Wild Years (11 page)

Small Change
explores a different mode with the next cut, “Step Right Up,” Waits's jumpy and jivey indictment of advertising. The singer is a huckster who's selling the ultimate product, but his description of that product is so vague and rambling that you can't figure out exactly what it is — you just know you have to have it. Speaking to David McGee, Waits explained what he was up to: “I didn't take things at face value like I used to. So I dispelled some things in these songs that I had substantiated before. I'm trying to show something to myself, plus get some things off my chest. ‘Step Right Up' — all that jargon we hear in the music business is just like what you hear in the restaurant or casket business. So instead of spouting my views in
Scientific American
on the vulnerability of the American public to our product-oriented society, I wrote ‘Step Right Up.'”
⁷

To Waits, one of the special things about
Small Change
was that it gave him the opportunity to work with a jazz drummer who'd been pounding the skins since the early forties. Shelly Manne had worked with a host of jazz greats — Coleman Hawkins, Stan Kenton, Woody
Herman, Raymond Scott, Stan Getz, Les Brown, Art Blakey. He'd also recorded many highly respected albums of his own. Waits had been telling interviewers for some time that he wanted to work with Manne, that he considered Manne's backbeat on Peggy Lee's “Fever” to be close to perfection.

“The first time Tom worked with Shelly,” recalls Jerry Yester, “Tom invited me down because I was going to be doing strings and he wanted me to hear the album and get into the atmosphere of it. I was there for the first take he did with Shelly Manne. And Shelly came out of the booth and said, ‘Who is this guy? This is the oldest young guy — or the youngest old guy — that I've ever met in my life!' He was blown away by [Tom].”

“Pasties and a G-String (At the Two O'Clock Club),” Tom's tribute to the fine art of stripping, was Manne's best
Small Change
showcase. Of course, because this was a Tom Waits song the tribute was to the old-time burlesque cabarets, not to the impersonal chrome-and-mirror “gentleman's clubs” that prevail today. “Pasties and a G-String” honored the smoky old theaters where wild women with names like Chesty Morgan and Watermelon Rose delivered the bump and grind and twirled the tassels that dangled from their pasties to a tacky jazz backbeat, those darkened rooms where guys sat and watched, drank beer, and got “harder than Chinese algebra.” Atmospherically, “Pasties and a G-String” is pure Waits; musically, it's Manne's show — no other instrument intrudes on Waits's voice and Manne's swinging and crashing drums and cymbals.

The album's title track may be the best known, and it is an awesome achievement. “Small Change (Got Rained on with His Own .38)” condenses a hard-boiled Mickey Spillane novel into a five-minute morality play. A small-time gangster named Small Change eats in a quiet neighborhood diner before making his way to the track to bet on Blue Boots in the third. As he leaves the diner he gets his ticket punched with his own piece. Waits claims that the song is based on a shooting he witnessed on 23rd Street in New York City. It is a compendium of reactions and effects: the cops joke about hookers and the cabbies, and the workers swear they know nothing; even the fire hydrants plead the fifth; someone steals Small Change's porkpie hat; no one bothers to close Small Change's eyes as his life trickles onto the linoleum and runs under the jukebox.

The listener is pulled into that dead-end diner, feeling the tension,
the possibilities, the tragedy of the violent passing, the unmourned victim. Here, in the details, is everything that Waits had learned about telling a story with music. Unfortunately, a couple of those details had to be edited out. Tom was forced to change the lines, “The whores all smear on Revlon / And they look just like Jayne Meadows,” when the cosmetic giant threatened legal action. And Meadows — the wife of Steve Allen, who had performed on Waits's favorite Jack Kerouac album — also had a problem with this vivid image. When the
LP
Small Change
was reissued the offending passage was replaced with, “The whores all hike up their skirts / And fish for drug-store prophylactics.” On the cd version of the album Waits sings the compromise lines, but the printed lyrics read: “The whores all smear on _______ / And they look just like _______________.” Apparently Waits wasn't willing to let Revlon and Meadows off the hook so easily after all.

The moving ballad “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart (In Lowell)” is perhaps the album's best indicator of the small changes that had taken place in Waits's music and philosophy. Like “Tom Traubert's Blues,” it explores the down side of the romantic image Waits had created for himself, but to even better effect. “I put a lot into ‘Bad Liver and a Broken Heart,'” he says. “I tried to resolve a few things as far as this cocktail-lounge, maudlin, crying-in-your-beer image that I have. There ain't nothin' funny about a drunk. You know I was really starting to believe that there was something amusing and wonderfully American about a drunk. I ended up telling myself to cut that shit out. On top of everything else, talking about boozing substantiates the rumors that people hear about you, and people hear that I'm a drunk. So I directed that song as much to the people that listen to me and think they know me as to myself.”
⁸

Bones Howe knew that the songs Waits was now bringing to him were as good as anything he had ever written, so he stepped back and allowed Waits to develop his vision. “My purpose was to make the best record that I could with Tom. Tom is, and has been from the very beginning, very strong about what he wants on his records. He was not a produced artist, ever. As Albert Grossman used to say, I just delivered the baby, you know? [Tom] was the creative engine. But I did make a lot of suggestions, I think, that helped him. Tom always said that with each record I held the bar a little higher for
him to jump over.”

And
Small Change
was a success — critically and commercially. The album far outsold any of Waits's previous albums, particularly
Nighthawks at the Diner
. With it, Waits broke onto
Billboard
's Top 100 Albums chart for the first time in his career. (He wouldn't manage it again until 1999, with the release of
Mule Variations
.) Suddenly Tom Waits was everywhere. He was profiled in all the music publications. Interviewers from such magazines as
Time,
Newsweek,
and even
Vogue
lined up to talk to him. Waits remarked that his mother had never been entirely sure that a career in music was right for her son until she saw him looking back at her from the pages of
Vogue
. This was as close as Waits had ever come to being a rock star, and, given the choice between being an obscure cult artist and a cult artist with a sizable following — well, that was a decision Waits didn't need to mull over. He sat back and enjoyed what was happening to him.

Waits had toured solo for years, but now, thanks to the money and prestige that
Small Change
had brought him, he was able to put together a regular band. He called it The Nocturnal Emissions, and it featured Frank Vicari on tenor sax, Fitzgerald Jenkins on bass, and Chip White on percussion and vibes. They toured the United States extensively, and a number of those tour shows were broadcast on radio. Then they headed for Europe, where Waits had wowed the critics and consumed a few pints of ale the year before. They performed in Germany, Holland, and then Japan.

On Tom's twenty-seventh birthday, he and The Nocturnal Emissions played the Agora Ballroom in Cleveland. While Tom was doing “Pasties and a G-String” a woman slipped onstage, walked up behind him, caught his eye, and started to dance. Waits got into it, assuming that she was an audience member acting on impulse, but his shock was apparent when she started to perform a slow, sensual striptease. Shimmying out of her dress, the woman revealed her very own pasties and G-string. Waits regained his equilibrium and sang along to the stripper's bump and grind. As the song ended the woman disappeared back into the crowd and Waits joked, “Thank you, thank you. I haven't seen my mother in years.”
⁹

Nocturnal Emissions drummer Chip White explained to a European radio interviewer how all of this actually came about. Tom didn't
know it, but that seemingly impromptu striptease was, in fact, a birthday surprise arranged for him by John Forscha, his road manager and old friend from L.A. It was an inspired gift: Waits enjoyed the spectacle so much that he had Forscha hire a local stripper at every remaining tour stop. Band members got to the point where they'd rate the girls. At the end of the tour, they tallied the points and named the Madison, Wisconsin stripper the hottest of the hot. While the band was playing in Japan, White recalls, Tom met a very nice woman. They got along well, but there must have been some sort of language-based misunderstanding, because the woman was somehow convinced that Waits had proposed marriage to her. Unaware of having entered into any such bargain, Tom returned to the States along with the band. They were scheduled to do a gig with Jimmy Witherspoon at the Roxy on Sunset Strip not long afterward, and, in the middle of their set, there was a car crash outside on the boulevard. The electricity went out and the Roxy was plunged into darkness.

As club staff scrambled to get some candles lit, Tom's Japanese friend showed up. She'd flown all the way to Los Angeles to see her new fiancé. It soon became clear that the power wasn't about to be restored, and clubs up and down the strip emptied out onto the sidewalk. A huge block party ensued. Nightclubbers mingled with drinks in their hands, smoking and chatting. Among them stood Tom Waits, talking to his Japanese visitor, trying hard to explain that he just wasn't looking to get married.

Waits saw the
Small Change
album and tour as a turning point, not just in his music but also in his life. He told McGee, “I'm not money oriented, except to the point that I have bills to pay and I have to support a trio. I want to be respected by my peers and I want my old man to think that what I'm doing is good. For me, it's more of an internal thing. I'm just trying to do something that I think is viable, that I can be proud of, trying to create something that wasn't there before. My wants and needs are small and limited. I'm not going into real estate or buying oil wells or becoming a slumlord . . .I've got to cinch something before we get out of the seventies. I've got a lot invested in this whole thing . . . in my development as a writer . . . I don't want to be a has-been before I've even arrived. That would be hard to live with . . . I don't want to think about it, man.
Let's go get a pizza.”

On a number of fronts, Waits really was creating “something that wasn't there before.” For example, in 1976, six years before the advent of mtv,
Small Change
spawned what many considered to be the first music video.
The One That Got Away
was a hand-painted animated short featuring Tom pursuing a scantily clad woman of questionable virtue down a neon-hued street. The film was directed by John Lamb, who would later win an Oscar for his animation; the character design was done by Keith Newton, who went on to become a top Disney animator; and head animator for the project was David Silberman, who became the chief character designer on the T.V. series
The Simpsons
. Not only did this clip spark a revolution in the music business, but it also broke new ground in the field of animation: it was the first cartoon to be filmed live and then animated, a technique that has since become widely used.

Waits was having an impact on the vast national-television audience, as well. He warmed up while on tour in Germany by appearing on the popular show
Rockpalast,
and then, in April 1977, he did the hipper-than-hip new comedy show
Saturday Night Live
. The guest host for that segment was civil-rights activist Julian Bond, and Waits was one of two musical guests — the other was Brick, a disco-funk outfit that had scored hits with “Dazz” and “Dusic.” When Waits came on he knocked them dead with “Eggs and Sausage (In a Cadillac with Susan Michelson).” (The song's title seems to have confused
Saturday Night Live
historians; in just about every book and Web site devoted to the subject, “Susan Michelson” is listed as Tom's duet partner.)
¹⁰

Tom also guested on
Fernwood Tonight,
comedian Martin Mull's hilarious parody of T.V. talk shows. Waits had been the opening act for several of Mull's stand-up performances and the voice of a bartender on a Martin Mull comedy album, so he was pleased to take part in his old friend's latest project — and a highly successful venture it was.
Fernwood Tonight,
a spin-off of the popular soap-opera satire
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,
was a late-night-T.V. sensation. Mull played Barth Gimble, the smarmy host of one of the most inept local talk shows ever produced. Rounding out the
Fernwood Tonight
team were Fred Willard as Gimble's breathtakingly stupid sidekick and Frank DeVol as the show's tone-deaf bar mitzvah bandleader. In the August 1, 1977, installment of
Fernwood Tonight
Waits plays
himself — a “rock star” who literally stumbles into Fernwood after his car breaks down. As he is interviewed by Mull/Gimble, Waits demonstrates his deft comic touch. He complains about the meal he's served at the local greasy spoon called the Cup and Sup: “A buck ninety-nine for all you can stand. I didn't know whether to eat mine or give it a ride home.” Offered a Sprite, he pulls out a bottle of wine and cracks, “I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” Finally he hits Gimble up for a loan to fix his car, “I had to leave our four-year-old for collateral.” The only unfortunate aspect of Waits's
Fernwood Tonight
appearance is the way the chuckling of the studio audience (or, more likely, of the laugh track) intrudes on his heartfelt version of “The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me).”
¹¹