Showing posts with label Tom Waits. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Waits. Show all posts

Friday 10 May 2013

Tom Waits waits in the shadows


Brian Appleyard on American singer songwriter Tom Waits, good piece! : )) One of my favourite writers too, some truly great photos and some of my favourite music images too by Anton Corbijn - http://bryanappleyard.com/tom-waits-growling-through-the-grain/ 

Wait's journey is the car and movement and the open American highways, mine is the Scottish and Irish shorelines and the docks at Newhaven and Leith. 

Tom Waits has some great lines - on his  marriage, “if two people know the same things, one of you is unnecessary.”  “She opened my eyes, she’s a real trapeze artist. She’s my headlamp and my road map and my hood ornament, my sunglasses and my spotlight, she’s all that.”  The dividing line for Tom is not an album, a song or a change of label, it is a wife. He met Kathleen Brennan on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s film One from the Heart. She is a musician but, for Coppola, she was working on scripts. It was love at first sight.

He was a beat, a child of the Fifties ... formed by reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Some of his most moving songs — notably Ol’ 55 and (Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night — are all about cars, about movement.  “Kerouac? God, yeah, sure. I wanted to be on the road. I wanted to be famous like Robert Frank’s photograph of Highway 85 going through New Mexico: a dramatic black-and-white photo with the highway going to a vanishing point. It was like a sign for me. If I’d seen that when I was 16 I would have decided to drive a truck for a living. Yeah, away is the place to go for me…He divides his songs into bawlers and brawlers: the first sweet and lyrical, the second defiant, wounded, and often sung in an epic, throaty growl...
“My favourite highway recently is the Interstate 5. It runs through Oakland and all the way to Los Angeles. It’s just flat and really dramatic, it’s so empty, it’s like being in the middle of the ocean. I’ve been driving a lot lately. I don’t like to take planes because I have too many things in my pockets and it’s too confusing in the airports. I have a lot of things in my pockets they disagree with in security.”

Quotes from -  Tom Waits: Growling Through the Grain Sunday Times, 15 April 2013

The dividing line for Tom is not an album, a song or a change of label, it is a wife. He met Kathleen Brennan on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s film One from the Heart. She is a musician but, for Coppola, she was working on scripts. It was — I hate to say this, but in this case it’s true — love at first sight. They married at a 24-hour wedding chapel and, ever since, at any opportunity Tom finds new strings of metaphors to describe her glory. I got my own special instant poem. After he met his wife Kathleen - things changed.  She introduced him to the work of Captain Beefheart, rock’s most avant-garde star, and Kurt Weill and, together, they produced the wildly odd album Swordfishtrombones. They have worked together ever since.
Their collaborations can be startling, both intimate and improvised. There’s a song called Pontiac in which, to the sound of traffic noise, Tom acts the old guy, recalling every car he’s ever owned. It’s about Kathleen’s dad and she recorded it as they were driving along and Tom had slipped into one of his idle, improvised riffs. This guy, as I find when we speak, sings when he talks.
He divides his songs into bawler and brawlers; the first sweet and lyrical, the second defiant, wounded and often sung in an epic, throaty growl, not unlike that of Captain Beefheart. Simon Schama, the historian, says Waits’s voice is “one of the great sound instruments of American art”, and describes the growl mode as “the raspy ruins of a voice that is itself like a building shattered by shellfire and coated with befouled sand”. “I guess I only have two categories,” Tom says in less elevated terms, “I need you and leave me alone.”
Hmmm. I try a Bob Dylan quote he’s fond of, “Fear and Hope: always sounds like a comedy team to me…”
Though he was exactly the right age — born in 1949 — he was never, you see, a hippie. He was a beat, a child of the Fifties rather than the Sixties, who had first been formed by reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the beat bible. Some of his most moving songs — notably Ol’ 55 and (Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night — are all about cars, about movement.
Some of his most moving songs — notably Ol’ 55 and (Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night — are all about cars, about movement.  “Kerouac? God, yeah, sure. I wanted to be on the road. I wanted to be famous like Robert Frank’s photograph of Highway 85 going through New Mexico: a dramatic black-and-white photo with the highway going to a vanishing point. It was like a sign for me. If I’d seen that when I was 16 I would have decided to drive a truck for a living. Yeah, away is the place to go for me…
“My favourite highway recently is the Interstate 5. It runs through Oakland and all the way to Los Angeles. It’s just flat and really dramatic, it’s so empty, it’s like being in the middle of the ocean. I’ve been driving a lot lately. I don’t like to take planes because I have too many things in my pockets and it’s too confusing in the airports. I have a lot of things in my pockets they disagree with in security.”