The Rolling Stones song that transformed Tom Waits as a performer: “I’ve got to learn how to do that”
Tom Waits is a lot of everything all at once. He’s complex Michelin Star cuisine served deep fried and on the bone. He’s high poetry and lowly pulp. He’s a street performer but the streets in question don’t belong to standard postcodes. He’s absorbed every ounce of the culture he’s surrounded himself with. So, it comes with quite the doff of a cap when he sees something new in your work and hungers to assimilate it into his own.
That’s an exotic feather that The Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger can tuck into his cap. Waits has long been associated with the British blues band owing to his friendship and frequent collaborations with Keith Richards. However, it was the guitarist’s friend, foe and frontman that Waits drew inspiration from when it came to their classic 1972 album Exile on Main Street. It’s an album he hails as a classic and cites as his favourite among the Stones’ lauded discography.
However, one element, in particular, sticks out to him. “‘I Just Want To See His Face’,” Waits began, singling out the record’s 13th track, “That song had a big impact on me, particularly learning how to sing in that high falsetto, the way Jagger does. When he sings like a girl, I go crazy. I said, ‘I’ve got to learn how to do that’.” The fizz of Jagger’s falsetto typifies the visceral appeal of the Stones. It is perhaps unrefined, but as Waits has said before, he likes his music with the “rinds and the seeds and pulp left in”.
Achieving this sound meant that Waist had to make a healthy sacrifice. It was the same one that turned Bob Dylan into a sweet crooner for his Nashville Skyline record: quitting smoking. “That’s when it started getting easier to do,” Waits told HearMusic back in 1999. Thereafter, the ‘Martha’ singer began incorporating this electrifying howl into his work, channelling the zing of Jagger at his best. He had always been singular already, now he decided that even singularity should be mixed up for the sake of originality with a mid-performance squeal.
“‘Shore Leave’ has that, ‘All Stripped Down’, ‘Temptation’,” Waits continues. “Nobody does it like Mick Jagger; nobody does it like Prince.” However, Josh Homme, more recently, might argue that he has mastered the manly falsetto. All the same, Waits sees Jagger’s performance as just one highlight of many on Exile on Main Street.
Waits poetically adds: “But this is just a tree of life. This record is the watering hole. Keith Richards plays his ass off. This has the Checkerboard Lounge all over it.” So, it proudly sits among the likes of I’m Your Man by Leonard Cohen, Startime by James Brown (ironically, the man who blew Jagger off the stage on the TAMI show to such an extent that the Stones man knew he would have to revolutionise his game), and Captain Beefheart’s eternally unfathomable Trout Mask Replica among Waits’ favourite records.
You can watch Waits performing ‘Little Red Lobster’ alongside The Rolling Stones below.
