“Things going on all the time”: Tom Waits’ strange practice of recording in the car
In 2004, Tom Waits released his 15th album, Real Gone, recorded in an abandoned schoolhouse in the Locke Historic District in California.
Waits had long established an intimacy across all of his records, but Real Gone was widely received as his most raw collection of songs yet, and his surroundings served to shape them in an inexplicable way, with Waits telling Rock’s Backpages, “That seemed to help the music somehow, I don’t know how.”
At the time, Waits did not have a proper studio where he was living, so the schoolhouse became a custom-made second home. There, he recorded with the likes of guitarist Marc Ribot and Primus’ Les Claypool on bass, turning homemade demos into moving songs that were explicitly political, blending an eccentric mix of influences across Latin and African rhythms, funk, hip-hop, blues and more.
Waits even tried his hand at beatboxing, inspired by his then-new interest in hip-hop. He described his blending of the genre with the blues as “the most logical extension… the growing edge of the blues and following in the same tradition and carrying the same rebellious nature,” he told the San Diego Union Tribune in 2004. In turn, he was continuing his tradition of pushing his musicality into unexpected realms.
“But most beatboxing, I guess it was purely economical (at first),” Waits explained. “It’s cheaper than a drummer; you put a mic up to your mouth and overload it in a Pignose (miniature amplifier), and you can make those sounds in front of a bank on the sidewalk. What I do with it is very crude (compared to) the people who do it, the pros. I’m not a pro. I’m just trying. I’m more like a rhythm guitar.”
When first conceptualising Real Gone, Waits had to compromise with his new surroundings and, where most artists would have a designated “creative space” to write and record, he took a different route.
“The quietest place around here is in the car, so I write in the car a lot,” Waits revealed. “Because here at home, I don’t necessarily dominate the various turntables around here. When you have kids, there are things going on all the time.” Armed with a tape recorder, Waits’ car became a makeshift studio, for a time, designating time to bring his songs to life.
Waits also resorted to any other rare, quiet spaces he could find in his home – including his bathroom. Explaining the process of working on songs that came about in unconventional ways, he detailed how his trust in his assembled bandmates meant that he knew the songs could come to fruition, as they were meant to.
“A lot of times (making this album), I’d play something to a guy, and he’d say, ‘I can’t put anything on there. I’m not touching that,’” he explained, “Because I came in with all these mouth rhythms, beatboxing, that I recorded in my bathroom at home. And they said, ‘That’s cool, don’t touch it.’ You’re asking for their opinion. They’re all medical professionals, so I want their opinions. I care more about their opinions than the public’s, because they’re in the kitchen with me.”
However strange the image may be of Waits sitting in his car, tape recorder in hand, singing the words to what would become Real Gone, the end result produced some of the most poignant songs of his discography.
