About book Wild Years: The Music And Myth Of Tom Waits (2006)
"I'll tell you all my secrets, but I lie about my past." from "Tango Till You're Sore" I don't know what the Tom Waits biography of my dreams would be. If I could sing back to the little birds who tell people things they need to know... How do you change the wires that hook your ears up to your eyes and loop up to the noodly parts that trick you into thinking (no, into believing) that the filth isn't there to dirty up the clean? Alphabet soup spells rhymes out of this world of Dr. Seuss and Sesame Street. There's a nose dive bar there. Everyone knows your name. I'm pretty good at not noticing the messes I've made around myself. I'm not at all sure that this is something to brag about. It somehow seems like not such a bad thing that Waits could give into some things and then say "That's enough of that" when he needed to do it. If anyone could do it it would be him. It seems to me the secret of everything must be carried on his moonglow. Go ahead and lie down in the dark for a while. It's something about noticing the dust that covers everything for everyone else. I wish I had on the ends of my fingertips the Tom Waits quote about how he can't live in his imagination without sanity and he can't live in the real world without the imagination. That's what the Tom Waits biography of my dreams would be. It would be like a manual to live like a person who can make life the necessary imagination part. I would want to do that. I want to be like Tom Waits. He could turn any life into something that's worth something other than trying not to see dirt. Maybe even mine. How do you live like you're in a Tom Waits song? Like what the next words are going to be howled or croaked out. A mumble in the grumble of what connects the gut. In the dive bar on Sesame Street they are singing 99 bottles of something something connected to the hip bone funny song. That's the Tom Waits book of my dreams.In 1976, Waits told Newsweek, "There's a common loneliness that just sprawls from coast to coast. It's like a common disjointed identity crisis. It's the dark, warm, narcotic American night." This, more than anything else, is what intoxicates Tom Waits. Not alcohol, not drugs, not fame, not fortune... but maybe love. He's inspired and challenged by the endless possibilities, the desperation, the hurried compromises made in order to survive and maybe even grab a little happiness.Is there guilt involved in writing a biography about an intensely private man? I got the feeling that author of "Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits" had his hands tied behind his back. Maybe too much rock star journalist hemming and rock star biographer hawing in the beginning that HIS book wasn't going to pry. Blah blah wouldn't it be good if it was all true. What would be good is if you could live like the imagination parts were true. There would be meaning to life it THAT were true. Why assume that the reader is assuming the worst of your intentions (it's probably in fear that the man himself would be ticked off)? If you care about where Tom Waits was born or shit like that (he couldn't keep it from coming out where he went to high school. That one I've already forgotten. Tom Petty went to the same high school as me. His yearbook photo was torn out long before I attended). I don't care about that kind of stuff. If you ever meet me I will never think to ask you what you do for a living or other such facebook stuff. I'm not all that interested in a collection of the myths either. It's kind of funny the stories changing about how he was born with a beard in a taxi cab. Jacobs must've listened to years worth of footage of interviews and concert performances to get some of those storytelling moments. You know what I like about it? That the stories aren't told to pull some man from Oz behind the curtain switcheroo with the truth. Waits isn't accusing folks like me of wanting to pry into his life. We get the benefit of that imagination tight rope walking thing. I doubt he knows what he is going to say before he says it. It reminded me of the colorful shit my grandfather used to tell us. It wasn't insulting because he didn't pretend we were stupid or anything for wanting that stuff to be true. What more do you need to know about someone than that they can write songs like those? Tom Waits is no blind man. So the myths are to keep him from being settled into one thing, he once said (personally, in my real life I make up shit when this one guy insists on repeatedly asking facebook style questions I hate answering to begin with. I'm not single! He/she lives in Niagra Falls and you wouldn't know them). If you don't want to get caught in yourself, in your own songs... Well, you just don't give a fuck, right? Just don't assume that you know what is in other people's heads or that they think they know what is in yours. I kind of want to know how you don't give a fuck. If you listen to the rock star journalists and the rock star biographers Waits is trying to be different people from Bukowski to Captain Beefheart. That's like saying that life experiences are a math equation and you'll get the answer if you put one together with four and five. You can't. If I think about it he's being other people or parts of himself. Like a way to get to know someone else by being in their shoes. That's my take on it, anyway. I suck at math. It's impossible to trap someone. People change. Just because you tell people stuff doesn't mean they know everything about you. (My favorite kind of person is someone who wouldn't have some asshole take on it like you were trying to hurt them or you imposed on them with some part of yourself. Like not pretending that people aren't alone in the world.) I liked a lot what Jacobs wrote about Waits giving dignity to the downtrodden bar types he wrote about, even though he could never truly be one of them himself. No pedestal, no stool. Sit next to someone. I was kind of bored about the wild years. The infamous squalid hotel for rock stars the Tropicana. I wouldn't mind if I never heard about the Tropicana again (it was torn down oh darn). Old girlfriend Rickie Lee Jones and her little runaway death wish on high heels like her own tight rope of save me from myself and I don't need no one's help. Jay S. Jacobs has a kind of quaint way of describing the background of this stuff. Did you know that there was a scene around William S. Burroughs and Kerouac? It might be unfair of me to find it unnecessary to lay out the history of the Steppenwolf theatre company. It might be that I'm a total loser for already knowing all about that. I couldn't help it. I was bored. It's funny how much of that stuff I already knew and I didn't try to know all that much about Waits until pretty recently (oh yeah, I like memorizing music trivia to stop me from thinking negative shit about myself. I know a lot about The Beatles, for example). I am fairly certain that I already read Joe Mantegna's quote about how humble and cool Tom Waits is from when they filmed Queen's Logic (I like that Jacobs pointed out that this makes Waits one degree in the Kevin Bacon game. I've used Waits many times in the Kevin Bacon game). I've seen a lot of the films Waits was in. I kinda wonder now about how he was type cast as a drunk so often. Is that how the filmmakers saw him when they went to the drawing board for casting? When you think of a drunk the slogan goes. That would be sad if that's what people thought of when they thought about Waits. The persona of a drunk (of anyone). I mean, people (well, most people) are asleep a large portion of their life, in one way or another. If they choose to do that, well, isn't the intent different? Anyone can party hard. What about everything else? That's why the scene stuff bores me. I don't care that other rock stars followed him around, or where Janis Joplin overdosed. There was other stuff going on. The head and soul spaces that made music. What were they TRYING to do? Tom Waits was trying to reach out to people he saw as trying to make a life. Anyway, I think I was aware of Waits as an actor before I ever heard any of his music. Waits as an actor fits. Wanting to wear the skin of another, right? The way he described doing it is that he just did it, like some natural thing. How do you do that? Just get close to someone else, be them, like it doesn't even matter than you can do it?My favorite parts of the book were about the making of the record. I loved it when recording a song was some magical thing that just happened and no one wanted to go home when it was over. I love that Waits never gave a shit that none of his albums made a lot of money. What I could have done without is the emphasis on that they never made much money. It must be some sort of rock journalist thing to talk about money or current influence as the relevance for even writing about your subject. Count von Count from Sesame Street couldn't add up how little I care about Norah Jones being a fan of Waits. I have some idea that music finds you when you most need it. That's why Waits has a fanbase despite not making it on charts. Oh well.Speaking of rock journalists, the interview with Mikal Gilmore from Rolling Stone was quoted a lot. That was pretty cool for me because I read Gilmore's memoir Shot in the Heart last year (about his family and his brother, executed murderer Gary Gilmore). It didn't really sink in for me before the to-do about his writing for ROLLING STONE. That he got out by running away and not looking back did, that the only way to stay above was to stay apart. Only, he did end up looking back, and staying apart was still being alone. I was happy that he got to interview Tom Waits. I think he would get that feeling of being close by not singing as if you're away from the world. I don't usually think about the interviewer that much. When Morrissey is interviewed the journalist tries too hard to insert themselves into the theme. "Look at me! I'm special! I'M the fan you'll reach out to just a little bit more." So far I've not seen any of that bull shit with Tom Waits. I guess there wouldn't be a Tom Waits book of my dreams. "Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters" I have high hopes for. It's pretty much a collection of interviews. Something I find comforting is reading Tom Waits interviews. I might read that one next. "Lowside of the road: A Life of Tom Waits" by Barney Hoskyns sounds depressing. Hoskyns wrote it against the wishes of Waits. Waits himself forbade any of his friends from participating in the project. I read in a professional review of the book that Hoskyns included emails from these people in the back of the book. According to the review, there was bitterness from the old drinking buddies that Waits drifted away from (drifted away like a life raft from a sinking ship, some could say). There was resentment from the same people towards Waits' wife Kathleen Brennan as if she were a Yoko Ono if she really did break up The Beatles (she didn't). That kinda left a bad feeling with me and I have no desire to read that particular book about Waits. I don't want to know if anyone would wish anything more than a rich life for Waits. Nothing but the life he would make for himself. A self made man of myth and legend. Maybe an uncle riding on tall tales and poetry. One thing that did make me sad was the story of Bone Howes, Waits one-time manager. Howes was left behind after Waits married Brennan and left behind everyone who knew him in the "wild years". I don't know... He didn't stop drinking then. It feels kind of funny for me to think about this because I don't think I would have done any differently than Waits did. I just finished watching again the '90s tv show My So-Called Life. You know when Angela stops talking to her life-long friend Sharon because she's in a changing state of her life? She can't even say what it is just that she needs to be away from her to stop being the old her and transform into the new Angela? Waits and Howe remind me of this. Howe wasn't bitter about it, just sad. He doesn't really try to push things with Waits. I was happy when a long time later they can be friends again. Maybe he needed his friend. I don't know. I felt weird about it like there's another side of what you can need from another person. I get what I need from the music of Tom Waits. He gives me some place to go to in my mind. I won't get stuck. How could he ever get stuck in his own songs? That couldn't happen. They gotta have lives of their own. As far as his personal life goes, was there ever any more declaration of love than his declaration of love in those love songs about Brennan? I know that love can happen when I listen to a Tom Waits love song. When he says she is the person you'd want to go into the woods with? I guess the Tom Waits book of my dreams would tell you how you could go into the woods with yourself and come back out. How did he just say he'd have enough and that was that? I did like reading this book. The best parts would feel like they were making those records then and there. It just got damned boring reading about the legal battles with the Cohens. It's a story as old as the music business. They own the rights to his early stuff. Not as bad as Michael Jackson buying up The Beatles, at least. Waits probably spends a lot of hair pulling time over that one. I still envy him getting to be him. He has all of that in his head. He gets to hear and see all of that.
It is easy to write about a man such as Tom Waits and I don't feel like Jay S. Jacobs went about it in a way that grabs the attention of the readers. Some parts drag on and he spends an unnecessarily long time on describing the people involved in his life and not the man himself. However, upon saying this he also gives the reader an excellent timeline of Waits' life and extracts some very in-depth details from his childhood and early days which are very intriguing. Overall the book had the potential to be much better, yet it is still worth reading.
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i first heard tom waits at a little club in boston my big sis took me to when i was 15 or 16 (1973? 74?). waits was opening for folkie danny o'keefe and we had no idea who the hell this weirdo on stage was. i was too stupid to appreciate him then...
—Brenda
I once heard a music journalist say that Tom Waits came from nowhere. He went on to explain that if you look at any artist you can usually see who they took their lead from. He then said that with Tom Waits there is only him, it is like he perfected his act in the desert then came to town. I didn't exactly agree with him but I thought that he voiced something that all Tom Waits fans instinctively feel. Whilst I would say that there were people before him there is no-one like him now.I was nervous about reading this as I really like the music of Tom Waits and you know what it is like when your heroes are exposed to the light of inspection. But I was warmed to soon discover that Jay S Jacobs is a big fan too. This makes him somewhat biased when it comes to Tom Waits. Although this is update to an older biography it still read to me as if it was written yesterday. Being an "unauthorised" biography means that Tom Waits had no part it is creation or content therefore it is all secondhand reporting. Having said that it is nonetheless comprehensive.One of the biggest elements in this is Tom Waits mythologising himself via stories, anecdotes and sayings that are attributed to him. You get the feeling that Tom Waits has created "Tom Waits" rather skillfully by merging the traits of the characters he sings about with details of his own life. Living in cheap hotels, drinking, hanging out with weird people, saying strange things in that raspy voice.For example, on Letterman, Letterman reels off a list of films Waits had been in up to that point, but can't remember one. When he asks Tom which movie it was, Waits replies "Ben Hur". Waits talked about his folks who are teachers and about his children. Letterman asked how old his kids were, and Waits says "My boy is older than I am." Letterman asked Waits which place he likes living better - New York or LA. Waits sort of ducked the question, but said that NYC is like a great ship sinking in the ocean, and the ocean's on fire. Waits says that the cover photo of Raindogs was taken in Hamburg and he told the names of the two people in the picture. One was supposedly Rosicrucia.There is lots here to please any fan. This book charts his career via his discography from whoa to go. It chronicles his life and times without destroying any of the mystique along the way.I found this picture somewhere and I think it just kinda sums it all up
—Dead John Williams
A rollicking good read if you're a Waits fan. Unlike the more recent biography 'The Many Lives Of Tom Wait' by Patrick Humphries, Jacobs' tome tends as much towards the mythology that Waits has created around his professional life, ie. the seedy barfly piano-man turned psychedelic farmer, as it does towards his real life. (He is, in reality, neither a complete dipsomaniac nor teetotaller, but rather somewhere in that sane place in-between.)More importantly, while sensation-seeking former NME hacks like Humphries are painting as much of his 'hidden' life and childhood as somehow sinister, if only through inference, Jacobs is talking to fellow musicians and producers, such as Waits long-time collaborator Bones Howes, to give the reader true insight into the creative process both on stage and in the recording studio.Granted I couldn't finish Humphries' competing book so perhaps my opinion should be tempered with that knowledge (it was just too depressing and dull.) At the same time I sailed through Jacobs' book, so perhaps that says it all. Sure, even the latest edition lacks info on the 'Orphans' trilogy, but I still say it's the pick of the bunch. Like me you could flick to that last chapter on Orphans in Humphries book at the library after reading Jacobs' tome...
—Benito
