The Loneliness of the Longdistance Nighthawk

This interview was published in Hot Press in April 1979, shortly after Tom Waits' first appearance in Dublin.

Tom Waits came to Dublin a cult figure. His albums have been bought, but in small-to-medium quantities. He’s been given good reviews and had an album voted among the Hot Press critics’ top twenty of ‘78. He’s also received more radio play here than in many other places, primarily through Dave Fanning’s show on Big D radio. But by no means could he be considered a major name. And yet with little promotion other than a half-page ad in this paper and a bunch of the regular mentions this kind of international visitor almost inevitably gets, he sold-out the Olympia Theatre. And he played a brilliant gig to the packed house. It was possibly the musical event of the year, before an audience which spanned every kind of musical barrier and pigeon hole. Tom Waits came to Dublin a cult figure. He left a legend.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *
On stage shades of Marcel Marceau. Louis Armstrong. A black bell-boy in a hotel, in a ‘50s movie. A waiter in an Italian restaurant. The simple guy that pumps the petrol at the service station down the road.
Shades of someone very close to me who can’t keep still when he stands and scratches his head with a cigarette in his hand and screws up his face when he’s trying to get something important out but he can’t. Someone who looks grubby and unkempt and unshaven and smokes like a trooper and curses louder.
Shades of Loudon Wainwright in his controlled delivery and his sense of timing and his demented ability to make people laugh. And then to hit them with something that should, if only people saw it clearly enough, inspire sheer terror beyond the sound of fading chuckles.
Tom Waits dominates the stage with his admirably humble presence, fills it physically with his mime and movement and then vacates the spotlight quietly to allow his sax-player or guitarist to come through and play a rivetting solo.
His voice is gravelly and hoarse and laden down with the weight of almost too much emotion but the songs carry it and it carries the songs in the kind of symbiotic perfection which defies analysis. It’s an experience. It just is.
And then there’s the words teeming with images and associations and resonances that shoot like an arrow straight for the subconscious and tug at the heartstrings and even make you cry bitter-sweet tears if you’re in the mood. He’s got the charisma to keep you transfixed and the creative muscle to make every second of it worth your while.
His gig is an unforgettable experience.

* * * * * * * * * * * *
I’m late for our rendezvous in Jury’s Hotel the following day but Tom is sitting there, patiently waiting, in the foyer. I guess it must be the tape recorder acting as identification – whatever, he signals to me like a lot of self-important rock operatives would feel beneath their superstarred dignity.
I say hello, sit down, set the tape rolling and throw out a few opening questions. Obvious ones about Ireland and local artistic giants. What does one of contemporary music’s most literary writers read during his spare time?
“I don’t read as much as I used to because I travel all the time.”
Waits’ voice is barely audible, a hoarse drawl that makes him sound more like a 70-year-old black blues artist than a Californian, born in the late 1940s.
“All I read now is the sports page. I like Dylan Thomas. He’s Welsh. How far are we from Wales?,” he croaks. It hardly registers on the tape.
Waits’ affinity for Kerouac and the beat generation is well known. But what about Joyce and Flann O’Brien?
“You’d never run into ‘em in a bar,” he quips, before continuing, agitatedly. “I’d feel more comfortable if we could sit down and have a beer somewhere. I feel a little awkward here.”
All the while he’s been scratching his head, a mannerism familiar from the gig the night before, and looking around more than a little suspiciously. It’s obvious he isn’t relaxed – besides which I can foresee gruesome problems hearing his verbals on tape against the backdrop of the din of the traffic that’s whistling through Jury’s lobby. The bar is a little, though not much, quieter. But Waits obviously feels better with a pint of plain in front of him and gradually opens up as the interview progresses. He is still on the taciturn side of being garrulous.

* * * * * * * * * * * *
Synopsised accounts of people’s lives are hopelessly inadequate and yet they can be useful and even revealing. I’m probably thinking something along those lines when I ask Waits what he did when he left school.
“I was working in an Italian restaurant,” he growls, helpfully. “I got a job when I was 14 and I worked till I was 19 in the same place. I used to work there till about four or five in the morning.”
Which is presumably how and where his predilection for night-hawking first germinated.
“When I got out of school I had a whole string of jobs. I did gas attendant in a service station for a while…” He also, if legend is to be respected, drove a cab, washed dishes, did a stint behind a bar, worked in a hardware store and drove an ice-cream truck.
“I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” he drawls before emphasising, “all I knew was what I didn’t want to do.”
What was that?
“I didn’t want to end up working in an Italian restaurant for the rest of my life.”
His humour is droll, never cruel. But he’s got an instinct for the one-liner that at times makes more straightforward communication difficult. It may be frustrating but it’s worth it.
So what was it that encouraged him to take to the stage?
“Well it was either that or work in air-conditioning and refrigeration or hotel management.”
Was it that concrete?
“Naw, nothing’s ever that concrete. I just wanted to work nights basically. I didn’t think I’d ever get this far.”
Waits’ points of reference are utterly distinct from those of his contemporaries. A few of the names are familiar but I can’t claim to know much about any of his mentors. They’ve got precious little – any of them – to do with what they call rock ‘n’ roll. But if Waits’ work is in some respect – in any respect – a product of their influence, then any or all of them have got to be worth checking out.
“Well, I listened to Jerome Kern and Johnny Mercer, Herb Allen, George Gershwin and Hoagy Carmichael, Mose Allison… I knew nothing about writing songs but I understood the creative process.”

* * * * * * * * * * * *
In the light of his subsequent achievements, that would have to be laughed out of court as a vast understatement. But with that degree of self-belief at least to work off, Tom went on the road as a musician, playing the clubs, seven years ago at the age of 22. (“I’m 29 years old,” he confides in me, as if he were saying 92).
Two years later he moved into the hotel which has remained his home ever since. It’s a setting which provides much of the inspiration for his low-life vignettes, his songs of poverty, exploitation and crime. Street sleaze.
I mention for example, ‘29 Dollars And An Alligator Purse’, a cautionary tale of how a young girl fresh into L.A. from Chicago is taken for every cent she’s got by a hood who passes himself off as a friend. I wonder is the song the product of direct personal experience?
“The hotel I live at, there’s a lot of actors. There’s a lot of hookers and a lot of lechers. At night, around the hotel, you see a lot of bloodsuckers. The water is full of sharks. You know what I mean?”
But he stays there because he prefers to live in a constant state of self-imposed poverty, to have the groundwork in experience for the kind of songs he likes to write.
“I’ve lived there for about five years”. His speech has a strange tone of resignation, even acute tiredness, about it. “I thought about movin’ out and getting my own place, y’know. It gets a little hectic sometimes.”
It seems an odd kind of set-up to begin with. Why live in a hotel?
“I used to drink close by to the hotel. And it used to be a long drive home and I’d always drive by the hotel. So I thought to myself, ‘If I lived there, I’d always be home’. Know what I mean? So I decided to move in.”
I imagine it must be pretty expensive. Waits chuckles, like he knows something I don’t.
“It’s not. It’s pretty inexpensive really. There’s a lobby and a bar. My friends are pretty close by. And there’s a restaurant right there.”

* * * * * * * * * * * *
The things that make life bearable. So Tom Waits hangs on in there, remaining close to the people he’s chosen to know well, whose lives, in all their squalour, he’ll bear witness to.
In somewhat the same way he hangs-on in, an anachronism in the music business. Waits is well aware of his position.
“I’ve been on the road now for seven years. My record albums don’t sell very well. Marcel Marceau gets more airplay than me.” (Think about it).
And yet he has a commitment to going forward, broadening his horizons and continually breaking new ground artistically: “The most recent albums are usually the ones that I do things from – ‘cos the stuff’s still new to me. I try to make things different every gig, I play every night, in sometimes 50 or 60 cities. I might be on the road for two to three months. In order to keep it fresh for me, I have to do something different every night.
“The real rewards from this are the advances I make as a writer. I’m trying to challenge myself. Every new song, I want to make some kind of stride.”
What’s surprising is that Asylum, his record company, haven’t ditched him for lack of profits. He doesn’t seem particularly enamoured of the organisation as it stands, despite the fact that it provides him with an umbrella.
“It’s become a huge corporate merchandising cluster fuck-up,” he concludes, “I don’t even know who’s on it anymore. Jerry Lee Lewis is on the label! But everything’s so samey.”
Just how he’ll challenge himself with his next album remains uncertain. And how he’ll challenge us.
“I’m going home in May to make another record. I’ve no idea what it’s going to be like. I’ll figure that out sometime in May.”
The experience of working in a studio isn’t something he looks forward to particularly.
“I go in there and I get out. Five days – after that I’m a wreck. If I was in the studio for too long, I’d… I like to give myself a deadline. A lot of groups come into the studio and they spend more money on narcotics than they do on tape. Then they go to the Bahamas and come back… record a little more…”
And generally take maximum advantage of their ridiculously privileged position. In contrast Waits does most of his recording live in a two-track studio – far away from the synthetics of the kind of 24-track studios in which most modern recording takes place.
“Most of my work is done like that – that way the musicians get very close. You seem to get more of the spirit that way.”
What’s amazing is that they do. Waits’ albums are the most significant testament to the redundancy of modern technology I know. Few others would believe such monumental albums could be consummated with the facility of just two tracks. Yet how many rock albums, with overdub heaped on overdub in the process of their making, will stand the test of time as well as Foreign Affairs or Blue Valentine.? I don’t like to think about it too much. And yet Waits’ work is, overall, somber and melancholy in mood and tone. His perspective is often tragic, sometimes devastatingly so. But when I put it to him he seems almost taken aback – certainly surprised.
“I don’t know,” he responds. “I do have a kind of grim attitude towards most things, I guess. If I saw a couple of people coming out of a church having just got married and getting into a car, I would imagine they’d go around the corner and be hit by a truck.”
Then almost by way of protest he adds, “But I can look on the bright side occasionally.”
And then to the heart of the matter: “It’s just that the dream always seems so much sweeter than the taste.”
You can say that again, Tom.

* * * * * * * * * * * *
Tom Waits says it himself. It’s especially crucial, given the kind of subjects he’s dealing with and the kind of people involved. And yet it’s so simple. Just this. “I try to give the people I write about dignity.” People like Small Change. That’s a name Waits invented for a black kid he saw lying in a pool of blood outside a drugstore across the road from the Chelsea Hotel in New York. ‘Cos Small Change got rained on with his own .38. Presumably he’d tried to pull a job. Waits treats his fate with compassionate understanding, as he does that of the main man in ‘Romeo Is Bleeding’, off Blue Valentine. Waits writes about losers but gives them a stature in our imagination beyond their ultimate defeat. They die in the story but they live on in our dreams.
I ask about ‘Kentucky Ave’.
“That was in California. In L.A. That was just the name of the street. It’s a dead end street. But it’s a song about growing up.”
The song is brilliantly constructed, the relationship between two youngsters being evoked through their conversation, in the lyrics. When it suddenly becomes clear that one of them is in a wheel-chair, the whole thing takes on an aura of almost unbearable sadness and poignancy. But it’s entirely without either apology or condescension.

* * * * * * * * * * * *
One of the things which Karl Tsigdinos, who’s sitting in on the interview, observes, is the extent to which Waits has adopted black mannerisms. Not just his singing voice – which echoes Louis Armstrong’s – but his hand movements, his facial gestures, his general gait. Everything reeks of that studied exaggeration that makes black people’s gestures unique. Waits doesn’t demur.
“They have an expression in the States,” he elaborates happily, “what they call a white spade. I went to black schools.”
So what about his infamous voice?
“It’s about to die,” he jokes. And then, rapidfire: “I used to be able to sing like Andy Williams but I can’t anymore.
“He used to be able to sing like me,” he adds.
I mention Louis Armstrong.
“Yeah, I like Louis Armstrong. You know why they used to call him Satchmo? They used to call him ‘Satchel Mouth’ ‘cos he had a mouth like a satchel. It got shortened to Satchmo.”
But something worries me. With references like that floating around, I’m afraid some people might be inclined to consign Waits to that part of their brain inhabited by ‘50s hangovers and nostalgia freaks. Which wouldn’t do at all, given the scope and breadth of his vision. I lay it on him. Again he sounds peeved.
“I feel very contemporary,” he pleads. “The ‘50s weren’t that attractive to me. In the States there was Joe McCarthy, the Korean War, Chuck Berry and parents who wouldn’t let you cut out. It was a very lonesome and confusing and twisted period in American culture.”
Which begs the question – does he feel things are any better now?
“Yeah, I feel comfortable. Skinny ties are back! I predicted that. I’ve been predicting skinny ties and shades for a long time. I’m glad to see it’s finally catching on.”
But seriously Tom, seeing as you brought up McCarthy, and so on. Do you worry about politics?
“I’m usually more worried about getting enough sleep, y’know? Nowadays, doing as much travelling as I do, I hardly get time to listen to the radio or read the papers. If I get some time off, I try to get twelve hours sleep, with some twelve-year-old scotch and a twelve-year-old girl…”
Which brings up Tom’s attitude to the... ah… opposite sex. He won’t be drawn on the subject of sexual politics, rather commenting wryly: “I like girls myself… I think America is going through some kind of gender crisis.”

* * * * * * * * * * * *
Later on, we hit on the loneliness of the long-distance nighthawk. Tom Waits confesses that he’s had a few girlfriends but that the touring fucks up his social life. None of them lasted. It comes as a shock when he says it, so much so that I have to do a double-take. But it’s there on the tape.
“I’m thinking at the moment of trying to find myself a wife.” And he adds, with his tongue barely in his cheek, “I’m not getting any younger. Know what I mean?”
That’s when I realise that it’s nearly as lonely at the bottom as it is at the top.
Talk to you again, Tom Waits.