Wild Years (5 page)

It was at this low ebb that Waits finally got himself onto the Troubadour stage. After months of standing on the sidewalk outside the club with
a mob of other Hoot Night hopefuls, he was allowed to come inside and try to prove that he had what it took to entertain the audience. “It was frightening to hoot, to be rushed through like cattle,” he told Rich Wiseman. “And at the Troubadour, it's like the last resort. You see old vaudeville cats, bands that have hocked everything to come out here from the East Coast just to play the Troub one night. You also meet a lot of carnival barkers, smoking Roi-Tans and giving you some long Texas routine. They say, ‘Hello, sucker.' And I was a sucker. But, you're desperate, you're broke.”
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That night another classic rock-and-roll success story was written according to the usual formula. It so happened that a rock manager was in the club, and he caught Waits's set. Herb Cohen handled Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, Tim Buckley, Fred Neil, Captain Beefheart, as well as an up-and-coming songstress named Linda Ronstadt. Listening to Waits, he became convinced that he'd found a diamond in the rough, a singer who was talented and eclectic enough to make an impact. The next day Waits had a songwriting contract and three hundred dollars in his pocket.

“You bust your chops to get hold of something,” Waits told David McGee. “Get chumped again and again to where you become bitter and cold-blooded and suddenly someone's saying, ‘Okay, here.' You can't offer any kind of rebuttal. You just have to take it, along with the responsibility. That was frightening.”
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Frightening but exhilarating. Waits was finally able to move to Los Angeles. There, Cohen supported him for a few years, shepherding his talent, giving him a chance to write.

Slowly, Waits's reputation started to build. His songs began to make inroads. The quality of his music and lyrics was apparent to those in the business, and some of Tom's musician friends appropriated a few of his tunes for their own sets. This was how Jerry Yester first heard a Tom Waits song. Yester — who was later handpicked by Herb Cohen to produce Tom's debut album,
Closing Time
— was doing production work for Tim Buckley, The Turtles, and The Association, the pop outfit responsible for such smash sixties singles as “Along Comes Mary,” “Windy,” and “Cherish.” Prior to that, Yester had been a member of, and producer for, the pop-folk group The Lovin' Spoonful. Joe Butler, a founding member of the Spoonful, performed a Waits number for him.

“I heard ‘Grapefruit Moon' quite a while before I met Tom,” Yester recalls. “So it rang a big bell when I heard it by Tom the first time in my living room. Joe Butler had met Tom somewhere along the line. Butler was in town and he did some recording out at the Association Clubhouse.
That's where I was, weaseling my way into the place so that I could use it while they were on the road . . . which they let me do. They asked me to help some friends out, and Joe was one of them . . . He played that song . . . I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, I like that song.' Then when I heard Tom do it, it was like the Technicolor version. I could see into the song about a mile deeper.”

Waits recorded at least twenty-four tracks for Cohen and Zappa's Bizarre/Straight label. Against Tom's wishes, Cohen released these tracks as the two-volume set
The Early Years
in 1991 and 1992, but they weren't originally intended for release. They were essentially two-track demos through which Tom could work out his various kinks and learned about the recording process; Cohen used them to shop Waits's material around to the record labels and to other artists. Several of the songs that would appear on Waits's first two albums came from these sessions, including “Ol' 55,” “I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love with You,” “Ice Cream Man,” and “Shiver Me Timbers.” In their crude, original form, these songs are undoubtedly interesting to listen to, but their later, more refined incarnations are better examples of Waits's art.

A number of those first recordings were never officially released. “Mockin' Bird” is a stunning synthesis of Waits's Tin Pan Alley jones and the popular folk rock of the time. “Looks Like I'm Up Shit Creek Again,” despite its unfortunate title (which seems to bear the Zappa influence), is actually quite a beautiful and moving Hank Williams–esque country weeper. “I'm Your Late Night Evening Prostitute” is a beautiful preview of Waits's future forays into folk and jazz. Some of the songs probably deserved to fade into obscurity though: “Had Me a Girl,” for example, is one of the few songs Waits ever wrote with painfully awkward lyrics — “Had me a girl in L.A. / I knew she could not stay”; “Had me a girl in Tallahassee / Boy she was a foxy lassie”; “Had me a girl from Mississippi / She sure was kippy.” But even this song is almost redeemed by its bluesy chorus — “Doctor says it's gonna be all right / But I'm feelin' blue.”

The Bizarre/Straight recordings served their purpose well in the end. Making them was excellent training for Waits — training he'd soon be drawing on. Big things were in store for Tom Waits. In 1972 he was signed to Asylum Records.

Tom had become a Troubadour regular by 1972. He often made his way onto the club's tiny stage, wearing ratty black jeans, a crumpled jacket, and shoes with holes in them. He'd flick the ashes of his Viceroy onto the floor as he regaled the assembled L.A. nightlifers with his tales of triumph and woe. Waits fit right in — his image meshed with that of the venue. Despite — or maybe because of — its run-down aspects, the Troubadour had a certain disheveled trendiness, and being invited to play there was quite a break for an unsigned artist.

Waits says, “They'd put a big picture of you in the window. In those days, if you sold out the Troubadour, that was it. People weren't playing in sports facilities. They announced your name and picked you up with a spotlight at the cigarette machine and they'd walk you to the stage with the light. It was the coolest thing . . . like Ed Sullivan, without Ed. Anyone could get up. It got very thrilling, because you would find people who'd hitchhiked to this spot for their twenty minutes.”
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One night, while Tom was participating in a Troubadour hootenanny, David Geffen happened by. The boy-wonder music exec had discovered Laura Nyro, The Eagles, and Joni Mitchell (who was so fond of her mentor that she immortalized him in her song “Free Man in Paris”). Geffen began his career as an agent for William Morris, and his nose for talent had propelled him to the top of the heap. From there he ventured off on his own, establishing an artist-management company with partner Elliott Roberts. The two were a powerful combination — they constituted a yinyang of rock-and-roll promotion. Roberts was the slightly scruffy former hippie who felt most comfortable when he was among musicians, drinking, hanging out, and staging impromptu gigs. Geffen was the savvy businessman with a remarkable ability to sell his well-chosen stable of artists to
the masses. Geffen was also more attracted to deal making than engaging in the day-in, day-out business of recording.

Eventually Geffen and Roberts were recruited to run Asylum Records. Asylum and its sister label, Elektra, had a reputation for discovering and nurturing esoteric talent. The acts that had sprouted up under the Elektra/Asylum banner reflected a range of musical styles — from The Doors to The Eagles to Iggy Pop and The Stooges to Joni Mitchell. Geffen would go on to form his own prestigious label, Geffen Records, for which he'd sign up such acts as Guns N' Roses and Beck. In the late nineties, Geffen made yet another major career move, joining forces with movie moguls Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg to form the superstudio Dreamworks
SKG
.

Geffen wasn't planning on staying long when he dropped by the Troubadour that night in 1972, but he quickly changed his mind. Commanding the stage was a guy who looked more like a vagabond than a rock musician. But Geffen had barely taken his seat before Waits's seductive aura had encompassed him. “He was singing a song called ‘Grapefruit Moon' when I heard him,” Geffen recalled recently. “I thought it was a terrific song, so I listened to the set.” He watched, he listened, and the wheels started turning. Here was an artist who could make some intriguing records. “After [the show], I said that I was interested in him. He said, ‘Well, I'll have my manager, Herb Cohen, call you.'”

Geffen left the Troubadour thinking that since Cohen had his own record company, this would be “the end of it.” But, to his surprise, Cohen did finally call: “He was interested in making a deal with me for Tom . . . Herb had said that he didn't really think that it was right for him to make the record. My making the record would help him with the publishing. So I made a deal for [Tom]. And he made a great first record.”

Geffen got Elliot Roberts involved in signing Waits to Asylum. Roberts, who is now Neil Young's manager, was happy to facilitate the process. “Waits was different than any act out there,” he told Hoskyns — “he'd reinvented himself as a beatnik.”
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Once Tom had been signed to Elektra/Asylum, Herb Cohen contacted Jerry Yester. Cohen had been impressed with Yester's production work, and he felt that Yester could bring out the best in his young protégé. Not knowing what to expect, Yester agreed to meet with Tom and asked Cohen to send the young musician to his home.

Yester still remembers the occasion clearly. “He came over and I said, ‘Let's hear your songs.' He started playing. Marlene [Yester's wife] was in the bathroom, washing the tub or something. She heard this guy playing
and just threw the sponge down, astonished. It was amazing. The songs were just undeniable, just absolutely wonderful. So I knew it was going to be a terrific project.” Waits himself mentioned the same meeting to Barney Hoskyns, concluding, “Jerry Yester was a great producer. The first guy whose house I ever went to and found a pump organ.”
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Yester maintains that he was unfazed by Tom's beatnik-jazzbo-hipster-bohemian image. “Nothing surprised me in '72 because it was in the new decade. We'd gone through the sixties and got through so much weird shit that nothing really surprised me. [Waits] just looked like a nice young fellow, which he was. During the album, he started going to the skid-row image. And he cultivated that for an album or two . . . until it started to catch hold. [Then] he just looked at it and snapped right out of it. He recognized that it was destructive. It was amazing to see. He just said, ‘Okay, that's enough of that.' And on he went to something else. Because it definitely was a character, it wasn't him. But his characters are so good and he draws on them with such faith.”

Closing Time,
which was released the year after Waits signed his recording contract, included many standards from his live sets. The album is probably his most accessible, and some hardened Waits fans find it too slick, but
Closing Time
is, in fact, a uniformly strong collection of songs and a very impressive recording debut. The voice hasn't yet reached the degree of gruffness it will later achieve, but the songwriting chops are there in abundance. “I was just blown away by the material,” says Yester.

In fact, the entire
Closing Time
project seemed blessed from the outset. Strong material was the starting point; then, as the recording sessions got under way, it became clear that the chemistry was right, too. “Tom's real easy to work with,” Yester remarks. “We had a real good relationship. I really wasn't interested in telling him what to do. I just wanted to get the music out of him. That was the important thing. So, we talked about how he wanted to do it and I would make suggestions. There was a very good relationship between all of the band members. That album was absolutely the easiest one I've ever done in my life. It was done in, like, a week and a half . . . in the studio at Sunset Sound. One reason it was good, I think, was we couldn't get the nighttime hours that I was looking for. We had to come in from ten to five every day. It took two days to get used to it, but once we did it was great. We were even awake when we got there, and it was like a job. Everybody was real alert and into it. We took our lunch breaks, came back and worked again. And we had the evening to do something with. It was like being human, you know?”

The
Closing Time
cut that seemed to attract the most attention was “Ol' 55,” a subtle ode to that most American of infatuations, the car, and to the freedom it represents. On a
VH1 Storytellers
segment taped in 1999, Waits shed some light on what had inspired him to write “Ol' 55.” He got the idea from a buddy of his named Larry Beezer. The two had hooked up at the Tropicana Motel, where Waits had lived for several years. Beezer knocked on Waits's door in the middle of the night. He was on a date with a very young girl, he had to get her home to her parents, and he was out of gas. Beezer wanted Waits to lend him some gas money. In exchange, he promised, he'd supply Waits with some jokes for his act. Waits, of course, agreed. Beezer's car, Waits then explained, was a '55 Caddy, and it could only go in reverse. So Beezer drove his seventeen-year-old date home backwards along the Pasadena freeway.
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Waits's passion for cars was enormous. By the early seventies, many Americans had become much more conservative in their gasoline consumption, and suddenly little foreign cars were everywhere. But Waits's taste in automobiles remained stubbornly traditional. He was always in the market for an American classic, a big old boat that got two miles per gallon and could house a small family. Or, as he himself put it during a 1976 concert at Boston Music Hall, “Climb aboard that Oldsmobile and let it take you for a ride. No, thank you, on the economy car. I don't like to ride around in the fetal position all night. I like the large one that's about a half a block long.”
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The kind of car that Frank Waits would have dreamed of owning when it was the latest thing to hit the showroom floor. Now it was just a few blocks ahead of the tow truck. Bald tires, broken turn signals, several shades of primer — these Tom regarded as assets. Somehow it all made sense, given his worldview. He was attracted to cars — and to people — that had once been beautiful and full of promise but had fallen on hard times.