When Tom Waits’ music was stolen and held to ransom
Life is forever imitating art. Or is it the other way around? Either way, when it comes to the back alleys, drunken bums, and oddities of urban existence that so often weave their colourful way into the back catalogue of Tom Waits, there is an Edward Hopper-esque notion that he is both a voyeur of this world and an active character within it.
This interface of the artist and inspiration particularly came to the fore when Tom Waits fell victim to a story that would ordinarily be fiction in one of his songs. In the early 1990s, Waits began work on a new project called Alice. It was to be a play, and once again, he teamed up with Robert Wilson. This time Paul Schmidt also entered proceedings. Meanwhile, Waits was working on songs that form an album that he would release concurrently.
This project was brought to an abrupt halt by a peculiar incident. “When we were doing the songs, all the tapes were in my briefcase. My car was broken into, and someone stole the work tapes of the show. They realised they had something that might be worth some dough, so they ransomed it, and I paid $3,000 to get it back.”
The fee offended Waits more than the crime itself. “Not a lot of money, was it? I was a little insulted,” he said. “I think they wanted fast cash and no arguments”.
When asked about the shadowy exchange that followed, Waits comically recalled: “Yeah, some dark cafe, you know, everybody was wearing sunglasses, it was really cold. They said, ‘We’re gonna leave the briefcase by the trash can. Put the money in a bag…’ It added a little intrigue to the whole project.”
For just about any other artist, you would assume that this was just a little fable, but with Waits, the whole damn thing is true. The thieves might have returned the work for a fee, but they also made copies. As Waits told AV Club: “Along the line, the tapes got copied, and the bootleg got out. At the time, I wasn’t interested in recording anything at all. I was taking a break from the whole damn business, so it went south. The songs sat in a box, and I thought they were worth looking at again.”
It wasn’t until 2002 that this project would finally be released, and one of the most Waits-defining details of the whole debacle is that Alice is a masterpiece—one that he was almost happy to wave goodbye to. He simply polished up the demos a decade later and squirrelled away to work on his next briefcase of art.
You can watch Waits perform the title track – about a man so deliriously in love that he ice-skates his lover’s name so many times that the ice cracks right through and he perishes – live in Amsterdam below.
