by Alex Harvey (Music 781.66 Waits)
Tom Waits is known primarily as a piano playing singer/songwriter, and his debut album came out in 1973, the same year that a couple of other well-known American singer-songwriters released their first albums (Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel). After starting with a more jazz-inflected style, he went on to invent his own unique brand of Americana in the 1980s, and has continued to release albums in his own unique, quirky style ever since. As a particularly funny fellow known for his unique stage banter and hilarious interviews, it will come as no surprise that he has been the subject of several music books over the years. Mr. Waits has been in a kind of semi-retirement since about 2011, when his last album “Bad As Me” was released, though he has been involved with reissues of his back catalog to vinyl in the last few years. However, there is a great new book called Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles by Alex Harvey that focuses on the earliest decade of his career, and you can borrow it from the Polley Music Library.
For most folks in the late Gen-X or early millennial contingent, the Tom Waits albums we generally recognize start around “Swordfishtrombones” onward, with classics like “Rain Dogs,” “Bone Machine,” and “Mule Variations.” His music before that, and the unique scene that nurtured it, remain somewhat of a mystery to many fans, other than knowing that Waits was inspired by jazz and poets like Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski. Alex Harvey’s new book Song Noir perfectly fills this gap, starting with Tom’s debut album “Closing Time” in 1973 and ending at “Swordfishtrombones” in 1983.
Tom Waits cultivated a different kind of vibe in those first 10 years, which Harvey explores on two fronts in his book. In his introductory chapter, he discusses Waits’ interest in examining the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles in the 1970s, which he did both in song and through living at the legendary Tropicana Motel for most of the decade. And he explores how this became a kind of stylistic trap for Waits: “This book charts the way Waits’ LA life became more of a trap than a means of escape; how his stark, melancholy musical portraits of Americana, with its diners and drunks, strippers and shysters, started to feel repetitive and mannered.” The transformation happens around the pivotal Swordfishtrombones album, the final record he recorded in LA, and we’ll get to see how it became a springboard to a new kind of music.
In his younger years, Waits was a notoriously difficult interview subject, often making up answers to serious or even simple questions for his own amusement, and in more recent years, he rarely consents to interviews at all. Based on the references in the back of Song Noir, it appears that Harvey wasn’t able to interview Waits for this book, but instead quotes him from other interviews throughout his career. I’m sure sources were compared and vetted before they reached the final edit of this book, but I would hate to be the person trying to verify Tom Waits’ biography from his tall tales! Nonetheless, in comparing the general information in Song Noir with another book we have in Polley, “Tom Waits on Tom Waits,” edited by Paul Maher Jr, it seems like he has the basic facts correct. In that latter book, Maher selected 50 interviews throughout Waits’ career that seem most representative and sincere, capturing a few of those rare moments when Tom got comfortable enough with a journalist to stretch out and get into the deeper aspects of his writing and himself. So I think that we can trust the details of Waits’ early life found in Song Noir, several of which seem to have had an impact on his career, such as his father walking out on his family when he was 9 years old, causing him to feel like he had to become the “old man” of the house at a young age, or his working at Napoleone’s Pizza House in National City, CA, as a teen, where he starting jotting down fragments of conversations he heard from the customers. And he was a fan of writers Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski from a young age, both of whom had tendencies to draw from the struggles of down & out folks in their writing.
Harvey gets through Waits’ childhood and the early portion of his career fairly quickly in the book, settling down to focus more on the period after his first album came out, and he had settled into the Tropicana Motel when he wasn’t on tour. To briefly summarize the major gist of the narrative here, Harvey follows along with Waits’ career record by record, occasionally pausing to highlight particular songs or lyric fragments and how they tied into his chosen lifestyle as a sort of character in a Bukowski novel himself. Several of his lesser-known friends are mentioned, such as Chuck E. Weiss, who was a musician himself that put out several fun albums in a style not wildly removed from the Tom Waits brand of Americana. Despite the sort of degenerate lifestyle he was leading, however, Waits proved to be a disciplined songwriter throughout his LA period: he released nine albums in the ten years covered in the book. And as we get further into the book, we indeed see him start to become uncomfortable with the way he had chosen to live versus what he was actually doing with his life. He mentioned in the liner notes to the 1976 album “Small Change,” for example, that he lived at the Tropicana, which resulted in an even greater influx of people trying to contact him, either by phone or in person. Some of these fans behaved more like stalkers, and he grew progressively unhappier with staying in the motel.
Although Waits recorded the 1983 album “Swordfishtrombones” in LA, in reality he had already broken from his Tropicana routine several years before that. In 1979, he briefly moved into a house in LA with his girlfriend at the time, Rickie Lee Jones (whose autobiography, “Last Chance Texaco,” is also available at the library). By 1980, he had moved to New York City, though he came back to LA to work on the soundtrack for the film “One for the Heart.” And it was during this period that he met Kathleen Brennan, his future spouse, whose immediate and profound influence on his music is apparent throughout “Swordfishtrombones.” From that album forward, Brennan worked with Waits both on his career in general and on songs in particular, and together they created a whole new style for his music, inclusive of all kinds of American roots music that had come before, but with a kind of surreal and cinematic twist. Lots of world music instruments and junk percussion became a big part of his sound as well, which some have even considered a curious kind of world music.
Song Noir is ultimately an interesting book that tracks the truly unique mid-career transformation of Tom Waits. While there have been lots of books about Waits in general, this is the only one I’m aware of that focuses directly on the beginning of his career up to and through the beginning of his transformation.
(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Lowside of the Road by Barney Hoskyns or Tom Waits on Tom Waits edited by Paul Maher, Jr.)
( publisher’s official Song Noir web site )
Recommended
by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
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