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January 20 - January 27, 2022
“We used to skate down this hill called Robert Avenue,” Waits remembered. “It was a great curve and you dug up a lot of speed. It went by our neighbor Mr. Sticha. He lived in the beauty of the curve, where all the momentum culminated in a beautiful slough of cement. It took you right past his house but as close as you could get to his porch.” Namechecked years later in “What’s He Building?,” Mr. Sticha would become so apoplectic at the skateboarders that his wife warned them they’d give him a heart attack. When eventually he did have a heart attack—on Halloween night, on his front porch—Mrs.
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On a trip to Baja California, Waits fell in with a band of local kids in the resort town of San Vicente. The boys would go out to the desert inland, bury themselves up to their necks in the sand, and wait for buzzards to arrive. “You stay as still as a corpse under the sand with just your head showing,” Waits told Francis Thumm. “You wait for the vulture to land and walk over to you, and the first thing they do is try to peck your eyes out. And when they make that jab, you reach out from under the sand, grab them around the neck, and snap their head off.” San Vicente was also where Waits
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Waits had thought about consulting Robert Wilson on how to shake up the conventional experience of live music. “I really want to create a stage environment for me that [gives me] confidence,” he said to Jim Jarmusch. “And not use all this stuff that is thrust upon me …” What had shaken him up the most was playing on the same bill as ska-funk-metal fusioneers Fishbone at the LA Riots benefit in May 1992. “The show they did just changed me,” he told Jarmusch. “Really, it combed my hair and gave me a sunburn. That’s when you realize that music, it does something physically to you. It can actually
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