“Prefiero tener una botella delante a que me hagan una lobotomía frontal”
“No existe el demonio es simplemente Dios cuando se emborracha”
“Dios protege , a los borrachos, a los locos y a los niños pequeños”
Tom Waits
“VF:¿Cual es la cualidad que mas te gusta de una mujer?
TW:Buenos huesos, dientes afilados, gran corazón, humor negro, magia en abundancia, mucha capacidad de perdón y que sea buena compañera.
VF.¿Que o quien es el mayor amor de tú vida?
TW. Mi esposa Kathleen
VF:¿Qué es lo que mas valoras de tus amigos?
TW:Cables de batería de coche y una cadena de arrastre
VF.¿Con qu figura histórica te identificas mas?
TW. Cantinflas
VF:¿Cómo te gustaría morir?
TW No creo que eso vaya a gustarme nada”
Tom Waits para Vanity Fair
Tras la lectura de un magnífico libro de uno de mis artistas favoritos con mas de 30 años de carrera , su última gira este año por varias partes del mundo “Glitter and Doom Tour” y sus 58 años cumplidos el pasado domingo 7 , no encuentro mejor pretexto para dedicarle unas líneas a quién ha influido con gran peso específico no solo mi forma de oír música sino mi forma de ver la vida , el brillante ,mordaz y Bukowskiano ,Tom Waits.
El libro de Mac Montadon es una recopilación de reseñas y entrevistas hechas por medios de todo tipo como (Rolling Stone Magazine,Entertainment Weekly,Billboard magazine, SPIN, Playboy,Washington Post,The Guardian, New York Times Vanity fair, The Nation,Trasher Magazine entre muchas otras) con un buen prólogo del líder de los Pixies Frank Black.
En este libro se puede apreciar un Tom Waits taladrante, obscuro, ocurrente, brillante y simpre lleno de sentido del humor , destacando un par de conversaciones entre el propio Waits con Elvis Costello y posteriormente con Jim Jarmusch, libro altamente recomendable sobre el quien ha sido llamado el poeta de los marginados, el esperpento que vino del frío, el agridulce, espantapájaros ebrio etc...
http://www.tomwaits.com/
http://www.myspace.com/tomwaits
A continuación “Straight No Chaser” conversación completa, entre el cineasta Jim Jarmusch y Tom Waits ,
STRAIGHT NO CHASER [Spring 1993]
Interview by Jim Jarmusch
I have known Tom Waits now for over eight years. Tom is not only someone
whose work has always, for me, been a source of inspiration, but a man for
whom I have a very deep, personal respect. I admire him because he remains
true to himself in both his work and his life. He follows his own code,
which is not always the same one prescribed by laws, rules or the
expectations of other people. He is strong and direct. There is no
bullshit surrounding the man.
Tom is, obviously, also a man whose use of language and ability to express
himself are completely unique. I spent half the time while with him
laughing uncontrollably, and the other half in amazement at the seemingly
endless flow of very unusual ideas and observations pouring out of him. The
guy is a wild man. Tom lives with his family in a big, strange house hidden
away somewhere in California. I think of it as the Tom Waits version of a
gangster hide-out; a world in and of itself. For reasons I am very
respectful of, its location will remain anonymous. The following
conversations were recorded (and accompanying photographs made), during a
one week period in October of 1992 in and around Tom's house, in a nearby
chicken-ranch-turned-recording-studio, and most often while driving around
in either Tom's 1964 Cadillac, or his '65 Chevy El Camino. Our final
conversation was abruptly concluded when the El Camino literally caught on
fire while we were driving it (with a full load of furniture in the back).
Somehow it was an appropriate ending point for an unpredictable adventure
with Tom Waits.
-- Jim Jarmusch, LA 10/92
~ Tom's First Vision ~
Jim Jarmusch: Tell me some stuff about when you were a kid.
Tom Waits: I was in the ocean when I was about seven years old. It was
getting dark and I heard my father calling, he has a very unique whistle
that he could send anywhere I was and I would hear it and I would know
that's my dad whistling and I had to come in.
JJ: My mom had that.
TW: All the kids knew their dad or mom's whistle or call.
JJ: We're trained just like dogs. In fact, in our house our dog used to
come back to the same whistle.
TW: [laughs] So I was in the water, up to about my chest, and it was
summer, and I was out a little deeper than I should be, and I got that
feeling on the beach when it's starting to get dark and you know you've
gotta go in. And a fog came over this part of the ocean -- this was in
Mexico. I was about seven, we had a trailer down there. And a pirate ship,
an enormous pirate ship came out of the fog. I was close enough to where I
could touch the bow of the ship where there was a cannon, and there was
smoke coming off the sails that were burning and there were dead pirates
hanging on the mast and falling off the deck. And I was stopped, I was just
-- because I knew I saw it. It came out of the fog, and I reached to touch
it and it turned and it went back into the fog and disappeared. And I told
my parents about it, and of course they looked at me like, "Pirate ship,
huh? Well, boy. Saw a pirate ship, huh? Honey, Tom saw a pirate ship out
there." And I'm like, okay. But I did, I really did, and it was a death
ship with a skull and cross bones, the whole thing.
JJ: That's a really ancient thing, seeing the death ship.
TW: Because they used to put people on those ship, you know, the crazy
people that were insane, debtors, people that had birth defects.
~ Alien Life Forms ~
TW: You know what I'd like to do, I'd like to go into space with a band,
have speakers on the outside of our spacecraft, see if we can communicate.
Choose a really strange band, develop our own space program where we're
gonna actually go up, because right now the only people who are allowed to
go up there, y'know, the way they pick them is just like I guess I'm sure
the way they picked explorers.
JJ: Sun Ra has been sending signals for some time into space. That's his
life.
TW: How does he send them? I mean --
JJ: Well, just through his music.
TW: But I mean get in a spacecraft to go into space, and perform in-space
music. Because they're saying that our new program now is to actually find
hard evidence of life on other planets. That is the mission and the
doctrine of the space program today. And my feeling is that I think that we
should communicate through music. We're sending these little things that
show the anatomy of man, and our very simple numerical system, and some of
our math, and some of our makeup, scientific makeup, but I think we should
go out with a group.
JJ: Which means they'd probably send --
TW: They'd send the wrong group, yeah.
JJ: They'd send Michael Jackson, instead of you or Sun Ra.
TW: But speakers on the outside of the spacecraft, can you imagine?
JJ: It's like these kids that have their cars with sound systems so hot
that -- A mechanic told me that those subsonic, sub-woofer bass systems
loosen all the bolts and screws in the car, and the whole construction of
the car from vibration gradually will just fall apart.
TW: It's beautiful. We recorded in a room that was not soundproof, you saw
the room. When you're on the set and you're recording outside you stop for
airplanes or trains or cars or kids coming home from school. You have to
stop. But I love that. We didn't stop for anything. I wish we'd had more
aircraft flying over on the record because I don't see the point in keeping
other sounds out.
JJ: Supposedly on some of the Sun Studio recordings from Memphis in the
early '50s you can hear trucks going by outside...
TW: It's great.
JJ: Do you think there are aliens or life forms from other planets or other
solar systems, other galaxies that have visited earth or at least surveilled
it? What do you think about UFOs and aliens and stuff?
TW: No, I believe there is intelligent life, but we are the ones who define
what intelligence is, so I'm sure it would fall outside of our intelligence
or ability to perceive it, which leads me to believe thay they may be here
among us and we are unable to see them, or understand that they're here. So
y'kno, where technology is now as far as tracking other life forms, I don't
know. When I was a kid I built radios. My dad was a radio expert in the
army, and in addition to bicycle repair, he had me building my own radios
and sending away for kits and creating my own little shortwave radios. And
I picked up things when I was a child that I swore were extra-terrestrial,
and maintain to this day that I made contact, or at least I was on the
receiving end of a relationship with an extra-terrestrial but was unable to
communicate with him becasue my radio couldn't transmit.
JJ: Were they voices, or sounds or what?
TW: It was a language that did not exist. It was not Russian, I was
picking up Russia and Poland and Hungary and China --
JJ: But this was a language?
TW: It was a language, but it was not from around here. And here I was
unable to transmit. On earth, we never acknowledge that they exist becasue
it doesn't fit into our beliefs about the creation of the universe. God
made the earth in seven days, then he rested. The idea that there would be
creatures out there. The government is apparently keeping creatures they
found, and in top secret bunkers in New Mexico, never to be viewed by the
public. I believe that.
JJ: Yeah, when we were in Colorado shooting that Burroughs documentary,
Burroughs was convinced that they were in that area of the Rockies -- there
were aliens there mining plutonium in the middle of the night. There were
all these reports of people seeing guys with silver suits, masks and helmets
on, carrying heavy black boxes in the middle of the night in these ghost
towns north of Boulder, Colorado.
TW: Wow. I believe it. We're here to go.
JJ: We're all here to go. Burroughs says we have no reason to expect them
to be benevolent, you know. Why should we? They're part of the same
universe.
TW: Yeah. They come down here and pick us up and suck the blood out of us
like plastic juice containers.
~ Operating on a flamingo ~
JJ: Tell me about recording. You just recorded the score for 'The Black
Rider?'
TW: Yeah. The songs were done, most of them were recorded very crudely in
Hamburg in a studio, and then we brought 'em here. So some of 'em are real
crude, which I like. I like to hear things real crude, cruder. I think if
I pursue it, I don't know where it'll take me, but y'know, its' getting more
and more like that. I just like to hear it dirty. It's a natural reation
to where we are in technology, becuz things swing in and swing back. That's
normal. And I like to setep on it, scratch it up, break it. I wanna go
further into that world of texture. That train thing that I played for you
came from taking nine pieces and improvising something really quickly, like
lining up children and having 'em march and scream out some word. "Real
quick, we gotta make it happen right now," it was like real fast sketch,
which is real hard to do when people come from (high) music, because that's
high music. People who play in all those symphony orchestras, like some guy
who plays contra bassoon, it's rare that he's gonna get to do anything.
Where it's just free, do something free, y'know, with structure and
planning, but very spontaneously from the depths. That's something you
don't really get from an orchestra, so I loved doing that. It gave
everybody a great feeling. You know that expression "go out to the
meadow"...orchestra goes out to the meadow?
JJ: I don't know that expression.
TW: You know, when you leave the room, you leave the music, everyone is
just like a ship, a strange ship, and everyone feels essential to it...I
love that. And those are the things I keep looking for in the studio, and
how to do it. There are certain variables that are possible to control, bu
that's what frustrates me when I'm in there all the time, becuz I'm thinking
about something in here that was alive an hour ago, and now it's
just...blood is all over the walls, and the fucking thing will never breathe
again, and then who's responsible? You! And you point to one of the
musicians, and you accuse him of murder. And then we have little mock
trials where the guy is found guilty of, whatever, murdering a particular
song, and sometimes there's a punishment, and it's a little too high for
some of these guys to pay. I've taken fingers off. I'm not proud of it,
but it's just part of -- One accordionist I worked with just eats the music.
He eats the music, and you find him, it's all over his shirt, down his chin,
it's just been murdered...Accordionists will sometimes take a part and
they'll just play the hell out of it until it's dead. But y'know you're
always fighting those things, the same thing on a film set. You've got to
turn it around. You're responsible for navigating through strange places.
I've had these terrible dramas about the expedition, and they remind me of
music, of operations where sometimes you lose a patient, and I'm despondent
over it, I'm so fucking mad about it. I leave the room like a doctor must
feel after he's lost a patient. Of course it's not that bad, but --
JJ: During the recording stage of the performing stage?
TW: Both. And it frustrates me. I don't mean to say that it's like
somebody dying, I'm just using that. But that's how it feels sometimes,
that it's an expedition and we fail. Other times we really soar. You know
how that feels. It's a great feeling. It can't happen every time, and if
it did you'd probably (stop doing it)...The democratic approach to sound
expedition is always a mystery where you're going to wind up. But the best
thing is to work with people who respond to suggestions, just like you would
tell actors, you have to know something about them, and you have to share
some common desire for mystery and danger, and then you can say things to
them that they will take you someplace. We'll all go someplace together.
JJ: But you're kind of like the navigator, right? You sort of set up the
direction where the ship's gonna go, and then you have the other sailors on
board.
TW: It's a ship. It's a ship of men. It's different every time. There's
always a collective unconscious that happens in a group if the soldiers are
open to confrontation. Sometimes you have to confront your own limitations
and smash them and go on. That's when you end up in a place that's new.
And I have to do it myself. You usually do it by working with people that
maybe you are a little bit intimidated by. You want to challenge your own
limitations. I still have a very crude approach to music. I don't read
music and I don't write traditional notation. I developed my own crude
shorthand or hieroglyphics that I can respond to if I'm writing on a plane
or train or in a car, and I'm not around an instrument, just use your voice.
But it's also I think helpful to sit down at an intrument you have no
history with, and then you approach it more like a kid. There's no right
and wrong about it, and it frees you from it. But then the other side of
that is that the fingers also have an intelligence, and places that they
want to go. Before you get there they've already gotten there, so
it's...like writing sitting at a typewriter. Sometimes it's just you and
the machine.
JJ: Do you sometimes sketch out your songs with other musicians?
TW: Yeah. We had a session a week ago where we took just viola, double
bass and cello, and we created a pointillist kind of ant colony. It just
happened very spontaneous and thrilling. Conceptually, working with
suggestions is usually the best way for me. We made up a train, a monster
-- Sometimes it's good to combine high music with low music, orchestral guys
with guys that play in the train station. Then, through the conflict of
background you go to a new place. And there's a lot of orchestral guys who
rarely get an opportunity to just, to abandon their history on the
instrument, just play free, go to a totally free zone, and you fall into
these Bermuda Triangles of rhythm, melody. And lately those are the places
that I like to go to. But most of the songs I write are very simple.
They're three-legged chairs, and you make 'em very fast. You provide just
enough for them to be able to stand up...You paint 'em, let 'em dry and move
on to the next one. I mean the songs on 'Bone Machine' are all really
simple songs, "Murder in the Red Barn", "That Feel", "In the Coliseum",
"Earth Died Screaming", mostly written with just a drum in a room, and my
voice, just hollering it out, until -- like the other day when we were in
there making photos.
JJ: There was song right on that tape. When I was cleaning up the room I
rewound it and listened to it.
TW: Enough ectoplasm to construct an organism.
JJ: You collect a lot of wild sounds, and sound effects, right?
TW: Yeah. There are so many sounds I want to record. Carnival stuff. All
the sounds on the (midway), you know...I still haven't got a really good
metal sound -- when you see like swords in a real sword fight, or a real
anvil with a real hammer. I'm still looking for the ultimate sound of a
real stress metal clang. I wanna hear, really hear, really the clang of all
clangs. Real clang.
JJ: I used to work in a sheet metal factory, and there were some great
sounds, tossing the stuff around, moving it, the metal scraps and stuff.
TW: Yeah, right. I gotta collect those sounds. Tchad Blake, my engineer
(on 'Bone Machine'), oh man, he's got a -- (He'd) got into India, a street,
and stand in a fish market with his mike on, and record the bicycles, the
bells on the handlebars. Ching-a-ching! Ching-a-ching! And the chings are
coming in and ching-ing out, and it's a wonderful movie for the ears. You
can just reach out and like, you can see the fish. Whoa! And trains, I've
got a lot of trains on tape. Real chugs that are like a rhythmic chug, you
just can't believe it. Like you pee your paints. And the TING ting ting as
the bell's coming up.
JJ: Explain the Chamberlain. The first keyboard sampling instrument. The
Chamberlain 2000.
TW: It's a 70-voice tape loop, it's a tape recorder, an elaborate tape
recorder with a keyboard.
JJ: What year was it made?
TW: I think maybe '60, '61 or '62. Musicians were afraid it was gonna put
'em out of business, because it was too real. It was like, oh my god...And
if somebody had one of these, why ever hire a band? It's too perfect...
JJ: Yeah, but that's what they say about synthesizers now. And people
would still rather hear the real instruments.
TW: A lot of scores are done on a synthesizer.
JJ: I like the Chamberlain because it sounds like it breathes somehow.
Maybe it's the action of the keys that you once showed me that cause a
delay, so that it changed the way you played.
TW: It changes the physicality of your approach to the instrument, because
the keyboard is not easy (to play). It goes down too far, your fingers get
stuck down there and can't get back up.
JJ: They were made in L.A.?
TW: Yeah. By Richard Chamberlain. Not the actor (laughs). There's a
bicycle chain in it, and if the tape gets on the other side of the chain it
can damage the tape. Tchad Blake actually spent four or five hours working
on it, repairing it. (That's why I say) there are no gamblers in
'Chamberlain Pass'. You get decorated for valor. It's like operating on a
flamingo. You don't even know where the heart is, nothing. If you touch
there, you know, the world will end. If you touch this tape here, I dunno,
you may lose your hand. It has that kind of danger about it.
JJ: How do you program tapes on it?
TW: They just move to a different place on the tape. They give you about a
12-second sample that's the length of time it takes for the tape to move
through the head, and give you about three feet of quarter-inch tape.
JJ: You've got two of them, right?
TW: I've got one Mellotron and one Chamberlain, and the Chamberlain I have
is a prototype. So it's made with found electronic objects.
JJ: How many were made?
TW: Well, ultimately it was mass produced, and they were out there like
Fender Rhodes, only on a much smaller scale. But they were marketed,
advertised and sold in music stores, and they had displays, and everyone
heard this name Chamberlain.
JJ: Did you use it on 'Bone Machine'?
TW: Only on two songs, on "The Earth Died Screaming" and "The Ocean Doesn't
Want Me".
JJ: What other stuff did you use it on previously?
TW: I used it a lot on "Frank's Wild Years".
~ A Proscenium of Beat-Boxes ~
JJ: Have you played live recently?
TW: We played on a bill with Fishbone in L.A., and I was worried, that oh
god, I'm gonna have to play for their audience and they're gonna have to
play for mine, and I think they're two totally different audiences, because
they have a mosh pit and thw whole thing, they're hanging off the rafters.
I was afraid to play on the bill with them, and I got there I met 'em and
they were great. The show they did just changed me, it really changed me.
It was so loud, it was so electric, it was just loaded. Really, it combed
my hair and gave me a sunburn. They fly, yeah. That's when you realize
that music, it does something physically to you. It can actually lift you
and throw you around.
JJ: If you take Fishbone, or the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or Public Enemy, or
a lot of groups that are strong now, they synthesize a lot of different
things that connect with a lot of people...The Chili Peppers' music is funk
and hip-hop and punk and metal synthesized somehow. Whereas you're way out
there, you're synthesizing a pneumatic jack hammer with somebody raking
leaves amplified a hundred times, or the rhythm of an insect walking across
a metal plate.
TW: Well, I'm not as far as I would like to go with those things. I feel
impulses to go further into those worlds, and then I have certain, I still
have to deal with the commerce of it, y'know.
JJ: Also, some songs of yours are well-suited to a simple, say slightly
country-tinged backdrop, songs that don't need to have radio signals from
Mars coming into them. You seem to find what's appropriate for the worlds
you create. A lot of your songs are like little films for me.
TW: Oh, how about this, Jim. You know sound systems in theaters? I hate
'em. Get beat boxes, just start collecting 'em, a wide variety of 'em, and
use their speaker systems, and make a proscenium of beat boxes, you know,
your own sound system, it's all wired into a main box, and you just, you
create this whole world of sound, but it's all found stuff, because people
throw those things out. And it's just dirt plastic, the lowest material,
the cheapest material, cheaper and cheaper to them. They're getting worse
and worse, but they're getting on another level, better and better. But
they vanish after they've been around awhile.
JJ: They're disposable.
TW: People throw 'em away like cigarette lighters.
JJ: But the speakers usually still work.
TW: Yeah. So mount all these speakers in this strange thing and travel
with that. Travel with your own sound system. You don't use any of these
Marshall stacks or any of this bullshit.
JJ: Not only that, but you could build a proscenium of the boxes, like an
arch.
TW: Yeah. And that's what becomes your stage set. And you walk out, and
the curtain comes down off of that. It's just like making the theater go
away. You make everything smaller and go into that world.
JJ: That's a great idea.
TW: That could work. Then if you blow a speaker it still doesn't matter.
I really want to create a stage environment for me that (gives me)
confidence. And not use all this stuff that is thrust upon me, these things
become like shovels and picks, you know. The standard proscenium lighting
truss, the front curtain side fills, the super trooper, and you know the
risers, and the drums in the middle and the band around...(front light)
downstage, and you know, I hate the convention (that it's come to). And I'm
not sure how to, what to do with that. I hate the feeling of it.
JJ: The ('Frank's Wild Years') tour (in smaller) theaters was really
strong.
TW: We had the light boxes?
JJ: Yeah.
TW: Yeah. The nightclub.
JJ: You had the refrigerator, too.
TW: I liked that. And the bubble machine...I rebel against all these
conventions. I'm going on the road this spring and I'm having to think
about it. You know, I think I'm gonna ask Robert Wilson maybe also his
opinions because he has a wonderful sense -- he has no limitations when it
comes to his understanding of the limits of theater.
JJ: Did you write "That Feel" with Keith Richards or did he just play on
it?
TW: No, we wrote it together.
JJ: You've written stuff with him before.
TW: Yeah, he's all intuition. I mostly play drums, he plays guitar. He
stands out in the middle of the room and does those Chuck Berry splits,
y'know, and leans over and turns it up on 10 and just grungg! I mostly just
play drums. He plays drums, too, he plays everything. It was good. I'm
just recently starting to collaborate in writing and find it to be really
thrilling. And Keith is great 'cause he's like a vulture, he circles it and
then he goes in and takes the eyes out. It was great. I guess we maybe
wrote enough for a record, but everything didn't get finished, so -- There
was one called "Good Dogwood", about the carpenter that made the cross that
Jesus hung on. (Sings:) "Made the other two out of pretty good pine, they
all seemed to be doing just fine, but I hung my lord on good dogwood, huh!
(40 ton)...And I made my house myself, and I know he likes the workmanship
'cause he's a carpenter himself, and I made the other two out of pretty good
pine, they all seemed to be doing just fine, but I hung my lord on good
dogwood." Dogwood is what the cross was made out of. And they say after
Jesus went up to heaven that the blossoms on the dogwood developed a red
cross in the bloom, and you can see it in the dogwood blossom. And that
wasn't until after He had risen. So, uh, that was a good one.
JJ: Man, you have so many songs. There are other songs you played for me
that aren't on 'Bone Machine', like "Filipino Box Spring Hog".
TW: Yeah, and "Tell It to Me", and "Mexican Song", "In the Reeperbahn", one
called "Shall We Die Tonight", a suicide pact ballad, and then a couple for
John Hammond at the same time, one called "Down There By the Train".
JJ: Did he record it?
TW: No, nobody did. And we couldn't find a way to do it either that felt
good, so we just left it, and it's just sitting there.
JJ: You've collaborated on a lot of songs with Kathleen (Brennan).
TW: Oh yeah. She has a real daring -- and also sometimes when you sit down
and write by yourself you find yourself falling intot he same patterns that
you've been falling into before. You develop these little cowpaths through
the music that are well worn by other journeys, so sometimes it really helps
to be working with somebody that wants to go to a totally new place. She
has more, she has a lot of biblical imagery that she keeps coming back to.
She raised Catholic, and -- Well, Kathleen is a lapsed Catholic. She still
knows all of her novenas and Hail Marys, and the whole bit. But they give
her a very deep sense of questioning and spirituality.
JJ: There's a lot of strange religious imagery in your house. But on a
kind of grotesque level.
TW: Yeah, "The Earth Died Screaming" was an attempt at some of that.
"Rudy's on the midway, Jacob's in the hole," that's all from the Book of
Rudy, which is one of the lost books of the Bible, the Book of Rudy.
JJ: I'm not familiar with the Book of Rudy.
TW: No, it's the uh, it's still being held in a library in Russia. Give
'em back, give 'em back! So it's great to go into a room with somebody you
really love and have known for a long time.
JJ: What songs on 'Bone Machine' did you collaborate with Kathleen on?
TW: About half of 'em. I don't know which ones, they all seem mixed up to
me. "I Don't Wanna Grow Up", "The Earth Died Screaming". "All Stripped
Down" is kind of a religious song, 'cause you can't get into heaven until
you're all stripped down.
JJ: Tell me about the drummer you used on the 'Night on Earth' score.
TW: Mule Patterson?
JJ: Yeah. How'd you meet Mule?
TW: Well, for a man who has not bathed ever in his life, studio work with
him has started to become a problem and people just won't play with him.
JJ: He's the first drummer I've seen who shows up (with no instruments) and
says, "Whaddya got?"
TW: Whaddya got. Mule "Whaddya got" Patterson.
JJ: And the gun thing kind of made me nervous.
TW: Yeah, y'know, I've talked to him, and we can't seem to reach him on
that. That it's just no, y'know, you're gonna lose work.
JJ: Yeah, the loaded gun...
TW: The waving of guns around in the...studio, and you have people there...
JJ: The gun in the gym bag just kind of made me nervous.
TW: Yeah. The gun in the gym bag.
JJ: There's a couple of beers in there an a loaded .38.
TW: Yeah.
JJ: And some of those dry roasted peanuts, but in the small bags that you
can't really buy, the ones that you get on the train or a plane or a bus.
TW: And that was his dinner.
JJ: That's what he had in the bag. No drumsticks.
TW: And the gun was also held together with string. There was a place
where the whole handle mechanism was coming off the handle, and the hammer
was loose.
JJ: I know that the grip was just electrical tape.
TW: Just tape, there was no more wood.
JJ: And also that the studio was way out in the middle of nowhere, but he
didn't drive.
TW: He has no car.
JJ: Then he left.
TW: Some men fear him. Others admire him. Because he steals his promise,
he'll steal his promise from being there. He'll show up, and if he doesn't
like what's going on in the session, he'll walk out. He won't work it.
JJ: Right in the middle of a take?
TW: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You hope, you wanna keep him happy. That becomes
the whole point of the session. Larry Taylor (from Canned Heat) is the same
way. He'll just walk away, "Hey man, I just don't get it. I'm sorry," and
he'll just walk away. That's it, he'll just give up...He had a gig the
night after we finished the album, and his bass broke. It was just, it was
like John Henry, the whole neck snapped and the strings came out, it was in
the middle of the first song, he ended up finishing it on electric, but --
JJ: What about working with guitarist Marc Ribot?
TW: Well, he's big on the devices. Appliances, guitar appliances. And a
lot of 'em look like they're made out of tinfoil and, y'know, it's like he
would take a blender, part of a blender, take the whole thing out and put it
on the side of his guitar and it looks like a medical show...that look. And
the sound seemed to come from, the way it looked and the way it sounded
seemed to be the same. (He works with) alternative sound sources, he turns
his guitar into an adventure.
JJ: Yeah, nobody plays like Ribot. Maybe that's a good thing.
TW: Yeah, he also gets himself whipped up into a voodoo frenzy. He gets
the look in his eye that makes you want to back off. Y'know? It's like,
"goddamn!" We were in some after hours place in, I dunno, Holland, in the
corner, there was no stage, it was a club with normally no live music. We
just got into the corner and plugged in and started to play. And everybody
just pushed the tables and chairs back and it was real wild. And Ribot
banged into a speaker box, and there was a bottle of Vat 69 on it, and it
tipped over, and it was full, and it just kept spilling out onto the floor,
and he was getting under the stream of liquor, which was splashing onto the
floor, and liquor was going everywhere, and you looked at his face and it
was like an animal, he'd been, like worked up--
JJ: Whipped up.
TW: Whipped up, whipped up into a place where he was gonna do something.
He was gonna bite somebody, he was gonna do surgery without knives. Like
those guys who can reach into your chest and pull your heart out, he went
(big grunt) and then put it back in. There's guys that say they can do
that.
JJ: They do that in martial arts films, kung fu movies...
TW: Yeah (laughs)...
JJ: ...pull your heart right out.
TW: And you just see it.
JJ: But there's a certain protocol thing that goes with iht. (String of
Chinese-style grunts.)
TW: It was pretty scary...
JJ: What about the sax player Ralph Carney? Like me, he's from Akron, so
we're like brothers.
TW: Yeah, well, you'll always be bound together by Akron. Ralph's parents
still live there, so when we played there...
JJ: You played in (Akron)?
TW: Yeah. It was a good night, it was a real good night. Next day Ralph
wouldn't come to sound check and when he finally did show up, it was about
15 minutes before the show. And I said, "What happened, where you been?"
And he said, "Well, I went home. I haven't been home in a couplf of years."
He said, "My dad had me rakin' leaves..." (laughs) He had to rake leaves
all fucking day.
JJ: How would you describe your artistic relationship with Francis Thumm?
TW: Oh. Frannie's um --
JJ: He was around for the recording of 'Bone Machine', right?
TW: Yeah. Security guard. He did a lot of security on the album because
there were a lot of kids in the area that were coming out, curious, and we
normally, we bring somebody from out of town. Frannie got security guard.
No, seriously. He wasn't sure how he was going to be involved, so he stayed
on the edge and waited to find out how he might be used. He has a very
regimented background. He comes from discipline. I come from the opposite,
which gets me in trouble sometimes. Frannie comes from the discipline which
gets him in trouble sometimes, so it's like if two people had come from the
same background, one of them is unnecessary. Like I bring something to the
music that I couldn't bring if I had the same kind of background that he
has. I curse it sometimes, y'know...
JJ: We talked about Ribot, we talked about Ralph Carney, we talked about
Francis Thumm. How about Greg Cohen, you've worked a lot with Greg Cohen,
too, the bass player.
TW: Greg's also an arranger and a stamp collector. He has a strong, very
peculiar personal mythology he brings to all of his musical exploits. It's
really great to watch Greg play both bass and drums at the same time.
That's really something. His left hand on the fingering board, his right
hand has two drumsticks in it, and he has the little kit he puts together,
and he hits the one on the drums and the two on the bass, goes back and
forth, and creates an independent sound board with four legs.
TW: I remember once I asked you about this: if there's Cuban-Chinese
(food), then there must be Cuban-Chinese music. But Cuban must be like the
dominant trait. If two people marry and have a child, the dominant genes
till prevail in appearance and personality sometimes. It must be the same
with music, right? So if Cuban-Chinese music is more Cuban music, the
Chinese did not win in the war of music between those two cultures.
Somewhere there are Chinese guys playing in Cuban bands.
JJ: Then what's the musical equivalent of nouvelle cuisine? New age music?
TW: New age-elle, I guess. It's a little tasty, and looks nice on a plate.
JJ: It's decorative.
TW: Decorative, it's like food elevated to a place where it never should
have been allowed.
JJ: It's like wallpaper.
TW: It's part of an interior design. (pause) Hey, that pygmy stuff that
you sent me really flipped me! It really got me listening, because we
struggled for a couple days with getting the sound of a stick orchestra
inside the studio for "Earth Died Screaming". We tried every configuration
and position of the microphone, and finally I said, "Well, why don't we go
outside, isn't that where all these recordings are made?" And five minutes
later we had a mike up, we were hitting it, it was there. It was that
simple.
JJ: Like out in the parking lot of the studio?
TW: ...Right outside the door, yeah.
JJ: What kind of sticks were you using?
TW: Just 2 by 4's, anything we could find, logs from the firewood. About
nine people. Just different people walking by. We'd say, "Come on, play
some sticks!" But that pygmy music really sent me. There were a couple of
rhythms on there that I listened to...that just really, boy, I went into a
Bermuda Triangle of rhythm, where you vanish in some -- You feel the power
of it, and you realize why there are no drums in church, you know? There
are no drums in church music...Gospel people...They don't like
drums...There's certainly no tribal drums. If there are, there's a
country-western high hat, cornball -- kit drums, like a red-headed
stepchild. I went through Mississippi when I was 23 playing a tour, and
they (the radio station) wouldn't play anything with saxophone on Sunday.
You know, those Bible Belt things. Forget about it. You had to deal with
it, you know.
JJ: In a lot of counties in southern states there's no dancing on Sunday.
Blue laws. It's still illegal.
JJ: The record company is promoting 'Bone Machine' as your "first studio
album in 5 years," so I just wanted to list all the things you've done since
'Frank's Wild Years'. You did the soundtrack to 'Night on Earth', which is
an entire album's worth of material, even more, really, 'cause we didn't
even use it all. You did a cover of a Fats Waller song for another film.
TW: 'American Heart'.
JJ: Directed by the guy who did 'Streetwise', Martin Bell. What's the Fats
Waller song?
TW: "Crazy About My Baby". Then we wrote a closing song for the film,
also, called "I'll Never Let Go of Your Hand". And I did a play at the
LATC, downtown LA, called 'Demon Wine', that was written by Thomas Babe,
it's kind of a gangster play.
JJ: Was Carol Kane in that one?
TW: Yeah, she was. Bill Pullman. And also Philip Baker Hall was in it,
who played my father.
JJ: And you acted in 'At Play in the Fields of the Lord' with Aidan Quinn
and Tom Berenger, directed by Hector Babenco, who you'd previously worked
with in 'Ironweed'. You just acted in the new Robert Altman film which is
still in production.
TW: Yeah, I play a limo driver who's married to Lily Tomlin, and I live in
a trailer. It was a great experience.
JJ: You acted in 'Queen's Logic'.
TW: Yeah, with Joe Mantegna. Then 'Dracula'.
JJ: You play Renfield in Francis Ford Coppola's 'Dracula' and you did the
voice of the DJ for 'Mystery Train'.
TW: Oh right, let's not forget that.
JJ: You did 'The Fisher King', the Terry Gilliam film. You also composed
the music for, and collaborated with Robert Wilson and William Burroughs on
'The Black Rider', for which you just recently recorded the score.
TW: The songs from 'Black Rider' are now finished. They will be out in the
spring.
JJ: You're also preparing now to do another collaboration with Robert
Wilson for his 'Alice in Wonderland', composing the music for that, which
you are already starting on. And there's even more.
TW: Oh yeah, a song for John Hammond called, uh, what the hell's the name
of that? Oh. "No One Can Forgive Me But My Baby". Then I did two songs on
Teddy Edwards' album. One was called "Little Man", and the other one was
called "I'm Not Your Fool Anymore".
JJ: Then you wrote that stuff with Keith Richards, too. You recorded a
song with Primus.
TW: Oh yeah. "Tommy the Cat" with Les Claypool. He's really jungalian,
primitivo.
JJ: I saw on MTV or somewhere a little documentary and interview with him.
It was great. I'm sure there's more stuff we're forgetting, even more
things. But it just shocked me to see, "first studio album in 5 years", and
me knowing you I knew I didn't even know all the things you did, but even
knowing half of them, it made me laugh, like people thinking, "What's he
been up to?" Your productivity in the last few years, plus with your
family, is quite amazing to me.
TW: Make hay while the sun shines. Well, I had a good vein, and so it
always -- You know, when it's really coming down there's not enough to catch
it in, and then you go through dry spells, too, y'know.
JJ: Yeah, while we were driving to San Francisco yesterday you were making
up songs and I wish I'd had a recorder. There were songs you were making up
--
TW: In the car?
JJ: Yeah, that song about tobacco, about smoking. That was a great song
you were writing. They just seem to pour out of you these days.
TW: Well, it's been a good period. So I'm anxious to start work on another
original album of new songs. I've got backed up with material for new
songs.
JJ: I think you should put some EPs out, some short things with collections
of those. You did a verion of "Sea of Love" for the film. It's one of my
favorite songs of all time, that version. I carry it with me, I have it
here on that cassette.
TW: Oh, thanks.
JJ: And I'm sure we're forgetting other things. Ken Nordine. Did you do
some stuff with Ken Nordine?
TW: Yeah. He's most known for his records, 'Word Jazz', 'Sound of Word
Jazz', 'Colors'. He worked with a small jazz group and made records in the
'50s, and they're really stories, those strange little stories, little
Twilight Zones from the dark recesses of his brain. Little worlds you go
into. He has little conversations with himself, as if he's got the little
guy with the pitchfork on his shoulder that's telling him, "Yeah, kiss her."
"Well, I don't know." "Go ahead, kiss her."
JJ: ...and the voices overlap.
TW: Yeah, Ken Nordine.
JJ: Yeah, Ken Nordine. Where does he live, in LA?
TW: Chicago.
JJ: He's a strange little addition to American culture.
TW: Yeah, he's really remarkable.
JJ: An overlooked one for most people.
TW: Yeah, he is. So they put out that album, and we did a little kind of
word duet. I don't know how else to describe it. I did a little story and
he talked in the pauses, and I talked in his pauses, and it was kind of a
little woven duet.
JJ: And how can one find that stuff, is it out?
TW: Yeah, let's see, I've forgotten the title of it.
JJ: It is released, though?
TW: Oh yeah.
JJ: ...Even his name, Ken Nordine, makes you hear his voice right away.
TW: "Hi, it's Ken." On the phone, "Nordine here, how are you? In town for
a couple of days, hope we can get together. Later."
JJ: I'm sure we're forgetting other things you've done. In any case the
point is that you've been so amazingly prolific recently, and people aren't
aware of it because you don't necessarily choose things according to how
high profile, or mainstream they might be. You are, for a lot of people,
very important just because your sensibility doesn't fall in the mainstream.
It's who you are, the kind of things that strike you about life on this
planet, the kind of characters that you write song about, and the way you
live yourself. You inspired me long before I met you. Then there are
things you've done that have become mainstream in a way because of the soul
of them, like the song "Jersey Girl", the Springsteen cover of that, or
"Downtown Train" covered by Rod Stewart.
TW: I'm in shoe repair, really, Jim. I'm like a cobbler, they come in,
they've worn 'em out. I work on the instep.
JJ: What things draw you to roles you play as an actor?
TW: Well, I'm not really in a position where I make all of those choices
myself. I mean actors get to a point where their involvement immediately
insures the film will be both financed and distributed and seen. So, I'm
not at that position in acting, so it's usually smaller parts that I'm
thought of for. Sometimes it's smaller parts that I'm interested in.
Y'know, they say there's no small parts just small actors. But believe me,
there are small parts. (laughs)
JJ: I think that sometimes smaller parts are much more difficult because
you don't have time to develop the character. To create a character in
three minutes on screen is not an easy thing.
TW: It's true. You don't have 15 scenes with a character where it's like,
if I drop it here I can pick it up later, or if I didn't get a chance to
develop that aspect, I have a much fuller realized scene later on that I get
to do those things in. Sometimes it's like sending your design to a big toy
company, and it may end up you're just the ears and the feet, and you don't
get the full anatomically correct character. But you still have to pursue
it, you hvae to do a lot in a few scenes. I like limitations. If I don't
have limitations I'll impose them on myself naturally, just to narrow it
down. Immediately time is always an element. If we were going to write a
song right here now, and we had only a half an hour to do it it would take
on certain characteristics. I find myself usually having more in common
with the directors than maybe sometimes the actors. A lot of directors look
at actors as insecurities with arms and legs, they're just children, and
they need to be constantly reassured and directed and given rewards and
discipline.
JJ: That's part of them, though. I think that actors that don't have a
childish quality are dangerous.
TW: Yeah. That's where a lot of those things live. You can't approach
them intellectually with the tools that you use for other things in your
life. You can't see the tools that you need to use in order to massage the
ideas out of it. It's sometmies in the most obvious place, and you're
looking right at it and you can't see it. You have to use truthful
behavior, and you have to use what's in your life. You have to use what
you're going through right now, and out of that comes, you say, "Oh my god I
can't do this, I'm having all these problems in my life and I can't handle
this right now," and you say, "Well, use all those things, 'cause those are
the things you'll use to make this. Don't think they're encroaching on your
work. They are your work, or whatever." You find ways of integrating your
other struggles into it. Then it gets like a tributary, and you realize it
gets like an irrigation system, and if you water here it'll also water this,
also water that, so it's always good, it always feeds you, and it always
shows up in other areas. If you make a breakthrough as an actor it'll help
you make a breakthrough in music. Because I think all things really do
aspire to this condition of music. Everyone keeps saying, well, it has a
musical quality to it, or want to find the music in this. You do it
yourself in film, you're very sensitive to music, to finding the music in
the pictures. So I'm always ready to incorporate all those things into
making it have balance and life.
~ Language ~
JJ: Have you ever written stuff that would end up being like a text, that
would exist as a book or as writing rather than as music or as acting?
TW: No, I haven't. I've got some lyric books of my lyrics out in Spain and
Italy and a few other places. I don't know; you see I'm always going for
the sound of things, even like recently when I was trying to write down
different little memories for an article. I was going to do an interview,
and I told the interviewer to go home. I couldn't talk to him, I couldn't
even look at him. I said just leave the questions and I'll deal with them,
and I'm doing that at night. But I have a hard time just writing things
out, I have to hear them first. Sometimes I put it on a tape recorder, but
then I transcribe it and it's lost its music.
JJ: When I was a kid and first read Jack Kerouac, when I was 15 or
something, I read 'On the Road', and it didn't speak to me. I didn't get
it. I mean I liked the adventure of it, but the language of it seemed
slapped together and shoddy to me. And four or five years later I hear
Kerouac on tape reading stuff, and suddenly I got it, immediately I got it,
and I went back and I read that and 'The Subterraneans', and I understood.
But without that first understanding his voice and his way of hearing
language, it was hard for me to get it off the page. Now it's permanently
in me, I can read it, I can pick up Kerouac and I hear his voice. Breathing
and phrasing and be-bop and sound influenced his way of thinking about
language.
TW: Yeah, I agree. It's like for Robert Wilson, words are like tacks or
like broken glass. He doesn't know what to do with them. He lays down on
them and it's alway uncomfortable. He wants to melt them down or just line
'em up and use 'em as design, or whatever, because he doesn't like to deal
with them. I love reference books that help me with words, dictionaries of
slang or the 'Dictionary of Superstition', or the 'Phrase and Fable, Book of
Knowledge', things that help me find words that have a musicality to them.
Sometimes that's all you're looking for. Or to make sounds that aren't
words, necessarily. They're just sounds and they have a nice shape to them.
They're big at the end and then they come down to a little point that curls.
Words, y'know, for me are really, I love 'em, I'm always lookin' for 'em,
I'm always writin' 'em down, always writin' down stuff. Language is always
evolving. I love slang, prison slang and street idioms and --
JJ: You like rap music because of that, right?
TW: Oh yeah, I love it. It's so, it's a real underground railroad.
JJ: It keeps American English living. Rap, hip-hop culture and street
slang is to me what keeps it alive, and keeps it from being a dead thing.
TW: Yeah, it happens real fast, too. It's....and it moves on, in like
three weeks maybe something that was very current is now very passe. As
soon as they adopt it, they have to move on.
JJ: It's an outsider's code, in a way.
TW: Well, it's all that dope talk that came because you had to have
conversations, that whole underground railroad thing where you had to be
able to talk to somebody in the presence of law enforcement, and have law
enforcement totally unable to understand anything of what you were saying.
I don't know if people really acknowledge as much as they should how the
whole Afro-American experience, how it has given music and lyricism, poetry
to daily life. It's so engrained that most people don't even give it
credit. A lot of those Alan Lomax records that he did, song collecting in
the '30s, captures that. He also captured just sounds, sounds that we will
no longer be hearing, eventually, like he captured just the sound of a cash
register that you really don't hear anymore.
JJ: Yeah, manual typewriters will be obsolete. Certain things that we're
so accustomed to now, most phones don't ring anymore, they have that
electronic beep beep beep. That ringing sound will be archaic. It almost
is already.
TW: Yeah, that's true. But, yeah, I love language. Like you yourself do,
and put it into the dialogue of the characters in your films as well.
JJ: What writers do you like?
TW: 'Course Bukowski, the new collection is great, the 'Last Night of the
Earth' poems. The one called "You Know and I Know and Thee Know"...there's
some beautiful things in there, very mature, and (with an) end of the world
sadness. And Cormac McCarthy I like. He has a new novel called 'All the
Pretty Horses'.
JJ: You worked with William Burroughs on 'The Black Rider'. What do you
think about Burroughs? Burroughs has always incorporated the language of
criminals and junkies and street stuff into that like process that he runs
the words through.
TW: Yeah, I love Burroughs. He's like a metal desk. He's like a still,
and everything that comes out of him is already whiskey.
~ Tom's Wedding Photo ~
TW: These are our champagne glasses from the night we got married. She's
carrying me in hers because mine broke and fell over. So the bride is
carrying the groom. And I broke a piece out of hers. She didn't want me to
get 'em. She thought we'd be wasting our money, to get a bride and groom
champagne thing. It was the night we got married, she said, "What, are you
nuts, you're gonna spend that kind of money?" We were gonna spend like $30.
JJ: Where were you?
TW: In Watts, in L.A., about 1am. She said don't do it, and I did.
JJ: Did it say "groom" in black, or in white?
TW: "Groom", just like this in white. You know, bride, groom. Kathleen
calls it "blind gloom." The bride and groom are from the cake. They gave us
a little bag, too, that had a novel in it called 'The Vanishing Bride', a
tampax, a couple of rubbers, you know, some Snowy bleach.
JJ: Come on!
TW: To wash out, so you start clean, as a couple. It was nice. It was like
your trouble bag. In this bag is everything you'll ever need to stay
together.
~ A Few of Tom's Memories ~
TW: I had a midget prostitute climb up on a barstool and sit in my lap when
I was about 18 in Tijuana. I drank with her for about an hour. It was
something. Changed me. Tender, very tender. It was like I didn't go off to
the room with her. She just sat in my lap.
JJ: Have you ever been arrested in Mexico?
TW: Oh many times, yeah. Bought my way out. As a kid, as a teenager down
there raising hell. It was such a place of total abandon and lawlessness, it
was like a Western town, going back 200 years. It was such a, mud streets,
the church bells, the goats, the mud, the lurid, torrid signs. It was a
wonderland, really, for me, and it changed me. I used to go down there for
haircuts with my dad, and he would go into the bars and drink, and I would
sit on those stools with him and have a special Coke.
JJ: What do you mean special Coke?
TW: You know, just a Coca-Cola with some lemon juice in it, a cherry. But I
had a lot of fun, saw a lot of things down there that stayed with me.
Mexican carnivals are the best. You find the rides are driven by car engines
that are mounted on just these wood blocks. And old guy, mentally ill,
covered with tattoos, drinking, running a stick shift on an old truck motor.
Laughing, speeding up and slowing down.
JJ: Where else have you been arrested? Of course in L.A.
TW: L.A. many times, yeah. Once I was jumped by four plain-clothes
policemen. They all looked like they were from Iowa, wearing corduroy Levi
jackets, tennis shoes, off duty. Grabbed me and a buddy of mine, threw us
into the back of a Toyota pickup with guns to our temples. Guy says, "Do you
know what one of these things does to your head when you fire it at close
range?" He said, "Your head will explode like a cantaloupe." I thought
about that. I was very still. They marched us down to the car, threw us in
the back. I thought they were going to take us out to a vacant lot and shoot
us in the head. They took us to the station where we spent the night. We'd
been kind of mouthing off. But they were real belligerent, they'd taken over
the tables of some people that we knew at the restaurant. They'd bullied
their way into a table. We let 'em know that we didn't think it was the kind
of thing that we do around here, and they didn't like that. Now I'm trying
to learn how to be invisible. I haven't been pulled over since I moved out
of L.A. I think it is possible to be invisible, certainly more in an area
like this than it is in Los Angeles or New York City.
JJ: Any other strange memories?
TW: Well, I bought some coke one night about four in the morning from a guy
in an apartment building in Miami, real down apartment, and he had a gunshot
wound in his chest and he was bleeding through the bandage, you know, and we
were counting out the money on a glass table and he was, he kept (grabbing
for his shoulder), and that was a really scary night. And the lighting in
there was like whoa! God! All low light, desk light, nothing above the
knees. The place was like a black swimming pool at night. This was some
hellish scene. Somebody had a phone number, and it was after a concert, and
we had to drive over there. Real gangster stuff. Y'know, with a gun on the
table and everything. Bad Scene: Black guy with suspenders and a terrible
wound. "No cops, no cops, no doctors. I'll ride it out." But you're burnin'
up, you're runnin' a 106, it's off the map, I can't even record your fuckin'
fever it's so high! "No cops." That could be the third scene in 'They All
Died Singing'.
~ Tom and Jim take a drive ~
JJ: (Car interior) What's that instrument in your studio that looks like a
vacuum cleaner with horns attached to it?
TW: Airhorn from a train.
JJ: It's one chord?
TW: One chord, yeah. I pick up junk when I find it. I wanna get a thing
that I can do a stick sound with like eight sticks mounted on a frame,
almost like a pitchfork, only the forks would be wood, and on a spring base,
so that when you hit it against the ground you get a flam, a stick flam of
eight characters. You get the clack, clack, clack, but you'd be able to do
it with just one stick, hitting the stick and hitting the sound of eight
sticks. I dunno...
JJ: And that metal frame with the metal pieces on it that you were playing
yesterday?
TW: The conundrum.
JJ: The conundrum? It's something you built?
TW: No, Serge Etienne, a guy that lives right here. (points out the car
window)
JJ: In fact is that Serge right there?
TW: That's Serge.
JJ: The guy in the t-shirt?
TW: Yeah...
JJ: He's got some motor bikes back there, too.
TW: Yeah, he drives motorcycles. He created a car out of a motorbike. He
built a car frame around a...motorcycle. Out of fiberglass and styrofoam,
and it's very light. It looks like those cars that we saw at the carnival
the other night going around on the little track.
JJ: And the conundrum...did you find those metal pieces and have him make
it for you, or did he build the instrument himself?
TW: He built it and gave it to me as a gift. I said I need some sounds I
can use in the studio that are just metal sounds, a variety and range of
vibrations I can use. It really does sound like a jail door closing if you
hit it right.
JJ: Yeah. It sounded amazing. So many different sounds out of it. You
have several accordions.
TW: One that Roberto Benigni gave me. I don't really play accordion. I
can play one-handed passages, with the left hand, but the button side is,
uh, I'm lost.
JJ: It always seemed real complicated to me.
TW: I always remember that accordion player in 'Amarcord' at the end,
remember that blind accordion player on the beach?
JJ: Yeah.
TW: The way he played and threw his head back, the little smoked glasses.
JJ: Roberto taught himself to play but he taught himself wrong, so now he's
been going to a teacher for a few years trying to correct himself. I think
you have a little (bandoneon) in your house, too. A little squeeze box?
TW: Concertina. Bandoneon I don't have.
JJ: You have a harmonium, right? That was in the studio.
TW: I have several.
JJ: Those are beautiful. You have a Mellotron, and of course, the
Chamberlain 2000.
TW: Ah, the Chamberlain. It has a full sound effects bank that's
thrilling. It has the sound of Superman leaving the window. It has storms.
It has wind, rain and thunder. There are three keys right next to each
other. What I have is a prototype, so its got whatever he discovered. In
fact on some of 'em even, at the end of the sample you hear, "Okay, that's
enough." You hear the engineer.
JJ: Seriously? Where did you find it?
TW: I bought it from three surfers who lived in Westwood who had a full
state of the art room filled with every current -- they had decambodeizers
--
JJ: Deneutralizers.
TW: They had the Tascam 299 with a 300 count back --
JJ: With a hertz shifter.
TW: Yeah.
JJ: Hooker Headers on it.
TW: They were laughing at the Chamberlain. I would have none of it.
JJ: Ridiculing it?
TW: Ridiculing it. I said, "I will take this from you." I got it for
three grand.
JJ: They know who you were?
TW: No. I was just a guy. They were playing it and laughing at all the
sounds it made, and I let them laugh knowing it would soon be mine and I
would treat it better.
JJ: They probably laughed that you paid that much for it.
TW: Yeah.
JJ: Little did they know. But then, they'll never know.
TW: They'll never know. It's got a variety of trains, it's a sound that
I've become obsessed with, getting an orchestra to sound like a train,
actual train sounds. I have a guy in Los Angeles who collected not only the
sound of the Stinson band organ, which is a carnival organ that's in all the
carousels, the sound from that we used on 'Night on Earth', but he also has
pitched four octaves of train whistles so that I can play the train whistle
organ, which sounds like a calliope. It's a great sound. You know, a lot
of the first, earliest experiments in sound, in creating illusions with
sound and manipulating sound happened with mediums that created this matrix
of pipe configurations in their homes. Mediums that were doing seance work,
contacting the dead, and they would outfit the room where they would conduct
the seance with this whole matrix of pipes and things they could send voices
into and have come out in unusual places. All of a sudden the sound of an
old man snoring would come from under your chair. And you're in a dark room
holding hands, and this was all an elaborate ruse to convince you that the
spirits were visiting the room.
So a lot of the sounds that we know, the things we can do in the studio
now, with chaning the shape of the voice, or the resonance, or the tonality
or the frequency response, or the EQ of it, was first explored with these
pipes. You'd hear a woman singing, and it's coming from behind a picture
that's on the wall. The pipe just came up through the wall, there's a hole
in the wall, the pipe came out and the sound came out.
Who would ever think that anybody would ever do that? So they actually
believed that they were hearing the voice of their mother, or all of a
sudden they're hearing a woman singing, or...Oh shit the car is smoking!
It's on fire, Jim.
JJ: From the exhaust or from the engine?
TW: I don't know, we better pull over.
**the end**
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