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

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 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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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,

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 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 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 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 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,

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 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.

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, 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. 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?

vocal influences. I'm so curious. We'll get to that, Okay, all right, Well get to that.

There's this like oft repeated logline that Christmas Card from 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

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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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.

off of asylum. Why for poor sales or drugs or well, 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 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 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.

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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.

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 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.

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.

Keith doesn't really remember anything or write anything down. So 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 saying diet coke and then a diet.

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 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 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.

his lyrical concerns. But let me check that out actually real quick. How do you feel about Captain bee Fart.

them and was just generally like a horrible tyrant. And 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 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 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

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?

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 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 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 would move, while the janitor in their hospital ward danced around dress like Miss America anyway.

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 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. 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 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.

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 actually knew about them.

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, 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, 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, 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 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 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.

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. 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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.

Captain Beefeart's landmark tout Mask Replica album is a bonker's sounding chaotic record that was so so rigorously rehearsed within 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.

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 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 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 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

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

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 walking by then.

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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, 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

metal title and it's like dreams. This is the worst 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

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 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.

like Wesley Willis and Dennis Johnson are into. Like pre Internet, 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 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 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 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 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 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?

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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

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 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

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 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 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 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 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.

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 also a percussion instrument. That's good. That's good. You get it, You get it. I googled this earlier.

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 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.

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. 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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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

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.

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 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 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 origin story. No black person ever said nice things about his guitar playing.

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 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.

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 Tom is like sholo lo, Bruce is doing Black Preacher voice over, and it's all it's all a bit much.

And one of your favorites of these kind of left of center LA Session musicians is a guy named Charlie muscle White.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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.

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 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 be forgiven. I have a whole riff on Tom Waits and forgiveness later. Oh, just save my voice.

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 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.

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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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?

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 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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.

at the top. But aside from that song ruling and 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 think is a fucking devastating song. As you write.

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.

to Victorian England. Marlbones were the shin bones of a 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.

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.

fall out. I don't want to have the biggest amount. I don't want to grow up. Why the hell? Oh God, 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

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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 didn't see that movie seventeen times while you're in college.

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 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 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 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.

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. 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 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.

I just you know. He actually used strove violins to 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.

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. 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 four hundred times are you referring to? So something took?

We really should have.

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 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, 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 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, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.

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