The two songs that changed Tom Waits’ life: “That’s something”
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.
In fact, it was dishing out dough that proved to be the formative artistic experience of his life. Waits took up the job when he was only 14 years old. He was certainly very young, but it kept him off the streets, which was all the more pressing since his strange Spanish-teaching father, “a tough one, always an outsider”, had 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”.
The locally renowned restaurant owner, Sal Crivello, kept Waits on the straight and narrow—and taught him about life. But it would be another fixture in Napoleone’s that imparted something even more impactful: a Jukebox brimming with old standards, the pick of which were two tracks by Ray Charles.
“I thought I was gonna be a cook,” Waits would later recall in Telegraph Magazine. “That’s about as far as I could see. But what also happened was that I was mystified by the jukebox, and the physics of how you get into the wire and come out of the jukebox. That’s where that came from. I’d listen to Ray Charles singing ‘Crying Time’ and ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You,’ and I’d think, goddamn, that’s something.”
These songs seemed to poeticise the world around him—and yet they remained true to it. Charles didn’t embellish the world; he just vivified it—he provided the opposite of escapism, turning up the saturation of reality, enlivening the zip and fizz of what we sceptics might like to call ‘ambience’. While Charles played on, Waits observed life as though he was studying a Hopper painting.
By the time he got behind a pissed-up piano whose keys wheezed out cigarette smoke, the songs he would creak out 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 we have a couple of epics from Charles to thank for it.
“I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years,” Waits would say. “I worked on Saturday nights, and I would take my break, and I’d sit by the jukebox, and I’d play my Ray Charles.” From this cosy position, the old crooner’s ways would seep into Waits’ impressionable mind.
He’d later tell Melody Maker about these romanticised days and how they weaved their way into these songs, recalling, “I worked in National City in a crummy restaurant for a long time, full of soldiers most every night, tattoo parlour next door, country-and-western diner-dance type of place down the street, Chinese restaurant, Chinese laundry, pool hall all real close, walking distance. So, I called up some of my memories of that time. Sit out on the sidewalk, wearing the apron, paper hat, watching the traffic go by, you know?”
He was an outsider on this street as he always has been in music, finding comfort in the soul of things, tapping his little toes to the heartbeat of Saturday night.
