Tom Waits and me: We hear about Irish people's love for the great American troubadour

As Tom Waits re-releases much of his back catalogue, Des O’Driscoll speaks to various Irish people about their love of the great American troubadour.

Tom Waits and me: We hear about Irish people's love for the great American troubadour

As Tom Waits re-releases much of his back catalogue, Des O’Driscoll speaks to various Irish people about their love of the great American troubadour.

PHILIP KING

Philip King, the Kerry-based broadcaster and musician, filmed Tom Waits for a 2001 TV documentary Freedom Highway: Songs that Shaped a Century.

He met with Waits at Prairie Sun, the rural studio 100 miles north of San Fancisco where the Bone Machine album and much of his output through the 1990s were recorded. Fittingly, Waits arrived in a pick-up truck.

“In the back of the truck, he had a ship’s piano, an old Dynacord guitar, a little amp, a five-string banjo and a harmonium,” recalls King. “We walked into the room we were going to work in and he said ‘Let’s do this thing in here; I’ll be right back’. He came back with his buddy, and his son Sullivan Waits and they were carrying a barn door with the hinges swinging off it.

“And then he went out and came back again and said ‘I must get myself a chair’ and he got himself a bentwod chair, and he put the chair on the door, and then said ‘I’ll be right back’, and he came back with a hammer, a few six-inch nails and a tambourine. And he drove the tambourine with the nails into the door. He sat down on the chair and creaked back and forth and tapped the tambourine with his foot and said, ‘I’m ready!’.”

Such humble equipment didn’t dim what followed. King remembers a wonderfuful version of Bob Dylan’s ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, as well as a rendition of Lead Belly’s ‘Irene Good Night’. A clip on YouTube from the documentary shows a powerful take on African-American spiritual ‘I Know I’ve Been Changed’.

“The sensation of him in the room was that he had a voice like a whirlwind,” says King.

The Corkman also warmed to Waits as a person. “I think the word I would have used was ‘tender’ about singing, about songs, about his own art, and about the artistic vision. I think of that phrase that he used in his own song, ‘Innocent When You Dream’... I felt that there was a profound innocence and playfulness in him.”

King quotes a piece by historian and broadcaster Simon Schama about Waits in the Guardian in 2006:

He has turned American music into the speech-song of ordinary men and women caught in that murky bad-smelling alleyway between the juvenile rhetoric of the ‘American dream’ and the unforgiving adult reality of contemporary life.

King agrees with those sentiments. “Tom Waits hears no noise. He likes found sound, the cello sliding down the stairs, clacking, chatter, random rattling, and the bar racket, the traffic, trains and trucks, the blocks, the bell jar, the squeaking barn door hinges of the yelping cur off in the distance, the holler of language funnelled from microphone and megaphone.”

Waits once said that the first song he remembers hearing was ‘Molly Malone’, and his father Frank, who taught him how to play the ukelele, was of Scots-Irish descent.

King believes Waits has an affinity with Ireland, and the ballad tradition that came out of here. It’s an affection that works both ways for Waits’ fans in this country.

Philip King featured Waits in his 2001 documentary, Freedom Highway.
Philip King featured Waits in his 2001 documentary, Freedom Highway.

King has no hesitation in describing Waits as one of the great singers and songwriters of our age.

“To be in his company was a privilege. To see his humility and tenderness in the engagement with his art was inspirational, and to film him sing with such open abandon and trust was a remarkable experience, and one that I’ll cherish for the rest of my life.”

WAITS IN IRELAND: 1981

IN AUGUST 1980, Tom Waits married Kathleen Brennan, the woman from Johnsburg, Illinois, who would become a guiding force in his musical output through the years. As her name suggests, Brennan was of Irish stock, and the couple spent some time in this country in 1981 before he set off on his European tour to promote the Heartattack and Vine album.

As the nostalgia website brandnewretro.ie points out, Waits gave an interview to In Dublin magazine over a bottle of Blue Nun at the South County Hotel, Stillorgan, in February of that year. He would return to Ireland in March for gigs in Cork, Galway, and Dublin.

“We were staying in a cottage near Tralee,” Waits told journalist John Little, “and we travelled all through Kerry — we went around the Ring three times — up to Galway, around Dingle. We’d just get up in the morning, get in the car, and drive somewhere for the day.

“I like the fact that you can feel the distance between cities. There’s a crisis around every corner... sheep, cattle, and all that. I love seeing sheep on the road. I’ll never eat another lambchop again!”

LATE LATE SHOW

Around the time of his tour, Waits and Brennan made their only ever live appearance on Irish TV when they featured on Gay Byrne’s legendary show. It looked like an uncomfortable experience for all concerned.

We see a slightly flustered Gaybo on his white telephone having to check if Waits is in the building. It seems he showed up late for The Late Late Show.

Tom Waits with Gay Byrne on The Late Late Show in 1981. Picture: RTÉ
Tom Waits with Gay Byrne on The Late Late Show in 1981. Picture: RTÉ

After the singer eventually performs a gorgeous version of ‘On The Nickel’ on the piano, he doesn’t look too happy to be approached by the presenter for a few words. Cigarette in hand, at one stage he quips to Byrne: “I was born at a very young age.”

Brennan looks just as shy when interviewed from the audience, but she was also willing to spin a yarn when she was asked how they met. The truth is that she was working for Francis Ford Coppola when Waits was doing the soundtrack for the film, One from the Heart. But she jokingly tells Byrne: “I was a nun and he fell asleep in the church, and I woke him up.”

CORK GIG

Among the people who saw Waits play on that tour was Donie Goulding from Fairhill in Cork. He reckons he came to Waits through hearing him on Pat Kenny’s radio show in the early 1980s.

“He played ‘Heartattack and Vine’ and I just thought his voice was incredible. So I went in to Golden Discs and bought the cassette,” recalls Goulding, who still has that tape. “Then one day my brother, Bertie, came in at home and said ‘That Tom Waits fella you listen to is coming to Cork’.”

Donie Goulding’s ticket for Waits’ gig at Connolly Hall, Cork. Picture: Siobhan Bardsley
Donie Goulding’s ticket for Waits’ gig at Connolly Hall, Cork. Picture: Siobhan Bardsley

The Goulding brothers bought two tickets for the Pat Egan-promoted gig at Connolly Hall, the headquarters of the ITGWU union in the city.

“I remember he came out on stage with an umbrella and he was crooning away with that,” says Donie, who also remembers an enthusiastic reception from the Cork crowd. Donie and Bertie had paid the princely sum of £5 each for that concert, a price that had inflated to €131 when he next saw Waits at one of his appearances at the Phoenix Park in 2008.

Another audience member on that Irish tour was Dublin artist and musician Stano, who remembers Waits’ appearance at the Olympia as the best gig he’s ever seen.

“There is one piece that stays with me to this day, as vivid as if it was yesterday, almost like a dream that you never forget,” he relates in the In Concert book in aid of Hope Collective Ireland.

“He stood there on stage singing a sea shanty, holding a broom handle with a light dangling from the end of it and as he was performing the piece he was swaying the light and as far as I was concerned he was really on a ship, so powerful was the performance.”

GET BEHIND THE MULE

Mick Flannery

Mick Flannery admits he cringes slightly when he now hears the obvious Tom Waits flourishes on some of his own early music. But the Blarney-born singer would never deny the influence the American singer has had on him.

Mick Flannery
Mick Flannery

His love of Waits’ music came from his mother, who had a copy of the album Closing Time in the house. Ironically, it was also during the flaunting of closing time during lock-ins in a pub in Killarney that Flannery would also hear his uncles and aunts singing Waits’ songs.

Now based in Ennis, Co Clare, the 34-year-old rates Bone Machine as his favourite album, and says he still uses some of Waits’ songwriting techniques.

“I like his approach of taking a character, and running with that character. It gives you more scope as a songwriter, so you’re not completely self-involved. His willingness to try new things, appear mad, and be silly, are also traits I admire in him.”

Flannery quotes Waits’ speech in New York in 2011 when the American was being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

He said, ‘Songs are really just interesting things to be doing with the air’. That kind of encapsulates how humble he is and how aware he is, and not taken in by prestige and fame.

Peter Aiken

Peter Aiken organised Waits’ last gigs in Ireland in August 2008, three nights at a marquee in Phoenix Park, Dublin, that was branded as the ‘Rat Cellar’. Not even hefty ticket prices in the region of €130 prevented all three gigs quickly selling out.

Peter Aiken
Peter Aiken

“They were great gigs and one of the songs from Dublin ended up on the live album of the tour [Glitter and Doom],” says Aiken.

However, the promoter admits he was glad when those gigs were over, given the logistical issues in creating a totally new venue in Phoenix Park. “It even rained heavily for two days before the gigs.

Tom Waits himself was a very pleasant guy to deal with, but he is very hands-on, and not exactly the type of guy to phone-in his gigs. We really wanted everything to be right. But it all really worked out well in the end, and I’d love to get him over again.”

John Creedon

Of all the songs in all the world, which is the most requested on John Creedon’s nightly show on RTÉ Radio 1? Amazingly, it’s ‘Martha’ by Tom Waits.

“It gets requested by a huge range of people,” says the presenter, who credits Cobh singer Freddie White with opening his own ears, and those of many other Irish people, to the genius of Waits. “The first time a lot of people in this country would have heard ‘Martha’ would probably have been through Freddie’s version. Then they would have gone back to the original source.”

That song from Waits’ 1973 debut Closing Time has retained its popularity with its catchy melody and refrain of “And those were the days of roses, Poetry and prose and Martha, All I had was you and all you had was me.”

Creedon’s eclectic show is one of the few outlets on Irish radio where you’ll hear Waits songs, and the presenter says he can even get away with playing some of the Californian singer’s more ‘out there’ tunes, if they’re placed carefully.

John Creedon
John Creedon

However, the Corkman admits he’s happy to regularly come back to that oft-requested classic, and his affection for the song can be seen from the fact from that he even named one of his daughters Martha.

Remastering the Master

  • Tom Waits’ current label Anti has re-released his first seven albums from when he was with Elektra Asylum in 1970s. They range from Closing Time (1973) to Heartattack and Vine (1980), and are available in digital formats and 180g vinyl.
  • Waits has also put together a 76-track Spotify playlist of his music through the decades, entitledThis Is Tom Waits.
  • If you have any memories or thoughts on Waits, feel free to share them at facebook.com/irishexaminer
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