Tom Waits Turns 75 This Month

Tom Waits. Photo by Virginia Curtiss.

As we make our way toward the end of 2024 it’s not hard to realize that this year has been a bumpy ride along the American landscape. I’ve always thought, since I was very young, it’s religion and politics that divide us, but it’s music that brings us together. We could enlarge that to all the creative arts, but for my purpose lets focus on music. Let’s talk Tom Waits.

Tonight, as I drift toward the midnight hour, when shadows disappear and darkness covers my funky old bedroom, I put on a familiar album. Tom Waits second album, The Heart of Saturday Night. If you want some comfort for disappointments, regrets, guilty pleasures, or deep-down and dirty blues, just put any album recorded by Tom Waits over the last 50 years.

As we close out 2024, it is a genuine pleasure to do honor to the singer-songwriter of the underbelly of the human spirit, Tom Waits, for his 75^th spin around the sun. It’s good to know Tom is alive and well tonight. In his lifetime Waits has a legacy that includes remarkable works of art in music, film, and theater. He first came around in the pre-punk and disco days of the early 1970s. His first albums on David Geffen’s Asylum label were the jazzy Closing Time and The Heart of Saturday Night. They landed at the peak of the singer-songwriter movement when the most popular artists of the era were Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Joni Mitchell; and James Taylor. These were artists who championed songs that stayed close to the earth and were often derived from folk music. They were influential rockers and held a sense of mellow that often bordered on melancholy. The biggest superstar of the time was considered to be mostly a lightweight. He was the balladeer of “Rocky Mountain High,” John Denver. It was all about “Sunshine on My Shoulders” and “Country Roads.”

In stark contrast to the majority of the artists of his time, Tom emerged like a shadowy phantom out of some dark alleyway, a drunk preacher with sermons about the glory of the seedy night life of any downtown U.S.A. As a teen in San Diego, he immersed himself in the music of Dylan, the words of Jack Kerouac, and the poetry of the Beats in the 1950s, including Alan Ginsburg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. From these influences, Waits created a sound of his own. While much of it seemed on first listen to be off-beat and challenging at the center of the soulful madness, here was an artist in complete control of his craft. If the listener dares to follow him to the eye of that storm in song, they’ll find an engaging and often mesmerizing storyteller who can tell tall tales as he hits the chord of truth on his piano, which we’re told has been drinking. From Grapefruit Moons and Chocolate Jesus comes a troubadour riding his own mule variation to success on his own terms.

Then, just as you think you’ve got this artist figured out, he comes up with a moving torch song version of West Side Story’s “Somewhere,” or you may find echoes of the haunted ghost of Hank Williams that he unveils on “Blind Love” from his 1987 album Rain Dogs. However you define it, Waits has made a career by following his own North Star like no other artist before him. He was no “new Dylan” in the 1970s, a time when all singer-songwriters were compared to the talented troubadour from Minnesota. Rather, Tom Waits was the sum total of all that he had experienced in his lifetime. He became his own road to originality, innovation embodied in a scarecrow like a figure who has taken audacious artistic risks that have paid off.

The music he produced during his first decade—from 1973 to albums and beyond—captured its uniqueness from his diversity of influences. A survey of the music includes echoes of Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, and Mose Allison with flourishes of New Orleans jazz, Brecht/Weill, and the spoken word of Gil Heron.

Waits in Lou Curtiss’ shop, Folk Arts Rare Records, 1972. Photo by Virginia Curtiss.

Music has been a solitary journey for this writer. My way of finding Tom Waits’ music happened in the town where Tom was born in a taxicab in Pomona, California. Folk rock and Americana pioneer, John Stewart, recommended Waits’ two albums at a concert at a local college concert. He then sang “Martha” from Closing Time and “Shiver Me Timbers” from his second album, Heart of Saturday Night. I bought the albums based on John Stewart’s recommendation. What I heard that night as the songs washed over me was one of my first inklings of Americana music. It was entirely different from anything I had heard before. It was more than any other element in the music the performance that held me. The way Waits embraced and delivered the song, at times haunting and touching, it was always mesmerizing.

It wasn’t long before I took a trip to Doug Weston’s Troubadour in Los Angeles circa 1974, where Tom was opening for Maureen McGovern, who was known for her hit Oscar-winning song, “Morning After,” from The Poseidon Adventure disaster movie. Tom came out on stage looking like the painting on album cover of The Heart of Saturday Night, with the hat and old coat. He began with a cold open and began snapping his fingers and rhythmically belting out “Diamonds on my Windshield.” During the song, he pulled an open beer magically out of his coat pocket, pulled back a swallow, and returned it to his coat. It was all so casual.

What followed proved Tom Waits to be not only a fine recording artist and songwriter but a performance artist as well. I sat wondering, “is this guy for real?” Having seen him multiple times over the years, the same question comes up every time. How much here is fact and how much is fiction—while he makes funny comments and has been featured on the talk show circuit over the years for his comical persona, when he’s on stage lost in a song like “Time” or “Christmas Card from a Hooker In Minneapolis,” sold-out audiences are with him for every word during these pin-drop moments. It’s at these times that it doesn’t matter if he’s playing a role, a character, or if this is the real Tom Waits on stage. What matters most is the stories and characters within the songs. In a way that the best folk singers can do, Waits shines a light on our longings, our desires, and our dreams through these vulnerable characters he brings to the songs. “Shiver Me Timbers,” one of his earliest songs, captures the essence of this:

And I’m leavin’ my family
Leavin’ all my friends
My body’s at home
But my heart’s in the wind
Where the clouds are like headlines
Upon a new front page sky
And shiver me timbers
Cause I’m a-sailin’ away

In order to peer behind the curtain of Tom Waits enigmatic persona a bit, I am honored to share this article with his cousin, Randy Miller. In the passages that follow he gives us a glimpse into his family experiences with Tom Waits before his success. The following memories provided by Randy are touching and provide us with an insight and a rare glimpse into the real character of the man behind the songs.

Hearing Tom for the first time, Christmas 1971 and at the Quiet Knight, 1974

By Randy Miller

Waits high school yearbook photo.

The first time I heard Tom play anything—in fact, the first time I was even aware he was a musician—was December 1971. It was at a reunion of my mom’s side of the family over Christmas in the Sacramento Valley. I was 17, my sister 15, and we had traveled with our folks from suburban Chicago in our blue Chrysler station wagon to join some three dozen relatives for the holiday.

My mom was one of seven children, and their families ranged in size from four (ours) to an even dozen, so it wasn’t hard to fill a good-size room when we assembled. Tom’s mom was two years older than mine. The aunt and uncle with the 10 kids had a spacious home, and it served as our gathering place during the reunion.

After dinner there one evening, Tom pulled out the bench at an old black upright piano pressed up against a wall and sat down. Our grandpa sat next to him, facing the other way, as the rest of us gathered around, not quite sure what to expect. Then the opening chords to “Martha” filled the room and then the words “Operator, number please, it’s been so many years. Will she remember my old voice while I fight the tears?” And he followed that one with “Little trip to heaven on the wings of your love, banana moon is shining in the sky. It feels like I’m in heaven when you’re with me. I know that I’m in heaven when you smile….” Our grandpa reached over and patted Tom on the back as he played. “Sing it out, boy! Sing it out!”

I stood off to the side thinking, “Holy crap, where did that come from?” They were two of the most beautiful ballads I’d ever heard.

It’s been fascinating to watch Tom’s career evolve since then. I listened to Closing Time endlessly upon its release in 1973. To this day, every time I hear the opening chords to “Martha,” I’m transported back to that evening at our aunt and uncle’s place.

I saw Tom the following year in Chicago. He was touring to promote his second album, (Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night and was doing a few solo shows at a little club called the Quiet Knight.

I was living in Elgin then, about 40 miles northwest of Chicago. A friend next door happened onto the tail end of a radio interview with Tom and came running over to tell me. We got back to her apartment as the show was wrapping up. “Hey,” Betsy said, “I’ve got the number for the station if you want to call them.”

I called and asked the guy who answered if I could speak with Tom. “I’m his cousin,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” he replied, but before he could hang up, I said, “Just tell him Randy’s on the phone.”

A minute later I hear Tom’s unmistakable voice. “Randy?” He told me about the Quiet Knight and invited us to come to his show the next night.

For some reason, it never occurred to me that the Quiet Knight would be located on the second floor of an old building—and one without an elevator. This would not have mattered except for the fact that, just before we left the for the gig the next afternoon, Betsy asked if she could bring along a quadriplegic friend from a rehab center where she worked. “He’s a huge music fan.” Of course, I said, and we headed off to Chicago in Jim’s specially equipped van.

Once there—and spying the steep, narrow staircase leading up to the venue—I realized that getting Jim safely into the show was going to be next to impossible. I left Betsy and Jim in the van and went up to find Tom. When I explained what was up, he came down to assess the situation. In addition to being a huge music fan, Jim was also a fairly huge guy, but Tom and I decided to see if we could carry him—in his chair—upstairs. To this day, I don’t know how we got him up there without dropping Jim or rupturing something in ourselves, but we did.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when Tom took the stage that night, but it was vastly different from his performance for the family a few Christmases back. The gravel-edged voice had yet to fully emerge, but he’d already stepped boldly into the “caricature of himself,” as he once put it, that the world would come to know. I watched him command the room from the moment he set foot on stage and couldn’t have been prouder.

We chatted with Tom in the bar down the hallway afterward as the evening wound down, but in the back of my mind I was fretting over how to get Jim safely down those stairs. Somehow, we managed.

After loading Jim into the van, I went over to where Tom stood alone in the cool night air to say goodbye. “You’ll probably see the family before I do, so tell ‘em hey.” The touch of melancholy in his voice caught me by surprise. In that moment I realized that this cousin of mine with this exciting and fascinating life, was out there on the road essentially alone and perhaps sometimes lonely. “I will,” I told him.

Our paths have crossed several times since then. I’ve watched him perform, talked with him on the phone a couple times, and seen him at memorial services as our elders have passed on. I’m always struck—but not surprised—by Tom’s warmth and humanity.

Former Byrds member John York, who has covered several of Tom’s songs, once remarked, “The gateway into Tom Waits’ music is through the ballads.” That was certainly the case for me from the moment I first heard Tom sing “Martha.” I remain forever grateful to have walked through that gateway those many Christmases ago, and that Tom followed our grandpa’s encouragement to “Sing it out, boy! Sing it out!”

The Roadhouse Series presents: A 75th Birthday Tribute to Tom Waits with Tom’s Cousin Randy Miller, John York, and MC Terry Paul Roland. Saturday, December 7, 8pm at the Fret House, 309 N. Citrus Ave., Covina.