`Words Are Music, Really'

I met Tom Waits on a cold, clear January morning in 1987. A film crew had taken over the bar at the corner of Central Avenue and Quail Street, in Albany, N.Y., and rechristened it The Gilded Cage. Hector Babenco, the director, was scheduled to shoot a scene inside for his adaptation of William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Ironweed. Jack Nicholson (as Francis Phelan) and Meryl Streep (as Helen Archer), were reported to already be inside as I stood on the corner, stamping my feet on the sidewalk to keep them warm and talking with photographers and other reporters.

Walking up the sidewalk, wrestling with a pin-striped suit jacket and looking as though he had just fallen out of bed, came Tom Waits, in costume as Rudy the Kraut, Francis’ doomed sidekick. His dense hair from a distance looked uniformly brown but up close, when I shook his hand, I could see it was glistening purple, green and yellow, like the feathers of starling. Waits had driven himself to the set. We talked for a couple of minutes and he signed my notebook, and then he went to work. The other reporters hadn’t recognized him, but a guy across the street shouted “Tom Waits for no man!” Waits winced.

Ironweed the film is disappointing. Babenco’s conception of what is, after all, a story about drunks in Depression-era Albany, is too grandiose, and devices that work just fine in Kennedy’s novel – the ghosts who haunt Francis – are too literal-minded and kitschy on the screen. But Waits and Nicholson are wonderful, as is Fred Gwynne as Oscar the bartender. Gwynne was the only person I have ever met who was both taller than me (I’m six-foot-six) and could convincingly wear a beret, a combination I didn’t think possible.

I spoke with Waits several more times. He was consistently friendly and thoughtful, and seemed grateful that someone knew his music pretty well, especially the recent Rain Dogs. My oldest son loves Tom Waits, and I flatter myself to think I can take some credit for his good musical taste. On Monday he sent me a link to an outstanding interview with Waits published at Pitchfork Media, a music web site. The occasion is the release of Waits’ three-disc magnum opus, Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards. I’ve heard two cuts and will have to wait until Christmas for the rest, but “Lie to Me” is irresistible rockabilly.

In the interview, Waits comes off as thoughtful, articulate, funny and attuned to language. Asked “To what extent has literature influenced your music?” he says:

“I'm usually more concerned with how things sound than how they look on the page. Some people write for the page and that's a whole other thing. I'm going for what it sounds like right away, so it may not even look good on the page. But I'm still a word guy. I'm drawn to people who use a certain vernacular and communicate with words. Words are music, really. I mean, people ask me, `Do you write music or do you write words?’ But you don't really, it's all one thing at its best. Sometimes when you're making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning. But to begin with, most people who make songs just start out with [Waits makes noises].”

Consider the bona fide rock musicians who would have used that question as an excuse for parading their bad taste in books and general illiteracy. Instead, tactfully, without dismissing the interviewer, Waits takes a thoughtful verbal detour, and I think what he says contains lessons for many print-bound writers: “Words are music, really.”

Asked about self-mythologizing, Waits again avoids an opportunity for a lot of portentous self-congratulation:

“The fact is most of the things that people know about me are made up. My own life is backstage. So what you "know" about me is only what I allowed you to know about me. So it's like a ventriloquist act. And it's also a way of safely keeping your personal life out of your business. Which is healthy and essential. I'm not one of those people the tabloids chase around. You have to put off that smell-- it's like blood in the water for a shark. And they know it, and they know that you've also agreed. And I'm not one of those. I make stuff up. There's nothing that you can say that will mean the same thing once it's been repeated. We're all making leaner versions of stories. Before there was recording, everything was subject to the folk process. And we were all part of composing in the evolution and the migration of songs. We all reached out, and they all passed through our hands at some point. You dropped a verse or changed the gender or cleaned up a verse for your kids or added something more appropriate for your community. Anything that says `Traditional,’ it's `Hey, I wrote that, I'm part of that.’ Just like when a joke reaches you-- how did it reach you? If you could go back and retrace it, that would be fascinating.”