Wild Years by Jay S. Jacobs

drop by and see Artie after one of his shows at the Main Point.
    â€œThe management and everyone goes nuts that Waits has finally showed up,” says Big Daddy. “But he’s not there to eat. He just wants to see Artie. And they don’t like Artie. They’re, like, ‘Artie is in the back washing dishes.’ And Waits goes back and washes dishes with Artie for, like, an hour, while Artie tells him his story. They had those glass portholes that look [through to] the back of the restaurant. People kept peeking in. What I always remember was, according to Artie, Waits came back and went, ‘Hey, I see you have a Hobart there.’ Hobart is the company that makes a particular kind of dishwasher. I always liked that line — ‘Hey, I see you have a Hobart.’ Waits apparently was familiar with the workings of a Hobart.”
    At about this time, Waits found himself looking down an intriguing new career path. Director Hal Ashby was making
Bound for Glory,
a film based on the autobiography of Woody Guthrie, the socialist songwriter and folksinger who, in the 1940s, penned such standards as “This Land Is Your Land” and “I Ain’t Got No Home.” Guthrie saw America: he rode the rails, crossed the prairies, climbed the mountains, and sang for his supper during the Great Depression. In 1952, when he was just forty, Guthrie was diagnosed with Huntington’s chorea, a degenerative neurological disease, and he died in hospital fifteen years later.
    Ashby entered Waits’s name on the list of actors he would like to see portray Woody Guthrie — along with nearly every other folk-ish singer of note, from Bob Dylan to Loudon Wainwright iii (“Dead Skunk”) to Tim Hardin (“If I Were a Carpenter”) to Guthrie’s son Arlo (“Alice’s Restaurant”). Somehow the part ended up going to a nonsinger, actor David Carradine, who was a hot property at the time due to his starring role in the martial-arts T.V. Western
Kung Fu
. Although Waits had been shut out in this instance, the notion that he could be an actor had taken root.
    And he was fed up with touring. The daily grind was getting to him. Wake up in a new town, stumble out of the motel, try to find a decent cup of coffee, do a sound check, meet with some local interviewers, poke around town a bit, do a couple of shows, have a few drinks, sleep, head out to the airport — and on it went. It was getting kind of old. Add to that the fact that Waits was suddenly experiencing writer’s block. It seemed inevitable. He had no time to himself. Someone was always there, pulling at his sleeve. He no longer had much opportunity to pull a stool up to the piano and let his ideas flow.
    What finally pushed him over the edge was an incident that occurred at a little New Orleans club called Ballinjax. Waits was slated to appear there on a night that Bob Dylan was in town with his Rolling Thunder Revue (or, as Tom called it, Rolling Blunder Revue), a touring band made up of Dylan cronies. The revue featured one of Dylan’s ex-girlfriends, folksinger Joan Baez; the former lead singer of the Byrds, Roger McGuinn, whose cover of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” was a major hit; and novelist and singer Kinky (“The Texas Jewboy”) Friedman. Rolling Blunder trooped into Ballinjax on Waits’s gig night, settled in, and decided to hold animpromptu jam session. “They got up there for an hour just before I was supposed to begin my set,” Waits told David McGee of
Rolling Stone
. “Nobody even asked me. Before I knew it, fuckin’ Roger McGuinn was up there playing guitar and singing and Joan Baez and Kinky were singing. By the time I got onstage the audience was stoked. They were all lookin’ around the room and shit. I don’t need this crap — it was my show.” 4
    Tom needed a total change of scene, so he asked Herb Cohen to set him up some shows in