Small victories in the outer world tend to give me validation. For some reason I accept kudos aimed at others as my own. It’s geometry.
I’m somehow able to predict the angle that cultural awards will carom off their intended recipients and I’m right there to grab the rebound and, internally, take a few bows. “Thank you for the recognition,” I mutter. “What took you so long?”
It can be anything from a book award for a semi-obscure author that I was the first kid on my block to read to a jazz sideman whose growth into a legend I predicted. It’s about getting in on the ground floor, about knowing them when. It matters not if the bandwagon in question has been crammed to the rafters for years. I still take bows as if I were the only one onboard.
The most recent case in point for this pompous and neurotic behavioral trait came with the announcement last week that Tom Waits had been elected by the powers that be to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. How utterly cool, I thought. I could see the posthumous smirk spreading across Charles Bukowski’s well-lived-in face.
I wasn’t even sure that the honor would mean as much to a relatively contemporary bohemian oracle such as Tom Waits as it did to me. But, I told myself between bows, I couldn’t care less. That’s not my problem. Whose validation ceremony is this, anyhow?
It was obvious from listening to his wonderfully thick growling vocal interpretations of his beat-style early compositions that he was a member of the tribe. The poses, perceptions, and sensibilities of Kerouac, Corso, Ferlinghetti, and Ginsberg flat-out oozed from the speakers.
You could also hear healthy portions of what they now call “roots music” along with jazz influences — hints of everything from Mississippi John Hurt and the Reverend Gary Davis to Thelonious Monk, Mose Allison and Lord Buckley. It was the sound of street corners and dive bars syncopated with the rhythms of a chrome-laden Southern California boulevard cruiser.
Endless cigarettes and cups of coffee with a hat pulled down and eyes and ears taking in everything within reach a noir ambiance if ever there was one. A poster child for both slouch and eccentricity, Waits writes and lives in a vernacular where shades, both on nose and window, are mandated by convention.
In attempting to capture the vibe for Newsweek back in 1976, he put it this way: “There’s a common loneliness that just sprawls from coast to coast … It’s like a common disjointed identity crisis. It’s the dark, warm narcotic American night. I just hope I’m able to touch that feeling before I find myself one of these days double-parked on easy street.”
No worries there, Tom. I can’t imagine the mainstream music industry or the public catching up with your overall “hipness” to the extent that massive radio airplay, record sales, or stadium tours inundate your quite singular art even with this latest honor.
I used to think that some smart recording engineer should implant a radio signal into the vinyl grooves of Tom Waits LPs that would automatically dim the lights to a flashing-neon-sign atmosphere that would make any room feel like an upper-floor flophouse or a back alley.
I never even needed to hear the actual words to settle into his songs. That gravely voice that music critic Daniel Durchholz characterized as sounding “like it was soaked in a vat of Bourbon whiskey, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car” played off my ears like a baritone sax that massaged my temples while it spoke in tongues.
The more you listened to it the softer it got. In a most strange way, it soothed! To this day, it brings a strangely packaged joy into the listening equation. On the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s website, Waits is cited for his mixture of “Chicago blues, parlor ballads, beat poetry, pulp-fiction parlance and heart-breaking tenderness.” There you have it! Works for me!
At his press conference, while acknowledging his impending induction, Waits read the poem “The Laughing Heart” by Charles Bukowski, which ends ” your life is your life./know it while you have it./you are marvelous/ the gods wait to delight/in you.”
Dig yourself, Tom Waits! Buk and I are taking bows.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.