Almanac Music: Not Quite Bob – Tom Waits Sharing a Curbstone With Chuck E Weiss … and Rickie Lee Jones

Almanac Music

Not Quite Bob – Tom Waits Sharing a Curbstone With Chuck E Weiss … and Rickie Lee Jones – Chuck E Weiss, Rickie Lee Jones, Tom Waits

 

This NQB is essentially about Tom Waits who if I was pressed I would nominate as my favourite artist.  Unless you asked me the next day when I might name Elvis Costello.  The day after, Neil Young … you know how it goes.  But Tom … poet, storyteller, songwriter, musician, actor and raconteur.  Every one of which applies to Bob too.  You could happily add, in the modern way, influencer, because his fingerprints are everywhere in modern music but, like Bob, the best versions of his songs are his own.

 

 

You couldn’t do a piece about Mr Waits without noting the influence of his close friends from the late 70’s in Chuck E Weiss and Rickie Lee Jones with whom he had a brief and fiery romantic relationship from 1977 and until around 1980.  Denizens of the Santa Monica area around that time, residents in the Troubador, beatnik hipsters before anyone making coffee in Northcote had even been born, rabble rousers and bon vivants writ large.

 

 

In the NY Times at the time of Weiss’ death last year is this piece that will catch you up/remind you about that famous LA gang.

 

 

 

Chuck E Weiss

 

 

While it can fairly be suggested that Chuck E Weiss’ musical career was a slight one compared to that of Jones and Waits there is still plenty of gold in his discography.

 

 

My favourite album was his last from 2014 called Red Beans and Weiss.  A link to sample here.

 

 

 

 

 

His clips on You Tube are mostly fan vids recorded on phones but here he is with Boston Blackie on Jimmie Kimmel.

 

 

There are only about 4 other albums including Extremely Cool and Old Souls and Wolf Tickets which are both really good.  Tom did us all a favour at the time of Chuck’s death by compiling a playlist which is attached here.  It includes some rarities from other compilations and is top and tailed with 2 Tom tracks as a bonus.

 

 

 

 

Rickie Lee Jones

 

 

It is well known that Track 1 on RLJ’s first album is Chuck E’s In Love and it is still her best known song (with the exception I suppose of The Horses which Daryl Braithwaite butchers at the races every year).  It’s an ode to Chuck E Weiss who (per the Times article above) rang Rickie and Tom from his home town in Denver and declared his love for … his cousin.  Thus the song.

 

 

It would be wrong however to consign RLJ to any One Hit Wonder club without noting that she has recorded many fine albums across a lot of musical styles, mostly pens all her own songs and is also a great interpreter of other songwriters work.  I think my favourite album of hers is 1981’s Pirates but there have been many good ones since.  On this album is a crack retinue of session musicians including the guys from Steely Dan and many of those they were using in sessions on Dan records at the time.

 

 

 

 

 

Later in 2012 she released a great album of covers called The Devil You Know.  Some of those songs she’d been playing live for years including Donovan’s Catch The Wind.  Here in 1989.

 

 

 

 

The real highlight of Rickie’s covers are that she makes them her own.  This is her version of The Left Banke’s Walk Away Renee which of course is the poster child of One Hit Wonders.

 

 

 

 

While some are put off by Rickie’s little girl voice I think she’s magical, a great artist and a great songwriter.  Famously prickly, she can be heard upbraiding her backing bands on stage, she is nonetheless a unique figure.  I’m not sure how the writing of a book came about but for more on her, literally warts and all, you could do worse than read her memoir called Last Chance Texaco:Chronicles of an American Troubador.  Compelling and funny by turn.

 

 

Tom Waits

 

 

And so to Tom.  Where to start? Born in Pomona in upstate California in 1949 Tom as a teenager had his bedroom walls festooned with handwritten lists of … the lyrics of Bob Dylan songs.  There it is again as with so many of the NQB subjects. He moves to LA in 1971 after dropping out of school at age 18.

 

From there I think his history is pretty well detailed by others but I guess the reason I looked to the period in the late 70’s hanging around with RLJ and CEW is that it’s a neat cut off point in his musical history too.  Tom’s first albums started out in a sort of LA sound country folk mode (Closing Time in 1973, from which the Eagles covered Ol’ 55), then moved into jazzier space with The Heart of Saturday Night (1974) and Nighthawks at the Diner (1975).  On these he was trying out his style and Nighthawks, which was recorded as though live, includes some of the famous audience patter that became a feature of his live work in later years.

 

The big leap into a grungier, more blues soaked mode came with Small Change in 1976.  From there the title song live in 1977.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then he met Rickie.  And Chuck.  And the high life.  Or low, depending on your POV.  The albums that followed are among his best loved and they include Foreign Affairs (1977), Blue Valentine (1978) and Heartattack And Vine (1980).  Many of Tom’s most famous and popular songs are in those albums.  Including this, On The Nickel, which would make most fans Tom favourites list from that or any time.

 

 

 

 

As you can see from the clip where Tom denotes it ‘A Winos Lullaby’, his performances and material had become of the barroom, sort of drunkard’s laments.  I saw him in 1979 and the stage setting was as shown in that clip, very theatrical, great songs, a best all-time concert in my live gig Hall of Fame.  But it didn’t sit well with Tom who knew he had to get out of that life and that setting.  The partying had to stop and in 1980 he cut off ties with Rickie and soon after became romantically involved with Kathleen Brennan who he’d met while working on the soundtrack of One From The Heart a film Directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

 

 

After marrying later that year Waits and Brennan began collaborating as songwriters and Brennan is certainly credited with helping Waits straighten out his tumultuous personal life getting him off the booze and the pills.  My view is that the albums that followed are Tom’s master works and the run from Swordfishtrombones in 1983, through Rain Dogs and Frank’s Wild Years to Bone Machine in 1992 he created his most challenging and musically adventurous work to date.

 

 

Here are ’16 Shells From A 30.6 and Cemetery Polka’ performed live.

 

 

 

 

 

Now Tom starts looking elsewhere to ply his creative trade and in 1993 he releases The Black Rider to accompany a stage play directed by Robert Wilson based on work by William S Burroughs and continues to work as an actor in film.  Along the way he has worked with many notable Directors including Coppola (several times), Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen brothers and Jim Jarmusch.  He’s even been depicted (caricatured?) in a Shrek film, there for the trainspotters.

 

 

But this is all on the way to his opus, Mule Variations which appeared in 1999.  My favourite of his, he’s just turned 50 and then this.

 

 

 

 

It’s magnificent, starts with the cacophony of Big In Japan and finishes with this:

 

 

 

 

 

He later releases two albums in 2002 to accompany plays (Alice and Blood Money) and in 2004 Real Gone and in 2011 Bad As Me.  All decent additions to his greater earlier work.

 

 

But there’s a bit of housekeeping to be done.  In 2006 he cleans out the cupboard and finds no less than 56 tracks that never made other albums or were otherwise discards.  They find their way onto a stupendous triple he calls Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards which is how he characterises each group of them.  You could grab any 12 songs and they’d make a great album on its own.  Spoilt for choice I pick this from the Bawlers group.

 

 

 

 

Then in 2008 he embarks on a tour which he labels the Glitter and Doom tour which later is released as an album in that name in 2009.  It’s a tour de force collection of live cuts from that tour with highlights from the post 1980 part of his catalogue.

 

 

To rock this (lengthy) homage out here is Goin’ Out West first heard on Bone Machine where it was altogether grungier but here … full tilt boogie.  Play it loud.

 

 

 

 

Q: What do I like about Tom Waits?

 

 

A:Everything.

 

 

His songs make me weep, dance and think.  That’s the sweet spot for any artist.  This piece (believe it or not) is about 500 pages short of what could be written on Tom.  Fortunately that work has already been done by Barney Hoskyns on Lowside Of The Road which also came out in 2009.  It’s a page turner like any good thriller. You should note though that it is unauthorised.  Famously Tom urged everyone he knew not to answer Barney’s calls.   An erstwhile recluse, he’s not for sharing his story except through his work.  Thank holy heck for that at least.

 

 

PS: I harbour a bucket list fantasy that I could walk into a café in Sonoma County where he lives and find him doing the crossword in the SC Tribune or somesuch.  On the extremely unlikely side of unlikely I’d suggest.

 

 

PPS:  He is my favourite artist.  On any day.

 

 

You can read more from Trevor Blainey HERE.

 

Read more stories from Almanac Music  HERE

 

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