i'm gonna put a hole in my tv set / i don't wanna grow up
[this is a post from the archives - originally sent december 7th, 2017]
Sorry, Tommy, it's happenin'. Extra email this week as a "It's Tom Waits' Birthday, Let's Boogie" bonus. I'll keep this one brief, and likely this weekend's too.
I love Tom Waits. There's probably something incredibly cliche about that declaration, but it's also one of those fact of life things. I love his music and I love the way he moves through life in a different world - a world he's created just for himself that's a little more noir and a little more fantastical than the one the rest of us occupy. It's a gritty, seedy, gnarly, rundown, grimy place and yet - also an inescapably and unapologetically romantic one. Tom Waits lyrics paint such specific pictures that you get to occupy that world with him for a little while until the record ends, the needle lifts and the rest of us have to pack it up and trudge on home. But oh, you can always play it again another night.
Tom Waits is one of my Cortazar music-as-passwords-to-unlock-the-door-and-get-past-the-isolation keys. When I teach a class for work, one of the ice breaker questions I always ask is where people would time travel and why. My answer is and has always been to see Tom Waits play in the early '70s when he was just getting started. The classes where people have heard Waits' always seem to go a little better. In another weird work game - a coworker of mine once asked everyone to pitch what their dream TV show to host would be - if they had to pick a genre and a celebrity to host with. You're looking at the future host of Tom.. Waits, a cooking show set in a diner where I mostly just make pancakes and fried eggs and Tom Waits serves customers if he feels like it and we shoot the breeze.
To listen to Tom Waits talk is a wonderous thing. Google some interviews with him. Or, better yet - watch this documentary (It's free! It's got Lucinda Williams in it!). Among other things, there's an amazing scene where Kathleen Brennan - Tom's wife and marvelous in her own right - jokes and says she met Tom when she was a nun and he fell asleep in her church. It's not true, but there's something in the way they look at each other that tells you it's not so untrue either. Tom and Kathleen are #relationshipgoals (that's what the kids say, right?) if ever there were any. Tom on Kathleen -
"My wife's like a cross between Eudora Welty and Joan Jett. Kathleen is a rhododendron, an orchid, and an oak. She's got the four Bs: beauty, brightness, bravery and brains. She rescued me. I'd be playing in a steakhouse right now if it weren't for her. I wouldn't even be playing a steakhouse. I'd be cooking in a steakhouse." also
“She’s like a heavy equipment operator and a clairvoyant - it’s rare you get that together. She’s something else — tree surgeon and a ventriloquist, astronaut and private eye. You’re always looking for those two things. A newspaperman and a bathing beauty. It’s a combination that works for us, ‘cause a lot of times, I’m in a stroller waiting to be pushed out into traffic. She’s the one that’ll do it.”
I've probably screwed myself over searching for a Tom and Kathleen kind of love story, but what else is there?
Pick up a copy of Tom Waits on Tom Waits, a collection of years of interviews and flip through the pages. (Austinites, there's a copy at the Central library and you can also check it out digitally through the wonders of technology. I've got my own at home to dog ear so it's probably there for ya and the library is so so rad. The more you know...) There's a grime-coated gem on every page.
This is getting unbrief, so I'll close with this. It's Thomas Alan Waits' birthday today. Celebrate by at least throwing on an album or two. Look at the characters around you, drink 'em in, eat that shit up. Take a walk down to Heart Attack and Vine.