Tom Waits: Georgia Lee

Tom Waits' 1999 album Mule Variations

Birthday greetings to Tom Waits, who celebrates No. 62 today.

If you’re wondering why Waits recently released his first new album in five years, the answer is on his website: Said Waits: “There’s only one reason why you write new songs: You get sick of the old songs.”

Waits might, even if his audience doesn’t. For that we can be thankful, because a new album means a new round of interviews, and a new round of witticisms. Waits’ website even has a listing of  his best through the years; some, but not all, of those that follow are from there:

• On being inducted into the Hall of Fame: “They say I have no hits and that I’m difficult to work with . . . like it’s a bad thing.” (New York Times)
• On corporate influence in rock and roll: “If Michael Jackson wants to work for Pepsi, why doesn’t he just get himself a suit and an office in their headquarters and be done with it?” (wikipedia)
• On helping his kids with their homework: “The other day I overheard my older kids talking to my younger boy and they were saying, “Don’t ever, don’t ever ask Dad to help you with your homework.’ They said I made up a war once.” (Tomwaits.com)
• On giving up drinking: “I didn’t know what to do with my hands.” (Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, npr.org, wbur.org)
• On his parents: “My father was an exhaust manifold and my mother was a tree.” (David Letterman interview; Tomwaits.com)

If there was a They Said It for musicians, as there is for sports figures in Sports Illustrated, Waits would be omnipresent.

(That’s before we even delve into his lyrics: “Don’t you know there ain’t no devil, that’s just God when he’s drunk;” or “If I exorcise my devils. Well my angels may leave too.” or “I don’t have a drinking problem ‘cept when I can’t get a drink.”)

If Oscar Wilde’s wit is present in music today, it’s best evoked by Tom Waits, in the voice famously described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding “”like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.”

And yet Waits can use that voice to  emote vulnerability, too, or tenderness, as he does in I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You or Little Trip To Heaven (On The Wings Of Your Love).

The New York Times once called Waits the “poet of the outcasts.” Thankfully, there’s a whole lot of outcasts for him to reach.

“I guess I’ve always lived upside down,” Waits told Terry Gross in an interview this fall with NPR’s Fresh Air. “I want things I can’t have. My wife, actually, thinks that I have a syndrome, it’s called reality distortion field. You know, it’s kind of like drugs, only you can’t come back from it, you know. Reality distortion is almost a permanent condition. So I guess to a certain degree, I did that with myself.”

sources: wikipedia.org, Tomwaits.com, npr.org, wbur.org

Rickie Lee Jones: On Saturday afternoons in 1963

Rickie Lee Jones' 2003 album The Evening of My Best Day

Birthday greetings to singer/songwriter Rickie Lee Jones, who celebrates No. 57 today.

She’s more than three decades past Chuck E.’s In Love, but no less cool than when she posed for that first album cover, beret on tilted head, mini-cigar in mouth, a few strands of hair falling over her eye. And though Chuck E. might not have really been in love with the little girl singing this song, a lot of album-buyers were. Including this one.

(According to wikipedia, in real life Chuck E. wasn’t in love with Rickie Lee, who added that line to the end of the song. Literary license).

Over the years she’s been compared to various artists, but none fit. Only Rickie Lee could make music sound like a poetry reading (or vice versa), only Rickie Lee could make one note sound so soft and the next so sultry, only Rickie Lee could make you cry to Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying. If On The Road was a generation later, Kerouac would have been writing paens to Rickie Lee Jones.

“She’s got a smoky saxophone voice, and she also sounds like a little girl, and she’s dealing with very dark things. I find it an irresistible combination,” Emilylou Harris told the New York Times in 2008.

(On a personal note, I bought a CD player a decade after mostly everyone else only because I couldn’t get Jones’ 1993 album Traffic From Paradise on vinyl; I spent $10 on the CD and $150 on the player, and still consider the $10 the money better spent. Rickie Lee’s Stewart’s Coat, off that same album, was one of two songs that was part of my wedding; by the time she got to Just give me many chances, I’ll see you through it all, Just give me time to learn to crawl, the groom’s eyes were moist).

Her life in song and out is well-chronicled — from running away from home to Chuck E. Weiss to Tom Waits to the substance abuse to motherhood to today. Here’s hoping she remembers the words she penned  so long ago for that very first album’s On Saturday Afternoons in 1963 (link below):

So hold on to your special friend
Here, you’ll need something to keep her in:
“Now you stay inside this foolish grin . . .”
Though any day your secrets end
Then again
Years may go by

Sources: rickieleejones.com, nytimes.com, vanityfair.com, wikipedia.org

Miles Davis: All Blues

Miles Davis' 1986 album Tutu

Remembering trumpeter Miles Davis on the day of his death from pneumonia 20 years ago.

Davis was as full of contradictions as he was musical ideas: personally churlish, he was supportive and encouraging of the apprentices in his band; disdainful of critics, he was pained by their criticisms; reared on bebop, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His album, Kind of Blue, was saluted on its 50th anniversary by Congress by a 409-0 vote; we’re guessing there weren’t 409 members who were familiar with it.

The next time you need to be reminded that people are complicated, remember Miles. When he turned his back on audiences, we can only assume he meant it.

Trumpeter heir Wynton Marsalis told The Independent in 2003 Davis was “a genius who decided to go into rock, and was on the bandstand looking like, basically, a buffoon.” Davis had been dead 12 years, but his reaction probably wouldn’t have been any different than it was 17 years previously, according to the Telegraph, when Marsalis climbed on the stage as Davis performed at the Vancouver Jazz Festival: “That motherf—-r’s not sharing the stage with me.”

 ”There was a classic competition between an older man and a younger man who is more idealistic. By that stage he’d given up jazz and was playing pop and rock, trying to stay pertinent,” Marsalis told the Telegraph’s Peter Culshaw. “He had released a large portion of his integrity. He knew it. We both knew it.”

We’ll see if Marsalis feels any differently a quarter-century hence when he’s 65.

We know this: asking where Miles Davis’ place is in jazz is a little like asking where Ty Cobb, the baseball player Davis’ personality most closely resembles, ranks in the Hall of Fame. It’s not if he’s in the first class, but whether he’s at the head of it.

Because there aren’t many jazz musicians whose death will evoke an editorial reaction from The New York Times as Davis’ did.

From the Times, three days after Davis’ death: “Unless someone soon emerges from nowhere, the trumpeter Miles Davis will be remembered as the most influential jazz artist of the second half of the 20th century. Mr. Davis remained iconoclastic through four decades as instrumentalist, composer and band leader. He felt compelled to change (a “curse,” he called it) and when he did, the whole of jazz often changed with him . . . Miles Davis is dead at 65. One of his albums was called “Miles Ahead.” And he was: an American original, as cool as they come.”

Davis was 65 when he died.

The link below is to Davis’ composition All Blues from the 1959 release Kind of Blue; it’s a live 1964 version with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams (there is, unfortunately, a slight skip or two).

Sources: telegraph.co.uk, independent.co.uk, wikipedia.org