Recently, and from time to time, I have read comments from people who say that Tom Waits has got to be the most underrated artist around today. While Waits is unique and his fans are sometimes described as part of a “cult following,” he is certgainly not “underrated” by those in the know.
Waits’ raspy voice has been described, with some justification, as “like how you’d sound if you drank a quart of bourbon, smoked a pack of cigarettes and swallowed a pack of razor blades. . . . Late at night. After not sleeping for three days.” Many of his songs give the impression that they were recorded at 3:00 a.m., after the bars all closed, before he crawled back to his Old ’55 Chevy to sleep it off.
Whether that characterization may have been accurate at sometime in the past, I can’t say. I believe that now, however, it is part of an artistic persona that Tom has fostered and publicly maintains because it serves him well. In fact, he is a very talented individual who seems to be very much in control of his career decisions and creative endeavors. He has been recording for more than 40 years and has released more than 20 albums. Two of those albums have won Grammys and he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
He has also acted in more than 30 motion pictures – I think the most recent was Seven Psychopaths in 2012. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the soundtrack on Francis Ford Coppola’s 1982 musical film, One from the Heart (which was not a very successful movie aside from the soundtrack).
As another indication that Tom Waits is quite successful and not as underrated as some might think, look at the consequences of his staunch refusal to let his songs be used for advertising. That position was well known even a quarter century ago when Frito-Lay produced a commercial based on his song “Step Right Up,” which is a “jazzy parody of commercial hucksterism.” Since it was known that Waits would not participate in the project, a sound-alike singer was found and the commercial was made and played on the radio. Tom sued and was awarded more than $2.5 million. On appeal, Frito-Lay claimed that Waits was not “widely known” enough to warrant legal protection of his “distinctive style”; but he Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. The quotes above about the bourbon and razor blade voice and commercial hucksterism are from that appellate opinion (which you can read here).
Ad agency folks seem slow to learn at times, and only a year later Levi’s used a version of Tom’s “Heartattack and Vine” in a commercial. Again he sued. The commercial was withdrawn and Levi’s publicly apologized in a full-page ad in Billboard. In the 21st Century, Audi ran a commercial in Spain with music very similar to Waits’ “Innocent When You Dream” (after Tom had refused to participate or permit the use of his music), and he recovered another judgment in the Spanish courts. In 2005, another car company, Opel, tried to persuade him to sing for their Scandinavian commercials, then hired a sound-alike singer when he refused. Opel claimed the commercials used music composed by Brahms. Hmmmm, it would be interesting to hear Tom sing Brahms. Anyway, Opel did settle the resulting lawsuit for an undisclosed sum, which Waits reportedly donated to charity.
Tom Waits has been married to Kathleen Brennan for nearly 35 years, they have three children, he has not drunk alcohol for several decades and he lives close to my good friend Annette and her husband Mark DeBacker in the lovely and thoroughly middle class town of Santa Rosa, California.
Now for the good news: next week is going to be another Break Week around here. I won’t be posting anything new for a couple of weeks. It seemed good to sail into Break Week with an old favorite. Here is Tom Waits’ ” Shiver Me Timbers” from the 1974 album, The Heart of Saturday Night. (For some reason this video goes on for a minute or so after the song ends, but it is just silent).