Tom Waits For No One - McCabe's - Rock Landmarks L.A.

In the hallway Max Ten said, "Jay, picking you up Saturday."  It wasn't a question, it was matter of fact. "Tom Waits. You've gotta hear this guy. Got a voice like an emery board. Fantastic."
Max Ten had a 1969 gold Austin America. He could have driven a four door Datsun and it would still be cool, but the Austin America was over the top. It had a Deadhead sticker on the back window and a cassette deck. Paige was in the back seat and at first I was a little taken aback. Was it all it ruse? A trick on Paigeboy's part, I don't know, but I felt a little more at ease with her there.  I sat in the passenger seat and we picked up Belinda Pocket. The girls sat in back. Belinda wore a mini-dress that was pretty indescribable. Imagine a gypsy-style white top, pretty see through, but then below the elbows and below the waist it was a black and white paisley print. It was pretty stunning, and I've got to admit, Paigeboy looked like a million bucks in a pale green knitted dress, real short, hair parted in the middle, curled real nice.  We headed out over the Sepulveda Pass into Santa Monica to a venue that wasn't much of anything, a converted storage space in the back of McCabe's Guitar Shop. It looked like the kind of place that would catch fire. There were a hundred guitars hanging on the walls, Gibsons and Fenders and Rickenbackers. There was a makeshift stage and a wall of amplifiers. Tom Waits was crazy and drunk and sang songs like "Ol' '55" and "Rosie." Leave it to Max Ten, the music was absolutely diabolical. It was always 2am in Waits' music and a bottle of Jack was paying you back, whispering loneliness. I wrote that in my red journal.  Long ago I'd bought another journal and then another, but I kept that first one, the red one from Gaia for the stuff I never wanted to forget. I don't know if I said it or if it was Max Ten, but I at least was the one who wrote it down.


I never mentioned my father dancing. We were in Joe and Aggie's Café in Hollbrook, Arizona.  We had chili con carne with onions and my father had a couple beers. We were playing a pinball machine called Gottlieb's Bowling Queen and my father went to the bar for another beer. A pretty lady in a cowboy hat started talking to him and the next thing I knew he was out on the floor and dancing a cowboy line dance. He didn't know what he was doing. I was so distracted that I let the fifth ball slip down between the flippers without enough for a replay, but I matched numbers and still got a free game. I didn't play it. I went and sat in the booth and watched my father dance. He was laughing the whole time and carrying on and when it was time for everybody in the line to tap the tip of their boots, he thought that was grand. It was the only part he really got down, otherwise he kept doing the wrong thing. It was real nice to see him have fun.
Tom Waits' didn't sing cowboy music, but there was an accordion and a cello in a couple of the numbers and I couldn't help but think about the dance my father did so poorly. Music can transport you places, so I was like back there in Arizona with my father. I think my father was back in the old west dancing at a hootenanny with a busty girl in a cowboy hat. He had a big old grin on his face. That's why I love music.
Paigeboy and I held hands in the back seat going home and then we parked up on Mulholland by Satan's black house with the Valley stretched out below and Max and I made out with the girls. I wasn't in love with Paige at all, but I was in love with the moment.
                                                          
- From Jay and the Americans 

When I wrote Jay and the Americans, it was with the goal of keeping it 90% accurate. I'd been reading a lot of memoirs. For the first hundred pages or so, I'd find myself fascinated and then lose interest. The lack of plot in modern memoir was boring, no matter what The New York Times Book Review said. And so 90% of what is in Jay is the truth; the rest is fictional verisimilitude that serves as plot. I bring this up because Max Ten is real. Maxwell Tennial was the coolest kid at Van Nuys High and now the coolest dad and the coolest husband too, I suppose. I've always jokingly said that my man crush was Ellen, but really, it's Max Ten. OK, the point: Max sent me an email all about Waits after he read Jay and the Americans. I mean, how cool do you have to be to dis Waits? Am I right? Fucker even writes better than I do. Here's the email:

Tom Waits is just awful.

I can imagine all the hipsters if they heard this statement, choking on their clove cigarettes, twisting their Smith Bros. beards, tripping over the laces of cherry Doc Martens; the tattoo that says, "You’re Innocent When You Dream," starts to itch, her mocha latte spills, she forgets to record Portlandia.  "How could you say such a thing?" she implies with a look of disdain.

Reality: I don’t think I have ever seen a negative review of Tom Waits. Cool people are required to love him, and only the coolest people write music criticism, ergo blah blah blah; an assumption is made that those who don’t like him are listening to the Disney girls and Radio Banal. 

I guess I'm just annoyed.  If Waits had simply sung his songs like a normal human being instead of the Incredible Hulk (Tom Waits Smash), I'd have no reason to call him out; maybe if he didn't hope to expressly appeal to the margins of cool, to those college kids and the eternally infantine who prop up the Avant-Garde willy-nilly, I'd have nothing to complain about, but the newly devoted are the same types impressed by Duchamp's urinal in the same way that a four year old is thrown into hysterics by a floater in the bathtub. These folks play Rain Dogs in public at top volume to show how edgy they are, how unlike Mom and Dad. They prove that they are "artists" instead of frat boys by putting on Waits during the evening shift at Jamba Juice.

Point is, even the gods are flawed, or fall. Joni Mitchell comes to mind. From the sixties through Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter in 1977 she could do no wrong. Sometime after that she got bored, seemingly with her own talent, or she was far too influenced by the culture of cool, and, like Waits, began channeling old black men. We need Joni doing Charles Mingus about as much as we need a blonde Mingus singing "Circle Game."

For me Waits announces the coming of the art student in paint-splattered coveralls and gauges and dirt strategically left in the most visible places. Every move screams, "Look at me! I’m different; I'm post-colonial, post postmodern, deconstructing all I see and hear and step over; I must dress exactly like all other art students, rearranging the dirt and tattoos and duct tape, assuring that I recycle (but 'God don’t take away my K-cups.')"  
So, yes, J’accuse!  I object.  How excited I was when "In the Neighborhood" was in rotation on MTV.  Something new. "Look at this guy!" Or when he appeared in Rumblefish.  Waits was cool exemplified - but all the hipsters have ruined that, reminded me that this is a fallen God.  Ho-hum. 

Swordfishtrombones is indeed a ten, the albums that preceded it are iconic, and there is nothing less beautiful about Franks Wild Years (sic), but that voice.  Bowie said that Dylan had a voice like "sand and glue."  The difference: that is Dylan; that's how he sounds.  He's not a caricature of himself, a parody. Hipsters United has embraced the wrong Waits and I guess that's why I’m so bitter.  Waits should be a ten all the way around.  Makes me so angry.  Just sing, Tom, like on "Neighborhood" or "Please Call Me, Baby." Sing like Waits sings, not like Waits with a trach. Okay, I'm done now.  End of rant.

Jay and the Americans is available all over the world!
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