“I’m going to kill you”: Tom Waits’ troubling encounter with a stalker
One of the biggest prices you’ll have to pay for your increasing level of fame is the fact that it becomes increasingly hard to remain private or anonymous the more your public profile increases. Plenty of musicians have to deal with unpleasant and obsessive behaviour from fans, and it has resulted in tragedy on some occasions. John Lennon was assassinated by a fan in New York City, and Björk nearly met the same fate after a stalker tried mailing an explosive to her, but while Tom Waits has had a cult following throughout his career, he’s managed to avoid a situation like this – just about.
It’s nice every once in a while to receive fan mail from your audience, and to get this sort of validation for your work is undoubtedly one of the most positive interactions you can have with your supporters. However, not all fan mail is welcome all of the time, and Waits is more than aware of this. In a 1979 interview with NME, coming a few months after the release of his spectacular Blue Valentine record, he explained that some of the mail he was getting around this time was peculiar to say the least.
“I get a lot of letters that say things like, ‘Dear Tom, why are you ruining your voice?’,” he revealed to the magazine. “I get a lot of stuff like that; really personal letters from people I’ve never met. Total strangers. I find that very strange.” He continued, questioning the sanity of some of his fans. “There are a lot of people who write to me who are obvious maniacs. A lot of girls who write to me are out of their minds. They are nuts, and I do mean bona fide lunatics.”
While this might not appear to have had a detrimental effect on Waits and his well-being, what wasn’t pleasant for him to have to deal with were the occasional death threats. Some people might be able to shrug off this type of behaviour as fans either playing a cruel prank or the writings of a “bona fide lunatic” as he puts it, but in other instances, these can be the sort of thing that would freak you out and not wish to leave the house. He may have been an unusual songwriter who wove dark subject matter into his lyrics, but there was nothing that was truly abhorrent or controversial about his work.
This makes it curious to think that anyone would ever have a reason to threaten Waits in this way. He also wasn’t on the same plane of popularity as someone like Lennon, so for him to get caught up in a bizarre stalker situation that could’ve cost him his life was a concern.
In his NME interview, Waits continued to explain how he’s dealt with some sketchy situations in the past, and revealed one incident that had him shaken. “A girl who had just escaped from a mental institution in Illinois hitchhiked all the way to The Tropicana, dressed entirely in black,” he recounted. “She was sat on my porch one time when I got home at about four in the morning, totally wasted. I almost had a stroke when I saw her. And then she’d call me up when I was on the road and just say, ‘I’m going to kill you’, and then put the phone down.”
This sort of encounter is sure to terrify the life out of any recipient, although Waits eventually realised that it may have been his own carelessness that led him to this situation. Many people in Waits’ situation would choose to adopt pseudonyms for staying in hotels to avoid fans mobbing them, but he reckons that his stalker found out the addresses despite him only ever telling his manager and his father where he was staying. “Now I change my name when I check in at a hotel; I register as Hercules Bellville,” Waits joked. “And now I suppose I’m going to have to change that.”
