He's barely playing in time. I
Speaker 2: saw them at some music festival and like they do
Speaker 2: have kind of a weird lock up, Like what's his name,
Speaker 2: the lead singer, Dan Auerbach, like he had one. They
Speaker 2: had like a full band, like a big band, like
Speaker 2: keys and bass and everything. At one point he sent
Speaker 2: all of them away and he's like, all right, me
Speaker 2: and Patrick are gonna do some of the old ones.
Speaker 2: And they like they do have a weirdly tell an
Speaker 2: lock up from just playing only together for so long,
Speaker 2: but he is a dog drummer. It's just really astounding.
Speaker 1: Only like seeing them when it's just the two of them,
Speaker 1: when they have the full band, they just.
Speaker 2: Sound like any other band like that. Dan Aurbuck is awesome.
Speaker 2: I mean, like I know, he's kind of a bro
Speaker 2: or whatever, and people will like give the Black Keys
Speaker 2: a lot of shit, but those early records are like
Speaker 2: legitimately for being from Akron, Like that dude would just
Speaker 2: drive down into the South and find like all of
Speaker 2: these old hill country blues guys and be like, please
Speaker 2: teach me this stuff, and and like, you know, there's
Speaker 2: on Chullahoma, there's that like he has he like gets
Speaker 2: a voicemail from like some clearly old black woman who's like,
Speaker 2: that's the you put out the only record I ever
Speaker 2: heard that sound like a you know something something record,
Speaker 2: And it's like he is very very good at copying
Speaker 2: that stuff and especially the at singing along with it.
Speaker 2: And it's just so funny to me that like Patrick
Speaker 2: Carney like briefly married to Michelle Branch and just got
Speaker 2: like dragged along on the on what was clearly dan
Speaker 2: Auerbach's a cent into being the musician he was meant
Speaker 2: to be, and Patrick Karney's just along for the ride,
Speaker 2: like solemnly tweeting and sucking at the drums. I hate
Speaker 2: that guy anyway, sidebar over he was like, bro, He's
Speaker 2: one of the sweetest guys I've ever interviewed, actually, isn't.
Speaker 2: I think I remember? No, No, I mean like someone
Speaker 2: was giving him this is like a this is just
Speaker 2: going so far down, idiot ats blues revival like rock
Speaker 2: revival stuff. But I feel like there was like some
Speaker 2: kind of at tension between him and Jack White because like.
Speaker 1: Oh, there was a huge amount of tension between him
Speaker 1: and Jack White. I mean when Jack White was getting divorced,
Speaker 1: all those emails came out because he just felt that
Speaker 1: like Dan Araback was following him around.
Speaker 2: Yes, which is hilarious considering that Jack White plays guitar
Speaker 2: like a toddler compared to Dan Auerback, and like Dan
Speaker 2: Aurback honestly for his part, produced an amazing Doctor John
Speaker 2: record and like has done a lot of cool collaborations,
Speaker 2: whereas Jack White has only like been surly and pale
Speaker 2: and wrote one of the worst James Bond songs. I
Speaker 2: like that. I like another Way to Die. It's no
Speaker 2: Skyfall sounds different.
Speaker 1: I like that it sounded different, although apparently they get
Speaker 1: it in at the last minute because Amy Winehouse was
Speaker 1: supposed to do the Bond theme for Quantum of Solace
Speaker 1: and then she just never got it together.
Speaker 2: So they went to Jack White, and he basically was like.
Speaker 1: Well, I know they're gonna use whatever I turn in
Speaker 1: because they're under a gun here, so I'm gonna do
Speaker 1: something weird.
Speaker 2: There's nothing they can do about it. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 2: I like Jack White, I don't I like the White Stripes,
Speaker 2: but they're they're doing something much different. And like it's
Speaker 2: insane to me that he would even they don't sound like.
Speaker 2: They sound like different bands like the White Stripes don't swing.
Speaker 2: And one thing at least you can say for those
Speaker 2: early Black Keys records is that they have a really
Speaker 2: good rhythmic feel to them, primarily because of Dan Auerbach
Speaker 2: and people would like give him shit. There's like a
Speaker 2: rolling Stone thing where like somebody gave him for liking
Speaker 2: g love and special sauce, oh yeah, and being like
Speaker 2: and being like, yeah, he was just like a varsity
Speaker 2: soccer player and in high school and like he liked
Speaker 2: G Love and he was his total like blues poser,
Speaker 2: and he got sadly defensive about it, where he was like,
Speaker 2: G Love is a very accomplished fingerpicker, and yes, I
Speaker 2: played soccer like I told you Love last year. It
Speaker 2: was incredible. But I feel for Dan auerback man, like
Speaker 2: he just likes the blues, and he admitted he admittedly
Speaker 2: did a lot more studying of it than like Jack
Speaker 2: White did, who was like, I'll just talk, I'll sing
Speaker 2: real stupid and play guitar like I have four thumbs,
Speaker 2: you know, And he's so thin skinned. I mean that's
Speaker 2: the other thing. Jack White is so muleing and he's
Speaker 2: the biggest sore winner ever. You know, he got all
Speaker 2: the money in the world to buy mustache wax and
Speaker 2: bolero jackets, and he's so perpetually aggrieved by it, just
Speaker 2: because everyone wants him to get back with Meg and
Speaker 2: make a record that doesn't suck. Sidebar over.
Speaker 1: I just I love how mad Jack White was that
Speaker 1: Dan Arabach's kid goes at the same school that Jack
Speaker 1: White's kid goes to.
Speaker 2: Again, like again, just you're in the city the same
Speaker 2: You're just two roads diverged in a wood and you're
Speaker 2: just mad that one of them that he's a better
Speaker 2: guitar player than you. That's it. And I bet I'm
Speaker 2: gonna go out on a limb and say that like
Speaker 2: having an old black woman's like voicemail on your record
Speaker 2: as like a seal of approval saying it sounded like
Speaker 2: a what does she say, Junior Kimbro. Yeah, because Chulahoma
Speaker 2: is where he's from, and they were performing or his
Speaker 2: juke joint, and they were performing there. They're an EP.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, okay, let me take all of this back. Actually,
Speaker 2: let me take everything I just said about about this back.
Speaker 2: Chullahoma is a Black Keys EP where they are recording
Speaker 2: Junior Kimbro songs. He's a hill country blues guitarist. And
Speaker 2: on that record is a voicemail from Junior Kimbro's widow
Speaker 2: thanking the Black Keys and that she was She said
Speaker 2: they're the only band that she heard who really plays
Speaker 2: like Junior. And I think that chap Jack White's ass
Speaker 2: so bad that he never had a black person say
Speaker 2: he plays guitar like one of them phrasing, but you
Speaker 2: get my drift. I think that's the entire source of
Speaker 2: his His beef is that he never got an imprimatur
Speaker 2: from a bluesman or a bluesman's widow and thus a
Speaker 2: mustached to That's why he dresses like a flash snipe. Yeah,
Speaker 2: tying women to tracks that he's That was his villain
Speaker 2: origin story. No black person ever said nice things about
Speaker 2: his guitar playing.
Speaker 1: So Patrick Karney of the Black Kids talking about Patrick
Speaker 1: Karney's uncle, Ralph Carney, plays on Tom Waits.
Speaker 2: This Tom Waits record for talking about in this episode. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also included on Bone Machine is La session guitarist legend
Speaker 1: and as you put no contest pleading, child porn aficionado,
Speaker 1: Body Wachtel.
Speaker 2: Great hair, great sixteenth note guitar line on edge of seventeen.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, no contest pleading. They found a bunch of
Speaker 2: kitty porn on his hard drive, but he sent it
Speaker 2: in for repair like a moron. When did that happen?
Speaker 2: I don't remember hearing that. He's also in the poside
Speaker 2: The Adventure Waddie Walkdel Yeah, tremendous. I know, three years
Speaker 2: probation in nineteen ninety eight compleating no contest. He was
Speaker 2: or for this. He was ordered to make a twenty
Speaker 2: five hundred dollars Nation to Children of the Night, an
Speaker 2: agency that helps runaways that probably should have had their name.
Speaker 2: Go back for another round, and yeah, walkedal took his
Speaker 2: computer to a shop, a La computer repair shop, and
Speaker 2: they opened it up and found kitty porn on his
Speaker 2: hard drive. Really gives Edge of seventeen a new meeting. Oh,
Speaker 2: I think I made that joke. We're now officially an
Speaker 2: orra TI because I think I made that joke before.
Speaker 1: No, I don't remember ever hearing that. Okay, so I
Speaker 1: think he's got to start playing with us start. But
Speaker 1: I think he played with the Buckingham Knicks duo before
Speaker 1: they joined the fleet with mac.
Speaker 2: Oh, he's yeah, he's everywhere in that era. I mean
Speaker 2: he was Buddies with Warren too. That's him playing slide
Speaker 2: guitar and where anyway? What are we talking about?
Speaker 1: And yet another returning Tom Waite's pal is Larry the
Speaker 1: Mole Taylor, an incredible nickname who is a longtime basis
Speaker 1: for all sixties weird pseudo country icons and woodstock vets.
Speaker 2: Can't eat? Can you do the voice? We can't do
Speaker 2: the voice? Yeah, going on to the country. Done the voice?
Speaker 2: Do the voice? Do do do Do Do Do Do?
Speaker 2: Do you know what was the craziest thing about Killers
Speaker 2: of the Flower Moon? No, I was hearing the original
Speaker 2: version of that song. Did you know there's an original
Speaker 2: going up the country that sounds the exact same way.
Speaker 2: They really just flat out stole that song. No, Henry
Speaker 2: Thomas nineteen twenty eight. I'm going up way long, I'm
Speaker 2: going away.
Speaker 3: Long.
Speaker 2: Wow, white people have no original ideas. Nope, sure don't.
Speaker 2: I'm oh yeah, sorry, uh, Larry the mol Taylor. One
Speaker 2: of my favorite bits of Wait's studio Apocryphi, is from
Speaker 2: Jaquiri King, who worked on Mule variations, and he said
Speaker 2: that most of the basic tracks on Tom RAITs records
Speaker 2: are just Tom either playing guitar or piano and usually
Speaker 2: Larry Taylor on bass accompanying him, because I guess that's
Speaker 2: just the lock up that they have, and then they
Speaker 2: build the rest of the song around it. Or for example,
Speaker 2: they do something like they do and Jesus is gonna
Speaker 2: be here where Waits is playing upright bass and Taylor
Speaker 2: is playing slide guitar and all he gets out of
Speaker 2: it is that wow wow, he literally gets like two notes.
Speaker 2: I guess that maybe counts as well, Tom plays. Tom
Speaker 2: plays upright bass, and he dryly remarked in the press
Speaker 2: kit probably would have been better if we'd gotten a
Speaker 2: Baptist choir, but I kind of like it by itself.
Speaker 2: And then Tom Waites had this to say about Larry Taylor.
Speaker 2: Larry's great. He used to play in VFW halls with
Speaker 2: Jered Lee Lewis where he would take a violin pickup
Speaker 2: and wrap it in a hanky and drop that into
Speaker 2: the piano hole that would be the mic. Larry would
Speaker 2: play over by that hole, and whatever came out of
Speaker 2: the speaker was the bass. He's a very intuitive musician.
Speaker 2: And right after we finished the record, his bass broke,
Speaker 2: which I thought was great. It just couldn't take it anymore,
Speaker 2: kind of a John Henry thing. And then I and
Speaker 2: I have to mention, of course, last Warren Zevon record,
Speaker 2: the famous Near pasthamous record The Wind. The Wind has
Speaker 2: a kind of rock and roll song on it that
Speaker 2: Bruce Springsteen's in sings on was that the one is
Speaker 2: I was in the house when the house burn No,
Speaker 2: yeah it was I was the house when the house
Speaker 2: burned down. Yeah, it's really funny, Bruce is there's some
Speaker 2: really there's a great documentary about it. And Bruce is
Speaker 2: having a high old time coming in there to sing.
Speaker 2: And there's one point where he's he's like supposed to
Speaker 2: be like he's supposed to be doing like a harmony
Speaker 2: or something, and instead he like can't understand what Worren's saying.
Speaker 2: So you just hear him on the track they kept it.
Speaker 2: Hear him going, I'm not even gonna try and follow
Speaker 2: Arren on that one. Ah, so like dense, densely intricate rhyme.
Speaker 2: But then he plays a guitar solo and and you know,
Speaker 2: I don't know if you know this about Bruce, but
Speaker 2: Bruce plays a mean guitar and they put him through
Speaker 2: one of those tiny little old tube of fenders like
Speaker 2: a ten inch speaker, and he blew it up like
Speaker 2: they did like a two takes of him playing a
Speaker 2: guitar solo on that, and then the second one it
Speaker 2: just like sparked out and died where they were like
Speaker 2: they're like it had fulfilled its purpose and it could
Speaker 2: go no longer. It went to Valhalla. Yeah, great guitar
Speaker 2: solo though, man, great great song. I was in the house.
Speaker 2: I had the doupe too Little Got Smoked. That song's okay.
Speaker 2: It's just one of those kind of like dumb boogie
Speaker 2: rock songs that all those guys were born in the
Speaker 2: baby bold baby boomers thought they could do. Did wait
Speaker 2: till Springsteen ever doing anything together? He covered Jersey Girl. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and then and then I think they do it. There's
Speaker 2: putting of them do it on stage, where of course
Speaker 2: Tom is like sholo lo, Bruce is doing Black Preacher
Speaker 2: voice over, and it's all it's all a bit much.
Speaker 1: We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right
Speaker 1: back with more too much information in just a moment.
Speaker 2: Well as you right.
Speaker 1: Tom Waite to a really interesting rolodex of not quite
Speaker 1: famous LA session musicians on his most recent album, twenty
Speaker 1: eleven's As Bad as Me. Emmy winning LA composer Patrick
Speaker 1: Warren shows up solely because he's one of the few
Speaker 1: people in the world who's an expert on the archaic
Speaker 1: keyboard instrument called the Chamberlain, which is like a pre melotron,
Speaker 1: which is in itself a pre sampler synthesizer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the Chamberlain is like the worst version of a
Speaker 2: melotron before they'd ironed out the kink whoa yeah, And
Speaker 2: so I guess this guy Patrick has like he's like
Speaker 2: one of the only people who knows how to play
Speaker 2: the actual instrument, so he gets every Chamberlain call from
Speaker 2: Tom Waits. But he also did the true detective like
Speaker 2: original score and want an Emmy for it. This is funny,
Speaker 2: these guys he picks out of the cracks, like, for example,
Speaker 2: you this guy you know, August Augie Meyers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, he's best known to me as a founding
Speaker 1: member of the You say obscure, I think underappreciated sixties
Speaker 1: garage rock groups Sir Douglas Quintet and the Texas Tornadoes.
Speaker 1: I think they're on nuggets, right, I believe. So. They
Speaker 1: do a really great version of Freddie Fender's Wasted Days
Speaker 1: and Wasted Nights. Great song. Play that on my college
Speaker 1: radio show. I bet they do, Buddy, Yes they do.
Speaker 1: And one of your favorites of these kind of left
Speaker 1: of center LA Session musicians is a guy named Charlie
Speaker 1: muscle White.
Speaker 2: Tell us about Charlie mussel White. Oh, I love him.
Speaker 2: I mean it is again just one of these guys
Speaker 2: that I just tracked down because of Tom Waits. There's
Speaker 2: this One of my favorite Tom Waite songs is come
Speaker 2: On Up to the House off New Variations, and you
Speaker 2: should really punch in the thirty seconds of that harmonica solo.
Speaker 2: Do you know what I'm talking about? No, it sounds
Speaker 2: like I radiate like a car radiator dying, but in
Speaker 2: like the most beautiful way possible. Has so many great lines.
Speaker 2: The only things that you can see are all that
Speaker 2: you lack. Come on up to the house, come down
Speaker 2: off the cross. We can all use wood. That's great.
Speaker 2: So yeah, there's this harmonica solo that kicks in.
Speaker 1: I almost have a hard time believing in such as
Speaker 1: like a squeaky door, and I mean that it's a compliment.
Speaker 2: Ah, it's a shame. Harmonica is kind of a cringe instrument.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know there's like Stevie, you could play
Speaker 2: anything on it, and there's like Junior Walker. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: but like how many other like harmonica's like the John
Speaker 2: Popper instruments. Right, it's like a fat white guy in
Speaker 2: a fishing vest, right, Like, but you hear like genuine,
Speaker 2: genuine Chicago harp, like through a sure green bullet into
Speaker 2: like a tiny eight inch speaker dimed out tu bam
Speaker 2: and it's just like hairw the next just pop right out.
Speaker 2: It's just ah overdriven harmonica, beautiful sound. Anyway, that guy
Speaker 2: was like a He was like a He grew up
Speaker 2: in Memphis and like literally saw Elvis like busking on
Speaker 2: the corners, and he was a whiskey bootlegger. And he
Speaker 2: moved to Chicago and became like the fourth best harmonica
Speaker 2: player of the sixties. He's like one of those guys
Speaker 2: who pursues like just perpetually on the other page of
Speaker 2: the history books. You know, it's like little Walter Paul Butterfield,
Speaker 2: you know, like all the sixties guys that you hear
Speaker 2: Toots Teelman, Yeah, Belgian born harmonica and whistle virtuoso, Toots
Speaker 2: Teelman and and then on like the third line of
Speaker 2: the fifth line of the Coachella poster, font Charlie mussel
Speaker 2: White and I interviewed him. Yeah, he was he was
Speaker 2: super cool. This great bit about baby Jessica fell in
Speaker 2: the well and that inspired him to quit drink because
Speaker 2: he said if she could go for three days without
Speaker 2: without a drink, so could he. That was like, that
Speaker 2: was like I later found out later he tells everyone
Speaker 2: that story, but it was I was like, that's cute.
Speaker 2: Good for you, Charlie. Then he didn't win a Grammy
Speaker 2: for that for the album that I profiled him for,
Speaker 2: which is sad.
Speaker 1: But anyway, one of my first People stories was Toots
Speaker 1: z Obit Oh really yes, Sesame Street harmonica player to Teelman.
Speaker 2: Jocko Pastorius collaborator, Yeah you grew it was for people
Speaker 2: dot com though you didn't get you didn't get the
Speaker 2: important god awful records with Jocko in there. It's like
Speaker 2: him and him and Belgian gypsy jazz virtuoso Birelli leren
Speaker 2: Really some dog records, just super eighties reverbed out. Jocko
Speaker 2: is all addicted to coke and Brelli Lagrenz. Everything's chorused
Speaker 2: within an inch of its life. There's like gated reverb
Speaker 2: on the harp. It's awful. We should do a podcast
Speaker 2: about jazz fusion, sure, I mean for Tom Waits as well. Hey,
Speaker 2: I know what's the less popular thing we can talk about?
Speaker 2: One of my favorite veins rich veins of Tom lore
Speaker 2: or the non musical directions that he's supposedly gives to
Speaker 2: people in the studio. People said he's color blind, like
Speaker 2: the guy who did the the guy who did the
Speaker 2: concert film Big Time that is like footage from the
Speaker 2: Franks Waders tour has said like Tom only sees in
Speaker 2: red and yellow like a dog. He's like, that's why
Speaker 2: all the stage lighting is red and yellow. And other
Speaker 2: people have talked about him maybe having like cynysthesia, like
Speaker 2: he says he gets sounds colors. But some of these
Speaker 2: things that he supposedly tells people in the studios sound
Speaker 2: like the oblique Strategies cards if they'd been written by
Speaker 2: like a nineteen twenties Carnival Barker, like the aforementioned play
Speaker 2: like Your Hair's on Fire. But there's this there's a
Speaker 2: song sixteen Shells from a thirty six off Swordfish Trombones,
Speaker 2: great song, and he was explaining it in the studio
Speaker 2: and he said, this is about a guy who's got
Speaker 2: a crow. He's right on a mule. He's got a
Speaker 2: Washburn guitar. It's this crow inside the guitar and it
Speaker 2: can't get out because it's got strings across it, so
Speaker 2: it's called the Washburn jail. And he hits the guitar
Speaker 2: just to rattle his cage. And it's important to note
Speaker 2: that those are the lyrics of the song. He was
Speaker 2: just like, very seriously, well, there's this guy and he's
Speaker 2: got a washburn with a crow in it. Did you
Speaker 2: get that? Larry Waits from the rain Dogs era. There's
Speaker 2: a bass player named Greg Cohen, tremendous bass player who
Speaker 2: was on the record with Tom and he instead of
Speaker 2: letting him play bass guitar, he made him play the
Speaker 2: bass pedals of a Hammond B three, but he could
Speaker 2: only play them with his fists, like I was punching
Speaker 2: somebody out mixing feedback from the Bone Machine mixing sessions.
Speaker 2: This is about the electric guitar sounds like it's not
Speaker 2: really part of the same trip. It sounds like it's
Speaker 2: splattered on the windshield when it ought to be in
Speaker 2: the back seat with a little bit and Brenda. What
Speaker 2: I want to hear is everyone back inside the car,
Speaker 2: screaming and laughing, all sitting together, one big happy family
Speaker 2: out for a drive. You get that, and we're done
Speaker 2: with this song that I actually kind of understand. It's
Speaker 2: kind of like David Lynch, Like David Lynch's the guitar
Speaker 2: sounds like it's not really part of the same trip.
Speaker 2: I see that that actually I understand, okay, all right.
Speaker 2: This is a variation on the ie load the chamber
Speaker 2: and she pulls the trigger. This is talking about it,
Speaker 2: Kathleen Brennan. A lot of the times, it's like lighting firecrackers.
Speaker 2: Who gets to light, who throws? We take turns. Sometimes
Speaker 2: it's I'll get the cherry bomb you hold, I'll light.
Speaker 2: And this is presumably about David Hidalgo because he says
Speaker 2: one accordionist I work with just eats the music. He
Speaker 2: eats the music, and you find him, it's all over
Speaker 2: his shirt, down his chin. It's just been murdered. Accordionist
Speaker 2: will sometimes take apart and they'll just play the hell
Speaker 2: out of it until it's dead. That's great. True. Actually,
Speaker 2: have you ever heard zydeco music? Oh? Hell yeah, hell yah.
Speaker 1: Bow Machine's second shortest song, the Ocean, also be its
Speaker 1: most disturbing. I took this from your outline because it
Speaker 1: really stuck with me. If you'd prefer to take.
Speaker 2: It, oh no, please go ahead, Waite explained. In the
Speaker 2: album's press kit.
Speaker 1: One of the local papers up here printed two photographs.
Speaker 2: One was a picture of a woman on the.
Speaker 1: Beach holding a bottle of beer and a cigarette, looking
Speaker 1: out at the ocean, and the next picture was the
Speaker 1: same day, a couple hours later, of her floating face
Speaker 1: down on the brine, the beer still in her hand,
Speaker 1: and the photographer walked past her and heard her say
Speaker 1: under her breath, the ocean doesn't want me today.
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, there's a couple. I forgot to modulate my
Speaker 2: tone from music Guide to True Crime prodcaster because some
Speaker 2: of these are fucking depressing. Did I know the identity
Speaker 2: of that person? I mean, dude, who even knows this
Speaker 2: is the real thing? Oh no, he said it, and
Speaker 2: it's creepy and you never heard the song the same
Speaker 2: way again, the ocean doesn't want me? What a Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: Tom Waits's daughter Ca Lissen and knee Kellis Simonis. I
Speaker 2: don't know, Kelly coin the term strangels.
Speaker 1: I love this for that tone the ocean, Waits later explained,
Speaker 1: it's basically a compound word strange angels. And if you
Speaker 1: have strangels, then you could have brangels. That's incredible. Those
Speaker 1: are the angels that live in your head. Higel, do
Speaker 1: you have brangels?
Speaker 2: I have Breeman's.
Speaker 1: I feel like that's what like Son of Sam has
Speaker 1: Some of Sam had brangels, he had the labrador.
Speaker 2: That's true. Every tell you my creepiest son of Sam theory. No,
Speaker 2: So I was reading this book. I think I may
Speaker 2: have done it in the Exorcism the exercise, but I
Speaker 2: there's this book called I'm Jumped the Devil Hostage to
Speaker 2: the Devil. Oh, yeah, and it's about It's by Malachie Martin,
Speaker 2: who is, you know, a allegedly one of these sanctified exorcists,
Speaker 2: and he talks about it when when David Berkowitz was
Speaker 2: was hospitalized, he became born again, and he like constantly
Speaker 2: wanted to be lectured on Christianity and stuff. And I
Speaker 2: was just struck by this horrible sensation reading it that
Speaker 2: like Berkowitz didn't actually believe any of it, he just
Speaker 2: like desperately wanted to. Because I think that's like some
Speaker 2: of the impression that Malachi Martin gives about these visits
Speaker 2: where he was like, well, he just really wanted to
Speaker 2: like talk about about God and stuff, but like and
Speaker 2: forgiveness and all this like stuff and talk about how
Speaker 2: you know, because he maintained that he'd been possessed, and
Speaker 2: but he was like I never really I just I
Speaker 2: was like struck by the idea that he would be
Speaker 2: like faking it to try and be like, no, I
Speaker 2: don't actually get this, but like I desperately want to
Speaker 2: be forgiven. I have a whole riff on Tom Waits
Speaker 2: and forgiveness later. Oh, just save my voice.
Speaker 1: Another ripped from the headlines bit on bow Machine comes
Speaker 1: during the song A Little Rain. The lyric she was
Speaker 1: fifteen years old and she'd never seen the ocean. She
Speaker 1: climbed into a van with a vagabond, and the last
Speaker 1: thing she said was I love you Mom. It was
Speaker 1: something that was inspired by a deeply depressing newspaper article
Speaker 1: on the Brennan Waits Archives about a van full of
Speaker 1: hitchhiking kids that had careened over a cliff in California.
Speaker 1: Doesn't really get much Sonnier on the next track, Murder
Speaker 1: in the Red Barn, which may have been similarly developed
Speaker 1: through a completely different source, an actual eighteen twenty seven
Speaker 1: murder in Polstead, Suffolk, England, in which a young woman
Speaker 1: Maria Martin was shot dead by her lover William Cord
Speaker 1: at the Red Barn, a local landmark, after meeting him
Speaker 1: for a promised elopement. This became a popular topic for
Speaker 1: murder ballads in the intervening years. The Waits version appears
Speaker 1: to have lidland common with the source except for its name.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so funny because murdered the red Barn is
Speaker 2: such a distinctly like there's nothing British about it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that surprised me. He does have the line that he
Speaker 2: said that a bloodstained axe is not a surprise something
Speaker 2: because it's never out of sight, because there's always some
Speaker 2: killing that has to be done around the farm. And
Speaker 2: then he talks about he's like, well, you know the
Speaker 2: barns were painted red because it was animal blood was
Speaker 2: all they had. It was cheaper than pain. I never
Speaker 2: heard that. Yeah, that was that was the Tom Waite's
Speaker 2: version of it. But then I gooled, like just murder
Speaker 2: a red barn and this this thing comes up like
Speaker 2: the Red Barn murder, which was like you know how
Speaker 2: many roads of the of the of seventeenth century British murders,
Speaker 2: like it's been It's been remixed and resung and rewritten
Speaker 2: so many thousands of different times. It just was one
Speaker 2: of them that he hasn't done. Although he does a
Speaker 2: really there's a version of he does an old murder
Speaker 2: ballad called two Sisters that pops up on orphans. That's
Speaker 2: a really so he has some familiarity with, like the
Speaker 2: whole British Irish murder ballad tradition. Anyway, I digress dirt
Speaker 2: in the Ground, sung in his prince voice. I loved it.
Speaker 2: He says he can only do it for like one
Speaker 2: or two songs. That's why you never hear him do
Speaker 2: it live live is all the cookie monster stuff because
Speaker 2: he can only do the falsetto for like one song
Speaker 2: at a time. And he said this is based on
Speaker 2: a pickup line that he heard from acclaimed though not
Speaker 2: famed tenor saxophone as Teddy Edwards, who used to get
Speaker 2: girls to go up to his try and bring girls
Speaker 2: back to his hotel room by saying, listen, darling, we're
Speaker 2: all going to be dirt in the ground. I love
Speaker 2: it interesting enough. Another major theme on Bone Machine is
Speaker 2: the Bible. He talked about in the press kid how
Speaker 2: the Bible was like new to me, and I guess
Speaker 2: he'd been going through it, particularly revelations. But all these
Speaker 2: different apocalyptic images that come upcross like earth Dyed Screaming
Speaker 2: has a line about the locusts taking the sky Cane
Speaker 2: and Abel are in Dirt in the ground, Murder in
Speaker 2: the Red Barn. Literally quotes don't covet your neighbor's house,
Speaker 2: don't covert your nature, wife, Jesus gonna be here is
Speaker 2: just very obviously intent revival like Preacher mode. I love
Speaker 2: the line, and that song is like, because I've been
Speaker 2: so faithful except for drinking, but he knew that I would.
Speaker 2: It's like such an eerily specific like ah, I get
Speaker 2: goosebumps thinking about it, and then all stripped down, which
Speaker 2: is amazing because he says he got it from Jimmy Swaggered,
Speaker 2: Jerry Lee Lewis's cousin. Yeah, the idea, He's like, I
Speaker 2: wanted to make a song that sounded horny, like baby,
Speaker 2: I need you all stripped down, But also like this
Speaker 2: this Pentecostal idea of like you have to be stripped
Speaker 2: completely clean before the Lord, like of all your sins
Speaker 2: and all your memories and all your worldly issues like
Speaker 2: when when when he comes again? You know? And then
Speaker 2: there's another great there's a there's a Shakespeare line in
Speaker 2: this on this album Black Wings, which I think of
Speaker 2: is his version of is the checker Checkerboard, kind of
Speaker 2: part to Red Right Hand by Nick Cave, which is
Speaker 2: just about like what sort of the genre of rambling
Speaker 2: badass like like Red right Hand is like just about
Speaker 2: a guy who rolls through and he's like he's scary
Speaker 2: and he kills people, but there's no further specifics than that.
Speaker 2: And same with black Wings, where he's like, I'll see
Speaker 2: if I can do this. This homewaid sign, well, he
Speaker 2: once killed him. They say he once killed a man
Speaker 2: with a guitar string. There are those who say that
Speaker 2: beneath his coat there are wings. It's so good. But
Speaker 2: he says, I'm gonna get myself unfurled from this mortal
Speaker 2: coiled up world, which is a really great internal rhyme
Speaker 2: that flips the line from a Hamlet from the Sleep
Speaker 2: of death. What dreams may come when we have shuffled
Speaker 2: off this mortal coil? Love it? Sorry?
Speaker 3: Okay, So.
Speaker 2: I was by I had little hair in my mouth
Speaker 2: from getting real close on the microphone. A little asmr
Speaker 2: there for you. Tom Waite's like a boom.
Speaker 3: M.
Speaker 2: So I brought up bout Dylan earlier, and I think
Speaker 2: it's interesting because you and I both know about Grail
Speaker 2: Marcus and the Old Weird America. Some of you's eyes
Speaker 2: will roll and some of you will think it's legitimate.
Speaker 2: I don't know where I'm going with this. So Grail
Speaker 2: Marcus talks specifically about the Basement tapes and the band
Speaker 2: and Bob Dylan's like sort of lyrical focus in the
Speaker 2: in the late sixties as memorializing and being concerned with
Speaker 2: what he called the old Weird America, And that's his
Speaker 2: shorthand for like pre industrial American culture basically like the
Speaker 2: from the ante bellum South up to the interstate system,
Speaker 2: you know, sort of like I mentioned earlier, like the
Speaker 2: itinerant carnivals, you know, touring tent revival preaching, like minstrel shows,
Speaker 2: you know, like Flannery O'Connor kind of shit. But it's
Speaker 2: just very interesting thinking that, you know, like I said,
Speaker 2: Bob Dylan is like seven years older than Tom Waits,
Speaker 2: but Tom Waits didn't have a career until Bob Dylan
Speaker 2: had already had like seven personalities tucked away in his pocket.
Speaker 2: Because if you're charitably thinking of Tom Waits's early career
Speaker 2: is like seventy four seventy five, that's like already in
Speaker 2: a blood on the tracks. Yeah, you know, so it's
Speaker 2: like Dylan's already in his divorce era. But yeah, both
Speaker 2: of their lyrics are very preoccupied with this interesting idea
Speaker 2: of like what we lost when America became unified, like
Speaker 2: mass culture, you know, like roving gamblers and criminals, tinerant
Speaker 2: laborers and all this folk like who do folklore, oral tradition,
Speaker 2: a lot of it being I think like Pan African
Speaker 2: superstition and stuff. It was all kind of coming from
Speaker 2: the Deep South. But the biggest difference between them is
Speaker 2: that Tom Waits California, so he fucking loves la and
Speaker 2: he loves cars. So it's so kindamn funny to me
Speaker 2: to think that, like, you know, Bob Dylan's like here
Speaker 2: writing all these songs like about like free and free will,
Speaker 2: and Tom Waits is like, you know, fourteen in like
Speaker 2: San Diego, and like, oh, yeah, this is great, but
Speaker 2: needs more cars. I just love this idea that you're
Speaker 2: getting at with the you know, the big Bill BRUNSI
Speaker 2: kind of covers and you know this, you're talking a
Speaker 2: lot about canaan Abel and Jesus and then By and
Speaker 2: so forth. But have you thought about a big car
Speaker 2: just driving right down through all that because I have
Speaker 2: and this is I'm going down a limb here because
Speaker 2: this is song is very personal to me, but I
Speaker 2: think it's very interesting. Tom Waits has this through line
Speaker 2: where he talks about he doesn't he doesn't talk very
Speaker 2: much about about religion, but he talks very much about
Speaker 2: like the state of forgiveness or like the state of grace.
Speaker 2: And there are multiple songs that he kind of talks
Speaker 2: to talks about forgiveness or grace as being like a
Speaker 2: place that you can get to. There's parts about that
Speaker 2: on Bone Machine. But specifically, what I'm thinking of is
Speaker 2: this song called down There by the Train that he
Speaker 2: actually wrote for Johnny Cash, and Johnny Cash covered it
Speaker 2: on one of the American records, and I don't like
Speaker 2: his version because it's like jaunty and Tom Waits's version
Speaker 2: is on piano and it's like heartbreaking, and it's this
Speaker 2: really interesting He is this really interesting image of like
Speaker 2: this idea of not an afterlife per se, because he
Speaker 2: talks about there's this great couplet, there's no eye for
Speaker 2: an eye, there's no tooth for a tooth. I saw
Speaker 2: Judas is Scariot carrying John Wilkes Booth. They were down
Speaker 2: there by the train. There's no other way, he says.
Speaker 2: I saw Charlie Whitman hanging on to Lucifer's wings, Charlie
Speaker 2: Whitman being the Tyra sniper, Yeah, the Texas Tower sniper.
Speaker 2: And so he has this beautiful image of like grace
Speaker 2: and forgiveness as a place that you can like go
Speaker 2: to and arrive at. Whereas Dylan, in like his writings
Speaker 2: about forgiveness and God, like I'm thinking of like God
Speaker 2: to serve somebody, but then you're also thinking about something
Speaker 2: that's completely stupid, like God gave name to all the animals,
Speaker 2: which is one of the dumbest songs I've ever heard
Speaker 2: in my life. Go google that one and see if
Speaker 2: you still have respect for Bob Dylan. Ah. But God
Speaker 2: to Serve somebody has this like sort of Protestant you
Speaker 2: will toil and then you will die and your reward
Speaker 2: will be in the suite hereafter. I don't know. I
Speaker 2: think there's something very interesting about the ways that they
Speaker 2: both kind of conceive of these just Cis white guys
Speaker 2: from the Midwest in California. I both kind of come
Speaker 2: around to this idea of forgiveness in God, but from
Speaker 2: very different angles, one of which has to do with transportation.
Speaker 2: I don't know. You can cut that if that doesn't know.
Speaker 3: I love that.
Speaker 2: But it's an interesting it's an interesting fixation I have
Speaker 2: because he talks about eye for an eye, tooth for
Speaker 2: a tooth in he literally says it, like in the Bible,
Speaker 2: there's eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. It's
Speaker 2: in something on bone machine maybe such a scream anyway,
Speaker 2: so I can talk about going out west coming up
Speaker 2: at the top. But aside from that song ruling and
Speaker 2: there's a great video of him doing it on Arsenio
Speaker 2: where he's like singing through a bullhorn through a microphone
Speaker 2: stand that is like half his height, so he's all
Speaker 2: hunched over and stomping weirdly. It must have been the
Speaker 2: most insane thing that the Dog Pound had ever seenoo who,
Speaker 2: et cetera. But there's a really funny bit of like
Speaker 2: Tom Waite's lyrical connection here he says I'm going out
Speaker 2: west because Tony Franciosa used to date my Ma. Tony
Speaker 2: Franciosa is a is an actor who was at one
Speaker 2: point nominated for a Tony for being in the play
Speaker 2: A hat full of Rain and for a weights complete
Speaker 2: this like me. There's a line on one of the
Speaker 2: B sides called long Way Home that he says, I
Speaker 2: got a hat full of lighting and a hatful of rain.
Speaker 2: So clearly Tom has a thing for the play Hatful
Speaker 2: of Rain and or Tony Franciosa. Anyway, the Olds eighty
Speaker 2: eight in Going Out West, also Going Out West is
Speaker 2: so funny, man, I mean he has that. There's that lineup.
Speaker 2: First of all, I think gonna change my name to
Speaker 2: Hannibal maybe just Rex is one of the greatest couplets
Speaker 2: that you can have lyrically. But then secondarily, you know,
Speaker 2: he says I got an Olds eighty eight and the
Speaker 2: Devil on a leash. I have to assume that is
Speaker 2: a reference to the Oldsmobile eighty eight, which is, of
Speaker 2: course the car model car popular stock racers that the
Speaker 2: very first rock and roll song, Rocket eighty eight, is
Speaker 2: named for, and Waite it suppears to reinforce this in
Speaker 2: an interview with Reflects magazine in nineteen ninety two by saying,
Speaker 2: I figured let's do a rocker. So you see there
Speaker 2: the connections are made between rocking and this old mobile
Speaker 2: and then he continued, we'll just slam it and scream,
Speaker 2: and my wife said, no, this is about those guys
Speaker 2: who come to California from the Midwest with very specific ideas. Mind.
Speaker 2: That's how the line about Tony Francierosa fits. There are
Speaker 2: some people come to California with less than that to
Speaker 2: go on a phone number somebody gave them, you know,
Speaker 2: for a psychic who used to work with Ann Margaret,
Speaker 2: And if I meet him, maybe I can get somewhere.
Speaker 2: Maybe if I play my cards right. That's very funny
Speaker 2: because she's from Illinois. She's from there's the Tom Waits
Speaker 2: song Johnsburg, Illinois is named for her hometown, so she
Speaker 2: a Midwesterner from LA. Was like, no, you have to
Speaker 2: write this song from the perspective of someone from the
Speaker 2: Midwest coming to LA to Tom Waits who's from San
Speaker 2: Diego and idolized La growing up his entire life. And
Speaker 2: then that leads into Whistled Down the Wind. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: think is a fucking devastating song. As you write.
Speaker 1: It's another song that seems to have death in one
Speaker 1: hand and then idealize seemingly California based life in another.
Speaker 1: Lyrics include lines like I grew up here all my life.
Speaker 1: I dream someday I'd go. Or the Blue Eyed Girls
Speaker 1: and the Red Guitars and the Naked Rivers. Flow Weights
Speaker 1: included the dedication for Tom Jans or Yahn's I Don't
Speaker 1: Know a songwriter friend of he, and Brennan's noting in
Speaker 1: the press kit. Jans was from the Central coast of California,
Speaker 1: kind of a Steinbeck up bringing in a small town.
Speaker 1: He wrote Love in Arms, Dobie Gray recorded it, and
Speaker 1: also Elvis did it. He used to play with Mimi Farina,
Speaker 1: who was jum Bias's sister. Sure check me on that, No, s.
Speaker 2: I choose to believe you're correct. Yes, JOm Bias his sister. Yeah,
Speaker 2: she got married in Big Sir. Good for Moon Farina.
Speaker 1: But as you write for a gigantic nerd like you,
Speaker 1: the most interesting lyrical concern in Whistle Down the Wind
Speaker 1: is I will take the marlbin coach and go whistling
Speaker 1: down the wind. Marlbin coach is, according to some linguists,
Speaker 1: a corruption of the phrase marrowbone coach that dates back
Speaker 1: to Victorian England. Marlbones were the shin bones of a
Speaker 1: horse or other hoofed mammal so taking the marrabone marleb
Speaker 1: bone coach, meant to hoof it somewhere, or walk like
Speaker 1: a bone machine, like cock me round like a bone machine.
Speaker 2: Get it? Yes, yes, it's in the name of the album.
Speaker 2: God whistle down the wind just crush kills me. Man.
Speaker 3: I grew up here all of my life. I dream
Speaker 3: someday I'd go with the blue eye purse and the
Speaker 3: Raid guitars.
Speaker 2: That's so good in my head. It kind of turns
Speaker 2: in the waltzing Matilda. They all turned into waltson Untila. Okay,
Speaker 2: I feel better now. I thought that was just making
Speaker 2: or Tom Trowbear's blues and properly titled Yes, yes, yes
Speaker 2: have you ever heard him doud somewhere from the West
Speaker 2: Side Story? Excuse no? That's great.
Speaker 1: Well, despite all of these naked allusions to murder and
Speaker 1: death and dying and killing, maybe the saddest song on
Speaker 1: this record is, on its face, the most jubulant, I
Speaker 1: Don't want to grow Up. When asked if the song
Speaker 1: was inspired by his kids, Waits answered, hey, they don't
Speaker 1: want to grow up, but hey, I don't either, You know, Jesus,
Speaker 1: how the hell did it get here so soon. That's
Speaker 1: a cold shot. I was going to throw the song out.
Speaker 1: I wasn't going to record it, but Kathleen said, oh no,
Speaker 1: you've got to finish that.
Speaker 2: On a record where people are.
Speaker 1: Struggling against arriving at or helping others to death. The
Speaker 1: brady directness as you write is what makes it so poignant.
Speaker 1: Nothing clever or biblical to say about finding out what
Speaker 1: growing up means, just sheer, childlike indignation. That's what made
Speaker 1: it such a natural fit for being covered by the
Speaker 1: Ramones on their last record. Oh that was from audioska
Speaker 1: y Yes, Tom Waits repaid the favor by covering their
Speaker 1: Danny Says and Return of Jackie and Judy, which appear
Speaker 1: on the Orphans box set. In fact, when you google
Speaker 1: I Don't Want to Grow Up plus Ramones, the first
Speaker 1: question in Google's people ask section is what is the
Speaker 1: saddest Romotes song.
Speaker 2: It's worth noting that one of the answers for that
Speaker 2: is pet Cemetery, which is my favorite remote song. I
Speaker 2: don't want to be bad, you know, pet Sem I
Speaker 2: don't won't live my life again. He sounds like Dracula?
Speaker 2: Is it got that? Like he's got that croon to him.
Speaker 2: He's like, as his voice deepened in later years, Oh
Speaker 2: so good. What else can I say about Bone Machine?
Speaker 2: Great record, great record. God, I don't want to grow up?
Speaker 2: Just shatters me. Man, I don't want my hair to
Speaker 2: fall out. I don't want to have the biggest amount.
Speaker 2: I don't want to grow up. Why the hell? Oh God,
Speaker 2: there's that. Man, these I just this is just going
Speaker 2: to turn into me reading all of these lyrics and
Speaker 2: then singing them. Yeah, it's so great. That's such a genius.
Speaker 2: It's so sad because I'm trying to find these lyrics.
Speaker 2: It is so direct and so childish, Like he even says,
Speaker 2: I don't wanna like there were bones, Like I don't
Speaker 2: want to go sniff some glue. I don't want to
Speaker 2: blah blah blah. But then he just sneaks these little,
Speaker 2: these little gut wrench lines in there, Like seems like
Speaker 2: folks turn into things that they'd never want. When I
Speaker 2: see my parents fight, I don't want to grow up.
Speaker 2: They all go out drink it all night. I don't
Speaker 2: want to grow up. I'd rather stay here in my room.
Speaker 2: Oh that feel co written by Keith Richards, takes one
Speaker 2: of the most most literal demonstrations of I forget who
Speaker 2: said this about him, Jordan who said that Keith Richards
Speaker 2: is the only singer who can sing in two keys
Speaker 2: at once. Oh, man, Oh, that's gonna bother me. I
Speaker 2: can't remember. Because his vocals on that feel, there's a
Speaker 2: great So there's a great line in mual variation and
Speaker 2: coming up to the house where he says, uh, you're
Speaker 2: singing lead soprano in a junk man's choir. And I
Speaker 2: believe that line is explicitly about Keith Richards, because you're
Speaker 2: here Keith Richards on this song last feel or that feel,
Speaker 2: and everyone sounds drunker than they've ever been in their life.
Speaker 2: And his reedy voice like sticks out so far. Oh,
Speaker 2: this is what's so stupid about God. This pisses me
Speaker 2: off so much. This is what's so dumb about Google AI.
Speaker 2: There is this quote that says he's the only sing
Speaker 2: I forget what journalists said, but Keith Ridgs is the
Speaker 2: only singer who can sing in two keys at once
Speaker 2: in a reference to his harmony vocals, and Google AI
Speaker 2: says Keith Richards doesn't sing in two keys at once,
Speaker 2: but he does play guitar and open g tunings you
Speaker 2: can create which can create a fuller sound. Oh God,
Speaker 2: roll stupid country. Anyway, Bone Machine didn't much light the
Speaker 2: sales world on fire. It peaked at one seventy one
Speaker 2: of the Billboard two hundred and the highest it crept
Speaker 2: internationally was number fifteen in Norway. Has got to be
Speaker 2: pretty good until you realize that Norway has like two
Speaker 2: hundred people living in it. Only one single, Going Out West,
Speaker 2: was released, and that peaked at one sixty seven in Australia,
Speaker 2: but the album has aged very well. It's since been
Speaker 2: named number forty nine on Pitchfork's Best Albums in the
Speaker 2: nineteen nineties. They placed it a slightly higher than Rolling Stone,
Speaker 2: who placed it at fifty three on their corresponding list
Speaker 2: of the same name. It has also be included on
Speaker 2: the one thousand and one albums You Must Hear Before
Speaker 2: You Die. Tom and Tom Waits's buddy and Jordan's also
Speaker 2: close friend Elvis Costello included it on his list of
Speaker 2: essential albums, highlighting A Little Rain and I Don't Want
Speaker 2: to Grow Up as his favorite. It also, as I
Speaker 2: mentioned at the top of this two hours one weighs
Speaker 2: his first Grammy for Best Alternative Album. So after releasing
Speaker 2: the material from Black Rider in nineteen ninety three, which
Speaker 2: as I mentioned, had been written prior to Bone Machine,
Speaker 2: or at least concurrently, Waits took another long ass break
Speaker 2: from recording. He was in Mystery Men in the year
Speaker 2: two thousand. Also not what oh he is in Mystery Men.
Speaker 2: He's amazing in Mystery Man. He's their wacky inventor guy.
Speaker 2: But I thought that happened before Mule Variations. Mystery Event.
Speaker 2: Did that come out ninteen ninety nine or two thousand? Ooh,
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety nine, So yeah, he returned. He returned to
Speaker 2: the charts in nineteen ninety nine with Mule Variations. The
Speaker 2: same year he returned actually I think he'd been acting
Speaker 2: on and off, but the same year that he graced
Speaker 2: the silver screen in Mystery Men. Great movie. But this
Speaker 2: is what's so funny. Mule Variations also won a Grammy,
Speaker 2: but he won it in the Best Contemporary Folk Catalog
Speaker 2: of recording. So from Best Alternative to Best Contemporary Folk
Speaker 2: in six years. Is that's the Tom Waits promise, Life
Speaker 2: comes at you fast does another crushing record by the way,
Speaker 2: just a great, great record, great lackled that's a deep cut.
Speaker 2: That's uh, Paul Rudd is John Lennon. Yeah, in Walkhart
Speaker 2: for all of you who have sex out there and
Speaker 2: didn't see that movie seventeen times while you're in college.
Speaker 3: Umm. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So Tom Waits's mellow since Bow Machine. I think he's
Speaker 2: been I mean, maybe not lyrically like Blood Money and
Speaker 2: Alice or some incredibly dark albums. And then he was
Speaker 2: in a Robert I think he made a void check
Speaker 2: the the that's Werner Hertzog movie, but it was a play.
Speaker 2: Hang on, give me one second. Shut up, Jordan, Shut up. God,
Speaker 2: I can't hear myself think Jordan hasn't said anything in
Speaker 2: like ten minutes. I could have just done this myself.
Speaker 1: I'm just basking in it. I no, I'm I'm asking Ques.
Speaker 1: I'm the voice of the audience in this episode.
Speaker 2: Just me a lot of this. You had Tom Waits
Speaker 2: dated Bette Midler for a brief time. That actually sort
Speaker 2: of sounds familiar. There are a great song called I
Speaker 2: Never talked to I never talked to don't talk to strangers, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I never talked to strangers. Off foreign affairs, one of
Speaker 2: his most jazzy albums that I don't like, So New
Speaker 2: Variations comes out in nineteen ninety nine, and then Tom
Speaker 2: kind of gets into his current era of being the
Speaker 2: dad who doesn't really like touring or making records. He's
Speaker 2: made Alice, Blood Money, Real Gone, and Bad at Me,
Speaker 2: Bad Is Me. Alice and Blood Money were written around
Speaker 2: the same time. It's split up into two records, and
Speaker 2: Real Gone was two thousand and six and Bad as
Speaker 2: Me it was twenty eleven, So he was at like
Speaker 2: five or six years in between records and we might
Speaker 2: not get another one because he was more interested in
Speaker 2: shooting for five minutes in Licorice Pizza. Then he apparently
Speaker 2: wasn't making a new record because he has an amazing
Speaker 2: cameo in that movie. But I have sadly given up
Speaker 2: hope that I'll ever get to see him live, and
Speaker 2: probably also giving up hope that we'll ever hear another
Speaker 2: full length album. He's seventy five, but he also seems
Speaker 2: two hundred and fifty. It's just great. I mean, I
Speaker 2: you know, his son Casey. Glitter and Doom is a
Speaker 2: great live record that he made from his Europe tour.
Speaker 2: But his son Casey played turntables and drums on real
Speaker 2: gone before like five years before that. He's just like
Speaker 2: a family man. I don't know. I mean, I love him.
Speaker 2: He's my guy. That's sadly, you know, we didn't really
Speaker 2: age into like amber wheat fields of grain, Tom, like
Speaker 2: pastoral Central Valley, California.
Speaker 3: Tom.
Speaker 2: We define the world definitely aged into like the craggy
Speaker 2: vistas and oil soaked valleys of bone Machine, you know,
Speaker 2: with a blood red horizon. That's the world we are
Speaker 2: actually living in. So in many ways he was quite prescient,
Speaker 2: I might say, uh, But in summary, I'd like to
Speaker 2: wrap up with a quote from nineteen ninety two, when
Speaker 2: Tom was interviewed by Vox magazine in October of that
Speaker 2: year of Our Lord. The prompt was what does the
Speaker 2: future hold? And Tom answered bustly, I think about the
Speaker 2: worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play
Speaker 2: peanutckle on your snout. A snake just crawled in your eye.
Speaker 2: I can't wait till the worms are eating me. That's
Speaker 2: a big dream, Well said Tom. Well said, no wonder,
Speaker 2: he's your guy. Thank you, folks. This has been This
Speaker 2: has been a this has been a solo performance. One
Speaker 2: Man's show. TMI on Tom Waite's Bow Machie of One
Speaker 2: Man Show. I'd like to thank my producer Jordan a
Speaker 2: stellar performance my script. Girl. No, I'm just kidding. Thank
Speaker 2: you as always for this is my even though it's
Speaker 2: only ten pages. This is my revolver.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, the asserted works of Tom Waite's or my Titanic,
Speaker 2: which I think we still broke two hours. I know
Speaker 2: you did most of that off the dome. Yeah. Well yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean that's where it's really troubling. I don't know
Speaker 2: I could talk about the variation sex. Uh down, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I just you know. He actually used strove violins to
Speaker 2: record most of the strings on Alice's actually an early
Speaker 2: wave amplifying acoustic instruments where they literally attached little tin
Speaker 2: they look like the gramophone horns onto the bridges of
Speaker 2: violins to like amplify them in old time and music halls.
Speaker 2: He actually went and found those and recorded with them.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I owe a lot out of not sex to liking Tommy.
Speaker 2: It's like the Doomer meme, the meme of the girl
Speaker 2: with like bloodshot circles under eyes and a gun. Like
Speaker 2: I lied, we're not going to hook up. I'm gonna
Speaker 2: make you listen to Heart of Saturday Night, followed by
Speaker 2: rain Dogs, followed by Bone Machine while I expound on
Speaker 2: the relative lyrical progressions and production differences of each. I
Speaker 2: don't have Netflix door clicks, door clicks behind some like
Speaker 2: Terrified Brooklyn twenty something girl, and yet you're the one
Speaker 2: of the two of us is married. I know, I know.
Speaker 2: It really is a cruel shock. I don't think I
Speaker 2: I low Is. I don't know where she sits on Low? Well, yeah,
Speaker 2: did I even make Did I ever play you Tom
Speaker 2: Waits when we were dating? She answered, which of the
Speaker 2: four hundred times are you referring to? So something took?
Speaker 2: We really should have.
Speaker 1: I feel like our listeners would be able to get
Speaker 1: to know you a lot better if we had low
Speaker 1: as a cameo every now and then.
Speaker 2: Don't give her a hot mic. Please don't take the
Speaker 2: last lingering shred of my dignity anyway, This has been
Speaker 2: too much information.
Speaker 1: Higel at night, I'm holding the microphone like Freddie Mercury, Right.
Speaker 3: You actually are?
Speaker 2: I love it? I love it, I love it. Join
Speaker 2: me next week when God? What else can I talk about?
Speaker 2: Off the dome? Like Tom Waits jazz?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: The studio recordings of Tom Dowd. Oh wow, engineer extraordinary
Speaker 2: at at Atlantic, come on out of places. Well we
Speaker 2: move technique. We might do like a rolling stone in
Speaker 2: honor of that movie. I didn't think was that great. No, no,
Speaker 2: shut up for a second. One are a fascinate Any
Speaker 2: things I think about Tom doubt is how he would
Speaker 2: go to these extraordinary lengths to get an accurate Charles
Speaker 2: minguz bas sound. And then Mingus would just pick up
Speaker 2: his bass while he's playing and walk around the room
Speaker 2: or just like move it around and yell you hear
Speaker 2: all these like blown out bait. It's like these Rudy
Speaker 2: van Gelder's over there like filating himself in Englewood Cliffs,
Speaker 2: trying to get like an acoustically pure environment, and Charles
Speaker 2: Mingus is like banging his upright bass against a mic
Speaker 2: that Tom Dowd recorded. And you know what, those Tomdowd
Speaker 2: records sound fantastic. This is where you board feed me
Speaker 2: down now. Earlier we mentioned how to get a great
Speaker 2: Chicago harp sound, and the way you want to do
Speaker 2: that is you get a sure green bullet mic. You've
Speaker 2: talked about that rich earlier in this episode yes, no,
Speaker 2: I say, okay, Well, what I'd like to get into
Speaker 2: now is Peter Ivers, who wrote the song in Heaven
Speaker 2: from a racer Head. Now, Ivers, I don't know if
Speaker 2: you knew this. There's not a lot of people that
Speaker 2: know this. I first was a harmonica virtuoso. In like
Speaker 2: two years, that guy discovered and mastered Blues Heart to
Speaker 2: the Point Too Much Information was a production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2: The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog.
Speaker 2: The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show
Speaker 2: was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtog and Alex Heigel,
Speaker 2: with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
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