Why Tom Waits hated Eagles covering his song: “As exciting as watching paint dry”
Tom Waits had already faced up to the many meddlers in the music industry when he was crafting his debut album, Closing Time. Creating one’s debut album is never an easy feat. Aside from the countless trials and tribulations one must traverse to actually have the opportunity to make the LP, as soon as you hit the studio, artists are almost bowled over by the ream of executives, engineers and enthusiastic new fans who not only know the best ways to use the studio to its fullest but also, somehow, exactly how you can use it to express yourself.
Like so many others, Closing Time could have easily been an early curtain call for Waits. Fortunately, the record turned out to be a consummate masterpiece. However, if the jaunty-hatted troubadour had it all his own way, then the folky sounds would actually have been closer to “a jazz, piano-led” cocktail of ballads from the wobbly barstool.
With the label ushering him towards something a bit more in line with the Bob Dylan covers that had made him a small, shaky name when he toured the club circuits, the jazz was tempered down to wistful horns and drunken keys while guitar wove its way into the melodies. This mellowed combination announces itself from the off with the beauteous opening track ‘Ol’ 55’.
The song is, for my money, a tale about Waits or some other disenfranchised character leaving his new lover’s place in the morning. He drives through a promising new dawn with just the vague hint that he’d still rather be in bed, shading his bright, poetic view of early morning traffic. Each additional car piling behind his post-coital precession further invigorates his love for his new romantic partner; such is the way amid the rose-tinted throes of the morning after a blossoming encounter. It’s a view that, if you’re lucky enough to enjoy, perhaps on the morning commute or a rain-soaked bus, can not only brighten your morning but your week, month and year.
Waits’ track works wonderfully, not just because of the sumptuous melody on offer or his eternally underrated vocals (which all too often are noted for their gravelly texture alone without remark on the quality), but also because there is a lived-in sense of depth there. There is genuine jubilation in the mix alongside the gruff edges of early morning weariness after a late night—this time, for once, a late night that bore promising fruit for our usually downbeat protagonist. This might not be expressed in the perfunctory sense, but it’s a mark of Waits’ postmodernist style as a songwriter that such corroborations seem to be easy to extrapolate from his poetic combination of words and melody.
The issue with the Eagles’ cover is that it offers up the buoyant transition of sleepy verse to the windows-down triumph of the chorus, but it arrives at this windfall without any depth as to why. The creaking crescendo of Wait’s instrumentation, as he stretches out his creases and yawns his way towards a key change in the early exchanges, is lost, resulting in a pleasant but ultimately sanitised AM radio version by the classic American commercial rock band.
As Waits explained to WAMU back in 1975: “I frankly was not that particularly crazy about their rendition of it.” Taken from their On the Border LP, Waits continued: “The song is about five years old, it’s one of the first songs I wrote, so I felt like it was kind of flattering that somebody wanted to do your song, but at the same time I thought their version was a little antiseptic.” The reality is, the Californians were, at this time, absolutely hell-bent on commercial success, and that was vastly at odds with Waits’ sentiment. The poet-cum-singer had ditched any idea of becoming a pop behemoth in favour of staying true to his art, while Eagles made being pop behemoths into an art.
While the flattery and royalties might have sweetened him at this stage of his career, he was even more cutting about their cover the following year, and delivered a pointed and scything review. “I don’t like the Eagles,” he told NME. “They’re about as exciting as watching paint dry,” he said in a proto-paraphrase of Jeff Lebowski. He then concluded his cutting lambast by stating: “Their albums are good for keeping the dust off your turntable and that’s about all.”
The irony is that they have indeed done more dusting than a few million feather bowers. Two of their albums sit in the top ten best-selling records of all time list, and their “anti-septic” ways have filled endless hours on AM radio. However, Waits’ crooked storytelling and songs that stagger towards Tin Pan Alley on a broken heel struggled to fetch any amount of sales. Eagles may well have been a somewhat clinical hit-making machine, but they could be relied upon for that, and Waits would have certainly relied on the royalties they sent his way.
Following the initial commercial flop of his first few records, Waits was in a far tougher place to keep on making his art-forward records than many might have thought. Struggling artists are certainly pure of heart, but when they are relegated to shouting their work from the nearest street corner, the message tends to get lost. We might have Eagles to thank for ensuring he could still afford to pursue a musical career. I guess that’s just the way things go.
