Found a great Magnet Magazine interview from around the time of "Mule Variations" and thought I'd share it with you guys:
Arriving at the Astro (Motel), Waits pulls up in a 1985 Suburban, an unlikely ride for a man known for driving cars made before Kennedy was assassinated. “I refuse to call it a Suburban - I call it a Bourbon,” he says, and compliments MAGNET on its taste in accommodations with a wry smile. He’s dressed head to toe in dark blue denim, a lived-in pair of boots and his trademark porkpie hat - a rabbit-fur Stetson he bought in Austin while in town for a rare live performance at the recent South By Southwest festival. We head over to the nearby Mission Cafe, an unassuming greasy spoon, for eggs and sausage. Still a bit morning groggy, his voice sounds an even rougher grit of sandpaper than on record. Laughing easily with a chesty wheeze, a pair of reading glasses perched low on the bridge of his nose, Waits looks almost fatherly as he dispenses bits of folk wisdom, oddball factoids and good old-fashioned horse sense from a beat-up notebook he brought with him. Though the camera tends to add a few miles to his face, catching the shadows in the lines, in person Waits looks younger than his 49 years. The advantage of being born an old soul is that you never really seem to age. You just become a classic.
Tom Waits: When I was comin’ down here, I was thinkin' of all the cars I had in my life. I’m drivin’ this ‘85 Suburban, kind of a Men In Black car. I started thinking about it because I got a letter from the daughter of my neighbor, who sold me my first car, a ‘55 Buick Special. From there, I got a ‘55 Buick Roadmaster. I had a ‘56 Ford Wagon, beige. Somewhere in there I had a ‘59 Volvo.
MAGNET: You don’t strike me as a Volvo guy.
No, it wasn’t me, but somebody was trying to get rid of it, and he wanted 5100 for it. And he was a cop, so I said, “I’ll take it,” Had that sloped back, that scoliosis back. I had four Buicks: a Special, a Century and a Roadmaster and a ‘65 T-bird. Had a ‘59 Dodge wagon; it was gorgeous. A ‘56 Mercury convertible, a ‘54 Caddie, black - they said it was in The Godfather, and I think I paid more for it because of that. Godfather prices, that’s what they said. Had two Caddies, a ‘54 Coupe De Ville and a ‘52 Caddie, blue and white. A ‘64 Cadillac, champagne color - bought it in Montana. My wife drove it back out, no air conditioning, it was 120 degrees. She’s still mad about that. [Reading from his notebook] Most American auto horns beep in the key of what?
Key of C?You cheated! You were looking at my notebook! The key of F. [Reading from his notebook]. You know, more steel is produced for the manufacture of bottlecaps than auto bodies. There’s a national thirst going on here. When gentlemen in medieval Japan wished to seal an agreement, they would urinate together and criss-cross the streams - that was an early contract… Recently, a Korean fisherman was arrested for feeding his wife to a school of sharks after getting into a heated argument; it’s still against the law to use your wife as bait in Korea.
Let’s talk about shoes.All I wear now is engineer boots. Before that, I only wore pointy shoes and I destroyed my feet. My feet are now in the shape of a pointed shoe. I have a lot of room on either side in these boots, and I have to put newspaper in there. But I lived to see the pointed shoe once again emerge as a footgear leader. That was exciting. When I started looking for pointed shoes, I used to go to Fairfax on Orchard Street in New York City, one of those little pushcart guys. I’d say, “You got any pointy shoes?” They would go way, way in the back and come back with a dusty box, blow the dust off the top and say, “What do you want with these things? Give me 20 bucks. Go on, get outta here!” And that was the beginning. From there, I saw it grow into a burgeoning industry, a pointy industry. The ultimate was the pointy toe and Cuban heel. But I was younger then. Now, I go for comfort and roadability.
What about suits?I still don’t pay more than $7 for a suit. when I first went on the road, I was very superstitious; I would wear the same suits onstage as I wore off. A lot of times, we would leave early in the morning. I hated the whole ritual of getting dressed, so a lot times I would just lay down on the bed in my suit and my shoes, ready to get up at any time. I would just put the blanket over me and sleep in my clothes, I did that for many years. I stopped after I got married. My wife just won’t have it. Whenever she goes away for a couple of days, I put on a suit and get in bed but she can always tell.
Speaking of the road, are you going to tour for this record?[Assumes mock belligerence] I’m not gonna tour. I want to be set up with a theater like those guys in Missouri, and people come to me. The Wayne Newton Theater. The Trini Lopez Theater. I want my own, a little tin shack with a marquee and a work light, six chairs and a dirt floor. I can see it - I know exactly what it looks like. I’ll play six nights a week. You come to see me. [Paging through his notebook]. I got some things for you - you’ll like this. You ever hear of a bombardier beetle? A bombardier beetle, when disturbed, defends itself by a series of explosions. Actually five individual reports from his rear end, in rapid succession, they are accompanied by a cloud of reddish-colored, vile-smelling fluid.
I’ll have to be careful. Do you still smoke?Gave it up. I’m like everybody else, quit a hundred times. It’s a companion and a friend. I would smoke anything in the end. I would take a pack of cigarettes and dig a hole in the back yard and piss on them and bury ‘em. Dig ‘em up an hour later, dry them in the oven and smoke. That’s how bad I had it.
Do you still drink?Now, is this of interest to your readers? We talked about the pointed shoes, the smoking - I have a feeling you’re trying to steer me into the bars … I just got an image of one of those emergency-wall things that says “Break In Case Of Emergency,” and inside is the beverage … I gave it up, gave it up. I haven’t had a drink in six years.
You have a new movie coming out called Mystery Men. What’s the premise?It’s about low-rent superheros. There’s a guy named the Shoveler. And there’s the Bowler, who has the skull of her famous bowler father sealed in this polyurethane bowling ball. There’s the Blue Raja; they make their own costumes and never get a chance to save the day. I play Dr. Heller, a weapons scientist they come to for firepower. Sounds like a blockbuster.
Who’s in it?Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofalo, Hank Azaria, Paul Reubens, William Macy, Eddie Izzard, Geoffrey Rush. Directed by Kinka Usher, who was a prince. I don’t know why I agreed to do this except he made the whole thing sound like a softball game.
By the way, great English accent as Renfield in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.They say I should be doing Shakespeare instead of all this pop-music crap.
How did you meet up with Jim Jarmusch?Met him around the time of Rain Dogs. He stuck out. His movies were like Russian films, like nothing anyone had ever seen before. For me, they were like the hair in the gate. You know when you used to go to the movies and a big hair would get stuck in the projector, and you would sit there and watch that piece of hair? You would lose the whole plot for a while. So, he was the hair in the gate.
The episode of Fishing With John is a hoot. How did you hook up with John Lurie?John’s an unusual guy. Met him in New York around the time of Rain Dogs. I did [Fishing] because of John. But once I got down there, I wanted to kill him. He knows this. It was pretty pathetic. A fishing show. High concept - the idea is that it doesn’t matter if we catch anything, which is the whole idea of fishing, anyway, getting out in the woods and being together. Just an excuse to hold something in your hand and look off into the distance and talk about life. We caught nothing, which is embarrassing. It got to the point where we bought fish from fishermen in a passing boat, which was humiliating. And I got seasick and sunstroke — I was an unhappy guy for most of it. But it turned out to be funny anyway. John is an excellent composer and musician, can pick up anything and play it. We’ll be walking along and he’ll pick up a piece of irrigation pipe and very seriously ask you to hold one end of it while he tries to get a sound out of it. He’s like a kid, a cross between a kid and a wizard - a kizzard. Great nose, too.
Let’s talk about the new record. You told journalist Rip Rense that the title comes from something your wife says when you’re being stubborn: “I didn’t marry a man - I married a mule.” And the fact that you were going through some “changes.” What changes?Electrolysis. I had a lot of unwanted hair removed. Went through aromatherapy. I’m third-year medical school now - love it!
The first song on Mule Variations that struck me was “What’s He Building?” I got kind of a Unabomber image. We seem to be living in a time when the guy next door may be building a fertilizer bomb in his basement.Guess it’s the rat theory: There’s too many of us, and we’re going crazy because of the proliferation of the human manifestation. You go down the freeway, and all of a sudden there are 350,000 new homes where there used to be wilderness. They all have to go to the bathroom somewhere, they all want toys for their kids, they all want eggs and bacon and a nice little car and a place to vacation. When the rats get too plentiful, they turn on each other.
In the song you mention a town called Mayors Income, Tenn.Came to me in a dream. Two towns. The other one, same dream, Miner’s Prayer, W.V.
You collaborated with Kathleen on most of the songs on Mule Variations. Can you describe how you two write together? Is she a musician?Excellent pianist, plays contrabassoon, classically trained. Used to play recitals with all the relatives around, and she would start the nocturne and then go off and everybody would cock their ears like the RCA dog: “That ain’t Beethoven anymore.” She’s free-floating. She doesn’t seem to be pulled in any one direction. You see, we all like music, but what we really want is for music to like us, because it really is a language and some people are linguists and speak seven languages fluently, can do contracts in Chinese and tell jokes in Hungarian.
Getting back to the names of places, St. Louis seems to pop up a lot, in “Hold on” from the new record and “Time” from Rain Dogs and you’ve mentioned it a lot in interviews. Ever live there?No, never lived there. It’s a good name to stick in a song. Every song needs to be anatomically correct: You need weather, you need the name of the town, something to eat - every song needs certain ingredients to be balanced. You’re writing a song and you need a town, and you look out the window and you see “St. Louis Cardinals” on some kid’s T-shirt. And you say, “Oh, we’ll use that.” [Paging through his notebook] There is still a law on the books in Kentucky that says you have to take a bath at least once a year, so we left Kentucky. They were too pushy.
I understand that you cover the walls of the studio with maps when you record.Makes it more like an expedition.
Where is “The House Where Nobody Lives”?That was the house I used to go by when I would drive my kids to school, abandoned and the weeds were literally as tall as the trees. At Christmas time, all the neighbors in the area kicked in and bought some lights for it. It was kind of touching. It was like the bad tooth in that smile of a neighborhood.
What about “Big In Japan”? How big are you in Japan?Haven’t played there in a long time. Last time I was there, I was on a bullet train, had my little porkpie hat, my pointed shoes and my skinny tie. There was a whole car of Japanese gangsters dressed like Al Capone and Cagney, really zooted. Everyone says, “Don’t go in there, don’t go in there,” but it was the only place with seats - everybody else was huddled together like cattle. And they are in this huge air-conditioned car, with tea and little cookies and six guys sitting around talking with cigars. I said, “Fuck, I’m gonna go in there and sit down.” And I did. It was like this big, heavy stand-off, then they all started laughing, we all tipped our hats and did that little bow. It was pretty funny. Then I brought my guys in and we all sat down, my mob with the Japanese mob. They always want me to do ads for underwear and cigarettes, but I never did them. I did one and I’ll never do it again. I used to see celebrities doing ads and my first reaction was, “Aw, gee he must have needed the money. That’s tough.” When somebody was on the slide, they would do an ad.
You successfully sued Frito-Lay for doing a commercial with a guy who sounds and acts just like you.This guy from Texas got paid 300 bucks to do me. That was his specialty, anyway, that he does this perfect impersonation of me. And they did this whole thing around “Step Right Up,” and every now and then they would say “Fritos” or whatever. And afterward, the guy felt so bad, he came out as our star witness. We won $2.5 million. David beats Goliath.
Let’s talk about some of the characters in the songs on Mule Variations. Who is Big Jack Earl?Tallest man in the world. Was with Barnum & Bailey. If you see old archival photographs, they used to put him next to some guy that was like a foot tall. Big hat, tall boots. That’s why “Big Jack Earl was eight-foot-one and stood in the road and he cried.” Imagine a guy eight-foot-one standing in the middle of the road crying. It breaks your heart.
What about Birdie Joe Hoaks?I read in the newspaper about this gal, 12 years old, who had swindled Greyhound. She ran away from home and told Greyhound this whole story about her parents and meeting them in San Francisco. She had this whole Holden Caufield thing, and she got an unlimited ticket and criss-crossed the U.S. And she got nabbed.
What did they do to her?They took her bus pass, for starters. I don’t think she did hard time. Me and my wife read the paper and we clip hundreds of articles, and then we read the paper that way, without all the other stuff. It’s our own paper. There is a lot of filler in the paper and the rest is advertising. If you just condense it down to the essential stories, like the story about the one-eyed fish they found in Lake Michigan with three tails, you can renew your whole relationship with the paper.
There’s a line in “What’s He Building?”: “You’ll never guess what Mr. Sticcha saw.”Mr. Sticcha was my neighbor when I was a kid. He didn’t like kids and he didn’t like noise. All the kids would go past his house yellin’ and making noise, and you would see his fist out the window and he’d threaten to call the cops. His wife used to say, “You’re gonna give him a heart attack if you keep this up.” And he finally had a heart attack and he died, and his wife told us that it was our fault, that we had killed him as a group. We all had to distribute that guilt and live with it, and it was upsetting: “Sticcha died and we killed him.” We might just as well have plotted his murder.
“Cold Water” is a kind of a hobo anthem. You ever sleep in a graveyard or ride the rails?I have slept in a graveyard and I have rode the rails. When I was a kid, I used to hitchhike all the time from California to Arizona with a buddy named Sam Jones. We would just see how far we could go in three days, on a weekend, see if we could get back by Monday. I remember one night in a fog, we got lost on this side road and didn’t know where we were exactly. And the fog came in and we were really lost then and it was very cold. We dug a big ditch in a dry riverbed and we both laid in there and pulled all this dirt and leaves over us Ike a blanket. We’re shivering in this ditch all night, and we woke up in the morning and the fog had cleared and right across from us was a diner; we couldn’t see it through the fog. We went in and had a great breakfast, still my high-water mark for a great breakfast. The phantom diner.
In “Black Market Baby,” you call the baby in question a “Bonsai Aphrodite.” Great line.Kathleen came up with that. We know this little gal who’s just a gorgeous chick, but she’s about four-foot-10, looks like she’s been bound, like the Chinese do with feet. Kathleen said, “She’s a Bonsai Aphrodite.” It was Patricia Arquette. We told her about that, she said, “I love that, I’m gonna open up a Flower shop and call it Bonsai Aphrodite,” which she did. But, apparently, it didn’t last, went under.
There’s a great line in “Picture In A Frame”: “I’m gonna love you ’till the wheels come off.”That’s prison slang. Means until the end of the world.
I notice that the Eyeball Kid has the same birth date as you.Just a coincidence. The Eyeball Kid is a comic-book character. Actually, it was Nic Cage that reintroduced me to comic books. I hadn’t thought about comic books since I was a little kid, but he seemed to carry that mythology with him. It was inspiring to see him keep alive some of those principles that we associate with childhood, to the point where he named himself after Cage, the comic-book hero. But I was trying to imagine what it would be like for a person with an enormous eyeball for a head to be in show business. If Barnum & Bailey were still around, I imagine he would have thrown in with them.
The tour would be sponsored by Visine or Bausch & Lomb.It’s a metaphor for people that get into show business, because they usually have some kind of family disturbance or are damaged in some way or another. I had a manager when I was a kid, I threw in with a guy named Herbie Cohen, who worked with Zappa. I wanted a big bruiser, the tough guy in the neighborhood, and I got it.
A knee-breaker?You said that, not me. I got to be careful what I say about Herbie. I’ll wind up in… court.
Speaking of the business end of things, why did you leave Island Records?It started changing a lot. (Former owner Chris) Blackwell’s gone. For me, it’s about relationships. And when Blackwell pulled out and started his own company, I lost interest.
What do you think of all the consolidation that has been going on with the major labels, cutting staff and artists?I think you should fight for your independence and freedom at all costs. I mean, it’s a plantation system. All a record company is is a bank, and they loan you a little money to make a record and then they own you for the rest of your life. You don’t even own your own work. Most people only have a small piece of their publishing. Most people are so happy to be recording, which I was - you like the way your name looks on the contract, so you start signing. I got myself tied up in a lot of knots when I was a kid.
Your deal with Epitaph is for one record, where you license the record to the label for a limited time and then ownership reverts back to you. I don’t know how aware you are of the Internet, but there is this technology called MP3 that basically allows artists to put songs on the Net and people can download them and burn their own CD’s, essentially cutting the record companies out of the equation.I don’t know what I think about that. I don’t know about the Internet. I’m not on that. I’m way behind. I have a rotary phone. Progress is compulsive and obsessive, I guess. I get the feeling that people aren’t leaving their homes. They are sitting in front of their computer desks and everything comes to them from their screens. That’s what the whole nation really wants, but anything that is that popular or easily accessible is usually not good for you. It’s like tap water is not good for you; it’s recycled piss and chemicals, that’s all. There is a reason that a bottle of water costs more than a gallon of gas. And what’s the biggest enemy of computers? Water. And the computers are trying to eliminate all the water. I don’t know where I’m going with this. I guess we’re in the middle of a revolution and nobody knows where the rocks are going to fall. The record companies are terrified. But I don’t want to be a record company. Too much paperwork, and I get too many calls already. Plus, ! have two teenagers, and if I was a record company, you would never be able to get through.
Mule Variations is your first record in six years. There were rumors floating around that you weren’t putting out records or performing because you were sick.No, I’m not sick, but it’s interesting that rumors of that nature would circulate. Rumors of my death were greatly exaggerated, as they say. The rumor was that I had throat cancer.
Bone Machine had a lot of death in it. And there’s that song on Mule called “Take It With Me.” Beautiful song. This is an absurd question, but I’ll ask it anyway: Are you afraid of dying?[With mock bravado] Who me? Naw, bring it on! Come on! Who me? I don’t wanna go. I gotta rake the leaves first. I got a lot of things to do. I’m like that guy who said on his deathbed, “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.” Famous last words. My favorite epitaph is the town hypochondriac’s: “l told you I was sick.”
In 1976, you were quoted in Newsweek as saying, “There’s a common loneliness that just sprawls from coast to coast. It’s like a common disjointed identity crisis. It’s the dark, warm narcotic American night I just hope I’m able to touch that feeling before I find myself one of these days parked on Easy Street.” Twenty-three years later, here you are with a wife and kids and a house in the country, a tidy nest egg from Frito-Lay - Easy Street by most any standard - and still you seem to be at the height of your creative powers and popularity. Your career strikes me as a model for how to do it the right way in a business cluttered with bad examples.OK, thank you. I’m just improvising, like everybody else … I never thought I would live out in the sticks. But now I’m the mean old man next door. Voila. I’m Mr. Sticcha. I got a whole collection of baseballs that have been hit into my yard, and I’m not giving them up for nothing.
Link: http://www.phawker.com/2008/06/30/phawker-exclusive-the-man-who-howled-wolf/
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