1,000 places to go with her
Tom Waits. By © Lynn Goldsmith/CORBIS.
What I like most about “Frank’s Wild Years,” is what a clever little liar it is and how — like all clever little liars — its lies reveal so many larger truths. Truths not just about this couple, Frank and his wife, but also about the city they live in and the very American dreams they dream and the very American nightmares they have. We saw how that all works in the last post.So, it tickles me to no end, makes me so happy (no really), to know that behind this sordid little tale of fatal domestic and urban misery there is something rather…marvelous. As I alluded to last time, that something marvelous is the relationship and creative partnership between Tom Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan. The two met in Los Angeles on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s film One from The Heart in 1980 (Waits was working on the soundtrack and Brennan was a script analyst) and they were married shortly later. Out of their early relationship Swordfishtrombones was born. Which, in a way, kind of makes “Frank’s Wild Years” their song.
Kathleen Brennan and Tom Waits
And, indeed, many of the things that Waits has had to say about his wife have become almost if not as well known as the things Waits had to say about Frank’s wife, but for very different reasons.
We’ve been working together since Swordfish…I’m the prospector, she’s the cook. She says, “You bring it home, I’ll cook it up.” I think we sharpen each other like knives. She has a fearless imagination. She writes lyrics that are like dreams. And she puts the heart into all my things. She’s my true love. There’s no one I trust more with music, or life…Most of the significant changes I went through musically and as a person began when we met. She’s the person by which I measure all others. She’s who you want with you in the foxhole. She doesn’t like the limelight, but she’s the incandescent presence on everything we work on together.
But wait, there’s more.
She’s a shiksa goddess and a trapeze artist, all of that. She can fix the truck. Expert on the African violet and all that. She’s out of this world. I don’t know what to say. I’m a lucky man. She has a remarkable imagination. And that’s the nation where I live. She’s bold, inventive, and fearless. That’s who you want to go into the woods with, right? Somebody who finishes your sentences for you.
Considering the source of those sentences, that’s quite a compliment. And, in fact, the partnership between Waits and Brennan is one of the legendary greats in American music.
Waits has collaborated with Brennan on almost all his projects since Swordfishtrombones, including their work together on the album and play Franks Wild Years, for which they co-wrote most of the songs. Together, the album and the play explore what happens to Frank, and more generally to guys like Frank, mapping their move from small towns to big cities and how they begin to mirror the corruption around them.Frank ends up a psychopath, but one who is redeemed in the end, although the redemption is pure Waits. Or, rather, pure Waits and Brennan. Sticking to the Hollywood theme, Waits describes Frank’s journey as a cross between It’s a Wonderful Life and Eraserhead — in other words, Frank is a man who is redeemed only by going through a particularly surreal kind of hell. Capra and Lynch, Waits and Brennan.
As a musical, Franks Wild Years made its premiere in 1986 at the Steppenwolf Theater Company, directed by Gary Sinese and starring Waits himself as Frank and several other characters. Here is Waits playing a version of the preacher trying to save Frank’s soul in the song “Way Down in the Hole”:
“Way Down in the Hole,” Tom Waits
> lyrics
Many readers will recognize this song as the theme for the hit HBO series The Wire. A different recording of the song was used each season, with versions, in order, by The Blind Boys of Alabama, Waits, The Neville Brothers, DoMaJe, and Steve Earle. (Season four’s version, performed by a group of Baltimore teenagers, was arranged and recorded specifically for the show.)
All five versions of “Way Down in the Hole” used for HBO’s The Wire
In essence, this makes “Way Down in the Hole,” a murder ballad 82 times over, which is the number of murders that take place in the series across its 64 episodes (all of which you can find collected, of course, on YouTube — yes, that is a link to a montage of every single murder in the series, be warned).
Of course, we can’t know if all the wonderful things Waits says about his partnership with his wife are true or not, although we do know that they are still married and still working together. And even if not, what of it? It’s a good story and we need good stories.
I feel like sometimes I have a map in my pocket that folds up and I pull it out and it’s bigger than the table, and there’s 1,000 places to go with her.
– Tom Waits speaking about his work with his wife
Given their story, I sometimes wonder what it must be like for Waits and Brennan to map things backwards — to go back from, say, each of those 82 murders in The Wire, tracing Frank’s struggles and demons in each of them and in the millions of people watching, and then from there to go back to Franks Wild Years, and back from there to the song that inspired it all, with its miserable little murder of a marriage, and then from there to find as the origin of it all one’s own long-lived and cherished relationship. And then to just pick up and start going, to hit the road working together again.I think it must be rather marvelous.
Tom Waits reading “The Laughing Heart,” a poem by
that Los Angeles misanthrope, Charles Bukowski
that Los Angeles misanthrope, Charles Bukowski