“The song was like a fortune cookie”: The track Tom Waits couldn’t stop writing
The other day, I was moved to peer out the window at some commotion unfurling on the street below. The curbside racket was revealed to be two drunken homeless men fighting over a trolley. As I feasted on the cacophony of growls, grunts, clanging aluminium, and aggression hopelessly unmatched by enfeebled strength, I thought to myself one thing, ‘I wish Tom Waits would release some new music’.
Waits is the poet in the gutter, the songsmith with the drunken piano, and the artist who never wants to grow up. He’s lived his life in fits and spats. He’s walked every alley that the urban dispossessed have ever ambled. He’s perched in the nookiest of crannies and poked about in the cranniest of nooks in cities all over the world. And he’s done it all with a hat so jaunty it seems to defy gravity and a cigarette with a magnetic attraction to his bottom lip.
He wanders around the outskirts of town and reports on the lives that he sees. There is an undoubted kinship between Tom Waits’ music and Edward Hopper’s paintings. They are the great, expressionist voyeurs of American life, lurking in the shadowy alleyways and purveying what poetry they can pry from the jungle of civility. Making the best pizzas in San Diego might not seem like a pivotal step on the way to this artistic position, but Waits was able to observe far more than the optimal conditions for dough during his days at Napoleone’s in National City, California.
Waits was only 14 when he took the job, and he would play Ray Charles on the jukebox and gaze out of the pizzeria’s window into the unspooling city night. By the time he got behind a drunken piano whose keys wheezed out cigarette smoke, the songs he would craft were vignettes that he spied from the pizzeria’s condensation-misted windows.
Tales like Tom Frost calling long distance to ‘Martha’ from a phone box in the street. This beautiful song is one of the finest ever written. It’s a love song stumbling on a broken heel, flagging a cab back to memory lane for the disenfranchised. It’s an anthem that delves into the bittersweet truth that life moves on. And that very notion – life moving on – would ensure that Waits himself got hung up on one song.
‘Frank’s Wild Years’ was the title track to Waits’ tenth studio album. It established the core concept of the album which aimed to reflect moments in life. However, Waits found himself unable to stop thinking about Frank, eventually turning the song into a musical. And he didn’t even stop at that, either. “The song was like a fortune cookie, after I wrote it I thought what happened to this guy,” he told Gavin Martin.
“Everybody knows guys like that, people you haven’t seen in a long time, what happens to these people?”
Tom Waits
In a manner akin to a Kurt Vonnegut novel, Waits’ own fictional creation began to consume his own thoughts. He worried about him and wondered when they would next catch up. In many ways, this seemed to him to be a reflection of life. “Everybody knows guys like that, people you haven’t seen in a long time, what happens to these people? What happened to John Chrisswicky? Oh Jesus, John’s second wife left him and he went to work in a slaughterhouse for a while,” he comically continued.
Adding: “Then he was in a rendering unit, of course his dad was always in the wine business – that didn’t interest John, I hear he ended up as a mercenary soldier. People go through these permutations in different stages of their life, perceived by someone else it can look strange. I imagined Frank along those lines. Y’see my folks split up when I was kid and … hey, look, let me give you $100 and I’ll lie down on the couch over there, you take notes and see if we can’t get to the bottom of this.”
Waits’ strange Spanish-teaching father, “a tough one, always an outsider”, had, indeed, left in the night when he was only ten. Like father like son, Waits was also an outsider, but this moment drove him further afield. He was a self-professed “amateur juvenile delinquent” and a “rebel against the rebels”. These were the people that Waits looked out to, and he started to find that there were more drifters than you might ever think—or maybe we’re just all drifters to somebody—somebody who is not filled in on all the details, which is pretty much everybody, if you’re lucky.
