Wild Years by Jay S. Jacobs Page B

penniless in a foreign land “where no one speaks English, and everything’s broken.” Traubert is etched as a sympathetic character, but it’s clear that he inhabits a hell of his own making. He’ll never make his way home again because any cash he gets his hands on he squanders on drink. The song’s chorus incorporates “Waltzing Matilda,” the classic Australian ballad of aimless travel. (“Matilda” is Aussie slang for “backpack,” and “waltzing matilda” means being on the road or hitchhiking.)
    Bones Howe distinctly remembers when Waits wrote “Tom Traubert’s Blues.” Howe’s phone rang in the middle of the night. It wasTom. Howe had long since become accustomed to the fact that being Tom’s friend meant receiving calls from him at all hours. “He said the most wonderful thing about writing that song,” Bones recalls. “He went down and hung around on skid row in L.A. because he wanted to get stimulated for writing this material. He called me up and said, ‘I went down to skid row . . . I bought a pint of rye. In a brown paper bag.’ I said, ‘Oh really?’” Waits replied to Howe, “Yeah — hunkered down, drank the pint of rye, went home, threw up, and wrote ‘Tom Traubert’s Blues.’” Howe was even more struck by what Waits said to him next: “Every guy down there . . . everyone I spoke to, a woman put him there.”
    Howe was amazed when he first heard the song, and he’s still astonished by it. “I do a lot of seminars,” he says. “Occasionally I’ll do something for songwriters. They all say the same thing to me. ‘All the great lyrics are done.’ And I say, ‘I’m going to give you a lyric that you never heard before.’” Howe then says to his aspiring songwriters, “A battered old suitcase to a hotel someplace / And a wound that will never heal.” This particular Tom Waits lyric Howe considers to be “brilliant.” It’s “the work of an extremely talented lyricist, poet, whatever you want to say. That is brilliant, brilliant work. And he never mentions the person, but you see the person.”
    Small Change
explores a different mode with the next cut, “Step Right Up,” Waits’s jumpy and jivey indictment of advertising. The singer is a huckster who’s selling the ultimate product, but his description of that product is so vague and rambling that you can’t figure out exactly what it is — you just know you have to have it. Speaking to David McGee, Waits explained what he was up to: “I didn’t take things at face value like I used to. So I dispelled some things in these songs that I had substantiated before. I’m trying to show something to myself, plus get some things off my chest. ‘Step Right Up’ — all that jargon we hear in the music business is just like what you hear in the restaurant or casket business. So instead of spouting my views in
Scientific American
on the vulnerability of the American public to our product-oriented society, I wrote ‘Step Right Up.’” 7
    To Waits, one of the special things about
Small Change
was that it gave him the opportunity to work with a jazz drummer who’d been pounding the skins since the early forties. Shelly Manne had worked with a host of jazz greats — Coleman Hawkins, Stan Kenton, WoodyHerman, Raymond Scott, Stan Getz, Les Brown, Art Blakey. He’d also recorded many highly respected albums of his own. Waits had been telling interviewers for some time that he wanted to work with Manne, that he considered Manne’s backbeat on Peggy Lee’s “Fever” to be close to perfection.
    â€œThe first time Tom worked with Shelly,” recalls Jerry Yester, “Tom invited me down because I was going to be doing strings and he wanted me to hear the album and get into the atmosphere