‘Eyeball Kid’: the classic Tom Waits song inspired by Nicolas Cage’s love of comics
In the world of Hollywood, Nicolas Cage has given us many unforgettable creations, but surprisingly, we also have him to thank for inspiring a classic Tom Waits song. Two iconic forces coming together, indeed. Cage and Waits share a long history, dating back to 1983 when they both appeared in Rumble Fish, a crime drama directed by Cage’s uncle, Francis Ford Coppola. While the film flopped, it sparked a friendship between the two, and unsurprisingly, they hit it off like a house on fire.
As many people who’ve spent time with Nicolas Cage can attest, give him an inch, and he will talk to you about his lifelong obsession with comics. Waits was clearly one of the people who gave him that inch and somehow caught the bug himself, at least enough to stumble across the little-known Dark Horse comics hero Eyeball Kid. Waits was inspired. Perhaps not by the story itself, which concerns the title character stealing the Greek God Zeus’ magic thunderbolt, but by the way the story was told, with the character delivering it to the reader as a monologue.
Clearly, Waits saw something of himself in the character and, in true comic book storytelling fashion, rebooted him. This time, The Eyeball Kid was a freakshow carnival attraction “Born without a body, not even a brow”. Over a slightly disturbing backdrop of a chain-gang call-and-response and dissonant Marimba hook, Waits goes full carnival barker. Howling about how “the first time I saw him was a Saigon jail / Cost me 27 dollars just to get his bail” and hauntingly securing his services by telling him to “cry right here on the dotted line”.
The question here is whether Waits sees himself as the impresario or the freakshow. Sure, the song is from the barker’s perspective, and he’s the one making a buck out of showing off the Kid. However, the lyrics explicitly state that the child was born on “the seventh of December, 1949”. Three guesses when Tom Waits was born. In the song, the Kid is also somewhat complicit in his own exploitation, demanding that the impresario “book me into Carnegie Hall”. The character struck a nerve with Waits, as The Eyeball Kid appears seven years prior in the lyrics to Bone Machine’s ‘Such A Scream’ as well.
However, Waits himself may have intended the message slightly broader than his own experience. In an interview with Exclaim in 1999, he stated, “Most of us, in some form or another, are fascinated with anything that makes us different. Most of us from time to time have felt that way and can relate on a certain level, whether it’s internal or external”. He takes his own experiences in the music industry and tells a story about the universal need to make an example of something that sets us apart from everyone else.
Perhaps the song’s heart is Waits’ seeing himself as both the kid and the narrator. While showbusiness is a heartless industry that will make a buck out of something different and then cast it aside, it’s also not entirely to blame. There’s a very human desire to showcase ourselves, and oftentimes, the line between showcasing and exploiting is a very thin one indeed.
After a life in showbiz like Waits’, where his real success came from morphing from a barroom crooner into music’s David Lynch, he knows more than most just how compelling weirdness can be. In the eyes of the song, perhaps the only way to exist in the industry is to be both exploiter and exploited.
