Interviews: Tom Waits

Before I reformed my wicked ways, I plied the dark alleys of the fourth estate. Touring through my back pages, I intend to report here on some of those bits and pieces.

This one is more or less how it appeared in RockBill. Bob O’Brian accompanied me to the interview because he knew stuff and also because sometimes in life you need Bob O’Brian on your wing. To this day, Waits is one of the most interesting, compelling, challenging, and rewarding artists. I’m grateful to have had this small exchange with him.

The Navy Still AWaits

Dr. Thomas Alan Waits, Esquire

Nope. We’re not in some Parisian pissotiére. Not stool side in any town’s downtown bar. Not even sloped on a guardrail off the Interstate in a place where “everything’s so flat you can dream everything up.” We’re on a bruise-colored couch in New York. Tom Waits is not smoking a cigarette, but he’s thinking of it. His voice tends to roll under the furniture so he puts the tape recorder right next to his trumpeter’s lips like he’s going to blow a solo.

     If you’re paying attention, you know Waits wrote “Jersey Girl” and “Downtown Train,” and his classic urban-suburban landscapes of bottomless desire on the albums Heartattack and Vine, Small Change, Swordfishtrombones, and a whole lot more. You know him from his acting in Down By Law, Rumble Fish, and other movies. You also know him from the soundtrack of Francis Ford Coppola’s underrated classic, One From The Heart.

         Waits plays a mean tape recorder, his voice sounding like early morning coffee grinds in the bottom of a cracked cup. He riffs on his songs, calling some of them “a score for a mutant dwarf community,” or “music for retarded monkeys on Benzedrine.” When he talks about composing movie soundtracks, he smirks. “It’s like sewing a button on a sports coat and you can’t contact the guy who’s working on the sleeves and the guy who’s doing the lining hasn’t been hired yet or he just quit. It’s like throwing a rock and waiting two years for it to go through the window.”

     Think of these questions like the backbeat to the demented calliope billowing through the carousel of Waits’ mind.

        How were you raised?

       I don’t think I’m raised, yet. I always found that curious. “You’re raised.” What do you do then? Go back down? There’s no place else to go.

       What do you listen to?

        Certain music affects you like you want your head on that body. For a long time, I liked hearing anything with an upright bass and a tenor saxophone.

What’s the current music in your head?

I’d like to have a band that could sound like an automobile accident and also rhumba.

How does the music come out of you?

       You have to dismantle yourself and scatter it all around and then put a blindfold on and put it back together.

        Why do you like bagpipes so much?

         I love the sound. It’s like strangling a goose.

         What other instruments would you like to play?

         I’ve grown very fond of the bass marimba lately.

         What was your first instrument?

        I played the trumpet when I was a kid because it was easy to carry, like carrying your lunch. A piano, you have to go to it. You never hear anybody say, “Pass that piano, buddy.”

        What kind of kid were you?

        Real repressed. I wanted to skip growing up and rush all the way to 40.

         Who were your early heroes?

         You ever hear of Tozzio Navarali? He’s a famous Italian race care driver, before Granatelli. Jonathan Winters talked about him. Now that guy, Winters, he’s certifiable. That must be a good way to be, to live in your head.

         Were you writing when you were a kid?

       It takes a long time for the input to be shoved through your apparatus and germinate and come out as something of your own devising.

         How do you write?

       With a butterfly net. All these things pass through you all the time. Every once in a while, you got to reach up, grab it, and swallow.

         Do you write on the road?

         I like to go to Rangoon or Hong Kong, come home, and then write. Get something on you and come home.

         Were you always a rambling man?

       I wanted to join the Navy when I was a kid. You know, the Navy’s not just a job, it’s $39 a month, or was back then. When I turned 18, I got tattoos and thought that was it.

         Would you join up now?

         I think the Navy is no longer a career opportunity for me, but it’s nice to know it’s there.

         What else would you do besides what you do?

         I’d like to be a great tap dancer.

         Could you be happy alone in a room?

         As long as I had a wet bar, some clam dip, a black and white TV, and the yellow pages, I’d be alright.

Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered

Reflections on history while writing my book, American Hero
Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered       

Good Times, 1692

How could a 13 year-old girl bring down an entire village of proper and prosperous Puritans? Only someone who hasn’t spent much time around 13 year-old girls would even ask that question. I would rather face an army of Orcs than one Abigail Williams. But what really destroyed Salem in 1692 and put a full grind stop on the Puritan Movement was not the hysterical rantings of one confused and bi-polar adolescent who convinced herself, her friends, and almost everyone else that harmless and lonely widows danced the sky-clad tango with the goat-footed devil under the pale moonlight—which for those who know witches already smacks of ridiculousness because Wiccan is a pagan (wo)manifestation of primal feminine forces that does not recognize the Judeo-Christian God or the Manichean Devil due to their masculine-based subordination of the Eternal Mother, duh—but something much more piercing than the sharpest pitchfork of any hell-spawn demon. In a word, what destroyed the Puritans was guilt.

    Of what would such God-fearing Pilgrims have to be guilty about? First, don’t believe that people didn’t know any better back in the 17^th century and so we can understand, if not excuse, their racism, sexism, intolerance, and the “is that a crowbar inserted into your lower intestines or are you just unhappy to see me?” attitude about anything not seared with the Puritan Seal of Approval. We already downed a few pints with jolly old Thomas Merton at Merrymount. He was unmatched for his drinking skills, but wasn’t alone in his open-mindedness. Roger Williams founded the Providence Plantation in what would become Rhode Island based on the idea of separation between church and state. William Penn actually worked with Indians and refused to treat non-Christian natives, Catholics, or Jews any differently than the Christian immigrants. Of course, the Dutch in New Amsterdam were aggressively heterogeneous. You could walk down Wall Street and hear as many languages then as you might now. Thanks to Adriaen van der Donck, with a last minute assist by the ornery Peter Stuyvesant, human rights survived the change in ownership from Dutch New Amsterdam to English New York.

    Despite these bastions of common sense, most white colonists in the late 17^th century condoned the extermination of Indians, the enslavement of Africans, and the war on women. At the same time, some still small voice within them warned against the Dark Side.

    When Anne Hutchinson, who advocated for women to lead spiritual services, was banished from New England, and later killed, the guilt grew like a canker among the Puritans. They already had the ghosts of murdered Indians on their conscience. Perhaps worse, the prosperity of New England, and Salem in particular, came from the slave trade. The slave ships during the Middle Passage, just beginning now, were built in New England. The ships’ captains and crews were from New England. The main income of the families in Salem in the 1690s came from slavery, both in British North America and in their interests in slave auction houses in Barbados.      

   To minds twisted into justifying the inhumanity of slavery with Christian compassion for the downtrodden, believing in witches and talking cats must have come as a relief. How easy it must have been to hang a few mentally imbalanced people rather than deal with the imbalance of your own morality.

    In the hysteria of the witch-hunts, over twenty people were executed, many more lives were ruined, including the accusatory girls who took on the guilt of their society. As for Abigail Williams, she disappeared into history, last seen walking the streets of Barbados, a scorned and bitter woman.

    The Salem Witch Trials soon made the Puritans ridiculous in their own eyes. It was a self-destructive act, subconsciously motivated to erase the guilt they felt for their involvement in slavery and other forms of oppression. After that, it took a long time for religious fundamentalists to be taken seriously again, enough time to give Ben Franklin and other freethinkers some space to develop the ideas that would change the world in the 18^th century.

Interviews: Elvis Costello Writes The Book

Elvis Costello Writes The Book

The Other King

Oh, I just don’t know where to begin.

While preparing for my interview with my absolute, palm-itchingly, hands up choice for most acerbically sarcastic, lyrically fearless, and crafty—in every admirable sense of the word—songwriter, Elvis Costello, by jumping back and forth between the twin beds in my hotel room until the springs plink through the mattresses and the neighbors clobber against the cardboard walls, I go through my mental Cliff Notes on E.C.’s oeuvre like a Yeshiva boy cramming for his first test on Talmudic tongue-twisters—and, by the way, impress myself with how clever I am about his cleverness. I psych myself up like I’m going into a word rumble. He’ll pull out a sharp-edged double-entendre and I’ll be ready to counter with an analytical allusion.  I’ll match him jab for jab, barb for barb, pun for pun. Listen, here’s the thing about interviews. Politicians, you put on the tape recorder, leave the room, get a sandwich, take a nap, and they’ll fill 45 minutes. Movie stars—Wow, you are so amazing—and that gets them interviewing themselves enough for you to think about last night’s episode of Battlestar Galactica. But Rock Stars can either be non-existent or out to mess with your head.

I thought Elvis would definitely be out to mess with my head. After all, for those who twist words like balloon animals, he’s the Master Clown.

For those waiting to be seated after the intermission, Elvis Costello erupted onto American radio out of London in 1977, along with the Clash and the Sex Pistols in that first wave of British punk. However, he was exponentially more melodic and reverent of diverse music styles, including jazz and country. His jukebox includes “Alison,” “Watching the Detectives” (a film noir masterpiece, without the film), “This Year’s Girl,” and “Accidents Will Happen.” He’s collaborated with Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach, T-Bone Burnett, and his wife, jazz swan, Diana Krall. Just Google him.

But bollocks to all that. Here we are, me and Elvis, before and after he and the Attractions hit the stage at, of all places, the Pennsylvania State Fair. He’s wearing a black suit, trademark glasses, and spanking cool checkered boots, the non-ironic wearing of which may be the whole reason one aspires to become a rock star in the first place. So much of life is about the shoes (and angels wanting to wear them). Elvis Costello:

“I never explain songs. I write songs about something I care enough about to want to write about, subjects that conjure up a feeling or an emotion. They’re generally about human matters, whether in the form of a relationship, the government, or my next-door neighbor. I hate the idea of political songs, because unless they’re ‘We Shall Overcome’ or ‘People Get Ready,’ they’re bloody boring. If you want to make a speech, don’t sing it. For the same reason, I hate the idea of rock music as a category. I suppose having all these labels in music—rock, country, urban, jazz, classical, what have you—I suppose it stops you from buying songs that you don’t like, so you don’t accidentally buy Ray Coniff instead of Roy Orbison. But I don’t see rock music as being more important than any other so-called label. That’s a very limiting idea. When rock ‘n’ roll replaced swing, they said, ‘this is the end of music.’ They burned Elvis Presley records! They broke Chuck Berry records! And rock music was very important in 1955. It shook up young people and led to rethinking the grey Eisenhower establishment. It was important again in 1964. It suggested that peace, love, and understanding were options. And in 1977, it gave young people power over cynical hypocrisy—though for a very brief time only. Other than that, it never exactly brings down the government, does it? There’s more power to me, say, in ‘The Kid’s Are Alright’ than in ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again.’ It’s important to take your work seriously, else you do it badly, but to take yourself seriously, you become an absolute buffoon. I’m less interested in writing about issues than I am in writing about trust and betrayal and love and people’s stories. These are the things that interest me the most. Only the most pompous people write songs thinking they’re going to change anything with them—whether politically or personally. An artist is primarily of an observer of him or her self in the world. Far too much emphasis is placed on aggression and mistrust and bitterness and anger and all of the negative things people read into my work. I always assumed that that was because it made better copy to project me as aggressive. And I wouldn’t say I hadn’t written songs like that. But maybe I just have high hopes. I am disappointed quite a lot, not least of all in myself, most of all in myself. Most of the vitriolic songs were really aimed at me, some weakness, some foolishness. Sometimes I don’t even know what the song is about until after I’ve been performing it for a while. I’ve often found myself singing and thinking, my God, was I really this depressed when I wrote this or was I just being too clever and messing about with words?”

The Anti-Pilgrim

Reflections of history while writing my novel, American Hero.

Maypole Envy

For want of a nail . . . the kingdom was lost. For want of an O’Doul’s non-alcoholic beverage, America lost a non-stop, multi-cultural, party-all-the-time party and got the Puritan Work Ethic, instead.

Let’s back up. Way up.

Back to the Roaring 20s—the 1620s. The Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock and started an intolerant, close-minded, xenophobic, racist, and repressed worker’s paradise. But a little side note has been written out of the history books.

Let’s dash across the pond to the Mermaid Tavern. (Shakespeareans know what I’m talking about). At a table in the back, through the haze of lavender and dill flavored tobacco smoke (What?), behind a small army of beer tankards you will see Thomas Morton, a Falstaffian libertine with poetry in his heart and beer on his breath. He just closes his copy of Francis Bacon’s utopian screed, Bensalem, that argues against the shame/guilt/blame sandwich that forms the staple of contemporary diets. Bensalem suggests, and Morton nods eagerly, that maybe God doesn’t want us to suffer. Maybe God didn’t necessarily create a zero sum world of pre-Darwinian Darwinism, winner takes all, to the victor go the spoils. Maybe God created the world’s biggest playground—the world—and said, okay, kids, go play, Daddy’s gonna take a nap.

Maybe life is about the pursuit of happiness (that’s right, young Tom Jefferson, pay attention). Maybe life is about exploration. Maybe science is not about defining the world, but fooling around with it. Maybe art is about the possible. Maybe people aren’t to be feared because they’re different. Maybe it’s more fun that way, more colors in the Crayola box.

So Morton gets funding from the Merchant Adventurers, the same cabal of business interests that funded the Mayflower and Jamestown—it’s called hedging your bets—and came to the New World, settling across the street from Plymouth in a plot of land Morton actually paid the Algonquin tribe for (unlike the Pilgrims who just bloody well took it), and, in honor of his Celtic ancestors—who were pretty much identical to the native population in America, especially with their fondness for feathers and naked dancing in the moonlight—he created Merrymount.

The difference between Morton’s Merrymount and Plymouth/Jamestown was that Morton had no interest in recreating the dysfunctional Church and State bananafish of the old world. He wanted to reinvigorate the ecumenical encomiendas of Bartolomé de Las Casas in Venezuela from the 1540s. He encouraged indentured servants to rebel against their masters. They did. He wanted the Indians to live with their English cousins. They did. Morton invited everybody to the party: Africans (including Muslims), Catholics, even Jews. There was complete equality between women and men. He established a representational democracy based on the Iroquois system. Everybody had a voice.

Mostly, the voices were singing. Morton felt the best use of time and resources would involve a lot of dancing and drinking beer.

 When they actually built a Maypole, a symbol of European paganism, and danced around it with ribbons and flowers in their hair, it became too much for the Puritans, who had already looked upon their neighbors as an incurable tumor.

They sent the stout Miles Standish, or as Morton called him, Captain Shrimp, to perform the operation. Two-dozen armed Pilgrims marched down the road to Merrymount singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

Standish’s bloodlust was frustrated because he arrived the morning of May 2^nd, the night after the Maypole revelry, which left the entire population merrily unconscious or with start-the-revolution-without-me hangovers. The Pilgrims bum-rushed the Catholics and Jews, re-indentured the white men, shipped off the Africans to the slave markets of Barbados, chased the Indians back into the forest, and married off (enslaved) the women. As for Morton, who as leader of the Merrymounters set the bar high for drunken revelry, he finally woke up chained in the hold of a ship plowing back to Merry Old England.

Thus ended a noble experiment in personal inspiration and social acceptance. The Merrymounters may have been having too good of a time, but eventually, people either moderate or pixilate. The Merrymounters never got that chance. I like to keep Thomas Morton’s fever dream alive every time I raise a pint, or some less fattening equivalent, but I don’t think of what might have been. I think of what can be.

Interviews: Jett Lagged

Interviews: Jett Lagged

Joan Jett

Before I reformed my wicked ways, I plied the dark alleys of the fourth estate. Touring through my back pages, I intend to report here on some of those bits and pieces.

I got into bed with Joan Jett and thought, not for the first time, that truly, I have the best job in the world. She was very Joan Jett, too. Rail thin, her crow black hair styled in a cross between a mullet and Jane Fonda’s from Klute, a stripe of black kohl across her eyes, red bandana tied around one wrist, black leather studs on the other. I wasn’t sure if she wasn’t going to kiss me or beat me up—and, either way, I’d be okay with it.

She brooded and she burned in that big bed in that small Manhattan hotel room, guitars and hair blowers on the floor, pizza boxes and beer cans on the table. She was sort of like an amped up version of the way Kristen Stewart played her in The Runaways years later, except this Joan Jett, the real Joan Jett, the one who the night before in a packed club belted out her hits such as “I Love Rock ‘N’ Roll,” “Crimson and Clover,” “I Hate Myself For Loving You,” and “Bad Reputation” was garrulous, talking non-stop, jet-lag anxious, caffeinated jittery. “I can’t get used to getting off the road,” she said, sitting up, crossed legged, flexing her hands like a boxer before getting gloved. “I never unpack. I can’t. I’ve got to run, even when I’m in bed. It’s fun, this life, working hard, getting blisters on your fingers from playing guitar all night, getting cramps from dancing around the stage, getting so tired sometimes because it’s like an hour and a half non-stop moving around horizontally with no time to breathe, like sex. 

She bursts out a guffaw and her head collapses onto the pillow, getting back into her groove, “And all the smoke and the lights—it’s like over a hundred degrees on stage—and if you stop for water everybody screams, ‘Hurry up, you—’ well, ‘hurry up’—and you think you’re just going to collapse any minute, just fall down in exhaustion and die, but you don’t, and that makes it all even better. God, I love it. Rock ‘n’ roll is better than sex.”

         During all of this, and though we’re both lying down in the bed, she never stops moving, twitching, arms flailing, miming a Pete Townsend guitar swipe or a series of Iggy Pop contortions, sitting up, flopping down. Being in bed with her is exhausting.

         Maybe she’s high, or maybe I’m low. She gets on about record companies and her original band The Runaways, and the enthusiasm turns sour. “We were slammed from here to eternity,” she says about the band, “because we were teenage girls playing sweaty rock ‘n’ roll, and then,” her eyes torch up, “they tag us with this sexual image.” She looks away, half disgusted, half embarrassed, “From there on then it was jailbait.”

         “I was always thought it was about the anger,” I offer.

        “Anger?” she says, angrily. “I’m not angry. I’m aggressive. There’s a difference. Men get to be aggressive because people will cut you down just because you’re rowdy and loud and wanna have a good time because otherwise what else is there, and that’s aggressive living, and that’s okay for a man. But for a woman, she’s angry like it’s this bad thing. You know what? I am angry. I’m angry at people who think I’m angry.”

        She rolls on her side facing me, head in hand, “Doesn’t it boggle your mind the way people twist? The same people who said to me two years ago, ‘Please, get lost,’ now say, ‘I always knew you were great.’ I’ve seen it repeatedly and it’s disgusting. But you don’t have to be in a rock ‘n’ roll band to get that. You see it in entertainment, you damn well see it in politics. I bet you see it in every hut and street corner in the world. That’s the human condition, isn’t it? And if that doesn’t—you know—the lies, the bullshit, the double-dealing, the raw manipulation, if that doesn’t make you angry, then you’re just not paying attention. That’s why the only truth there is, the only thing real, sometimes, I feel, is that time on stage, that time when the lights are hot, the music is loud, you’re soaked in sweat, your hands are numb, you’re playing out of a near death experience, and everyone in that room is with you, for that song, maybe a note, you got them, they got you. Yeah, I live for that. I got the best fucking job in the world.”

I lay down corrected.

Land of the Free, Home of the Slave

Reflections of history while writing my novel, American Hero.

                 Islamophobia led to Slavery                       

As many things do, this story begins with a storm at sea. A Dutch ship carrying 20 African slaves to Brazil is blown off course and slams into the outer banks of Virginia within rowing distance of the English settlement in Jamestown. The Dutch make a deal: fix our ship and we’ll give you 20 barrels of sugar. But the laborer-deficient Jimmies say, how about those men over there? Welcome to the future United States, Africans, and centuries of slavery and oppression. But wait. Not yet.

So these 20 Africans are unchained and escorted off the slave ship. The Jimmies don’t take out the whip. Instead, they hand them shovels. They give the Africans the same deal they got: seven years of backbreaking labor for The Man (the Merchant Adventurers, underwriters of the settlement) and then . . . freedom. Meaning, a lifetime of backbreaking labor for yourself. They were Indentured Servants. After their term, just like the Euro-Jimmies, the Afro-Jimmies got a few acres and a pat on the back.

Wait? Where’s the Massa and the bullwhip? Not yet.

Meet Antonio Negron, aka, Anthony Johnson. At the end of his indenture, he got some land, grew tobacco and indigo, took on his own indentured servants, got more land, more servants. He became one of the biggest planters in Virginia, with over 200 workers, mostly European.

To recap: One of the richest men in America in 1640 was a black man and he had over a hundred white men working his fields—and that was considered normal. At the end of their Hard Seven, all of them, whether they came from Gloucester or Gambia, were given the same deal; land and a handshake.

What happened?

In the classical and medieval world, there is tribalism based on religion or geography. But all that ugly racism (leading us to Nazis, Bull Connor, and the Birthers) doesn’t appear until the late 17^th century and then used to justify slavery, ipso facto.

It doesn’t start with color of skin.

It starts, as many things do, with the Puritans.

The problem with Anthony Johnson and the other Africans mixing it up in the jambalaya of humanity making it rich in the New World was not skin color, but religion.

The vast majority of Africans in America were Muslims.

The problem with Anthony Johnson was his God.

Puritans hated Islam more than Catholicism, almost as much as they hated the Jews.

So, as the Massachusetts Colony became more successful and had more clout they made laws to prohibit Muslims, Catholics, and Jews from owning land.

Eventually, Catholics got Maryland and Jews settled in Rhode Island. They had powerful connections in European politics. Muslims did not.

What did Anthony do? By this time he was a devout worshipper of the only religion that really counted in America. Keep your muezzin, show me the money. He converted to Christianity.

In compliance with the worship of money, however, businessmen gradually changed the laws to confiscate African-owned land. From there, it’s an easy step to take suddenly indigent blacks and make them work—for free and, unlike traditional slavery, for life and, here’s the real innovation, create generational slavery so children are automatically born bonded.

Like Jews in Germany, Africans in America did not at first realize the momentum of these new laws.

Once it became obvious that things were changing, Anthony bought and freed as many “slaves” as he could—in vain. Slave trading proved profitable. The game was up.

Anthony died sometime before the slave laws really kicked in. (Georgia waited until the 1750s to make slavery a legal distinction, only a generation before the Revolution for Freedom and Equality—oh wait, not for you, sorry).

How did the black people react to this unfortunate series of events? How would you? Stunned at first, disbelieving (again the parallel to the Jews in Germany), then outrage. Stories of slave revolts don’t often make it into the history books because it’s embarrassing at Back to School Night, but we’ll get to that later.