Tom Waits' 'Bone Machine': Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known, fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows
and more. Where your two swordfish, trombones of Scintille, your
rain dogs of random facts, your mule variations of magnified
views on stock, I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan Roun

(00:32):
talk and today, as the nerdy among you may have
picked up on, we are talking about America's original steam powered,
part tree, part tombstone, Carnival Barker playing a piano made
out of mammoth fossels, an old era almost didn't get
to the end of that sense, that's right. We are
talking about Tom Waite and his epical nineteen ninety two
album Bone Machine, maybe a runner up right after Eraserhead

(00:56):
for like least commercially popular thing we've covered on here. Yeah,
it's up there, like critics loved this album, and writers
love this album and nerds love this album. But researching it,
I was like, oh, yeah, this has got the Grammy,
and then nothing else, like no significant sales to speak of.
The single went nowhere. I mean, but you know, I

(01:17):
am one of the biggest Tom Wait's nerds you will
ever meet in this or any other life, and I
love that about you. I was thinking about this a
lot prayer to tabing this episode. I am fairly certain
that I was introduced to him by MTV two. Do
you remember when MTV two first launched.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
I don't, but I love how that was really your
entry point for so many bands because it was also
the box, right.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Well, so that's exactly what it was on the cable
slot in that the box used to have in Central Pennsylvania.
MTV I guess. I don't know if they took over
the box, which was request only, but they took over
the slot as MTV two, which, for a while, bless
its pointed Little Heart or Head or whatever that Jefferson
Airplane album is just showed music videos and there was

(02:01):
no like time restrictions on those music videos. So one
second you would see like the nineteen ninety three video
for Rage Against Machines Freedom, then you would see the
old Penny Lane promotional clip, then you would see Last
Night by the Strokes, and then you would see and
in my case, God's Away on Business by Tom Waits.
But the point was is that you had no idea

(02:23):
what era of stuff it was gonna throw at you.
And it was like at Christmas or something, and I
was channel surfing. One of my cousins came in and
was like, oh, Tom Waits, And I was like, is
that what this is? And they were like yeah, the
cookie Monster and God's Away in Business is like the
funniest possible song for that, because that's really one of
his ones where he like devolves into self parody and
is literally just.

Speaker 3 (02:42):
Like oom boh oom bah God's oh wait, God's oh
way on business business uh.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
And so I was like, Okay, that's hilarious. So I
do a range of weights. There's the uh you know,
Tom Waits giving interview, his voice just a little bit
more laid back and then devolves into Gordeworst. Have you
ever interviewed him? No, I'd be terrified. He hates giving interviews.

(03:11):
He does not want to be Tom Waits at this
point in his life at all. He wants to be
like Dad Waits Chile Mountain, Sonoma County. I actually heard
that he came to like this tiny DIY Experimental music
festival or space in Oakland, like just by himself, like
drove down from Sonoma because it was a night. It

(03:32):
was a tribute night to some obscure experimental instrument maker
and like random guy and I did door there, volunteered
tog door there occasionally, and like showed up like the
following week to run door and someone was like, oh,
Tom Waits was here last week, and I was like,
ah no, So that crushed me. Also, I'll never get

(03:53):
to see him live. He hates playing live. He probably
never will again, which is great it fits his whole personality,
but it does kill me at all times. Anyway, So
I saw I saw that video and my two like
cool music cousins were like, oh yeah, Tom Wade's like
blah blah blah blah. And so I went to I
want to say LimeWire or Kazah, one of the green ones,

(04:14):
and I downloaded Going Out West from this very album.
And I didn't know any of them about bit rates,
but I knew that certain things sounded like dogshit when
you would get them from like a pirate site in
the early days. So I downloaded it and I was like, ooh,
it's kind of cool, like noir surf guitar intro. Yeah,
like makes me feel like I'm a detective, but I

(04:35):
have a stun gun and I don't know if it's
the thirties or blade Runner. And then it just that
guitar riff kicks in is just like and then like
him singing like through a megaphone or something. I was like, Wow,
this sounds terrible. So I went to the CD warehouse
locally and bought a copy of Boone Machine and then

(04:57):
like brought it back home. I was like, Oh, this
is this is how it's supposed to sound. This is incredible.
And then I just right down the proverbial rabbit hole.
I just went back there like every week and was
just like, Hey, what's the next of these albums I
should get? And I was like, well, you gotta do
rain Dogs, you gotta do Swordfish Trombones, and then and
then filling in the gaps with some of the more

(05:18):
obscure stiff like but not obscure but like less canonized
stuff like you got to go back and you got
to go to like Billy Joel tom Waits, which like
I don't I think maybe not maybe, I don't know.
I think that's like an insult to both people but like,
you know, the log line on Tom Waits's this early
stuff is like I always just say he's like a
drunker billy Joel, Like it's all very uh because you know,

(05:41):
he was pounding around it with the Melo Mafia. He
was like buds with you know when the ron stat
that's yea nuts So and Ricky Lee Jones and like
the Eagles and all those guys they dated for a while, right, Yeah, yeah,
him and Ricky Lee. Yeah. Weirdly enough, in the Classic
League Annals of how rockstar Relationships dissolve, it was her
heroin habit that actually caused them to break up. Anyway, Yeah, man,

(06:06):
And I you know, I think about it. I thought
about it a lot in contextualizing it in like my life,
and I thought it was just I think it was
what drew him to me, What drew me to him
was that, like, you know, about two years prior, I
had gotten into like punk rock, right And and when
you're in getting into punk rock in anywhere in like

(06:28):
a small town, that means you like go to it
intimidating club and there's five people there wearing a black
flag shirt, five people there wearing the Dead Kennedy shirt,
five people wearing the misfit shirt and five people wearing
the ramone shirt, and you're like, okay, I have homework.
And also everyone is dressed the same way, and all
of these people are very intimidating, and then I get
screamed at it. So for someone like me who was

(06:50):
a little bit insecure about entering that world and also
a big nerd, when I got to Tom Waits, I
was like, oh, like, you guys think like Rancid is transgressive,
or you think like the Dead Kennedy's are transgressive, Like
this man sounds like a broken radiator, you know, like
and then sadly manifested in a brief period where I

(07:11):
was wearing like tweed jackets and fingerless gloves and fedoras
around to like punk shows. But it was really like
such a shot in the arm of like self confidence
of being like, oh cool, Like you guys are like
Ramon's weird and like Ramon's punk, but like I'm into
Tom Waits and he's the weirdest man alive. And also

(07:32):
he sings like an actual monster and not in like
an adenoidal so col wine the way that like you know,
blinquin a two or green Day did or any of
that stuff. And I was like, so this man is
real as hell and like more punk rock than any
of you will ever be. And uh, yeah, I've just
been obsessed with him for my entire life. And he's like, oh, so,

(07:54):
you know, there's a lot to be obsessed with. I
think I get into this topic later, but he is
such a I mean, the guy is like, if you
spend as much time with his body of work as
I do, and the truly obsessed among us do, like,
he's such a repository of the detritus of like America's

(08:15):
twenty of the twentieth century, you know, and you just
find out all these weird little old turns of phrase
and lyrical like references and tropes, and it's just an
endlessly interesting series of rabbit holes to just fall down into.

Speaker 1 (08:30):
And that way, I always got the sense that it
was almost like the American Elvis Costello in terms of
just being, like you said, this repository of not only
a continuum of music, but just phrases culture.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
I mean, the linguistics is probably the big part of it. Yeah. Yeah,
it's funny. I mean, he's it's really interesting being as
obsessed with him as I am, because you do start
to notice some of his ticks, and you start to
notice some of his like that the box set Orphans
that came out at one point is so fascinating because
it is because of these songs were never officially released.

(09:05):
You really hear how his like studio approach of just
kind of being like, well, I have this song that
is me and piano singing, and then we're just gonna
try it seventeen different ways and see what happens. Like
there's an outtake on that one of this song called
never Let Go where I think they fully like miss
there's like an extra bar, like, so you hear the
drummer do this big like role and then it like,

(09:27):
I don't know, there's just all these little mistakes and
stuff that you listen to, and he repeats lyrics and
has different repeat themes and so it's like, I think
I'm just more deeper into him than any other artist,
with the exception of maybe Miles Davis, and so like,
I just have such an inside, like a disturbingly deep
view of his like processes and little quirks and sessions.

(09:49):
So it's like, yeah, it's like me and the Beatle
it's like my Beatles. He's my Beatles. Oh and the
Beatles are your Beatles?

Speaker 1 (09:55):
Yes, yes, I mean you know, it may not surprise
you to know that Tom Waits is not one of
my go tos, because you know, considering how much Brian
Wilson and Paul McCartney I listened to, I have to
admit that I do find his voice a little hard
to take at times.

Speaker 2 (10:10):
Well which voice? Which voice? Okay, though, because you've got,
like I said, you've got early raspy voice, and then
you've got like the Prince falsetto, and then you've got
like there's a period I think from like Blue Valentine
to small change where he just is kind of doing
like Louis Armstrong or like like Blues shouting, and then
right around brain Dogs and Swordfish from Bones and that

(10:32):
trifecta into Bone Machine is where he just really goes
off the deep end. And that's anyway, what are his
vocal influences. I'm so curious. We'll get to that, Okay,
all right, Well get to that.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
I mean I do love him almost more from a
literary standpoint. I sort of always thought of him as
like the musical Covid of like Bukowski or something.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
Well, that's an interesting relationship. One of my earliest defeats
as a writer came when I was freelancing for no
money for Pop Matters and I pitched them like a
listicle of Tom Waite's songs. And this is one of
the things that's made me such a fact checking nerd.
There's this like oft repeated logline that Christmas Card from

(11:17):
a Hooker in Minneapolis, which by the way, is like
one of the best has There's a performance of this
song that he does on solo piano on some Australian
TV show or English TV show where he starts with
Silent Night, goes into Christmas Card from a Hooker Minneapolis,
interpolates little anthemyy Imperials, and then finishes it again at

(11:38):
silent Night. That is like one of the most incredible
things I've ever seen stagecraft and like theatrically musically wise,
that song, like on the Internet was a commonly repeated
fact that it was based on a short story from
a Charles Pokowski collection, and one of the first comments
I ever got as an Internet writer was that that

(12:00):
is incorrect. There is no such Charles bukowskis short story
and this is a commonly repeated lie on the internet,
and I do not know where it started. There's like
something to that effect. I think this short story collection
is like Rooming House Madrigals. And the big problem with
Bukowski is that he wrote seventeen hundred poems a night
when he was hammered between the hours of like four

(12:21):
thirty pm until he passed out. And so particularly when
you get into the Dolphin Press or Echo or whatever
the like the people who handled his latter day stuff,
there's dreams of new poems, but then there's also all
the like archival stuff, and I think Rooming House Magic
Goals is one of the earlier collections, and that is

(12:42):
where this poem that Tom Waites based the song on
supposedly appears, and it doesn't. And it was so it
spurred me forever to be a researcher and a nerd.
And that's my origin story for this podcast. And so
in a way I could take it all back to
Tom Waits and Bukowski. Yeah, I mean, Beukosko is a
big influence on him, but I think he also comes

(13:03):
from a very pre Bukowski sentiment, which is just like
the beats. I mean, it's important to know that he
grew up in San Diego and so pretty much everything
he does is filtered through like native Californian lens, you know,
So like the beats in San Francisco were like a
huge thing for him, he idolized. You know, there's a

(13:23):
song on one of his I think it might be
a foreign affair that it's just called I'm going to
California to meet up with Jack and Neil, which is
like the most nakedly beat fetishizing garbage I could ever
think of. Do you want to tell the folks that
Jack and Nail are? Do I have to his education
really fallen that far in this country? I guess I do.
Why I ask that question? Jack Carrorac and Neil Cassidy

(13:47):
the protagonists and writers of On the Road. So yeah, that,
like I, he was also really into this guy named
Ken Nordaan whose whole thing was a word jazz. Oh yeah,
I think we've covered him before. Ken Nordan was if
Jack Carrek's whole thing was trying to write like he
conceived of jazz musicians playing, Ken Nordon was kind of

(14:08):
trying to reverse engineer it. And do like spoken word poetry,
like improvising live to jazz music. And so there's all
these Ken Nordin albums and he does. There's an appearance
of him on the on the Steve Allen Tonight's show
where Steve Allen's playing piano, and I talk about this later,
Like Tom Waits and Bob Dylan are only like seven

(14:30):
or eight years apart. And so if you look at
the two of them and their sort of lyrical preoccupations
and a lot of the places that they overlap, the
biggest difference is that Tom Waits is like is from California.
That's really how how I've pinned it down. So he
starts from this era of like beat worship and like
Hogy Carmichael, and he supposed he has this joke about

(14:51):
only learning the black keys on the piano because they
were the only ones that worked on like a piano
that he had at home, which is such a bit
of like Tom Waits myth making. So yeah, a lot
of his early stuff is coming from this whole you know,
ten Panelley forties fifties beat nick preoccupation. I don't know
where to stop. You're going to have to give me
some pauses because I will just continue going.

Speaker 1 (15:13):
Okay, Okay, I know that this man is very steeped
in lore, and what little of it I know, I
know through you, So I fully expect that I'm going
to learn a lot of this episode I'm really looking
forward to because I know how much you love him well.

Speaker 2 (15:26):
From the storage room and or shed on a chicken
ranch that Bone Machine is recorded in because some of
the best off kilter musical instructions Weights provided to his
studio musicians, to the invented instruments he played on it,
to the abysmal chart performance of this album which did
win him a Grammy. Here's everything you didn't know about

(15:46):
Tom Waits's Bone Machine. Tom Waitson had a hell of
a nineteen eighties. At the top of the decade, he
was broke and I believe he had just been kicked
off of asylum. Why for poor sales or drugs or well,

(16:06):
it's quite funny, yeah, I mean he had one of
these artist trajectories that will never happen again, just full
on will never happen again. He made a career initially
as like I said, part of in the Circle of
This like Mellow Mafia in La you know, he was
i think working he was living in the Tropicana Hotel
and working at like at the Troubadour, and that's how

(16:30):
he met Linda Ronstat Ricky Lee Jones the Eagles, who
later covered one of his songs. And so he cuts
his early albums Closing Time, Heart of Saturday Night, and
there's a bunch of demos out from this time period
that are all pretty like it's basically singer songwriter stuff.
And he's got a producer who's a jazz guy named

(16:50):
bones How. He's doing all of these like string laden
kind of jazzy arrangements, and that's kind of what they're
they're pairing him with. I mean, you get also get
Nighthawks the Diner, which is a great faux live album
where they just like trucked a bunch of people and
a stripper into a like a big studio live room
and just had him do his like live set.

Speaker 1 (17:10):
You mentioned bones How. I mean Bones How was a
big deal in like sixties pop. He did stuff with
like The Association and the Turtles and like the Fifth Dimension.

Speaker 2 (17:19):
Like that's a.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
Really I mean, he's like like one of the architects
of what's called Sunshine Pop, which is like, yeah, sixties,
that's that's a weird pairing with Tom Waits.

Speaker 2 (17:28):
Well exactly, And I think that's what's so interesting. I mean,
there's this there's a one of the early compilations I
got was the Early Years, and it's a lot of
him demoing on just piano and guitar. And you know,
his early songs like Old fifty five was covered by
the Eagles, Martha is a really beautiful song covered by
Tim Buckley. So like, if you think about like Cookie

(17:49):
Monster Tom Waits writing songs that were covered by like
Tim Buckley and the Eagles, that's very weird. But it
was just because of this part of la that he inhabited,
and he had a managined named her Cohen, who basically
mismanaged him into the toilet. I mean, he put Tom Waits,
like doing this piano ballad stuff on a tour with
Frank Zappa, and it was hell because he was Zappa's manager,

(18:13):
so he paired his two clients together. Didn't make any sense.
But he sort of starts leaning towards like Blue Valentine
and Heart Attack and Vine and Small Change of these
albums where he starts toying with his voice a little
bit more and getting into a little bit more CD
noir rather than like California kind of balladerie. And so

(18:34):
basically at the top of the eighties though he's been
kicked off of Asylum and doesn't have any money because
of herb Cohen. So Electra and Asylum had been absorbed
by Warners and Asylum was originally founded by David Geffham
with the idea of being the only like artist friendly

(18:54):
major right, That's why he called it asylum, And so
I always thought it was short for lunatic asylum. Maybe
it was like the idea of like the inmates riding asylum,
but like you know, so so Warner Brothers and Warner
Electra Asylum now had like Grateful Dead, Van Morrison, Eagles,
Queen Carly Simon, pre Merger, Electra and Asylum had like

(19:17):
Judy Collins and Jackson Brown. And so Tom Waits is
in there too, and and his A and R guide
Joe Smith actually told Barney Hoskins at one point, right, biographer,
Yeah for the Low side of the Road, which is
a great Tom Waits bio. I was trying to keep
Freddie Mercury from falling apart. I was trying to get

(19:37):
Don Henley and Glenn Fry into a studio together, or
I was trying to sign new acts like the Cars.
My promotion and marketing staff would roll their eyes when
I announced we had a new Tom Waits record. I'm
playing Queen and Jackson Brown and we have a meeting
and I play weights, and that's when everyone goes to
the bathroom. Yeah. And it was interesting because like Tom
was like a COGNISEETI kind of pick, but he didn't

(19:59):
have any real mainstream audience at that point. And Smith says, like,
you know, Joni Mitchell can say I want to go
record a jazz album with Charles Mingus, and that's because
it was Joni Mitchell ten years into being Joni Mitchell.
Tom Ways didn't have any of that. So at the eighties,
at top of the eighties, he is poor and at
the proverbial transitional phrase, and you could say that he

(20:22):
is at crossroads. I indeed later on, I know, well,
you've been jumping around so much. I don't know where
it's oh yeah, but this is fifties word jazz baby,
you know, bebop, rich, fireworks, bang boom, whimper, not a bang.
I don't know. I don't really like beat poetry. I
think it's dumb. They need an editor. Uh, okay, enough

(20:45):
grammar punctuation, there's no m dashes. The biggest change in
Tom Waye's life at this point comes via his slow
sort of entrance into Hollywood. He'd been asked by Francis
Ford Coppola to write the music for One from the Heart,
which is not a film that I bet you can
tell me anything about. Yeah, it's up there in sort

(21:09):
of a Coppola's like semi fallow period of the eighties
when he did this. He did Rumblefish, he did like
Outsiders and stuff like.

Speaker 1 (21:18):
That, all building up to Jack starring Robin Williams.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
Yeah, this is all building up to bram Stoker's Dracula
in two and which I will then get into. There's
a long sidebar on Bramstoker's Dracula, all right. Anyway, So
on One for the Heart actually waits picks up a
nomination for Original Music Score, which he did with Crystal Gail.

(21:44):
And so it's on that at American Zoatro Pictures, which
is Copola's production company, that he meets Kathleen Brennan. Kathleen
is a script editor for Zoatrope, and Waits had been
given the old time composer treatment of getting an office
on the lot, like on the at the offices where

(22:06):
he was writing these songs. And he meets Kathleen Brennan there,
and he is the other thing. This is the other
thing about Tom Waite's. Nearly anything Waits as quoted as
saying is either charitably a yarn, good old fashioned American
West male buucherie, or a straight up lie. So you
do have to take certain things of what he's saying

(22:26):
with certain incredible amounts of salt. But he basically meets
Kathleen Brennan, and not only does she open his eyes
to all of this other music. At what he told
the Guardian once, I didn't just marry a beautiful woman.
I married a record collection that's amazing. But she she
also sets him on his path like out of the gutter.

(22:49):
I think I did find a excited source. I think
it's in the Hoskins book that he went into AA
in nineteen ninety two. But she was really like, you
got to quit this drink and if you want to
be with me two ninety two but she like put
the clamps on it, because there's a hilarious story at
one point in the nineties about him hanging out with
the Replacements. I think this might have been for police

(23:11):
to meet me or maybe Tim where he was like
in the building with them, and he had admitted to
liking them, like I think he had seen them live
at some point and was like, yeah, I like those kids,
the Replacements. And so he just shows up at the
studio with Kathleen and it's very like, kind of buttoned
down and respectful, like, hey, you know, I like what
you kids are doing, Like it's real good rock and roll,
you know, back to basics. And then he's like, okay,

(23:33):
honeywell I think I'm gonna you know, I think I'm
gonna hang out with the Replacements for a little while
and see what they can get up to in the studio.
And and so Kathleen's like, all right, take a cab home,
I'll see you. I'll see you boys later. And I
think it's Paul Westerberg, or it's either Paul Westerberg or
the bassist Tom Tommy Stinson, who says like and it
was like a he turned into a were wolf, like

(23:54):
he he like grabbed one of their bottles of Jack
Daniels and started slugging it. There's all this hilarire, drunken
outtakes of like them just doing like basic backing while
Tom Waits plays like a B three organ and is
like doing all these like preacher like tent revival riffs.
Like you have to let him use you just anyway.

(24:17):
But so she's like she puts a curba his drinking.
She exposes him to all this kind of stuff, everything
from you know, Puccini to Captain Beefheart, Alan Lomack's field
recordings and Harry Parch And what this does is kind
of give him all of these context clues to fill
in the gaps into everything that he says he's like

(24:37):
been into before, from like you know, Hogy Carmichael and
Tin Panale stuff backwards into like real gut bucket blues
and like real strange stuff. All of this is to
say that way, it's essentially reverse engineered his soft jazz metal,
mafia cool boho beat nick sound into something that more

(24:59):
resembled and as madic Werewolf driving a slowly dying model
t forward through a junkyard filled with skeletons improvising a
score out of antique instruments and it rules. And so
the first one that sets this path out is Swordfish Trombones,
and that that's followed by rain Dogs and Frank's Wild Years,
and that's kind of a loose trilogy that cements like

(25:19):
the new Tom Waits sound. And also, you know, he
keeps acting, which is really quite interesting. He has like
roles in three Copola films in nineteen eighty three alone,
and he like really hit it off with Coppola, which
is actually funny. And there's he's like talked about like
going over to spaghetti dinners like at the at the
Coppola's while he was doing all these movies with them

(25:41):
and like listening to Puccini and all of this stuff.
So they get married Waits and Kathleen, and they have
their first child, a daughter, and they moved to New York.
Waits had made a stab at living in New York before.
He didn't exactly like it. Like I mentioned, he's a
California boy through and through, but he makes a number
of important connections and collaborations in New York. He meets
Jim Jarmish, who later casts Waits in down By Law.

(26:05):
He meets Robert Wilson, who is a theater guy who
had just done Einstein on the Beach with Philip Glass.
And he meets John Lourie, who at the time was
an also Jarmish pal who was leading the Lounge Lizards,
And that is where he meets Mark Ribo. I still
don't know how to pronounce that guy's name, Ribot Rebot.

(26:25):
I don't think I've ever heard it. I've seen him
live twice, I don't think I've ever heard it pronounced anyway.
He's this downtown kind of New York eighties jazz loft
seen guitarist who is all over rain dogs and a
lot of wait stuff, and it's awesome. He plays guitar
like it's a slowly dying stun gun that he doesn't

(26:46):
have an instruction manual for. Your analogies for this are incredible.
You've hadtice, I practice a lot of them. You've had
twenty five years. Yeah, I've had my whole life to
prepare for this.

Speaker 1 (26:55):
Yes, yes, yes, yes, Well, during his time in New York,
Tom Waits met up with somebody that I've actually heard of,
little British guitarist songwriter, an occasional singer named Keith Richards.

Speaker 2 (27:06):
This is I love this story so much. I'm so
glad you included this. Waits recall The Island Records asked.

Speaker 1 (27:12):
Them for a list of who we'd like to work
with on the album rain Dogs, and he was a
huge fan of the Stones, as you put it, dirt
Bag Magnum Opus Exile on Main Street, which is probably
the most Keith centric Stones album ever, And so Waits
throughout Keith's name, and the label said, great, we'll call him,
to which an absolutely aghast Waits responded, Jesus, please don't

(27:35):
do that. I was just kidding around, and supposedly a
few weeks later, this is something the only bit of
Tom Waits Laura I've heard of. Tom gets a letter
from Keith in the mail that reads, the weight is over,
Let's dance.

Speaker 2 (27:49):
I love that. I love that so much. He has
so many great lines about about Keith Ridchards. He's like
he comes into the studio with his head at ten
and his next it too. I don't know, I don't
know how he does it. He's like he just comes
in and hits the guitar and everything falls into place
around that he says like he's someone who music likes

(28:10):
to be around, which is like one of the most
poetic phrases I've ever heard about someone talking about a collaborator. Wow,
that's great.

Speaker 1 (28:18):
Waits also apparently contributed to The Stones nineteen eighties, not
a high point for the band Dirty Work.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
I did not know that before researching this, Oh, rote
Tom Waits fanas, I did not know he's supposedly somewhere
on Dirty Work of all places.

Speaker 1 (28:35):
Yeah, not the best Stones album, But Waits and Richards
hit it off so well that Richard's actually thanked wait
for quote spiritual encouragement on his own solo debut, Talk
is Cheap. Years later, at NPR's Fresh Air, Waits talked
about co writing with Richard's own rain Dogs. We wrote
songs together for a while and that was fun. But
Keith doesn't really remember anything or write anything down. So

(28:57):
you play for an hour and he would yell across
the room scribe, and I looked around scribe, who's the scribe,
and he'd say it again, now pointing at me. I
was supposed to have written everything down that we said
and dreamt of and played. And I realized we needed
an adult in the room, which is dangerously close to
the John Mulaney Mick Jagger guesting on SNL and just

(29:19):
saying diet coke and then a diet.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
Coke appearing in his hands from one of the many assistants.
You're dealing with people who have had their entire life.
There have been millionaires since they were like nineteen. What
do you want? Yeah? Yeah? Is he nice? No? In
my world, you say, may I please have a diet coke? Please?
And maybe you will get one? Yeah. Waited also at

(29:42):
this point become enamored of the work of the adult
blacked Les. That makes sense, Yeah, all of which goes
into rain Dogs. And rain Dogs is a bit of
a bigger hit than Swordfish. Crombones got Record of the
Year from NME and Songwriter of the Year from Rolling Stone,
and then so from rain Dogs. He just sort of
explodes in all directions. And I think it's really interesting

(30:03):
considering how much his output has slowed in latter years,
because he's really working at a very fevered pace at
this point in the eighties, and much of it, I mean,
I don't know. He doesn't really talk about his personal
life or his marriage that much beyond its impact on
his artistic thing, but I feel like she was probably
making more money than he was when they met, and

(30:23):
he was like, Okay, I've got to leverage these different connections,
and I've got to leverage all this stuff and do
a bunch right away. All right, Well, I have two questions.

Speaker 1 (30:31):
One, I think in your piece that you sent me earlier,
there was a great description of where the title rain
Dogs came from. And I also I don't believe you
included this in that, But I also want to know
where does Swordfish Trombones come from?

Speaker 2 (30:43):
Right? So, rain dogs is refers to the phenomenon of
dogs going out to pee after it rains and all
their scent marks have been washed away, so that they're
all confused, and they.

Speaker 1 (30:52):
Go up and look to you as if asking you
can you please take me home?

Speaker 2 (30:55):
I thought that was very sweet. Swordfish Trombones, I want
to say, just off the top of my dome, I
think it might be a Captain beef Heart thing, because
that was one of the biggest people that Kathleen had
introduced him to it. And one of Beefheart's stupid trademarks
is like putting animal things with like non animal things
like trout mask replica, trout Mask replica. What's the fun.

(31:18):
There's like a bit of fasta the Masquatta snake faster
than bulbous. Uh. Just yeah, anyway, that's like some of
his lyrical concerns. But let me check that out actually
real quick. How do you feel about Captain bee Fart.

Speaker 1 (31:30):
I get a sense that it's it's similar to Frank's
app but nothing wrong with a little beef art.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
But a long a lot of beef far. I like
beef Heart. I will admit that I had to do
the classic like listen to this like five times and
then finally like get it. But that record is really wild.
I don't see a concrete thing at least on wiki

(31:56):
about the Swordfish Turnbones name. But I mean, have you
heard about how they made that record? Pieces He like
tortured that band. He put them all in a remote mansion.
They only had his car, and he stole all their
mail and their money and like rationed food out to
them and was just generally like a horrible tyrant. And

(32:17):
they rehearsed at all hours, and he put them through
all of his whimsical beef Heart bullshit. Like there's great
bits of like studio outtake chatter where he's like forcing
them to do these like dialogues like fast and bulbous,
the mascout of Snake, and you see the guy who's
supposed to be reading this dialogue just go oh Jesus Christ.
But you know that records bonkers and you do hear

(32:41):
like it's like looking at a you know, it is
like looking at a Kandinsky or a Pollock or something
where like the longer you look at it and you
start to see like different micro structures in it. And
because it was so tightly rehearsed, they did the backing
tracks for that whole album, which sounds for the uninitiated
like random. It sounds like you just threw a bunch

(33:01):
of random backing tapes into a big machine that threads
them all onto a tape machine and spits out a
master mix, and then Captain Beefheart is singing over it.
But they were so locked in and so well rehearsed
making that that when Zeppa was producing and trying to
sort through different takes to find stuff for beef Heart
to sing the vocal lines over, he couldn't tell the

(33:22):
takes apart. So it's just like absolute emotionally abused, lockstep
rehearsed like watch tight version of chaos that just sounds
like nothing else. But then there's stuff like too much time,
like this beef Heart's song, too much Time, it sounds
like a motown song. And anyway, so that's my take
on beef Art. Where was I going with this?

Speaker 1 (33:43):
I just want to know the origins of the name
Raine Dogs and sort of fish dn Bones.

Speaker 2 (33:47):
Yeah, well, and now I have them. I rule, I rule.
I don't think we can mention that. I know. I
love that you picked what that was from. Yeah. So
the next thing that he does is kind of create
a musical, a narrative arc out of the songs on Swordfish,
Trombones and Rain Dogs, and he presents it as a

(34:08):
musical with Chicago's famed Steppenwolf Theater, home of Gary Sonise
and John Malkovich. And then he releases that as an
album in nineteen eighty seven, still acting in eighty six
and eighty seven, and then he moves back to la
with Brennan and their kids. And it's really important to
note at this point that like ninety percent of what
he does is then credited to Brennan Waits she's like

(34:32):
his producer. She writes lyrics with him. They like source
material together. And then in nineteen eighty nine, Waits begins
his collaboration with the aforementioned Robert Wilson, who had done
Einstein on the Beach with Philip Glass, as I mentioned,
which the stage direction for that is already like ridiculous.
Look that up if you haven't. But the other thing

(34:53):
you need to know about Robin Wilson Robert Wilson is
that he once directed a ballet for iron lung patients,
which was the enormous this manual breathing machine that they
used to insert polio victims into when they couldn't manually
breathe on their own. And so his way of staging
a ballet for them was to have them he put
streamers in their mouths that they would blow and it

(35:15):
would move, while the janitor in their hospital ward danced
around dress like Miss America anyway.

Speaker 1 (35:21):
The streamers like the party, like those things that yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:26):
Yeah anyway. So Robert, So these two, this charming pair,
joined up with William S.

Speaker 1 (35:33):
Burrows of all people before or after he killed someone after.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
In Hamburg or The Black Writer, which is a musical
in stage production that premieres in nineteen ninety. Meanwhile, Waits
is in The Two Jakes, the late era Chinatown sequel
starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, Terry Gilliams, The Fisher King,
Steve Rash's Queen's Logic, and Hector Ankles at Play in

(36:01):
the Fields of the Lord. Those last three were all
in nineteen ninety. And then he wraps up this Hollywood
run with his role as Renfield in Francis Ford Coppola's
bram Stoker's Dracula in nineteen ninety two, which is probably
where he got the most like that sold him as
like a character actor. He's so great in it. He's
wearing like steampunk goggles and like long Union jack like

(36:24):
a union suit like underwear, and eating bugs and he
has all these like weird steampunk contraptions on his hands.
It's awesome. And then he also does an instrumental soundtrack
for a Jim Jarmish fund called Night on Earth. And
so all of this is to say that when Tom
Waites began work on Bone Machine, he was you do
the honors, no you at He was at a crossroads.

(36:51):
So when he sets out on Bone Machine, one of
his inspirations is industrial music. Weirdly enough, and here's not
one though that I think is very funny. He's never
I don't think, acknowledged the fact that Pixies coined the
phrase bone machine five years earlier on Surfa Rosa, which
the opening track of that record is your Bones Got

(37:13):
a little MESSH got a bone machine? Ah, I got
a boom she. I mean, I don't know how much
he would actually heard them. That is the record that
they blew up on, but the song is I thought
it was too little.

Speaker 3 (37:31):
No.

Speaker 2 (37:32):
Gigantic was their first big hit, and that's what that's
what ironically set the stage of that like destroyed the
band because Frank Black was a very unstable uh weenie
and he was like so horrifically threatened by the fact
that their big single had been written by Kim Deal
that it like essentially doomed the band from the start.

(37:53):
There's there's a point, and I don't remember where I
saw this, but like they were like backstage at some event.
They were getting a festival, and they were getting ready
to go on and perform Gigantic and Iggy Pop comes
up and he's like, oh, Frank Black you're like you're
in the Pixies, you know. Oh I love that song. Gigantic,
great song man and like mag Fike dies just a
little inside. So anyway, I don't know how much he

(38:16):
actually knew about them.

Speaker 1 (38:18):
But so it was Sinatra saying that something is a
spavent line of no Cartney song.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
It's like, yes, yeah, but they got to the phrase
before him. But anyway, I feel like Tom Waits would
have arrived at that on the own anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
And this is what goes. The title of the record
is its best evocation of what you would put on
douchebag hat, referred to as a sort of fin de sicle, melancholy,

(38:43):
and possibly Waits his own mortality as evidenced by his
his his burgeoning careers, head of a household, bread winner,
et cetera, late American male masculinity crisis, and so forth
epidemic of male loneliness in cell. Al Right, proud boys,

(39:04):
I'm doing more word jazz here. We're free associating. I'm
like Jack Herrak in this way. I'm a modern day
beat poet. If I didn't have this podcast, I don't
know what I'd be. One of those things I'd just
be wondering around talking to myself in the streets, which
I still do actually, So it's why my voice doesn't
get that sore until we're into three hours of the Titanic. Anyway,

(39:26):
there's a really hilarious press kit that he put together
for this album that has like a lot of factual
information with a lot of like Tom Waite's bullshit, but
it's like many pages long, and so in the press kit,
he says most of the principles for most machines developed
in the machine age, where principles that were found in
the human body. We're all like bode machines. I guess

(39:46):
we break down eventually and were replaced by other models,
newer models, younger models. See all of those things that
I said before, Is that true? I mean, yeah, yeah,
I guess you're thinking about. I think about like Vitruvian
man and all those learn and she like like gears
and like shoulders and the you know, your a cl
and your shoulder harness and maybe your hamstrings. I want

(40:10):
to say, all right, I don't know much about the
human body. I know where to point to things and
say that they hurt, points to heart, points to head,
points to tummy and back anyway. Actually, my back's okay,
it's okay, you know that's everybody. Everybody listening right now.

Speaker 1 (40:36):
Take a stretch break, everybody right now, everybody right now.

Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah, shoulders back and up. You know, I go back
to Alexander techniques interestingly every now and again, which I
did not invent, but really good stuff about like like
you know, like you know, we fetishized like Ramrod straight posture,
but the actual like your spine is kind of actually
curved because you know, we're not that are descended from

(41:00):
apes evolutionarily speaking, and like so when you sit and
force your back like rigidly straight, it actually pushes you
off your sit bones because they're curved. So like the
ideal posture is actually like not Ramrod straight, like shoulders back,
because that's going to like put all this tension into
your intercostal muscles between your ribs, but it's actually like
slightly shoulders forward, like a little bit back round it.

(41:23):
If you look at like the natural curvature of the spine,
it's it's a little bit rounded. My spine spent from
carrying your ass up and down the court forty five
minutes a night.

Speaker 1 (41:35):
I do something called the Alexander Heigel technique, where I
scream into my pillow for about twenty minutes every morning
and twenty minutes in the evening.

Speaker 2 (41:43):
Mostly through editing. I find it centers me as you
meditate on that. We'll be right back with more too
much information after these messages. Wow, okay, so discounting the

(42:08):
soundtrack to Night on Earth, which is instrumental, and Black Rider,
which has written before but released after Bone Machine. Bone
Machine was Wade's first album of original music since nineteen
eighty seven, five years. At the time, it may have
also seemed like his last half of the lyrics directly
referenced the end of the world, and it is also
concerned with many smaller acts of death and dying, such

(42:30):
as infidelity, moral compromise, maiming. He told the French magazine
Telerama in nineteen ninety two. My mom heard the title
and hated the title. She said it sounds so degrading,
sounds like something hellish or devilish. She also said there's
nothing the devil hates more than a singing Christian, which

(42:50):
is quite funny and maybe true Christian music sucks though
discuss anyway, Although Funnily enough, the Blind Boys of Alabama
I covered Jesus going to be Here, which is like, oh,
that makes sense, and like took it completely straightforwardly, as
opposed to the sort of hilarious like weights in postmodern

(43:13):
twists on it. I don't know. I think that's funny.
It's like when Rod Stewart covered Downtown Train and made
it super because he doesn't understand. He knows good songs
but occasionally has trouble understanding that he doesn't have to
sing them. Ah, I love us. What a clown, God's
perfect buffoon. Also in that interview, he made this point

(43:36):
we're all going to the same place. Some of us
are taking different routes, and some of us are leaving
earlier and arriving later, but we're all going to the
same place. Seems like a legitimate topic to uncover once
you get to a certain point. That don't mean it
to be morbid. I'm not morbid. I think if you
talk about it then it disarms, It makes it seem
a little more easier to handle. Someday we're all going
to be in a little box. It's going to be

(43:56):
real dark, and they put the lid on, put you
six feet down and that's where we'll spend the rest
of what there is of time.

Speaker 1 (44:05):
Is that in the press kit or an interview for
French magazine? Oh that's for Oh okay, either way, I
guess that feels appropriately French.

Speaker 2 (44:13):
Though that feels very very soft. So we touched on
this earlier.

Speaker 1 (44:17):
But as you mentioned, Captain Beefhart is a common comparison
for Tom Waits's voice, but the relative approaches to making
records are fascinating to compare as well, because they're very different.
Captain Beefeart's landmark tout Mask Replica album is a bonker's
sounding chaotic record that was so so rigorously rehearsed within

(44:37):
an inch of its life to sound that way, and
apparently they rehearsed it so so completely and thoroughly that
it was recorded in just six hours, with all of
the backing tracks virtually indistinguishable from one another because they
just had it down. Tom Waits, meanwhile, was still pursuing
a studio approach like you mentioned Miles Davis or Bryant Eno.

Speaker 2 (44:57):
You had sketches for songs, but.

Speaker 1 (44:59):
Assembled player in the studio and put them into odd
configurations with deliberately obtuse confusing directions, like any favorites.

Speaker 2 (45:07):
Well, there's play it like a midgets bar mitzvah was
one that I've seen pretty famously. Play it like your
hair's on fire is another. Okay, that one.

Speaker 1 (45:15):
I sort of understand that intensity. Play it like a
midget's bar mitzvah. I'd like you to unpack that, or
help me unpack that well, like klezmer a little bit, or.

Speaker 2 (45:25):
Like you know, I know. I think it's like I
would have had if he had said a Jewish midget's wedding.
I would have leapt handily to the image, would have
sprung fully formed from my mind, like like Athena from
a Jewish Zeus's forehead. I would have had that explanation ready.
But he said bar mitzvah. So I don't know. Maybe
I don't know. Yeah, maybe Jewish klezmer, but small but

(45:48):
small men, small klesmer, small diet diet klezmer. Now we're
getting somewhere.

Speaker 1 (45:54):
Half a boat machine's grim end of day sound is
effect due to the studio. But when we say studio,
it's not quite a studio. Tom Waits, by this point
had moved his family out to Sonoma, County, well outside
of San Francisco, and he'd recorded the soundtrack to Night
on Earth at Prairie Sun's studios in the small town

(46:15):
of Ronert Park in.

Speaker 2 (46:19):
Tati Kotati, California. Do you know Katati? I know Ronert
Park because the that's where AFI is from before they
I think and punk band of Note. I don't even
know they're still together order if they're still considered punk,
but Ceremony the band that blamed themselves after a Joy
Division song there from Ronert Park. It might be Ronert

(46:42):
I don't know. People out here talked them spiders. Spiders.

Speaker 1 (46:50):
Prairie Sun Studio co owner Mark Muka Rednick founded the
studio near Sonoma State University in the late seventies before
relocating it to a twelve acre chicken ranch in nineteen
eighty one.

Speaker 2 (47:02):
As you do.

Speaker 1 (47:03):
It's a quote turnkey style studio, which means that no
one lives on the property, and for a long time
the only permanent resident was a cat named Bubba. Prairie
Sun Studios has among its facilities a large live room
where Weights recorded Night on Earth, but once Waits got
set up there for Bone Machine, he relocated and said
that what's been variously referred to as a shed or

(47:24):
closet adjacent to the studio, now called the weights Room.

Speaker 2 (47:28):
Higel tell us about the weights Room, I believe it
is technically a storage room. It's been called a shed.
But without having been there myself and maybe I'll go,
who's to say, something like an hour and a half drive.
I was so disturbed the studio we got was totally wrong.
Waits til journalist Mark Rowland. Fortunately we stumbled upon a
storage room that sounded so good, plus had already had

(47:49):
maps on the wall. So I said, that's it. We're sold.
What of the idea, make of that what you will.
That's the that's just Tom for you. The weights room,
which is just it had its wood panel walls and
a concrete floor, which accounts for its sort of weird
acoustic properties. But it's become the bone machine like sound

(48:11):
has become so famous as a shorthand that there is
a preset after it, modeled after the sound of that
room on a five thousand dollars digital rack reverb called
s ERCASTI M seven. So he found a storage room
in a studio on a chicken ranch, and decades later

(48:32):
people programmed it into a rack reverb that cousted more
than any car I've owned. And then he added it
rained a lot when we were recording, and we worked
in a shed, just a cement floor and water heater.
We ran wires down the hill in the rain. It
wasn't soundproofed. And he adds, I've got great singers Chad

(48:54):
Blake and Biff DAWs and Joe Marquez, and they can
get a great sound out of anything. They don't flinch.
If you say you want to put a mic up
that bull's ass over there and you want to slap
him on the stomach, they'd say, well, uh, I guess
we could use an SM fifty seven, which is actually true.
You can put those things on anything. Guarantee you for
all your you know, if anyone out there wants to
get into a home recording, ninety percent of your favorite

(49:15):
record was recorded with an s M fifty seven. I
was working with Tom Waites on his album Bone Machine.
Producer and engineer Chad Blake told Sound on Sound he
wanted to go to a flea market one day when
we were working, and we got there, we said we're
gonna split up and just go look for something. We
like to do that. We would go to places and
find one little thing that you could use on a session.
I went looking around and ended up with a microphone

(49:37):
from a submarine and the Sure level lock to a
volume limitar compressor unit. I paid five dollars for each
of those things. I just got the level lock because
I liked the name. I had no idea what it was,
Blake continued. When I took it back to the studio,
I plugged it in on the desk and ran something
through it from an OX and it made one little

(49:57):
cap sound and then nothing, And I said, I think
I just blew it up. Tom just said I know
a TV repairman up in Santa Rosa, just up the road.
I don't remember what he said. I blew, but the
guy had to replace something and he didn't have the
right things and he had to improvise. So five dollars
used Sure compressor limitter fixed by a TV repair guy

(50:20):
with whatever he had laying around the shop. That's the
Tom White sound. Baby, take that to the bank.

Speaker 1 (50:27):
Another great Blake Boone machine moment from my dear friend
Morgan Enos's roundup of Tom Waite's session musician interviews at.

Speaker 2 (50:33):
Title Great piece. That is a great piece. He did
a lot of really, he talked to most people who
are living and trackable from the piece.

Speaker 1 (50:41):
Blake was also inspired by a tripy tick into India
where he fell in love with another very specific sound,
an entire silver band than a car blaring their music
through a twelve olt.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
Pa mounted on top.

Speaker 1 (50:54):
He ended up buying one of those systems, bringing it
home and applying at the bone machine. We have that
set up out the horn about one hundred feet away,
then the microphone recording the horn, and then Tom off
the side of the building with a microphone yelling into
the outdoors.

Speaker 2 (51:09):
This is a stupid question. What is a silver band?
I don't know. Actually I looked that up and I
and I couldn't find any like pinned down references. I
assume it's a horn band of some kind. But yeah,
a lot of this album was recorded outdoors, like just
in and around the ranch. He was using a lot
of feud recordings that he made of like cars going
by and stuff. But they would just like the guitarist

(51:32):
on it, smoky horn. All all of these guys have
names like Raymond Chandlers. It's kind of hilarious. I'm trying
to figure out who said this. One of the guitarists
on there was talking about like they weren't getting the
sound that they wanted in the shed, so they just
opened the doors. And he was like, yeah, and I
would just be playing guitar into like a ten thousand
dollars noyman mike and there would just be a dog

(51:53):
walking by then.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
Is that Bob Dylan recorded some of Blood on the
tracks like Tangle Up Blue and was in the outside.

Speaker 2 (52:01):
I don't know. I'm not sure about that, matter of fact.
I know, like I mean, basement tapes is obviously like
much of it was done in a basement, even though
a lot of it was over dubbed in a big,
fancy Columbia studio. Anyway, what scronk Heigel assertive dissonance As
one of my favorite YouTube guitarists, Eric Hougan put it,

(52:25):
skronk is when you sound like you don't know what
you're playing, but you mean it. That's beautiful. Wow. I
like that. Anyway. Waite and Brennan assembled Bone Machine from
about sixty sketches for songs, a process he likened to cannibalism.
That's part of the's that's part of the process. Frankenstein

(52:45):
that number over there, take the head off him and
sew it on to this guy, immediately keep him alive
until the head has been severed. Kathleen is great to
work with, he said. She's elapsed Catholic from Illinois. She's
loaded with mythology and has a great sense of melody.
I spin the chamber and she fires it. It's Russian roulette.
Sometimes you get great things. Much of the album's roulette

(53:07):
like nature came down to the fact that Waits was
occupied more on this record than anyone previous with percussion sounds.
He plays percussion of different kinds on nearly every track,
which I think is an outgrowth of his sort of
interest in of all things hip hop. He's actually mentioned
how like, in interviews around this time he was like
much of what he was listening to was hip hop
because his son, Casey I think, was born around rain

(53:32):
dogs and I think was like growing up listening to
hip hop. So he talks a lot about getting like
the sounds of that percussion and stuff. He's like in
many interviews have been like, oh no, I like hip hop, Like,
I think it's like the most interesting form of pop music.
Happening right now anyway. For the cheery opener, the Earth
Died Screaming, Waits grabbed the title from a nineteen sixty

(53:53):
four British sci fi movie that he'd never actually seen,
and then set about recreating a field recording that Jim
Jarvion had sent him of a tribe of pigmies playing
stick percussion. Now here's the depths I go through for
you people. The pigmy thing is a noted Weights quote,
right Like, He's talked about this with Jarmish. He's talked

(54:14):
about saying like playing pygmy percussion like a tribe of pygmies,
blah blah blah. He says he got it from Jarmish
because there's an interview I think in Q magazine or
something where they're interviewing each other and he says to Jarmish,
like that recording of pigmies that you sent me like
really flipped me out. I wanted to get that sound

(54:34):
on bone machine. So in researching this episode, I said
about finding what recording that may have actually been the
closest I was able to get to it was a
Jim Jarmish interview at the Creative Independent where he recommended
the nineteen ninety three book Song from the Forest, My
Life among the bob Benjelly Pigmies by Louis Sarno, And

(54:57):
this book is about how Sarno went to Central Africa
to research the music of these pigmy tribes and he
wound up marrying one of them and like staying there
the rest of his life. But because that came out
in nineteen ninety three, I don't know that that if
there was a CD that accompanied that recording, or Jarmish
had an advanced pressing, because the other thing that you

(55:18):
get when you look for, you know, Pigmy stick recordings,
is this nineteen ninety two recording that is linked which
you should punch in, that came out ninety two from
Smithsonian Folk Ways. So well, I can't say for certain

(55:44):
what the actual recording that Jim Jarmus sent Tom Waits
that inspired the percussion sounds on Earth Died Screaming. I
can say for certain that there was at least a
year or two long period in the nineties during which
Jim Jarmish was really into Pigby music.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
When you think about it, wasn't there a time in
the nineties when all of us were really into big
thing music.

Speaker 2 (56:04):
I remember being a big influence on in Utero. So anyway,
Wade's told so.

Speaker 1 (56:08):
Quick, sir, can you tell us a little more about
how they're making that sound?

Speaker 2 (56:13):
It sounds either yeah, well, so like marimba's are are
xylophones made of wood, right, and they're they're also basically
because they came first, they're one of the more like
ancient forms of musical instruments that we have. And there's
a great documentary called Throw Down Your Heart with Baila

(56:34):
Fleck of All People, which is like because he's a
banjo verrsuo, so he goes on this like musicological tour
of Africa because that's where the banjo comes from. That's
his whole thing. He's like, I'm just gonna go to
all these different countries in Africa that has like musical
traditions related to the banjo, and I'm gonna just go
jam there with them. And it's really incredible. And there's

(56:54):
one where he goes to a village where they build
a marimba that is like thirty feet long by just
digging a giant trench and shoving a bunch of logs
into it that create pitches based on how long and
wide the logs are relative to the depth of the hole.
And then like ten or fifteen kids all just get
together and start hitting the different pieces with wood or

(57:15):
rocks or whatever. And so that's how you get this
kind of tonal, polyrhythmic thing out of this massive sound.
Because it's like ten people playing a thirty foot long
instrument dug into the ground. So I have to assume
it's like wood on wood of some kind. Wow. And
so when Wade's and Jarmish you're talking to each other
in this interview for a straight no chaser, he tells

(57:38):
Jarmish we struggled for a couple of days with getting
the sound of a stick orchestra inside the studio for
Earth Dyed Screaming. We tried every configuration and position of
the microphone, and finally I said, well, why don't we
go outside? Isn't that where all these recordings are made?
And five minutes later we had a mic set up,
we were hitting it. It was there, just two by fours,
anything we could find, logged from the firewood, about nine people,

(57:59):
just different people fucking by. We'd say, come on, play
some sticks, and then hilariously you b four D has
a song called Earth Dives Screaming, based after the same movie,
and it sucks. It really sucks. Ah, So I hate
on a scale I won the Red Red one. How's
it right, Probably worse because it's it's like this incredbling

(58:19):
metal title and it's like dreams. This is the worst

(58:46):
I've ever heard in my life, Like this whole like
British when they like, I know the British are really
into reggae, right, but like once it got out of
the clashes hands and into the hands of the softest hands, imaginable,
My god, I don't want to all the Specials. What
about the Specials? Specials were biracial. I mean they were,
and it was and it was like more on the

(59:06):
ground floor of SKA. They were closer. They were like
ten years from actual sky, whereas like UB forty is
like eighties. So it's like it's like synth ska. You know,
there's synth tones on there, and I hate that the
guitar sounds that bad on that though. You shut up,
you shut your mouth, ah, what do you know? Suddenly
enraged much of the percussion that time. One of my

(59:33):
all time favorite Steve Bailey moments of stage bands or
was there were there and he was like, this next
one's a slow song, and I went, oh, I know
this one, and and suddenly he goes.

Speaker 3 (59:43):
Do you.

Speaker 2 (59:47):
Oh? I love that guy. Much of the percussion that
Waits used. Much of the percussion that Waits used on
this album's inspired by Harry Partch was tremendously fascinating figure
in twentieth century music. He's one of these classic outsider artists.
There is a actually you know now that I mentioned
I'm not sure if he's in songs in the kiev Z,
which is sort of the like outsider music tome that
like Wesley Willis and Dennis Johnson are into. Like pre Internet,

(01:00:10):
that was like where you'd find out about the bulk
of these guys. Didn't We talk about Harry Partch on
the Planet of the eight Side, So probably we've talked
about it somewhere and I'm gonna do it again. Harry
Partch was born in Oakland in nineteen oh one. His
parents were Christian missionaries in China who fled during the
Box of Rebellion, and then once they came over to
the state, they moved around quite a bit from Arizona

(01:00:31):
to Albertquerque to La and so Harry Partch grew up
hearing everything from Chinese lullabies that his mother would sing
to him and Mandarin to the Yaqui Indian tribes in
the Southwest, and he began studying piano and playing a
bunch of different instruments when he was a teenager, but
he was an orphan by the time he was nineteen.
His father died of I want to say, tuberculosis, and

(01:00:53):
then his mom died in a car accident. And he
spent like two years in college in LA and then
moved to San Francisco. And San Francisco at this time
had this interesting influx of white guys being enamored of
non Western music, which was because of San Francisco's Chinatown,
which had been rebuilt after the Great Fire, and in

(01:01:15):
the wake of that is when you get sort of
the I hate to say this, but like disneyfied version
of Chinatown. Like pre the Fire, San Francisco's Chinatown was
terrifying because the Triads owned it and it was like
where they did all their opium trafficking and sex trafficking
and other trafficking, food trafficking. The least love member of

(01:01:37):
the Trafficking Apocalypse. Anyway, listen to Steve Winwood's band Traffic,
the most loved of the four traffics of the Apocalypse, sex, drug, food,
and traffic trafficking. Mister fantasy, Yeah, that's if you're a
real I'm a traffic trafficker. I got a real extensive

(01:01:59):
collection of board feeds from the nineteen sixties. That's a
really absurd like mister show said, the traffic Traffickers. They
pan over and there's Steve Winwood playing a B three
and like a dog crate. Mao? Did he mao? Anyway?

(01:02:19):
So yeah they So the rebuilt San Francisco Chinatown had
all of these nightclubs where people would play, and tea
houses where people would play traditional Chinese music, and including
the guy who was heading my employer, the San Francisco
Conservatory Music. Oh, he would go see Chinese music there
like five nights a week, and so would these guys

(01:02:39):
named Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, both of whom are
considered foundational figures and avant garde sort of experimental twentieth
century new music as opposed to like your romantic and
maller and all that stuff, and what they were really
interested was getting away from Western tonalities, and Lou Harrison

(01:03:00):
particular was really inspired by Gamalan music from Indonesia in
the way that that's like has all of these non
it's anything that isn't in like the twelve tone Western
scale and has all of these quarter tones and the
little different half tones. And you get that in Chinese
melodies because they have a lot of non fixed pitch
instruments like the auru and I think it's called the

(01:03:22):
just the chin, the big slide. I think that looks
like a big lap steel guitar, but it's like twelve
feet long and made out of wood. So they use
a lot of microtones. And so there's this weird confluence
in the in San Francisco in particular of these three
guys and many others Lou Harrison, like I said, Lou
Harrison and Harry Cowell Ernest Block from the Conservatory at
Harry Parch and they are all like totally transfixed by

(01:03:42):
these sounds. And Parch becomes obsessed with the idea of
just intonation, which I've talked about previously on this podcast
and I will do again. Just intonation is a method
of tuning that goes back to the early pre Pythagorean
forms of musical tuning. The Pythagorean tuning is when it's

(01:04:06):
based on the ratios of intervals to one another, right,
and so in the Western temperate scale you get uneven
ratios because you're cramming twelve semi tones into an octave,
so the ratios are like three to two. They'll be
uneven in different places. But if you actually drill down
into the way that the overtones of any fundamental pitch work,

(01:04:31):
they stack up in fits and they create more perfect
sensical ratios to each other one to one. That's the
shorthand version of just intonation. And so for Parch he
basically decided to burn everything that he'd written in Western
intonation in an actual stove in New Orleans in nineteen

(01:04:52):
thirty and was like, I'm only doing my stuff now.
And the first thing that he did was he went
to a New Orleans luthier and he brought him a
cello neck and a viola body, and he was like,
put these together for me, and the guy did, and
that turned it into an instrument that had twenty nine
tones per octave. Wo and Western music is all twelve tones. Proactive,

(01:05:15):
but like Indian music, Chinese music, Gamalo music, all the
other musics of the non West have microtones in them
where it'll be like a quarter of a tone, or
a third of a tone, or three quarters of a tone.
That stuff sounds really really alien to people. I've talked
with a lot of composers of Iranian or Persian or
otherwise Middle Eastern descent who talk about how difficult it

(01:05:36):
can be to notate those pitches. For Western musicians who
haven't grown up with them, it must be impossible. I mean,
it must be like they have to sit down and
sing them, and they can really and and the best
people doing it are people and non obviously non fixed
pix instruments. So like this, when composer came back and
had premiere at the Conservatory and it was it was

(01:05:57):
like a string quartet, but he was making them all
sit and play like quarter tones and stuff that came
out of his background and what was before it became
iron Persia. And he was like, yeah, I'd have to
sit down and sing this stuff to them because I
would put like three quarters of a pitch, and in

(01:06:17):
some places they have to invent new notation for it. Anyway,
Parch got some money to go study in England, but
then he returned to the States in nineteen thirty five
at the height of the Great Depression, and for the
next nine years he was basically a hobo. He would
like travel around with his collection of scores and like
plans for these different instruments and all the music that
could be made on them that he was writing. But

(01:06:39):
he would basically just stop anywhere that he could have
space to set up and create new instruments and compose
and then move on. For example, his instrument called the
Chromelodeon was a forty three tone read organ that sounds,
if you'll click on this link, exactly like a Tom
Waits record. Ah. But he would set up in places

(01:07:02):
as various as like a forge on a ranch in Wisconsin,
a chicken farm, and Petaluma, an abandoned shipyard in Sasolito,
and he would just keep building these instruments when he
had the resources to it, and writing this music, and
finally some of it got released in like I think
The World of Harry Parks was the first record that

(01:07:23):
this stuff was recorded on and thus inspired the creation
of this Harry Parks Ensemble, which is still out there
performing his music and maintaining these instruments, of which there
are only like one version of many of them. And
I think Waits heard the sound of Harry parts from
Kathleen Brennan and was obsessed with all of these different

(01:07:44):
percussion instruments and just the idea of like making your
own crap. And so he had met a guy named
Francis Thom who owns the Chrome melodeon. Did you play
that thing? You got to punch in a clip of it.

Speaker 1 (01:08:04):
It's funny because there's a little kid I had. I
think it was called a melodica. Oh yeah, And it
sounds just.

Speaker 2 (01:08:11):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And it's sort of like
you can get microtnes out of read instruments, like you
get blues heart players who bend notes and stuff. But
like this is actually split into forty three tones.

Speaker 1 (01:08:25):
Actually it doesn't sound as alien as I would have
expected given.

Speaker 2 (01:08:29):
How many tones. What's interesting about it is that like
you hear out of tune stuff or out of Western
tune stuff, Like if you play an old piano, there
are gonna be parts of it that are intonated, closer
to just intonation than Western temperament. Right, So it just
sounds like a saggy old or like or like bad
reads in a reed instrument, Like it just sounds like

(01:08:51):
a baggy old, saggy organ because it sounds like it's
falling out of pitch. But it was actually elaborately designed
from the jump to not play in the pitches anyway.
Good luck Editing that waits. His contribution to the spiritual
canon of parch instrumentation is something he calls the Conundrum.
Get it. This is like the word conundrum, but it's

(01:09:12):
also a percussion instrument. That's good. That's good. You get it,
You get it. I googled this earlier.

Speaker 3 (01:09:21):
This is cool.

Speaker 2 (01:09:21):
Oh okay, yeah, various quotes about it follow. It looks
like a big iron crucifix, and there are a lot
of different things that we hang off of it, crowbars,
tijuana sabers, and found metal objects. I like the sound
of I like to play drums when I'm angry at home.
I have a metal instrument called a conundrum, A lot
of things hanging off of it, metal objects. I like

(01:09:44):
playing it with a hammer. It's just a metal configuration,
like a metal cross. It looks a little bit like
a Chinese torture device. It gives you access to these
alternative sound sources. Hit him with a hammer sounds like
a jail door closing behind you. I like it it
you end up with bloody knuckles when you play it.
So many thoughts in that. Yeah. Oh, he's such a

(01:10:06):
champion interviewer, man, I wish you would do more. Bone
Machine is packed with the usual rotating cast of uh
Waits collaborators, but with a couple of far Field picks.

Speaker 1 (01:10:18):
Yes, there's Primus drummer Brian and Tia credited as Brain
because Primus sucks, which is their official logo and my
statement on them, as well as the band's singer and
bassist Les Claypole. They show up as a favor for
Waits guest vocal on Tommy the Cat in nineteen ninety one.

Speaker 2 (01:10:37):
I've never heard that song, So maybe do you want
to let down with me? So maybe do you want
to let down? By my side?

Speaker 3 (01:10:41):
A baby?

Speaker 2 (01:10:42):
Do you want to let down with me? It's great
he talks about like sending them well, I mean he
read this next.

Speaker 1 (01:10:48):
Part much like Tom Waits and Keith Richards.

Speaker 2 (01:10:51):
It was kind of a record label hookup.

Speaker 1 (01:10:52):
Les Claypole mentioned Tom as a possible voice for the song,
and his label was like, well call him. Primus came
up from the studio and found a voicemail from Weights
on his answering machine saying he do the part and
this is cute. Let's Claypool still has the answering machine tape.

Speaker 2 (01:11:09):
He's like, he like does a little imitation. You can
punch it, and he's like, and I get this, you know,
and I get this. Uh try to how to go
from a less Claypool voice. So I punched play on
my voicemail machine. I hear Tom going, well, it's great
to have got your demo tape from the boys to
the label, and I think it's really great when your
kids are up to him glad you're you know, hip
to the scene and this.

Speaker 1 (01:11:31):
It's kind of like a it's kind of like a
California Bruce Springsteen when I hear you do.

Speaker 2 (01:11:35):
It at least yeah, I mean it's a little of that,
like you know that David Cross skit where he's like
uh uh heo, man, I'm from Butte, Montana. Yeah, man,
I'm from Pomona, Pomona, California. Oh man, I'm from Texar, Canada, Texas.
It's just like the American hick voice. Yeah, that spans
the entirety of the country. Yeah, there's a good bit

(01:11:56):
of that. Also on the Machine.

Speaker 1 (01:11:58):
There's Los Lobos founding member David Hill Dago, who plays
accordion and violin. He also shows up on grace Land.
We talked about in a Graceland.

Speaker 2 (01:12:05):
Episode yep, possibly having songs stolen. Yep. There's Sacks and
Reid specialist Ralph Carney, who's best known to me as
being the uncle of the drummer for The Black Keys,
Patrick Karney, who sucks. He's like if all the jokes
about Ringo were true, he's like the worst drummer to
ever achieve. Oh my god, he's awful. Listen to those

(01:12:28):
early Black Keys records. He's barely playing in time. I
saw them at some music festival and like they do
have kind of a weird lock up, Like what's his name,
the lead singer, Dan Auerbach, like he had one. They
had like a full band, like a big band, like
keys and bass and everything. At one point he sent
all of them away and he's like, all right, me
and Patrick are gonna do some of the old ones.

(01:12:50):
And they like they do have a weirdly tell an
lock up from just playing only together for so long,
but he is a dog drummer. It's just really astounding.

Speaker 1 (01:13:00):
Only like seeing them when it's just the two of them,
when they have the full band, they just.

Speaker 2 (01:13:03):
Sound like any other band like that. Dan Aurbuck is awesome.
I mean, like I know, he's kind of a bro
or whatever, and people will like give the Black Keys
a lot of shit, but those early records are like
legitimately for being from Akron, Like that dude would just
drive down into the South and find like all of
these old hill country blues guys and be like, please

(01:13:24):
teach me this stuff, and and like, you know, there's
on Chullahoma, there's that like he has he like gets
a voicemail from like some clearly old black woman who's like,
that's the you put out the only record I ever
heard that sound like a you know something something record,
And it's like he is very very good at copying
that stuff and especially the at singing along with it.
And it's just so funny to me that like Patrick

(01:13:46):
Carney like briefly married to Michelle Branch and just got
like dragged along on the on what was clearly dan
Auerbach's a cent into being the musician he was meant
to be, and Patrick Karney's just along for the ride,
like solemnly tweeting and sucking at the drums. I hate
that guy anyway, sidebar over he was like, bro, He's

(01:14:09):
one of the sweetest guys I've ever interviewed, actually, isn't.
I think I remember? No, No, I mean like someone
was giving him this is like a this is just
going so far down, idiot ats blues revival like rock
revival stuff. But I feel like there was like some
kind of at tension between him and Jack White because like.

Speaker 1 (01:14:29):
Oh, there was a huge amount of tension between him
and Jack White. I mean when Jack White was getting divorced,
all those emails came out because he just felt that
like Dan Araback was following him around.

Speaker 2 (01:14:39):
Yes, which is hilarious considering that Jack White plays guitar
like a toddler compared to Dan Auerback, and like Dan
Aurback honestly for his part, produced an amazing Doctor John
record and like has done a lot of cool collaborations,
whereas Jack White has only like been surly and pale
and wrote one of the worst James Bond songs. I

(01:15:00):
like that. I like another Way to Die. It's no
Skyfall sounds different.

Speaker 1 (01:15:03):
I like that it sounded different, although apparently they get
it in at the last minute because Amy Winehouse was
supposed to do the Bond theme for Quantum of Solace
and then she just never got it together.

Speaker 2 (01:15:13):
So they went to Jack White, and he basically was like.

Speaker 1 (01:15:15):
Well, I know they're gonna use whatever I turn in
because they're under a gun here, so I'm gonna do
something weird.

Speaker 2 (01:15:21):
There's nothing they can do about it. Yeah, I mean,
I like Jack White, I don't I like the White Stripes,
but they're they're doing something much different. And like it's
insane to me that he would even they don't sound like.
They sound like different bands like the White Stripes don't swing.
And one thing at least you can say for those
early Black Keys records is that they have a really
good rhythmic feel to them, primarily because of Dan Auerbach

(01:15:43):
and people would like give him shit. There's like a
rolling Stone thing where like somebody gave him for liking
g love and special sauce, oh yeah, and being like
and being like, yeah, he was just like a varsity
soccer player and in high school and like he liked
G Love and he was his total like blues poser,
and he got sadly defensive about it, where he was like,
G Love is a very accomplished fingerpicker, and yes, I

(01:16:04):
played soccer like I told you Love last year. It
was incredible. But I feel for Dan auerback man, like
he just likes the blues, and he admitted he admittedly
did a lot more studying of it than like Jack
White did, who was like, I'll just talk, I'll sing
real stupid and play guitar like I have four thumbs,
you know, And he's so thin skinned. I mean that's
the other thing. Jack White is so muleing and he's

(01:16:29):
the biggest sore winner ever. You know, he got all
the money in the world to buy mustache wax and
bolero jackets, and he's so perpetually aggrieved by it, just
because everyone wants him to get back with Meg and
make a record that doesn't suck. Sidebar over.

Speaker 1 (01:16:50):
I just I love how mad Jack White was that
Dan Arabach's kid goes at the same school that Jack
White's kid goes to.

Speaker 2 (01:16:57):
Again, like again, just you're in the city the same
You're just two roads diverged in a wood and you're
just mad that one of them that he's a better
guitar player than you. That's it. And I bet I'm
gonna go out on a limb and say that like
having an old black woman's like voicemail on your record
as like a seal of approval saying it sounded like
a what does she say, Junior Kimbro. Yeah, because Chulahoma

(01:17:21):
is where he's from, and they were performing or his
juke joint, and they were performing there. They're an EP.
Oh yeah, okay, let me take all of this back. Actually,
let me take everything I just said about about this back.
Chullahoma is a Black Keys EP where they are recording
Junior Kimbro songs. He's a hill country blues guitarist. And

(01:17:44):
on that record is a voicemail from Junior Kimbro's widow
thanking the Black Keys and that she was She said
they're the only band that she heard who really plays
like Junior. And I think that chap Jack White's ass
so bad that he never had a black person say
he plays guitar like one of them phrasing, but you

(01:18:05):
get my drift. I think that's the entire source of
his His beef is that he never got an imprimatur
from a bluesman or a bluesman's widow and thus a
mustached to That's why he dresses like a flash snipe. Yeah,
tying women to tracks that he's That was his villain

(01:18:27):
origin story. No black person ever said nice things about
his guitar playing.

Speaker 1 (01:18:33):
So Patrick Karney of the Black Kids talking about Patrick
Karney's uncle, Ralph Carney, plays on Tom Waits.

Speaker 2 (01:18:39):
This Tom Waits record for talking about in this episode. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:18:44):
Also included on Bone Machine is La session guitarist legend
and as you put no contest pleading, child porn aficionado,
Body Wachtel.

Speaker 2 (01:18:52):
Great hair, great sixteenth note guitar line on edge of seventeen.
Oh yeah, no contest pleading. They found a bunch of
kitty porn on his hard drive, but he sent it
in for repair like a moron. When did that happen?
I don't remember hearing that. He's also in the poside
The Adventure Waddie Walkdel Yeah, tremendous. I know, three years

(01:19:13):
probation in nineteen ninety eight compleating no contest. He was
or for this. He was ordered to make a twenty
five hundred dollars Nation to Children of the Night, an
agency that helps runaways that probably should have had their name.
Go back for another round, and yeah, walkedal took his
computer to a shop, a La computer repair shop, and

(01:19:35):
they opened it up and found kitty porn on his
hard drive. Really gives Edge of seventeen a new meeting. Oh,
I think I made that joke. We're now officially an
orra TI because I think I made that joke before.

Speaker 1 (01:19:46):
No, I don't remember ever hearing that. Okay, so I
think he's got to start playing with us start. But
I think he played with the Buckingham Knicks duo before
they joined the fleet with mac.

Speaker 2 (01:19:56):
Oh, he's yeah, he's everywhere in that era. I mean
he was Buddies with Warren too. That's him playing slide
guitar and where anyway? What are we talking about?

Speaker 1 (01:20:07):
And yet another returning Tom Waite's pal is Larry the
Mole Taylor, an incredible nickname who is a longtime basis
for all sixties weird pseudo country icons and woodstock vets.

Speaker 2 (01:20:22):
Can't eat? Can you do the voice? We can't do
the voice? Yeah, going on to the country. Done the voice?
Do the voice? Do do do Do Do Do Do?
Do you know what was the craziest thing about Killers

(01:20:43):
of the Flower Moon? No, I was hearing the original
version of that song. Did you know there's an original
going up the country that sounds the exact same way.
They really just flat out stole that song. No, Henry
Thomas nineteen twenty eight. I'm going up way long, I'm

(01:21:10):
going away.

Speaker 3 (01:21:13):
Long.

Speaker 2 (01:21:16):
Wow, white people have no original ideas. Nope, sure don't.
I'm oh yeah, sorry, uh, Larry the mol Taylor. One
of my favorite bits of Wait's studio Apocryphi, is from
Jaquiri King, who worked on Mule variations, and he said
that most of the basic tracks on Tom RAITs records
are just Tom either playing guitar or piano and usually

(01:21:40):
Larry Taylor on bass accompanying him, because I guess that's
just the lock up that they have, and then they
build the rest of the song around it. Or for example,
they do something like they do and Jesus is gonna
be here where Waits is playing upright bass and Taylor
is playing slide guitar and all he gets out of
it is that wow wow, he literally gets like two notes.

(01:22:02):
I guess that maybe counts as well, Tom plays. Tom
plays upright bass, and he dryly remarked in the press
kit probably would have been better if we'd gotten a
Baptist choir, but I kind of like it by itself.
And then Tom Waites had this to say about Larry Taylor.
Larry's great. He used to play in VFW halls with
Jered Lee Lewis where he would take a violin pickup

(01:22:24):
and wrap it in a hanky and drop that into
the piano hole that would be the mic. Larry would
play over by that hole, and whatever came out of
the speaker was the bass. He's a very intuitive musician.
And right after we finished the record, his bass broke,
which I thought was great. It just couldn't take it anymore,
kind of a John Henry thing. And then I and

(01:22:44):
I have to mention, of course, last Warren Zevon record,
the famous Near pasthamous record The Wind. The Wind has
a kind of rock and roll song on it that
Bruce Springsteen's in sings on was that the one is
I was in the house when the house burn No,
yeah it was I was the house when the house

(01:23:05):
burned down. Yeah, it's really funny, Bruce is there's some
really there's a great documentary about it. And Bruce is
having a high old time coming in there to sing.
And there's one point where he's he's like supposed to
be like he's supposed to be doing like a harmony
or something, and instead he like can't understand what Worren's saying.
So you just hear him on the track they kept it.
Hear him going, I'm not even gonna try and follow

(01:23:26):
Arren on that one. Ah, so like dense, densely intricate rhyme.
But then he plays a guitar solo and and you know,
I don't know if you know this about Bruce, but
Bruce plays a mean guitar and they put him through
one of those tiny little old tube of fenders like
a ten inch speaker, and he blew it up like

(01:23:46):
they did like a two takes of him playing a
guitar solo on that, and then the second one it
just like sparked out and died where they were like
they're like it had fulfilled its purpose and it could
go no longer. It went to Valhalla. Yeah, great guitar
solo though, man, great great song. I was in the house.

(01:24:07):
I had the doupe too Little Got Smoked. That song's okay.
It's just one of those kind of like dumb boogie
rock songs that all those guys were born in the
baby bold baby boomers thought they could do. Did wait
till Springsteen ever doing anything together? He covered Jersey Girl. Yeah,
and then and then I think they do it. There's
putting of them do it on stage, where of course

(01:24:29):
Tom is like sholo lo, Bruce is doing Black Preacher
voice over, and it's all it's all a bit much.

Speaker 1 (01:24:39):
We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right
back with more too much information in just a moment.

Speaker 2 (01:24:58):
Well as you right.

Speaker 1 (01:24:59):
Tom Waite to a really interesting rolodex of not quite
famous LA session musicians on his most recent album, twenty
eleven's As Bad as Me. Emmy winning LA composer Patrick
Warren shows up solely because he's one of the few
people in the world who's an expert on the archaic
keyboard instrument called the Chamberlain, which is like a pre melotron,

(01:25:21):
which is in itself a pre sampler synthesizer.

Speaker 2 (01:25:25):
Yeah, the Chamberlain is like the worst version of a
melotron before they'd ironed out the kink whoa yeah, And
so I guess this guy Patrick has like he's like
one of the only people who knows how to play
the actual instrument, so he gets every Chamberlain call from
Tom Waits. But he also did the true detective like
original score and want an Emmy for it. This is funny,

(01:25:46):
these guys he picks out of the cracks, like, for example,
you this guy you know, August Augie Meyers.

Speaker 1 (01:25:52):
Yeah, yes, he's best known to me as a founding
member of the You say obscure, I think underappreciated sixties
garage rock groups Sir Douglas Quintet and the Texas Tornadoes.
I think they're on nuggets, right, I believe. So. They
do a really great version of Freddie Fender's Wasted Days

(01:26:13):
and Wasted Nights. Great song. Play that on my college
radio show. I bet they do, Buddy, Yes they do.
And one of your favorites of these kind of left
of center LA Session musicians is a guy named Charlie
muscle White.

Speaker 2 (01:26:26):
Tell us about Charlie mussel White. Oh, I love him.
I mean it is again just one of these guys
that I just tracked down because of Tom Waits. There's
this One of my favorite Tom Waite songs is come
On Up to the House off New Variations, and you
should really punch in the thirty seconds of that harmonica solo.
Do you know what I'm talking about? No, it sounds
like I radiate like a car radiator dying, but in

(01:26:48):
like the most beautiful way possible. Has so many great lines.
The only things that you can see are all that
you lack. Come on up to the house, come down
off the cross. We can all use wood. That's great.
So yeah, there's this harmonica solo that kicks in.

Speaker 1 (01:27:29):
I almost have a hard time believing in such as
like a squeaky door, and I mean that it's a compliment.

Speaker 2 (01:27:33):
Ah, it's a shame. Harmonica is kind of a cringe instrument.
I mean, you know there's like Stevie, you could play
anything on it, and there's like Junior Walker. Oh yeah,
but like how many other like harmonica's like the John
Popper instruments. Right, it's like a fat white guy in
a fishing vest, right, Like, but you hear like genuine,

(01:27:57):
genuine Chicago harp, like through a sure green bullet into
like a tiny eight inch speaker dimed out tu bam
and it's just like hairw the next just pop right out.
It's just ah overdriven harmonica, beautiful sound. Anyway, that guy
was like a He was like a He grew up
in Memphis and like literally saw Elvis like busking on

(01:28:20):
the corners, and he was a whiskey bootlegger. And he
moved to Chicago and became like the fourth best harmonica
player of the sixties. He's like one of those guys
who pursues like just perpetually on the other page of
the history books. You know, it's like little Walter Paul Butterfield,
you know, like all the sixties guys that you hear
Toots Teelman, Yeah, Belgian born harmonica and whistle virtuoso, Toots

(01:28:43):
Teelman and and then on like the third line of
the fifth line of the Coachella poster, font Charlie mussel
White and I interviewed him. Yeah, he was he was
super cool. This great bit about baby Jessica fell in
the well and that inspired him to quit drink because
he said if she could go for three days without
without a drink, so could he. That was like, that

(01:29:06):
was like I later found out later he tells everyone
that story, but it was I was like, that's cute.
Good for you, Charlie. Then he didn't win a Grammy
for that for the album that I profiled him for,
which is sad.

Speaker 1 (01:29:17):
But anyway, one of my first People stories was Toots
z Obit Oh really yes, Sesame Street harmonica player to Teelman.

Speaker 2 (01:29:25):
Jocko Pastorius collaborator, Yeah you grew it was for people
dot com though you didn't get you didn't get the
important god awful records with Jocko in there. It's like
him and him and Belgian gypsy jazz virtuoso Birelli leren
Really some dog records, just super eighties reverbed out. Jocko

(01:29:48):
is all addicted to coke and Brelli Lagrenz. Everything's chorused
within an inch of its life. There's like gated reverb
on the harp. It's awful. We should do a podcast
about jazz fusion, sure, I mean for Tom Waits as well. Hey,
I know what's the less popular thing we can talk about?
One of my favorite veins rich veins of Tom lore

(01:30:08):
or the non musical directions that he's supposedly gives to
people in the studio. People said he's color blind, like
the guy who did the the guy who did the
concert film Big Time that is like footage from the
Franks Waders tour has said like Tom only sees in
red and yellow like a dog. He's like, that's why
all the stage lighting is red and yellow. And other
people have talked about him maybe having like cynysthesia, like

(01:30:31):
he says he gets sounds colors. But some of these
things that he supposedly tells people in the studios sound
like the oblique Strategies cards if they'd been written by
like a nineteen twenties Carnival Barker, like the aforementioned play
like Your Hair's on Fire. But there's this there's a
song sixteen Shells from a thirty six off Swordfish Trombones,

(01:30:53):
great song, and he was explaining it in the studio
and he said, this is about a guy who's got
a crow. He's right on a mule. He's got a
Washburn guitar. It's this crow inside the guitar and it
can't get out because it's got strings across it, so
it's called the Washburn jail. And he hits the guitar
just to rattle his cage. And it's important to note
that those are the lyrics of the song. He was

(01:31:16):
just like, very seriously, well, there's this guy and he's
got a washburn with a crow in it. Did you
get that? Larry Waits from the rain Dogs era. There's
a bass player named Greg Cohen, tremendous bass player who
was on the record with Tom and he instead of

(01:31:36):
letting him play bass guitar, he made him play the
bass pedals of a Hammond B three, but he could
only play them with his fists, like I was punching
somebody out mixing feedback from the Bone Machine mixing sessions.
This is about the electric guitar sounds like it's not
really part of the same trip. It sounds like it's

(01:31:57):
splattered on the windshield when it ought to be in
the back seat with a little bit and Brenda. What
I want to hear is everyone back inside the car,
screaming and laughing, all sitting together, one big happy family
out for a drive. You get that, and we're done
with this song that I actually kind of understand. It's
kind of like David Lynch, Like David Lynch's the guitar
sounds like it's not really part of the same trip.

(01:32:18):
I see that that actually I understand, okay, all right.
This is a variation on the ie load the chamber
and she pulls the trigger. This is talking about it,
Kathleen Brennan. A lot of the times, it's like lighting firecrackers.
Who gets to light, who throws? We take turns. Sometimes
it's I'll get the cherry bomb you hold, I'll light.
And this is presumably about David Hidalgo because he says

(01:32:39):
one accordionist I work with just eats the music. He
eats the music, and you find him, it's all over
his shirt, down his chin. It's just been murdered. Accordionist
will sometimes take apart and they'll just play the hell
out of it until it's dead. That's great. True. Actually,
have you ever heard zydeco music? Oh? Hell yeah, hell yah.

Speaker 1 (01:32:56):
Bow Machine's second shortest song, the Ocean, also be its
most disturbing. I took this from your outline because it
really stuck with me. If you'd prefer to take.

Speaker 2 (01:33:05):
It, oh no, please go ahead, Waite explained. In the
album's press kit.

Speaker 1 (01:33:09):
One of the local papers up here printed two photographs.

Speaker 2 (01:33:12):
One was a picture of a woman on the.

Speaker 1 (01:33:14):
Beach holding a bottle of beer and a cigarette, looking
out at the ocean, and the next picture was the
same day, a couple hours later, of her floating face
down on the brine, the beer still in her hand,
and the photographer walked past her and heard her say
under her breath, the ocean doesn't want me today.

Speaker 2 (01:33:33):
Wow. Yeah, there's a couple. I forgot to modulate my
tone from music Guide to True Crime prodcaster because some
of these are fucking depressing. Did I know the identity
of that person? I mean, dude, who even knows this
is the real thing? Oh no, he said it, and
it's creepy and you never heard the song the same

(01:33:54):
way again, the ocean doesn't want me? What a Meanwhile,
Tom Waits's daughter Ca Lissen and knee Kellis Simonis. I
don't know, Kelly coin the term strangels.

Speaker 1 (01:34:09):
I love this for that tone the ocean, Waits later explained,
it's basically a compound word strange angels. And if you
have strangels, then you could have brangels. That's incredible. Those
are the angels that live in your head. Higel, do

(01:34:29):
you have brangels?

Speaker 2 (01:34:31):
I have Breeman's.

Speaker 1 (01:34:34):
I feel like that's what like Son of Sam has
Some of Sam had brangels, he had the labrador.

Speaker 2 (01:34:38):
That's true. Every tell you my creepiest son of Sam theory. No,
So I was reading this book. I think I may
have done it in the Exorcism the exercise, but I
there's this book called I'm Jumped the Devil Hostage to
the Devil. Oh, yeah, and it's about It's by Malachie Martin,
who is, you know, a allegedly one of these sanctified exorcists,

(01:35:04):
and he talks about it when when David Berkowitz was
was hospitalized, he became born again, and he like constantly
wanted to be lectured on Christianity and stuff. And I
was just struck by this horrible sensation reading it that
like Berkowitz didn't actually believe any of it, he just
like desperately wanted to. Because I think that's like some

(01:35:28):
of the impression that Malachi Martin gives about these visits
where he was like, well, he just really wanted to
like talk about about God and stuff, but like and
forgiveness and all this like stuff and talk about how
you know, because he maintained that he'd been possessed, and
but he was like I never really I just I
was like struck by the idea that he would be
like faking it to try and be like, no, I
don't actually get this, but like I desperately want to

(01:35:49):
be forgiven. I have a whole riff on Tom Waits
and forgiveness later. Oh, just save my voice.

Speaker 1 (01:35:58):
Another ripped from the headlines bit on bow Machine comes
during the song A Little Rain. The lyric she was
fifteen years old and she'd never seen the ocean. She
climbed into a van with a vagabond, and the last
thing she said was I love you Mom. It was
something that was inspired by a deeply depressing newspaper article
on the Brennan Waits Archives about a van full of

(01:36:20):
hitchhiking kids that had careened over a cliff in California.
Doesn't really get much Sonnier on the next track, Murder
in the Red Barn, which may have been similarly developed
through a completely different source, an actual eighteen twenty seven
murder in Polstead, Suffolk, England, in which a young woman

(01:36:40):
Maria Martin was shot dead by her lover William Cord
at the Red Barn, a local landmark, after meeting him
for a promised elopement. This became a popular topic for
murder ballads in the intervening years. The Waits version appears
to have lidland common with the source except for its name.

Speaker 2 (01:36:57):
Yeah, it's so funny because murdered the red Barn is
such a distinctly like there's nothing British about it. Yeah,
that surprised me. He does have the line that he
said that a bloodstained axe is not a surprise something
because it's never out of sight, because there's always some
killing that has to be done around the farm. And
then he talks about he's like, well, you know the

(01:37:18):
barns were painted red because it was animal blood was
all they had. It was cheaper than pain. I never
heard that. Yeah, that was that was the Tom Waite's
version of it. But then I gooled, like just murder
a red barn and this this thing comes up like
the Red Barn murder, which was like you know how
many roads of the of the of seventeenth century British murders,

(01:37:41):
like it's been It's been remixed and resung and rewritten
so many thousands of different times. It just was one
of them that he hasn't done. Although he does a
really there's a version of he does an old murder
ballad called two Sisters that pops up on orphans. That's
a really so he has some familiarity with, like the
whole British Irish murder ballad tradition. Anyway, I digress dirt

(01:38:04):
in the Ground, sung in his prince voice. I loved it.
He says he can only do it for like one
or two songs. That's why you never hear him do
it live live is all the cookie monster stuff because
he can only do the falsetto for like one song
at a time. And he said this is based on
a pickup line that he heard from acclaimed though not
famed tenor saxophone as Teddy Edwards, who used to get

(01:38:26):
girls to go up to his try and bring girls
back to his hotel room by saying, listen, darling, we're
all going to be dirt in the ground. I love
it interesting enough. Another major theme on Bone Machine is
the Bible. He talked about in the press kid how
the Bible was like new to me, and I guess
he'd been going through it, particularly revelations. But all these
different apocalyptic images that come upcross like earth Dyed Screaming

(01:38:50):
has a line about the locusts taking the sky Cane
and Abel are in Dirt in the ground, Murder in
the Red Barn. Literally quotes don't covet your neighbor's house,
don't covert your nature, wife, Jesus gonna be here is
just very obviously intent revival like Preacher mode. I love
the line, and that song is like, because I've been
so faithful except for drinking, but he knew that I would.

(01:39:13):
It's like such an eerily specific like ah, I get
goosebumps thinking about it, and then all stripped down, which
is amazing because he says he got it from Jimmy Swaggered,
Jerry Lee Lewis's cousin. Yeah, the idea, He's like, I
wanted to make a song that sounded horny, like baby,
I need you all stripped down, But also like this
this Pentecostal idea of like you have to be stripped

(01:39:36):
completely clean before the Lord, like of all your sins
and all your memories and all your worldly issues like
when when when he comes again? You know? And then
there's another great there's a there's a Shakespeare line in
this on this album Black Wings, which I think of
is his version of is the checker Checkerboard, kind of

(01:39:58):
part to Red Right Hand by Nick Cave, which is
just about like what sort of the genre of rambling
badass like like Red right Hand is like just about
a guy who rolls through and he's like he's scary
and he kills people, but there's no further specifics than that.
And same with black Wings, where he's like, I'll see
if I can do this. This homewaid sign, well, he

(01:40:18):
once killed him. They say he once killed a man
with a guitar string. There are those who say that
beneath his coat there are wings. It's so good. But
he says, I'm gonna get myself unfurled from this mortal
coiled up world, which is a really great internal rhyme

(01:40:39):
that flips the line from a Hamlet from the Sleep
of death. What dreams may come when we have shuffled
off this mortal coil? Love it? Sorry?

Speaker 3 (01:40:49):
Okay, So.

Speaker 2 (01:40:51):
I was by I had little hair in my mouth
from getting real close on the microphone. A little asmr
there for you. Tom Waite's like a boom.

Speaker 3 (01:41:04):
M.

Speaker 2 (01:41:08):
So I brought up bout Dylan earlier, and I think
it's interesting because you and I both know about Grail
Marcus and the Old Weird America. Some of you's eyes
will roll and some of you will think it's legitimate.
I don't know where I'm going with this. So Grail
Marcus talks specifically about the Basement tapes and the band
and Bob Dylan's like sort of lyrical focus in the

(01:41:30):
in the late sixties as memorializing and being concerned with
what he called the old Weird America, And that's his
shorthand for like pre industrial American culture basically like the
from the ante bellum South up to the interstate system,
you know, sort of like I mentioned earlier, like the
itinerant carnivals, you know, touring tent revival preaching, like minstrel shows,

(01:41:54):
you know, like Flannery O'Connor kind of shit. But it's
just very interesting thinking that, you know, like I said,
Bob Dylan is like seven years older than Tom Waits,
but Tom Waits didn't have a career until Bob Dylan
had already had like seven personalities tucked away in his pocket.
Because if you're charitably thinking of Tom Waits's early career
is like seventy four seventy five, that's like already in

(01:42:15):
a blood on the tracks. Yeah, you know, so it's
like Dylan's already in his divorce era. But yeah, both
of their lyrics are very preoccupied with this interesting idea
of like what we lost when America became unified, like
mass culture, you know, like roving gamblers and criminals, tinerant

(01:42:35):
laborers and all this folk like who do folklore, oral tradition,
a lot of it being I think like Pan African
superstition and stuff. It was all kind of coming from
the Deep South. But the biggest difference between them is
that Tom Waits California, so he fucking loves la and
he loves cars. So it's so kindamn funny to me

(01:42:58):
to think that, like, you know, Bob Dylan's like here
writing all these songs like about like free and free will,
and Tom Waits is like, you know, fourteen in like
San Diego, and like, oh, yeah, this is great, but
needs more cars. I just love this idea that you're
getting at with the you know, the big Bill BRUNSI

(01:43:22):
kind of covers and you know this, you're talking a
lot about canaan Abel and Jesus and then By and
so forth. But have you thought about a big car
just driving right down through all that because I have
and this is I'm going down a limb here because
this is song is very personal to me, but I
think it's very interesting. Tom Waits has this through line
where he talks about he doesn't he doesn't talk very

(01:43:43):
much about about religion, but he talks very much about
like the state of forgiveness or like the state of grace.
And there are multiple songs that he kind of talks
to talks about forgiveness or grace as being like a
place that you can get to. There's parts about that
on Bone Machine. But specifically, what I'm thinking of is

(01:44:06):
this song called down There by the Train that he
actually wrote for Johnny Cash, and Johnny Cash covered it
on one of the American records, and I don't like
his version because it's like jaunty and Tom Waits's version
is on piano and it's like heartbreaking, and it's this
really interesting He is this really interesting image of like

(01:44:28):
this idea of not an afterlife per se, because he
talks about there's this great couplet, there's no eye for
an eye, there's no tooth for a tooth. I saw
Judas is Scariot carrying John Wilkes Booth. They were down
there by the train. There's no other way, he says.
I saw Charlie Whitman hanging on to Lucifer's wings, Charlie
Whitman being the Tyra sniper, Yeah, the Texas Tower sniper.

(01:44:51):
And so he has this beautiful image of like grace
and forgiveness as a place that you can like go
to and arrive at. Whereas Dylan, in like his writings
about forgiveness and God, like I'm thinking of like God
to serve somebody, but then you're also thinking about something
that's completely stupid, like God gave name to all the animals,
which is one of the dumbest songs I've ever heard

(01:45:12):
in my life. Go google that one and see if
you still have respect for Bob Dylan. Ah. But God
to Serve somebody has this like sort of Protestant you
will toil and then you will die and your reward
will be in the suite hereafter. I don't know. I
think there's something very interesting about the ways that they
both kind of conceive of these just Cis white guys

(01:45:34):
from the Midwest in California. I both kind of come
around to this idea of forgiveness in God, but from
very different angles, one of which has to do with transportation.
I don't know. You can cut that if that doesn't know.

Speaker 3 (01:45:45):
I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:45:45):
But it's an interesting it's an interesting fixation I have
because he talks about eye for an eye, tooth for
a tooth in he literally says it, like in the Bible,
there's eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. It's
in something on bone machine maybe such a scream anyway,
so I can talk about going out west coming up
at the top. But aside from that song ruling and

(01:46:08):
there's a great video of him doing it on Arsenio
where he's like singing through a bullhorn through a microphone
stand that is like half his height, so he's all
hunched over and stomping weirdly. It must have been the
most insane thing that the Dog Pound had ever seenoo who,
et cetera. But there's a really funny bit of like

(01:46:30):
Tom Waite's lyrical connection here he says I'm going out
west because Tony Franciosa used to date my Ma. Tony
Franciosa is a is an actor who was at one
point nominated for a Tony for being in the play
A hat full of Rain and for a weights complete
this like me. There's a line on one of the

(01:46:50):
B sides called long Way Home that he says, I
got a hat full of lighting and a hatful of rain.
So clearly Tom has a thing for the play Hatful
of Rain and or Tony Franciosa. Anyway, the Olds eighty
eight in Going Out West, also Going Out West is
so funny, man, I mean he has that. There's that lineup.

(01:47:11):
First of all, I think gonna change my name to
Hannibal maybe just Rex is one of the greatest couplets
that you can have lyrically. But then secondarily, you know,
he says I got an Olds eighty eight and the
Devil on a leash. I have to assume that is
a reference to the Oldsmobile eighty eight, which is, of
course the car model car popular stock racers that the

(01:47:33):
very first rock and roll song, Rocket eighty eight, is
named for, and Waite it suppears to reinforce this in
an interview with Reflects magazine in nineteen ninety two by saying,
I figured let's do a rocker. So you see there
the connections are made between rocking and this old mobile
and then he continued, we'll just slam it and scream,

(01:47:53):
and my wife said, no, this is about those guys
who come to California from the Midwest with very specific ideas. Mind.
That's how the line about Tony Francierosa fits. There are
some people come to California with less than that to
go on a phone number somebody gave them, you know,
for a psychic who used to work with Ann Margaret,
And if I meet him, maybe I can get somewhere.
Maybe if I play my cards right. That's very funny

(01:48:16):
because she's from Illinois. She's from there's the Tom Waits
song Johnsburg, Illinois is named for her hometown, so she
a Midwesterner from LA. Was like, no, you have to
write this song from the perspective of someone from the
Midwest coming to LA to Tom Waits who's from San
Diego and idolized La growing up his entire life. And
then that leads into Whistled Down the Wind. Yeah, I

(01:48:37):
think is a fucking devastating song. As you write.

Speaker 1 (01:48:40):
It's another song that seems to have death in one
hand and then idealize seemingly California based life in another.
Lyrics include lines like I grew up here all my life.
I dream someday I'd go. Or the Blue Eyed Girls
and the Red Guitars and the Naked Rivers. Flow Weights
included the dedication for Tom Jans or Yahn's I Don't

(01:49:03):
Know a songwriter friend of he, and Brennan's noting in
the press kit. Jans was from the Central coast of California,
kind of a Steinbeck up bringing in a small town.
He wrote Love in Arms, Dobie Gray recorded it, and
also Elvis did it. He used to play with Mimi Farina,
who was jum Bias's sister. Sure check me on that, No, s.

Speaker 2 (01:49:27):
I choose to believe you're correct. Yes, JOm Bias his sister. Yeah,
she got married in Big Sir. Good for Moon Farina.

Speaker 1 (01:49:34):
But as you write for a gigantic nerd like you,
the most interesting lyrical concern in Whistle Down the Wind
is I will take the marlbin coach and go whistling
down the wind. Marlbin coach is, according to some linguists,
a corruption of the phrase marrowbone coach that dates back
to Victorian England. Marlbones were the shin bones of a

(01:49:56):
horse or other hoofed mammal so taking the marrabone marleb
bone coach, meant to hoof it somewhere, or walk like
a bone machine, like cock me round like a bone machine.

Speaker 2 (01:50:08):
Get it? Yes, yes, it's in the name of the album.
God whistle down the wind just crush kills me. Man.

Speaker 3 (01:50:15):
I grew up here all of my life. I dream
someday I'd go with the blue eye purse and the
Raid guitars.

Speaker 2 (01:50:31):
That's so good in my head. It kind of turns
in the waltzing Matilda. They all turned into waltson Untila. Okay,
I feel better now. I thought that was just making
or Tom Trowbear's blues and properly titled Yes, yes, yes
have you ever heard him doud somewhere from the West
Side Story? Excuse no? That's great.

Speaker 1 (01:50:52):
Well, despite all of these naked allusions to murder and
death and dying and killing, maybe the saddest song on
this record is, on its face, the most jubulant, I
Don't want to grow Up. When asked if the song
was inspired by his kids, Waits answered, hey, they don't
want to grow up, but hey, I don't either, You know, Jesus,
how the hell did it get here so soon. That's

(01:51:15):
a cold shot. I was going to throw the song out.
I wasn't going to record it, but Kathleen said, oh no,
you've got to finish that.

Speaker 2 (01:51:23):
On a record where people are.

Speaker 1 (01:51:24):
Struggling against arriving at or helping others to death. The
brady directness as you write is what makes it so poignant.
Nothing clever or biblical to say about finding out what
growing up means, just sheer, childlike indignation. That's what made
it such a natural fit for being covered by the
Ramones on their last record. Oh that was from audioska

(01:51:49):
y Yes, Tom Waits repaid the favor by covering their
Danny Says and Return of Jackie and Judy, which appear
on the Orphans box set. In fact, when you google
I Don't Want to Grow Up plus Ramones, the first
question in Google's people ask section is what is the
saddest Romotes song.

Speaker 2 (01:52:09):
It's worth noting that one of the answers for that
is pet Cemetery, which is my favorite remote song. I
don't want to be bad, you know, pet Sem I
don't won't live my life again. He sounds like Dracula?

(01:52:30):
Is it got that? Like he's got that croon to him.
He's like, as his voice deepened in later years, Oh
so good. What else can I say about Bone Machine?
Great record, great record. God, I don't want to grow up?
Just shatters me. Man, I don't want my hair to
fall out. I don't want to have the biggest amount.
I don't want to grow up. Why the hell? Oh God,

(01:52:51):
there's that. Man, these I just this is just going
to turn into me reading all of these lyrics and
then singing them. Yeah, it's so great. That's such a genius.
It's so sad because I'm trying to find these lyrics.
It is so direct and so childish, Like he even says,
I don't wanna like there were bones, Like I don't
want to go sniff some glue. I don't want to

(01:53:12):
blah blah blah. But then he just sneaks these little,
these little gut wrench lines in there, Like seems like
folks turn into things that they'd never want. When I
see my parents fight, I don't want to grow up.
They all go out drink it all night. I don't
want to grow up. I'd rather stay here in my room.
Oh that feel co written by Keith Richards, takes one

(01:53:39):
of the most most literal demonstrations of I forget who
said this about him, Jordan who said that Keith Richards
is the only singer who can sing in two keys
at once. Oh, man, Oh, that's gonna bother me. I
can't remember. Because his vocals on that feel, there's a
great So there's a great line in mual variation and

(01:54:00):
coming up to the house where he says, uh, you're
singing lead soprano in a junk man's choir. And I
believe that line is explicitly about Keith Richards, because you're
here Keith Richards on this song last feel or that feel,
and everyone sounds drunker than they've ever been in their life.
And his reedy voice like sticks out so far. Oh,

(01:54:27):
this is what's so stupid about God. This pisses me
off so much. This is what's so dumb about Google AI.
There is this quote that says he's the only sing
I forget what journalists said, but Keith Ridgs is the
only singer who can sing in two keys at once
in a reference to his harmony vocals, and Google AI
says Keith Richards doesn't sing in two keys at once,

(01:54:48):
but he does play guitar and open g tunings you
can create which can create a fuller sound. Oh God,
roll stupid country. Anyway, Bone Machine didn't much light the
sales world on fire. It peaked at one seventy one
of the Billboard two hundred and the highest it crept
internationally was number fifteen in Norway. Has got to be

(01:55:10):
pretty good until you realize that Norway has like two
hundred people living in it. Only one single, Going Out West,
was released, and that peaked at one sixty seven in Australia,
but the album has aged very well. It's since been
named number forty nine on Pitchfork's Best Albums in the
nineteen nineties. They placed it a slightly higher than Rolling Stone,

(01:55:33):
who placed it at fifty three on their corresponding list
of the same name. It has also be included on
the one thousand and one albums You Must Hear Before
You Die. Tom and Tom Waits's buddy and Jordan's also
close friend Elvis Costello included it on his list of
essential albums, highlighting A Little Rain and I Don't Want
to Grow Up as his favorite. It also, as I

(01:55:54):
mentioned at the top of this two hours one weighs
his first Grammy for Best Alternative Album. So after releasing
the material from Black Rider in nineteen ninety three, which
as I mentioned, had been written prior to Bone Machine,
or at least concurrently, Waits took another long ass break
from recording. He was in Mystery Men in the year
two thousand. Also not what oh he is in Mystery Men.

(01:56:16):
He's amazing in Mystery Man. He's their wacky inventor guy.
But I thought that happened before Mule Variations. Mystery Event.
Did that come out ninteen ninety nine or two thousand? Ooh,
nineteen ninety nine, So yeah, he returned. He returned to
the charts in nineteen ninety nine with Mule Variations. The
same year he returned actually I think he'd been acting
on and off, but the same year that he graced

(01:56:37):
the silver screen in Mystery Men. Great movie. But this
is what's so funny. Mule Variations also won a Grammy,
but he won it in the Best Contemporary Folk Catalog
of recording. So from Best Alternative to Best Contemporary Folk
in six years. Is that's the Tom Waits promise, Life

(01:56:58):
comes at you fast does another crushing record by the way,
just a great, great record, great lackled that's a deep cut.
That's uh, Paul Rudd is John Lennon. Yeah, in Walkhart
for all of you who have sex out there and

(01:57:20):
didn't see that movie seventeen times while you're in college.

Speaker 3 (01:57:23):
Umm. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:57:25):
So Tom Waits's mellow since Bow Machine. I think he's
been I mean, maybe not lyrically like Blood Money and
Alice or some incredibly dark albums. And then he was
in a Robert I think he made a void check
the the that's Werner Hertzog movie, but it was a play.

(01:57:47):
Hang on, give me one second. Shut up, Jordan, Shut up. God,
I can't hear myself think Jordan hasn't said anything in
like ten minutes. I could have just done this myself.

Speaker 1 (01:57:57):
I'm just basking in it. I no, I'm I'm asking Ques.
I'm the voice of the audience in this episode.

Speaker 2 (01:58:04):
Just me a lot of this. You had Tom Waits
dated Bette Midler for a brief time. That actually sort
of sounds familiar. There are a great song called I
Never talked to I never talked to don't talk to strangers, Yeah,
I never talked to strangers. Off foreign affairs, one of
his most jazzy albums that I don't like, So New

(01:58:29):
Variations comes out in nineteen ninety nine, and then Tom
kind of gets into his current era of being the
dad who doesn't really like touring or making records. He's
made Alice, Blood Money, Real Gone, and Bad at Me,
Bad Is Me. Alice and Blood Money were written around
the same time. It's split up into two records, and
Real Gone was two thousand and six and Bad as

(01:58:51):
Me it was twenty eleven, So he was at like
five or six years in between records and we might
not get another one because he was more interested in
shooting for five minutes in Licorice Pizza. Then he apparently
wasn't making a new record because he has an amazing
cameo in that movie. But I have sadly given up

(01:59:12):
hope that I'll ever get to see him live, and
probably also giving up hope that we'll ever hear another
full length album. He's seventy five, but he also seems
two hundred and fifty. It's just great. I mean, I
you know, his son Casey. Glitter and Doom is a
great live record that he made from his Europe tour.
But his son Casey played turntables and drums on real

(01:59:33):
gone before like five years before that. He's just like
a family man. I don't know. I mean, I love him.
He's my guy. That's sadly, you know, we didn't really
age into like amber wheat fields of grain, Tom, like
pastoral Central Valley, California.

Speaker 3 (01:59:49):
Tom.

Speaker 2 (01:59:49):
We define the world definitely aged into like the craggy
vistas and oil soaked valleys of bone Machine, you know,
with a blood red horizon. That's the world we are
actually living in. So in many ways he was quite prescient,
I might say, uh, But in summary, I'd like to

(02:00:13):
wrap up with a quote from nineteen ninety two, when
Tom was interviewed by Vox magazine in October of that
year of Our Lord. The prompt was what does the
future hold? And Tom answered bustly, I think about the
worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play
peanutckle on your snout. A snake just crawled in your eye.

(02:00:35):
I can't wait till the worms are eating me. That's
a big dream, Well said Tom. Well said, no wonder,
he's your guy. Thank you, folks. This has been This
has been a this has been a solo performance. One

(02:00:55):
Man's show. TMI on Tom Waite's Bow Machie of One
Man Show. I'd like to thank my producer Jordan a
stellar performance my script. Girl. No, I'm just kidding. Thank
you as always for this is my even though it's
only ten pages. This is my revolver.

Speaker 3 (02:01:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:01:17):
Well, the asserted works of Tom Waite's or my Titanic,
which I think we still broke two hours. I know
you did most of that off the dome. Yeah. Well yeah,
I mean that's where it's really troubling. I don't know
I could talk about the variation sex. Uh down, Yeah,
I just you know. He actually used strove violins to

(02:01:38):
record most of the strings on Alice's actually an early
wave amplifying acoustic instruments where they literally attached little tin
they look like the gramophone horns onto the bridges of
violins to like amplify them in old time and music halls.
He actually went and found those and recorded with them.

Speaker 3 (02:01:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:01:58):
I owe a lot out of not sex to liking Tommy.
It's like the Doomer meme, the meme of the girl
with like bloodshot circles under eyes and a gun. Like
I lied, we're not going to hook up. I'm gonna
make you listen to Heart of Saturday Night, followed by

(02:02:18):
rain Dogs, followed by Bone Machine while I expound on
the relative lyrical progressions and production differences of each. I
don't have Netflix door clicks, door clicks behind some like
Terrified Brooklyn twenty something girl, and yet you're the one
of the two of us is married. I know, I know.

(02:02:39):
It really is a cruel shock. I don't think I
I low Is. I don't know where she sits on Low? Well, yeah,
did I even make Did I ever play you Tom
Waits when we were dating? She answered, which of the

(02:03:00):
four hundred times are you referring to? So something took?
We really should have.

Speaker 1 (02:03:07):
I feel like our listeners would be able to get
to know you a lot better if we had low
as a cameo every now and then.

Speaker 2 (02:03:12):
Don't give her a hot mic. Please don't take the
last lingering shred of my dignity anyway, This has been
too much information.

Speaker 1 (02:03:26):
Higel at night, I'm holding the microphone like Freddie Mercury, Right.

Speaker 3 (02:03:33):
You actually are?

Speaker 2 (02:03:33):
I love it? I love it, I love it. Join
me next week when God? What else can I talk about?
Off the dome? Like Tom Waits jazz?

Speaker 3 (02:03:41):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:03:41):
The studio recordings of Tom Dowd. Oh wow, engineer extraordinary
at at Atlantic, come on out of places. Well we
move technique. We might do like a rolling stone in
honor of that movie. I didn't think was that great. No, no,
shut up for a second. One are a fascinate Any
things I think about Tom doubt is how he would

(02:04:03):
go to these extraordinary lengths to get an accurate Charles
minguz bas sound. And then Mingus would just pick up
his bass while he's playing and walk around the room
or just like move it around and yell you hear
all these like blown out bait. It's like these Rudy
van Gelder's over there like filating himself in Englewood Cliffs,
trying to get like an acoustically pure environment, and Charles

(02:04:25):
Mingus is like banging his upright bass against a mic
that Tom Dowd recorded. And you know what, those Tomdowd
records sound fantastic. This is where you board feed me
down now. Earlier we mentioned how to get a great
Chicago harp sound, and the way you want to do
that is you get a sure green bullet mic. You've
talked about that rich earlier in this episode yes, no,

(02:04:47):
I say, okay, Well, what I'd like to get into
now is Peter Ivers, who wrote the song in Heaven
from a racer Head. Now, Ivers, I don't know if
you knew this. There's not a lot of people that
know this. I first was a harmonica virtuoso. In like
two years, that guy discovered and mastered Blues Heart to

(02:05:09):
the Point Too Much Information was a production of iHeart Radio.
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog.
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show
was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtog and Alex Heigel,

(02:05:31):
with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review.

Speaker 1 (02:05:38):
For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio Apple Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Tom Waits' 'Bone Machine': Everything You Didn't Know