Tom Waits is an American legend. His first album Closing Time (1973) features folk-style piano ballads with smooth baritone vocals. The album’s opening track “Ol’ 55” is a song about Waits’ 1955 Buick Roadmaster. His voice sounds like a late-night piano bar lounge singer. He maintained this crooning style for his next two albums The Heart of Saturday Night and Nighthawks at the Diner.
Waits’ early music demonstrates a genius for songwriting and lyricism but the albums sold poorly. His label Asylum Records considered dropping him until David Geffen came to the rescue. Geffen, who’d signed Waits, convinced the Eagles to perform “Ol’ 55” in concert. Eagles singer Glen Frey said Waits hated their version “until he received his first royalty checks. Since then, Tom and I are really close.”
Waits was a fan of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Both singers had rugged raspy voices. Waits adopted a new gravelly voice on his fourth album Small Change (1976). The opening song “Tom Traubert’s Blues” is sung with a whiskey-soaked growl. For the second track “Step Right Up,” Waits sounds like a classic carnival barker. By the third song “Jitterbug Boy,” he emulates the voice of raspy singers like Dr. John and Louis Armstrong.
Waits’ style was accompanied with tonal changes in his lyrics. He said Small Change is about “ambulance drivers, night watchmen, ticket takers, street sweepers, tattoo parlors, stage door jockeys, and shoe string hotels from New York to Chicago to Buffalo.” The songs are dark but also funny. When he sings, “The piano has been drinking, not me,” it’s as if he’s channeling a tipsy Groucho Marx.
Small Change was the first Waits album to chart on the Billboard Top 100 (reaching #89). He earned acclaim from Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times who wrote that Waits had become “one of America’s most valuable pop performers.”
Like a method actor, Waits immersed himself in booze and cigarettes and slouched like a lifelong alcoholic. He told author David McGee, “I was sick through that whole period. It started to wear on me, all the touring… living in hotels, eating bad food, drinking too much. There’s a lifestyle that’s there before you arrive and you’re introduced to it. It’s unavoidable.”
Waits’ newfound drinking buddies included author Charles Bukowski and fellow singer Chuck E. Weiss (inspiration for Rickie Lee Jones’ “Chuck E.’s in Love”). While acting in the film Paradise Alley (1978), Waits met screenwriter Kathleen Brennan. The two fell in love and married in 1980. Brennan encouraged Waits to ditch his poet lounge singer act and embrace a more experimental, avant-garde approach. The couple wrote songs together and left Los Angeles for Sonoma County where they had three children.
Brennan inspired Waits to join AA and he became sober in 1992. Waits’ famously said, “One is never completely certain when you drink and do drugs whether the spirits that are moving through you are the spirits from the bottle or your own. At a certain point, you become afraid of the answer. That’s one of the biggest things that keeps people from getting sober, they’re afraid to find out it was the liquor talking all along.”
Fortunately, the quality of Waits’ music improved with sobriety. His voice became raspier as well. When music critic Daniel Durchholz told Waits his voice sounded like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon and then taken outside and run over with a car, Waits responded, “flattery will get you nowhere with me.”
Waits concocted myths about his new husky sound. He claimed he imitated an uncle whose scratchy voice was the result of a botched surgery. He said that at the dinner table, his “uncle went into a coughing fit and spit out the surgeon’s utensils that were left in his throat.”
Waits relished telling anecdotes about his croaky voice:
“I gargle with razor blades and scream into my pillow every night.”
“My voice is the sand in the sandwich.”
“I like my music with the rinds and seeds and pulp left in.”
“I ate a lava lamp.”
“I gargle with asphalt.”
“I went to Europe, got the flu, and when I came back that was how I sounded.”
Waits told NPR interviewer Terry Gross, “I bark my voice through a closed throat.” He said he did strange vocal exercises before shows, aiming to sound like a dog or a neighing horse. This relaxed his throat muscles and soothed the Satchmo style tones that were hard on his larynx. When New York talk show host Don Lane asked how a guy with a voice like Waits decided on a singing career, Waits said, “It was a choice between entertainment and a career in air conditioning and refrigeration.”
In 2009, author Barney Hoskins published an unauthorized biography about Waits called Low Side of the Road. Hoskins wrote that when Waits opened for Frank Zappa in 1974, his mellow vocal style was barely discernible over Zappa’s boisterous audience. According to Hoskins, Waits began working with Frank Sinatra’s voice coach. The transition to a gruff voice was “intentional and spurred on by necessity.”
Tom Waits is not easy listening. Audiences eager for a pretty voice often find his songs abrasive. A writer on the Midnight Cafe blog wrote that Waits “is like a sick hippopotamus gurgling Castor oil.” Many don’t appreciate Waits’ music until they hear his songs covered by others. Norah Jones covered “Long Way Home”; Rod Stewart sang “Downtown Train”; Diana Krall recorded “Temptation.” When Heath Ledger played the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008), he modeled his voice and mannerisms after a 1979 Waits talk show interview.
Waits quit smoking several times to spare his vocal chords. In the Jim Jarmusch film Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), he joked “the best part of having stopped smoking is that I can now occasionally have a cigarette whenever I want because I’m already a non-smoker.”
These days, Waits largely stays out of the public eye. He’s 76 and has cut down on his musical output. Thankfully, he’s been a prolific songwriter with 17 studio albums and more than 500 songs. October 2nd will mark the 50th anniversary of Small Change. With luck, we’ll have new Tom Waits music for years to come.