Conjuring Tom Waits up

"I didn't just marry a beautiful woman," Tom Waits says, "I married a record collection."

Me too. Except without the beautiful woman. Andrew brought all the assets to our marriage: DVDs I couldn't have bought stacked precariously against a wall, comics bending and breaking shelves of the secondhand Ikea bookcase, books spilling out of overloaded cardboad boxes, plastic boxes, grocery bags ... wherever they've been since we moved in February and I gave up on organizing them, CDs ostensibly organizied but I found a tiny bit of a broken jewel case in my tights — inside! right down by the toe! — yesterday morning.

His record collection runs the gamut from things I know and love to things I wish I didn't know. Tom Waits is in there, of course, somewhere. When I first got to Manchester, bewildered but happy about it, Andrew never stopped playing records. One of the things I remember hearing then was Stay Awake, versions of Disney songs including Tom Waits doing "Heigh Ho" as the polar opposite of the cheery dwaves' song it originally was in Snow White. Andrew likes to play this for people after asking them to guess what it is; it's completely unrecognizable at the beginning. Actually, it still is even when the words start, even when the chorus starts! In Tom Waits's hands a song eponymizing the phrase of relentless optimism has bcome all sinister and growly. What else would you expect?

"I like to go for that broken-down feel," he says, "the disintegration of it all." (Solvé, I think. Et coagula. I grin.)

Upon first hearing that song, I had the vaguest sense of hearing Tom Waits when I was the sort of age where I'd have watched Disney cartoons, of being simultaneously enthralled and terrified by that voice. I'm not even sure now if that's true or just something I recently decided should have been true (I have this problem a lot; it comes from meeting cool people abruptly and after my formative years have been squandered). If I were going to make something up, after all, that'd be it: it's the obvious reaction to him.

Tom Waits is in that category of things (it also includes, for example, rum, orgasms, and playing the bassoon, lest you wonder) that I thought (and said) that I loved even before I properly knew what they were like. I'm not sure how I got the impression that Tom Waits should be something I enjoy, but I am sure I was right about all those other things as well as him: they're all great. I like it how that works out sometimes.

It's the voice you usually hear talked about. Described by an early reviewer as "that of a drunken hobo arguing with a deli owner over the price of a bowl of soup," this was supposed to condemn him to failure or at least the outer fringes of cult figures, but of course now it's his trademark, his calling card, and now we call a lot more than he wants to answer. I remember a brief period last year when Andrew's mom was excited about the prospect of seeing him in his one UK show. It didn't work out, of course, for her or who knows how many others.

Next only to his voice is his attitude; again we reach for cliches of the music business but we don't need to wax poetical about his gruff exterior, the dues he's paid to earn the right to tell us all to fuck off, when he will explain it much more vividly and maybe even a bit less gruffly: "Gotta keep 'em hungry," he says, and I bet he was smiling when he said it. 'You know what they say: Don't feed the dolphins or they'll poke a hole in your boat next time you go out."

Who says that, anyway?

Or, a better question: Did you see what I just said? Andrew's mom wanted to see Tom Waits! A lot. I'm still trying to wrap my head around this: my mom doesn't really listen to music at all. But Andrew's parents have taught me that Parents Are People Too, and I'm so jealous of the education they, however unwittingly, gave him. I think requests to hear Zappa were among his first words, and I know he'd memorized the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the age of seven or so, years before my mom would allow my brother or I to watch Good Morning Vietnam or Animal House.

There's a Tom Waits song book among the piles of stuff stacked on top of their extremely out-of-tune piano, and I have a nice memory of Andrew's sister playing something from it while her parents sang. She didn't like this, because she'd never heard the song and didn't know how it went, and her parents words of encouragement and singing voices weren't helping as much as they thought they were. The only problem with this memory is that it might have been a Neil Young song.

I mean, I know it did happen with a Neil Young song, that one, you know, oh hell I can never remember what it's called, but I think it might have happened with Tom Waits too. I'd like that, possibly only because I love Tom Waits and I don't like Neil Young. I might just be thinking of the Tom Waits book because Andrew always bangs out a few songs from it on the extremely out-of-tune piano when I'm making him relinquish the computer for a few minutes.

But, wait, I'm getting ahead of myself here. Before Andrew got me to Manchester to play music at me, he had to do it from a distance. And along with the Zappa and Wondermints and Love he showed me a few mp3s from his own band. The one I liked best, I tried to convince myself, was not just the one I liked best because he'd written it and performed most of it. At the time I never would have admitted that I would've listened to it just to hear his voice. I thought I was hearing far too little of it those days. It didn't sound like his voice on the phone, though; he said it sounded like Bernard Manning but that's just the accent (and Andrew's isn't that bad anyway); I called it his Tom Waits voice. He scoffs at this, of course, as he does at almost all compliments. But that's the voice he uses when he's playing Tom Waits songs on the extremely out-of-tune piano.

And, oh yes, there was the time when our Greyhound finally stopped in Minneapolis. Andrew had just noticed (and we were still only a block away from) 9th and Hennepin. He was impressed; I was glad he pointed it out, and not just because I got revel in, for once, getting to be the nonchalant one in this relationship.

Tom Waits may exist mostly in the parts of my head that are in the UK, but he has some presence on the other side of the Atlantic too. It's odd how much he's connected with Andrew, in my head, which doesn't seem fair to either of them, but my brain loves connecting weird things.

The Guardian article I'm nicking these quotes from didn't help; it starts:

When Tom Waits was a boy, he heard the world differently. Sometimes, it sounded so out-of-kilter, it scared him. The rustle of a piece of paper could make him wince, the sound of his mother tucking him in at night might cause him to curl up as if in pain.

'It wasn't a cool thing,' he says, shaking his head lest there be any doubt. 'It was a frightening thing. I mean, I thought I was mentally ill, that maybe I was retarded. I'd put my hand on a sheet like this [rubbing his shirt] and it'd sound like sandpaper. Or a plane going by.

And I think of Andrew running out of the room when he sees me reaching for the Brillo pad, wincing at the sound of me walking if my trousers contain sufficent synthetics. I smile, probably because this makes me think I know Tom Waits more than I do.

It's sort of nice, too, that another thing they have in common is that both will tell you good things about their wives. That, when they'd had enough solvé-ing, a nice lady came along to help with the coagula.

It's such an attractive illusion, thinking you know anything about celebrities. It's easy to feel superior about the one you like because he sings in a gravelly voice rather than answering teen-magazine questionnaires: What's your fave flick? What do you do to chill out?

What do I really know anyway?

Not as much as I might hope, but more than I might think. He says so himself: "I would love to have seen Leadbelly play," he says, and I could say the same thing about Tom Waits (actually, I'd love to have seen Leadbelly play too!), but I know how far down I am on the list of dolphins, "but that's the great thing about records, you put them on and those guys are right there in the room. They're back." So by his own rules, we've been in the same room a few times.

And, it seems, that isn't accidental. "I think about that sometimes," he says. "Some day I'm gonna be gone and people will be listening to my songs and conjuring me up. In order for that to happen, you gotta put something of yourself in it. Kinda like a time capsule. Or making a voodoo doll. You gotta wrap it with thread, put a rock inside the head, then use two sticks and something from a spider web. You gotta put it all in there to make a song survive."

I'm so glad he puts it all into his songs.