Wild Years by Jay S. Jacobs Page A

Europe — a kind of working holiday. The dates were set, and Waits headed across the pond to play Ronnie Scott’s, a famous London blues club. It was 1976, and as far as the British press was concerned, this new American phenomenon was a source of great interest. Here was the inheritor of the Beat tradition, a weather-beaten raconteur who’d been around. But, most importantly, Tom Waits gave great interviews. Punk was big in London, and the ladies and gentlemen of the press had already had their fill of interviewing sneering, uncommunicative punk-scene movers and shakers. And as pleased as these journalists were with Waits, Waits was delighted with them. They constituted a whole new audience for his stories. He’d joyfully spin yarns for them about all those seedy characters he hung out with back home — like this guy Chuck E. Weiss (or “Chalky Weiss,” as one British scribe recorded it), who’d sell you a rat’s ass as an engagement ring. 5 Then Waits would start handing out advice, telling his interviewers where, in America, they could find a drink at any hour of the day; listing the worst places to stay in a variety of cities; and explaining how to find a reasonably priced pavement princess when you’re a stranger in town. The Brits loved Waits’s stories of cruising L.A. in a big old honker of a car, equipped with a six-pack of Miller High Life, singing along with Ray Charles testifying “What’d I Say?” or James Brown begging “Please, Please, Please.” They could just picture him tossing his empties out the window, driving everywhere, going nowhere. The appeal was obvious. To these Europeans, who were forced to contend with confined spaces and complex social hierarchies, Waits embodied a drive-all-night, be-yourself dream of freedom.
    Most of the European journalists who became so enthralled with Waits were unaware of the tradition he’d come out of. They were just too young. After all, Jack Kerouac and Lenny Bruce were already dead, Ken Kesey had entered the mainstream (the 1975 film adaptionof his novel
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
swept the Academy Awards), and Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs weren’t getting any younger. But what did it matter? Tom Waits, great American storyteller and spokesman for the (somewhat romanticized) denizens of the night, was here and now and happy to oblige. He loved Britain. The pubs, the people, the attention — it was just what he needed, and he returned home rejuvenated.
    By this time, Waits had pulled together enough material to make a new album, which he’d tentatively titled “Pasties and a G-String.” It represented a new direction for him, and that was evident to anyone who listened to the first few seconds of the finished product: “Wasted and wounded / It ain’t what the moon did / I got what I paid for now.” The lyrics of the new song collection, which was finally named
Small Change,
had a dark immediacy to them, a sense of hurting that Waits hadn’t really tapped before. Like his earlier recorded material, the
Small Change
songs were very well written and reflected their composer’s famous sense of humor, but their lyrics had more sting.
    Tom has always considered
Small Change
to be the high watermark of his early recording career. “There’s probably more songs off that record that I continue to play on the road, and that endured,” he told Barney Hoskyns. “Some songs you may write and record but you may never sing them again. Others you sing every night and try to figure out what they mean. ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues’ was certainly one of those songs I continued to sing, and, in fact, close my show with.” 6
    â€œTom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)” is the album’s stunning opener, and it sets the tone for what follows. It tells the story of a man who finds himself stranded and