Red’s Recovery Room: The dive bar that inspired a Tom Waits song
“Gee, thanks a lot! You finally stick me in a song, and I’m sitting in a bar in my bra. And you’re there with the dog tied to the stool,” said Tom Waits’ wife, Kathleen Brennan, about the musician’s first song to name her – a track also inspired by a dive bar where they were regulars.
Brennan and Waits are a musical love story for the ages. The pair met on the set of Paradise Alley in 1978 when the musician was preparing to make his acting debut, and Brennan was an up-and-coming script writer. Both are multi-hyphenate creatives, combining the world of music, writing, acting and production in one creative and romantic partnership.
By the early 1980s, Brennan had empowered Waits to begin producing his own albums. Since Swordfishtrombones in 1983, the couple have worked together on Waits’ records, regularly sharing production or writing credits. It’s a match made in heaven as the musician called his partner “a remarkable collaborator”, adding that she is “bold, inventive and fearless”.
Waits added: “That’s who you wanna go in the woods with, right? Somebody who finishes your sentences for you.”
But despite Brennan’s vital role in Waits’ music, she wasn’t properly present in his lyrics until 1999. In the midst of the madness of the Mule Variations, with its experimental production and wild sounds, there is what Waits described as “a nice family portrait”.
“Kathleen was sittin’ down in Little Red’s Recovery Room,” sings Waits, “In her criminal underwear bra.
I was naked to the waist with my fierce black hound”. As one of the few songs written by Waits alone, in ‘Filipino Box Spring Hog’, the singer shouts out his wife by name. But he also name-drops another specific, the location of Little Red’s Recovery Room. Set in Sonoma County, the area of California that the Waits family call home, Little Red’s Recovery Room was a dive bar in the truest sense of the word.
Opening in 1976, the bar was just off Highway 116. “We welcomed everyone who walked through that door. They became our friends and regulars,” one of the old owners, Maureen Lehan, said of the spot. Waits and Brennan were two of those regulars, clearly loving the bar enough to immortalise it in song.
A place for cheap drinks and playing pool, the dive bar was a Sonoma staple. It’s likely to have played a key role in the Waits family’s years in the county, standing as a real centre point for the area’s alternative community or anyone looking for a cheerful watering hole.
Sadly, the bar closed in 2009 as the owners lost the lease as investors pushed them out of the area. They had hoped to find a new location for the musical landmark, but there hasn’t been any notice of a reopening since.
While the song isn’t exactly a sweet little ode to his wife and their favourite bar, it’s as close as Tom Waits ever really gets. Clearly a place of importance to the couple and a whole era of Sonoma County residents, Little Red’s Recovery Room sounds like exactly the place you want to get a beer and drown your sorrows.
