“He’s like a vulture”: the musician Tom Waits called “all intuition”
Some of the greatest rock and roll tunes of all time didn’t need to have a ton of thought put into them. While singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan talk about turning a song over and over in his head until he got the exact right words for every verse, some artists have the kind of music built into them that only needs to be channelled whenever they pick up their instruments. Tom Waits falls somewhere between the two, but he knows to stand back when watching one of the naturals in action.
But when looking at Waits’s back catalogue, some of the best songs of his career sound like they were thrown together on a whim. As someone who was known as one of the biggest singer-songwriters of his generation, records like Rain Dogs or Mule Variations were perfect ways for him to make the most eclectic music possible, almost as if someone like Bob Dylan had somehow developed Captain Beefheart’s style of oddball energy.
Once someone starts peeling back the layers of what he does, though, they start to realise some of the magic behind every one of his records. Yes, a song like ‘What’s He Building’ might sound like it was thrown together in an hour with a few different filters on Waits’s voice, but listening to the way that he crafts every single word coming out of his mouth, people start to realise that he made sure to get everything right to achieve that specific texture whenever he was making one of his classics.
One need only look at the Eagles cover of ‘Ol’ 55’. The tune is played out the same way that Waits laid it out on his first album, but most of the personality has been sucked dry out of it as soon as Don Henley’s voice comes soaring over everything. For someone like Waits, personality is half the battle when crafting a song, and there aren’t many who manage to leave that kind of musical footprint as Keith Richards can.
“He circles it, and then he goes in and takes the eyes out.”
tom waits
From the minute that he plays his trademark Telecaster licks, Richards is instantly recognisable as the pure swagger behind The Rolling Stones. When working with Waits, though, Keef started to pull out a lot of those old-school rock and roll licks and somehow make them sound modern again, even when fading into the background of some of his tunes.
Compared to Waits’s schematic when writing his tunes, he always admired Richards’s ability to dominate whenever he strapped on his guitar, saying, “He’s all intuition. I mostly play drums, he plays guitar. He stands out in the middle of the room and does those Chuck Berry splits, y’know, and leans over and turns it up on ten and just ‘grungg’! I’m just recently starting to collaborate in writing and find it to be really thrilling. And Keith is great ’cause he’s like a vulture, he circles it, and then he goes in and takes the eyes out. It was great.”
That’s not all that dissimilar from what he was doing in The Stones’ prime, either. While Mick Jagger was the one always coming in with the killing blow whenever he stood behind the microphone, Richards seemed to know where the song was going before anyone else did, normally guiding everyone through the right changes when making something like ‘Monkey Man’.
It might not be that easy to read someone when they are in that zone, but even if Waits could get clinical about his songs, he knew there was a different temperature in the room whenever working with Richards. Anyone can try to keep everything moving through a song, but sometimes, it’s better to simply let the song play you rather than being on top of the music.
