“Most American automobile horns beep in the key of F. Did you know that?
It’s true.”
Singer-songwriter Tom Waits has long been known as one of our great raconteurs. His comic timing is nigh unto perfect. And that voice. The one that was described in Rolling Stone as sounding “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.” Tom Waits telling stories? I’m so there. Tom Waits is a truly great bullshit artist! The best.
I love Tom Waits, so how the hell did I not know he did a VH1 Storytellers? Well he did, back in 1999, and it’s as good as you would expect it to be. Better even. It’s a damned shame this has never come out on DVD (or what about Netflix streaming oh Viacom digital overlords?). The quality here is so-so, it was obviously taped off air onto a VHS tape, but I’m not complaining.
At Archive.org, some kind soul has posted the entire unedited set, more stories, more songs, but it’s audio only.
A special highlight, for me, comes at 25:20 when Waits growls “This is about the neighbor we all become…” when he introduces “What’s He Building?” from his then current album, 1999’s Mule Variations.
Bonus clip: Waits sings “The Piano Has Been Drinking” on Fernwood2Night in 1977:
As a committed modern troubadour, Tom Waits has always used a lot of locations in his songwriting, but I wasn’t aware of just how many until I saw this map that some brilliant, wonderful person has painstakingly curated. Supposedly, it contains every location Tom Waits has ever sang (or narrated) about. As a Tom Waits completest who will always defend him, even when he’s blatantly imitating Captain Beefheart, I have been wracking my brain trying to find something they missed, but to no avail… yet.
However, as a Hoosier, I checked immediately to see if they got all the Indiana locations. Not only is my state accurately documented, they kept the misspelling from the album book. The song “First Kiss,” contains the line, “And when she got good and drunk, she would sing about Elkheart, Indiana, where the wind is strong, and folks mind their own business.” (It’s actually spelled “Elkhart.”)
Let’s take it home with, “I Wish I was in New Orleans,” live from Paris, 1979, shall we?
FYI, that’s Cassandra Peterson AKA “Elvira, Mistress of the Dark” in the background with the pasties
I’ve been on a Rickie Lee Jones bender for the past week—I don’t want to can’t listen to anything else at the moment—and I was poking around on YouTube for clips of her (not even her official YouTube channel has that much good stuff, sadly. And what’s up with there being not even a single decent version of the “Chuck E’s in Love” video on YouTube?). Expect a Rickie Lee Jones megapost here sometime soon…
I was also looking around for information about why she and Tom Waits split up. There is a lot of conflicting information about their iconic soulmate boho pairing on the Internet (surprise, surprise) and the version of the story I’d always heard, and thought was true (that she revealed her junk habit to him and he left for New York the next day and never spoke to her ever again) turned out to be apocryphal. Whereas Jones has reluctantly told her side of the story—she must get damned tired of being asked about a former boyfriend from over 30 years ago—Waits has been more tight-lipped about what went down between them.
This 1979 interview with Waits, taped at the Shryock Auditorium in Carbondale, Illinois, sheds some light on their relationship—among other topics, like Waits’ famous lasagna (“talked about all over town”), how you should never play pool with a guy named “Fats” and the exhaustion of incessant touring—which was then ongoing. He alludes to something without actually saying it, but the message is pretty clear when he’s talking about how she’s doing. (For those of you reading this who are too young to remember, Jones had a reputation in the early part of her career as the Amy Winehouse of her day, an image she struggled to shake for a long time after it had ceased to be in any way accurate.)
There’s a great moment when the interviewer, Phil Ranstrom asks “I was reading an article from Rickie Lee Jones, she was saying you have become that person…you became that character you talk about in your songs through living it, through having to live it as an artist.”
Waits: “She’s right! It’s a dangerous business, y’know?…It’s kind of like a photographer going to a wedding and ending up married…You’re bound to get a little on ya, if you go poking your nose down the wrong street. As far as being a character in my stories, in my songs, I remain in all the stories, but at the same time I think the creative process is like gumbo, it’s a combination of imagination, experience and memories.”
Ranstrom also asks Waits “Who is one historical figure you would have liked to be?” Waits thinks about this for a moment, then eventually comes up with “Castro maybe?” He then adds STP racing CEO Andy Granatelli (who died last week at the age of 90) to that short list.
Note: The longer version of this video can be seen at the Media Burn website (it autoplays, so I can’t embed it here). The part where Waits speaks about Jones isn’t in the YouTube clip below, but starts at approximately 9:16 during the Media Burn clip.
In 1978 or 1979 (we’ll get to that in a minute), Tom Waits was touring Europe. He had a concert in Vienna the day after a show in Amsterdam. He showed up in Vienna and was greeted by two young men named Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, employees of ORF (Österreichischer Rundfunk, i.e. Austrian television) with the proposal of shooting an interview while he was in town. Waits countered with a better idea.
As Barney Hoskyns tells it in Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits:
Waits and band flew to Holland for a short European tour that took in Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Vienna, London, Dublin, Brussels, and Paris. … In Vienna on 19 April, Waits was filmed by Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher for a short documentary that incorporated live performances of “Sweet Little Bullet,” “Christmas Card,” and a loose-limbed take on “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” “He came in from Amsterdam saying he hadn’t slept all night, but he agreed on the spot to let us film him,” says Rossacher. “He said he didn’t want to do a proper interview but instead he wanted to tell stories.”
The film’s credit at the very end itself says quite clearly that it dates from 1978, but everyone else seems to think it was really 1979. For one thing, the video ends with a rendition of “On the Nickel,” which first appeared on 1980’s Heartattack and Vine.
The concert in the footage was at the Konzerthaus, specifically the Mozartsaal, which seats 704. The European tour was in support of 1978’s Blue Valentine, and in the footage Waits plays “A Sweet Little Bullet From A Pretty Blue Gun” and “Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis” off of that album. We get three songs from Waits’ 1976 album Small Change (“Jitterbug Boy,” “Pasties and a G-String (At the Two O’Clock Club),” and “I Can’t Wait to Get Off Work (And See My Baby on Montgomery Avenue)”). Waits’ rendition of “Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis” folds in a few bars of “Goin’ Out of My Head” when he gets to the Little Anthony and the Imperials line and ends with “Silent Night”—this was his usual practice in the late 1970s.
At the end of the video Waits does a slow dance with what Hoskyns calls “a Thai prostitute” in a joint called the Moulin Rouge on Walfischgasse in the city’s 1st district. The Moulin Rouge is still there, but that area is completely different today. Walfischgasse intersects with Kärntner Strasse, which is kind of like Times Square/42nd Street in more ways than one. In the 1970s it was a red-light district, but today it is one of the most commercialized avenues in Vienna. I love the footage in the middle where Waits tells the story of the saxophonist who can’t manage the bridge to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”—few things are more “Vienna” than a little table crowded with beer glasses and stately little cups of coffee.
Tom Waits, wedding singer, on America 2-Night in 1978. Waits croons “Better Off Without A Wife” after a snarkily funny intro by Barth Gimbel (Martin Mull):
“I think there’s no better way to really make a tribute to these people than through music. And fortunately we have a very special guest with us… Mr. Tom Waits! And when he plays and sings, it’s almost like music.”
Waits had appeared the previous year on Fernwood Tonight before the show moved to Alta Coma, California (“the unfinished furniture capital of the world”) and changed its name.
While Waits’ appearance on Fernwood Tonight from 1976 has been viewable on Youtube for awhile, this America 2-Night clip is a bit of a rarity.
“I get a little choked up on occasions like this. Actually the closest I have ever been to a marriage is… I was the best man at a friend of mine’s divorce.”
I have no idea what the source is behind this clipping or quote. Who is “Jack”? Why is Tom Waits wearing “Jack’s” pants and not his own? Is he referring to Jack Kerouac? Why doesn’t Tom Waits want Rickie’s bare feets all over “Jack’s” pants?
Stunning new video directed by Matt Mahurin for Tom Waits’ “Hell Broke Luce” from the album Bad As Me.
Big fucking ditches in the middle of the road
You pay a hundred dollars just for fillin’ in the hole
Listen to the general every goddamn word
How many ways can you polish up a turd”
With Waits’ death-rattle vocals, Keith Richards’ snarling guitar and Mahurin’s post-apocalyptic visuals, this is one dark grungy slab of somethin’ or other. Magritte breaking real bad.
Big Time filmed at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater and the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles, is like entering a sideshow tent in Tom Waits’s brain. Directed by Chris Blum and written by Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan, Big Time makes use of minimal sets and simple disguises to create a wildly evocative musical that draws from elements of vaudeville and burlesque. A truly unique vision from the always inventive Mr. Waits.
When the film was released in 1988, the press notes (grappling for some reference point) described it as a mix of…
[...] avant-garde composer Harry Partch, Howlin’ Wolf, Frank Sinatra, Astor Piazzolla, Irish tenor John McCormack, Kurt Weill, Louis Prima, Mexican norteno bands and Vegas lounge singers.
Tom Waits: organ, vocals
Michael Blair: percussion, bongos, drums
Ralph Carney: clarinet, horn, sax
Greg Cohen: bass, horn
Richard Hayward: drums
Marc Ribot: guitar
Long out of print on VHS (used copies are fetching a couple hundred bucks) and never released on DVD, it’s a treat to find Big Time in its entirety on YouTube. Dig it while you can.
Fernwood 2Night was a talk show satire starring Martin Mull and Fred Willard. Preceding Alan Partridge and Larry Sanders by quite some years, Fernwood 2Night came on the air in 1977 when I was eleven years old and I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. Where I lived, it was on a station called Channel 53, a low rent UHF channel in Pittsburgh that was like a junkyard of cheaply licensed television. Like a real life version of the fictional cheapo cable channel in SCTV, Channel 53 showed an insane low-budget mix of Marx Brothers, WC Fields, Aussie women in prison soaps, Monty Python, Flash Gordon serials, The Avengers, Hammer horror, Sgt. Bilko, My Favorite Martian, Jack Benny, Tom Baker-era Doctor Who shows, freakazoid televangelist, Dr. Gene Scott, Dave Allen at Large, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman five days a week. It was TV heaven for some, telly hell for others. Me, I loved it.
That’s where Fernwood 2Night comes in. Fernwood 2Night was the summer replacement series so that Mary Hartman’s cast and crew could take a much-needed break from pumping out five weekly episodes. It was my favorite TV show and I would throw a FIT if my parents wanted me to go someplace when it was on. Like Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, it was on five nights a week, too, and I probably saw ALL of them.
Martin Mull was brilliant as Barth Gimble, the twin brother of Garth Gimble, a caddish wife-beater character Mull portrayed on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman who had come to a gruesome end (he was impaled on a Christmas tree!). It is implied that Barth has legal issues (which may or may not involve an underage girl in Miami) so after his brother’s death, he’s stuck working in the podunk town of Fernwood, where he feels smugly superior to everyone, especially his announcer/side-kick Jerry Hubbard. played by Fred Willard.
In a scene-stealing role that defined his entire career playing the clueless white guy—is there ANYONE more Caucasian that Fred Willard?—Willard portrays what is quite possibly the dumbest, most dense character in all of television history. I’ve always thought that Willard was a comedic genius—the obtuse angles of his observations, so off the cuff and spontaneous, so REAL—and he was never funnier than he is in this role. The core cast was rounded out by their dour band leader, “Happy” Kyne” (Frank De Vol) and his “Mirthmakers.”
The Fernwood 2Night writers overlapped somewhat with the Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman crew, but by and large (I think) Harry Shearer seemed to be the head writer, with other material provided by Mull and Willard and future rightwing shill Ben Stein. Alan Thicke—who must’ve been a hip, hip guy before Growing Pains, he even wrote for Richard Pryor—was the producer and the whole enchilada was, of course, executive produced by the great Norman Lear. Guest appearances included Dabney Coleman, Kenneth Mars, Jim Varney and even Tom Waits
In the second season—which was renamed America 2Night—the show “moved” out of small town Fernwood to the fictional town of Alta Coma, California, “the unfinished furniture capital of the world” (mainly so the writers could stop having to come up with contrivances for why a particular celebrity would happen to be in Fernwood, Ohio in the first place). The America 2Night series saw the likes of Gary Coleman, Vincent Price, Robin Williams, Peter Frampton, Steven Allen, Paul Lynde, Milton Berle, Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston and many others making guest appearances. America 2Night was shown on the United Broadcasting System, or UBS, “the network that puts U before the BS.”
Other than sporadic showings on TV Land in the early 90s, the 130 episodes of Fernwood 2Night and America 2Night have seldom been seen since they originally aired. It’s a comedy goldmine that’s remained untapped for a long time—as brilliant as the original SNL if you ask me. Back in my Disinformation days I tried to license the show for DVD release but even Norman Lear’s company had no idea who owned it (turns out it was Sony who still haven’t done anything with them). A couple of years ago, I was able to download the entire series of Fernwood 2Night from a rare TV torrent tracker and I was in absolute TV heaven again.
Dr. Emanuel Kazinsky explains the differences between the races:
A spanking demonstration by Marshall Petty:
After the jump, more Fernwood 2Night and America 2Night clips…
Keith Richards and Marc Ribot provide suitably down and dirty guitar riffs for this tune by Tom Waits that sounds eerily like Captain Beefheart. It’s been obvious from the get-go that Waits owes a big debt to Beefheart but this enters the realm of mystical channeling. And I like it.
Here’s Waits writing about Trout Mask Replica:
The roughest diamond in the mine, his musical inventions are made of bone and mud. Enter the strange matrix of his mind and lose yours. This is indispensable for the serious listener. An expedition into the centre of the earth, this is the high jump record that’ll never be beat, it’s a merlot reduction sauce. He takes da bait. Dante doing the buck and wing at a Skip James suku jump. Drink once and thirst no more.
“Satisfied” by Tom Waits from the new album Bad As Me Directed by Jesse Dylan.
For those of our readers lucky enough to live here in Los Angles (try to get that earlier post out of your mind, if possible) tonight at the Hammer Museum as part of their Flux series, Dangeorus Minds pal Syd Garon will debut his new film, co-directed with Sam Spiegal: N.A.S.A. The Spirit of Apollo..
Syd writes:
I’ve been working on a documentary about the band N.A.S.A. and the making of their first record for a few years now. We took behind the scenes footage from recording sessions and mixed it in with animation on top of the picture as well as excerpts from the animated music videos. The animation was a collaboration between fine artists like Marcel Dzama, The Date Farmers, Sage Vaughn, Shepard Fairy and director/animators such as Logan, 3 Legged Leg, Florescent Hill as well as myself. The music is based around unusual collaborations, David Byrne and Chuck D., Tom Waits and Kool Keith, Method Man and E-40, Old Dirty Bastard and Karen O.
The show starts Tuesday Aug 2nd, 8 pm sharp at The Hammer Museum in L.A. The will be live custom screen printed t-shirts, food, drinks, N.A.S.A. will play a DJ set after the show, and a bunch of other stuff. The screening is free, open to the public and there is plenty of cheap parking. RSVP suggested.
An exclusive excerpt from the upcoming film N.A.S.A. The Spirit of Apollo. Sam records Kool Keith in his studio while Tom Waits literally phones it in. The animation here is incredible.
Below, N.A.S.A. “Money” (feat. David Byrne, Chuck D, Ras Congo, Seu Jorge, & Z-Trip). Art by Shepard Fairey. Directors: Syd Garon & Paul Griswold
