Chapter 1 Some Ways about Me that Just Aren't Right "Take care of Tom. He needs a lot of love." (Alma Waits to Ralph Carney, Chicago, 1986) Tom Waits tends to bristle when interviewers probe him for the lowdown on his early years as a suburban oddball in the inland empire of Los Angeles. "I'm in therapy now?" he'll say with a mildly threatening laugh. "Should I lay down?" But sometimes, if he's relaxed enough, Waits will drop his guard. When I asked him in 1999 if it was true he'd been alone a lot as a boy, he didn't answer the fairly innocuous question. But he did say this: "I guess most entertainers are, on a certain level, part of the freak show. And most of them have some type of a wounding early on, either a death in the family or a breakup of the family unit, and it sends them off on some journey where they find themselves kneeling by a jukebox, praying to Ray Charles. Or you're out looking for your dad, who left the family when you were nine, and you know he drives a station wagon and that's all you've got to go on, and in some way you're going to become this big sensation and be on the cover of Life magazine and it'll somehow be this cathartic vindication or restitution." On a simplistically Freudian level, here is the story of Tom Waits in capsule. His father did leave the family when his son was nine (or ten); and the teenage Tom did, literally, kneel before the sound of Brother Ray, dreaming of the "cathartic vindication" he might experience if he too could become a voice coming out of the speaker. In some ways, that's the story of all art, period. Extrinsic to human survival, art is nonetheless essential to those who wish to do more than survive--to, in fact, make stuff that'll enable them to stand out from the crowd. And often those people have, in Waits' words, "some type of a wounding" that "sends them off on some journey." Why, for example, are some of us driven to write when we could be doing perfectly normal jobs? Why am I writing this book? Waits' great 1999 album Mule Variations featured a song called "Eyeball Kid," about a carnival freak whose head consists simply of a giant peeper. "Everybody in this business called show," he said of the song, "has something peculiar about them that they've been made fun of for or singled out in an unpleasant way or made to feel like they were not good enough to fit in. And at some point, you realize, 'Well, dammit, fine! Maybe I can make some dough off of it.'" He put it more prosaically back in 1975. "I come from a good family and everything," he said. "But I've, over the years, developed some ways about me that just aren't right, so you just have to look for the kinks in your personality and it helps sometimes." Tom Waits did come from a good family, or at least a family that from the outside looked conventional in the context of postwar American suburbia. "I had a pretty normal childhood," he admitted in 1976. "I learned to handle silverware and all of that stuff." He was the middle child of three siblings, a boy sandwiched between girls and born to school teachers who, at the time of his birth, resided at 318 North Pickering Avenue in Whittier, the same humdrum Los Angeles suburb that produced Richard Milhous Nixon. "He used to go to our church on occasion," Waits said of the American president in 1973. "That was a long time ago. He's come a long way since Whittier." Founded by Quakers in the late nineteenth century, Whittier is twelve miles southeast of downtown LA and later achieved minor pop renown via the 1965 release of "Whittier Boulevard," a wildly pounding instrumental by Latino garage band Thee Midniters.("Let's take a trip down Whittier Boulevard!" yells Little Willie G. at the beginning, followed by Ronnie Figueroa's screamed "Arriba! Arriba!") But that was a very different Whittier--a Hispanic neighbourhood of low-rider barrios like Jimtown and Sunrise--from the middle-class suburb where Waits spent the first ten years of his life, one more akin to the setting for the film Back to the Future , which used Whittier High School as one of its locations. "Pat Nixon taught at Whittier High," says Pat DiPuccio, who founded the punk fanzine Flipside in the town in 1977. "High school was very big in Whittier. It was kind of like growing up in a Midwest suburb." "Tom grew up very much in the way that I did, in the eastland suburban districts of Los Angeles," says poet Michael C Ford, a Waits acquaintance in the 1970s. "Whittier in the fifties was untouched. The San Gabriel Valley had not been as poisoned as itis now--that grey poisonous ether that comes in now and lays against the San Gabriel mountains." The circumstances of Waits' birth are shrouded in the mystery he prefers. Under duress he'll concede that he was born "at a very young age" but remains cagey about details beyond the actual date. Was his birthplace Park Avenue Hospital, as mentioned in the announcement of his birth in the Pomona Progress-Bulletin ? Or was it Murphy Hospital, namechecked in a song intro on stage in New Jersey on 16 April 1976? And should we infer from Waits' regular references to being born in a taxi that either his parents didn't make it to the maternity ward in time or it was a mighty close shave? Let us record the plain facts that Thomas Alan Waits was born on 7 December 1949, to "Mr. and Mrs. J. Frank Waits," and that he weighed in at a healthy 7 lb 10 oz. "All they ever wanted was a showbiz child," he would sing of Zenora Bariella and Coriander Pyle on "Eyeball Kid," "so on the seventh of December, 1949, they got what they'd been wishing for . . ." Zenora and Coriander were Jesse Frank and Alma Waits. Frank, whose name would later be given to the protagonists of "Frank's Song" and "Frank's Wild Years," was the product of Scots-Irish ancestry and hailed from Sulphur Springs, Texas. His family hadmoved to La Verne, California, whose orange groves he worked in during the 1930s before becoming a radio technician in the Second World War. "He came west," said Waits. "In those days if you had any kind of bronchial problem they'd say, 'Aw, move to California!'" Alma Waits, too, was first-generation Californian, born of Norwegian stock and raised in Grant's Pass, Oregon. Waits would later claim that he'd been "conceived one night in April 1949 at the Crossroads Motel in La Verne, amidst the broken bottle of Four Roses, the smoldering Lucky Strike, half a tuna salad sandwich, and the Old Spice across the railroad tracks. . ." If that fanciful scenario is even halfway accurate, it says more about Jesse Frank than it does about Alma. Named after legendary outlaw brothers Jesse and Frank James, Tom Waits' dad was a wild one--a boozer, a roving romantic, a lover of old sentimental Mexican songs. "He was really a tough one, always an outsider," Waits said in 2004. Alma by comparison was a somewhat strait-laced 1950s hausfrau, and a regular churchgoer to boot. "Tom's mom was a very put-together suburban matron," says Bill Goodwin, drummer on Waits' Nighthawks at the Diner . "She was not what you'd imagine Tom Waits' mom would look like." "The first time I met Tom's mother was the first time I ever heard his voice come up high," says another Waits drummer, Chip White. "He wasn't quite as gruff with her. We teased him about it. It was like, 'Oh hi, Mom, how you doing?' in a real high voice." It's tempting to see the warring sides of Tom Waits' character in the unlikely pairing of his parents' marriage. "On my father's side we had all the psychopaths and alcoholics," he's said, "and on my mother's side we had all the evangelists." Throughouthis life Waits has in some sense struggled to reconcile his father's impetuousness with his mother's domesticity. One pictures the marriage as somewhat akin to that of Nathan and Ruth Fisher in the LA-set Six Feet Under --Dad as louche bon viveur, Mom as fastidious domestic goddess. "Tom and his sisters were very independent, avant-garde-type people, a little edgy," says Bob LaBeau, a folk singer and an early Waits champion. "Whereas his mother was this standard type of June Cleaver person. She was just a really neat lady, very pleasant and kind of pretty, a nice woman. I think they were all probably more like their father." Waits had no brothers to play or compete with, perhaps explaining the comparative loneliness of his childhood. One has a sense of little Tom as an old soul, a playground introvert in the fifties idyll of the Eisenhower suburbs. "About the rest of his childhood he is fairly reticent," wrote Dave Lewis in 1979, "[. . .] admitting that he was often picked on at school for being skinny and 'funny-looking' then skimming swiftly over the rest of his background . . ." In 1999 Waits confessed that--in emulation of Popeye--he "ate spinach so I could get stronger [and] beat up the bullies." Waits was small and peculiar, with wild hair that stood up and an odd pigeon-toed walk exacerbated by his "trick knee"--a knee joint that would lock in position, owing to longitudinal splitting of the medial meniscus. "What sort of a child was I?" he hassaid, clearly discomfited by the question. "I can't really answer that point-blank. But, you know, I liked trains and horses, birds and rocks, radios and bicycles." More recently, he said he "[grew] up in a drive-in, watching movies and eating popcorn out of a paper sack and falling asleep in the back seat and getting carried into bed by your dad." If Waits did most of the things LA kids did in those innocent suburban days--delivering newspapers, going to Dodgers games, shoplifting, or just hanging around in Sav-On parking lots and trading baseball cards--one suspects he was rather more troubled than a lot of his peers. While Alma offered a measure of security and consistency, Frank was a more complex mixture of authority and nonconformity. On the one hand he taught Spanish in schools in Whittier, Pomona, La Verne, and Montebello; on the other he was a heavy drinker and regular patron of local alcoholic establishments. "I remember my father taking me into bars when I was very young," Waits said in 1979. "I remember climbing up a barstool like Jungle Jim, getting all the way up to the top and sitting there with my dad. He could tell stories in there forever." Frank Waits' family were a strange lot. For Tom and his sisters, visits to his paternal grandmother's house amid La Verne's orange groves usually involved encounters with uncles Vernon and Robert, who both "had an effect on me very young and shaped me in some way." Uncle Robert was blind and played the organ, erratically, in a nearby Pentecostal church. When the church in question was later torn down, Robert had the organ disassembled and installed in his chaotically messy house, its pipes running up through the ceiling. Vernon, meanwhile, spoke in a deep, gruff voice that Waits claimed was the result of a childhood throat operation. Allegedly the doctors had forgotten to remove a pair of scissors and gauze when they stitched him up. Years later, during a Christmas dinner, Vernon choked and coughed out the gauze and the scissors. "That's how [he] got his voice, and that's how I got mine--from trying to sound just like him," Waits said. "I always hated the sound of my voice when I was a kid. I always wanted to sound more like my Uncle Vernon, who had a raspy, gravelly voice."* Years later, Waits inserted Uncle Vernon into "Cemetery Polka," the third track on 1985's Rain Dogs and a first nod to the vagaries of family history. For Waits the song was an opportunity to round up as many of his eccentric relatives as possible andreunite them round the grave. "'Cemetery Polka' was, ah, discussing my family in a way that's difficult for me, to be honest," he explained. "The way we talk behind each other's backs: 'You know what happened to Uncle Vernon.' The kind of wickedness that nobody outside your family could say." Around Vernon was clustered the song's rather more fictionalized cast: Uncle Biltmore, for example, and Auntie Mame who's "gone insane" and "lives in the doorway of an old hotel." La Verne represented more than the roots of Waits' extended family. It marked the beginning of his early love for the countryside he'd one day roam on Bone Machine , Mule Variations , and Real Gone . The journey from Whittier to his grandmother's house was then a long drive from the suburbs to the country, crossing railroad tracks as the landscape slowly changed. "We were always waiting for trains to pass," he said in 2006. "And the magic of that for a kid, hearing the bell--ding ding--and counting the cars as they go by . . . and I knew we were getting further out of town when I could smell horses . . . it was like perfume to me . . ." Now home to hip-hop icon Snoop Dogg, La Verne back then was just a long road, Foothill Boulevard, with orange groves all around and the sound of the Southern Pacific whistling through on the nearby railroad tracks. On Alma's side were the Johnsons, who lived up in central northern California. Come summer, Waits and his sisters would visit their relatives in Gridley and Marysville, the latter namechecked in 1977's "Burma Shave." That song's inspiration was cousin Corinne, who couldn't wait to get out of the place. "[She] was always like, you know, 'Christ, man, I gotta get out of this fucking town,'" Waits recalled. "'I wanna go to LA.' She finally did. She hitchhiked out and stood by this Foster Freeze on Prom Night. Got in a car with a guy who was just some juvenile delinquent, and he took her all the way to LA, where she eventually cracked up." Waits treasured happy memories of his Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Chalmer, who grew prunes and peaches in Gridley--and whose welcoming kitchen made an appearance on Mule Variations ' "Pony." He also recalled visiting other relatives dotted about the Butte and Yuba County towns of Biggs, Oroville, Live Oak, and Chico. Back in Whittier, the Waitses moved from North Pickering Avenue to a new build on Kentucky Avenue. On "Frank's Wild Years" Tom sang of their "thoroughly modern kitchen" with its "self-cleaning oven." Later the street was celebrated in one of his most emotional songs of childhood. "I had a little tree fort and everything," he said, introducing "Kentucky Avenue" on stage in 1981. "I had my first cigarette when I was about seven . . . it was such a thrill. I used to pick 'em up right out of the gutter after it was raining. My dad smoked Kents." Excerpted from Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits by Barney Hoskyns All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
