CAN YOU EVEN FREAKING STAND HOW COOL YOU ARE???

tina says it better than I ever could. I'm so thrilled for you, Cor and Hec. You each have spicy musical brains. I admire those two artists fervently, both as performers and for their brilliant writing. Equalling me extra antsy to dive in to such tasty concoctions.

I'm about to bust here at my desk suppressing the whooping crane dance I'm longing to do.

Thanks, everyone! I'm so psyched I don't know what to say.

Man, David, I'm thrilled that you're getting to write your book, b/c Swordfishtrombones is one bad-ass album, and I'm relieved because none of the (far, far better) writers on my music geek board made the cut and I've been thinking for the last 2 days I would have died of embarrassment if you didn't get the nod. And fuck yeah, you should try to meet Tom Waits. Drink beer with the man. Just don't take him fishing in Jamaica.

As to the questions, I'm planning to finish my draft by November. Since I work for the State Lege, I'm going to be too busy to think between January and June of next year. And yes, I intend to interview as many major players in the making of that album as possible, including Richard Thompson, Linda Thompson Kenis, Joe Boyd, Gerry Rafferty, and anyone else who'll talk with me. I'm specifically trying to model my approach on the informative model of the Kinks & NMH books.

And lord, no, I'm not cool. I'm specifically intending to exploit a couple of my heroes over the most painful period of their lives. "So, let's talk about when Linda got drunk on stage and smashed a glass at your feet. How did that make you feel, Mr. 'Forkbendingly Talented' Guy? Did you feel a slight bit of regret over dumping her just before you started an 11-month tour together, perhaps?"

Juicy question, Cor!

I will be using "forkbendingly talented" the first chance I get. I hope you don't mind.

Oh, that's Linda's description, not mine. Please use it often!

I don't think I directly answered the question, but yeah, I intend to travel to do these interviews. Richard Thompson lives in LA now, and I think Linda lives in Boston, although Joe Boucher would have to confirm or deny that impression. I don't know anything about the money.

He's been in Santa Monica for years, but I thought she lived in London. As of the Fashionably Late tour she still lived there. I'm not having any luck finding anything more recent. I'll bookmark the interviews I find & send them to you. Love this from a KGSR interview:

Q: You've been married to Steve Kenis, who is a motion picture agent, for about 20 years. How did he feel about this reunion and the fact that you use your surname (as) your stage name still?

A: Oh, well, he's in the movie business so he completely understands that. He's from Hollywood. He's a Los Angeles person. I think if he thought I was going to sell records, he'd let me remarry Richard.

Unfortunately the link to page 2 is broken & none of the permutations I tried managed to find it. Know anyone at the station? Tell them their state funding is dependent on fixing the link, or even better on reposting the audio.

I would like you to ask one or both of them the following: "How close to killing Gerry Rafferty did you come when you heard the tapes?" Even he couldn't fuck up "Walking on a Wire" but the others I heard are terrible.

And yes, I intend to interview as many major players in the making of that album as possible, including Richard Thompson, Linda Thompson Kenis, Joe Boyd, Gerry Rafferty, and anyone else who'll talk with me.

I guess I should note here that my editor at Routledge on the Lost in the Grooves book, Richard Carlin, toured with Richard & Linda Thompson on the Shoot Out The Lights Tour. (Accordion, I think. Maybe concertina.)

eta: Googling indicates concertina.

Richard left Routledge but I could probably track him down for you.

Here's his concertina website with an email connection, Corwood.

He's a real nice guy, and I'm sure he'd be willing to answer some questions and maybe give you some connections as well. Use my name, and point him at the High Hat so he knows what you're on about. He'll like the High Hat.

Just catching up here, so chiming in with the congrats David & Hayden!

And even though you may have heard about the RFP elsewhere, I distinctly remember posting about it here, so I am going to take partial credit for your successes.

And even though you may have heard about the RFP elsewhere, I distinctly remember posting about it here, so I am going to take partial credit for your successes.

I think I saw it here first, though Kim notified me too. So claim away!

For those curious, here's my actual pitch. You can see that board assisted as well:

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Swordfishtrombones doesn't lack for fans or critical cachet, but it's gotten a meager share of ink over the years. For a variety of reasons, Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years drew more press than the record where Tom Waits radically reinvented himself, and reshaped the musical landscape. Swordfishtrombones stretched so far beyond the expectations of anybody who had followed his career that there didn't even seem to be words to describe it. He pawned his tenor sax for a bass marimba.

And yet, Swordfishtrombones wasn't unprecedented. There are hints in his earlier work that point toward it. There are fascinating parallels with artists and musicians as various as Joseph Cornell, Conlon Nancarrow, Edward Gorey (and the Poet's Theater he did with Frank O'Hara and Alison Lurie), George Herriman, Moondog, and Edgar Ulmer. Swordfishtrombones benefits tremendously from hearing it in context, from knowing the range of Waits' references (literary, cinematic, theatrical and musical), and how he pulled those elements into something wholly original.

There's a lazy tradition of Waits reportage that paddles along in his wake, quoting his shaggy dog tales, and rolling over for his sly, evasive charm. He's copy on the hoof. This approach has left a lot untold. His peer group through the early seventies included a number of vintage pop diletantes, all swimming upstream against the hippie effluent. At that point his career looked similar to that of Dan Hicks, Leon Redbone, Randy Newman and even Tiny Tim. His early beat/jazz/Bukowski persona (and full commitment to that lifestyle) became an unexamined endpoint. Everybody underestimated Tom Waits.

Two entwined narratives run through the creation of Swordfishtrombones and will form the backbone of the book. As the seventies ended, Waits felt increasingly constrained and trapped by his persona and career. He became bitter and desperately unhappy, so he moved to NYC in 1979 to change his life. It wasn’t working. At that low point he got the call that changed everything. Francis Ford Coppola tapped Tom to write the score for One From the Heart. Waits moved back to Los Angeles to work at Zoetrope's Hollywood studio for the next 18 months. He cleaned up, disciplined himself as a songwriter and musician, collaborated closely with Coppola and met a script analyst named Kathleen Brennan – his "only true love."

They married within two months at the Always and Forever Yours Wedding Chapel in Watts at Two O'Clock in the morning. Swordfishtrombones was the first thing he recorded after his marriage, and it was at her urging that he made a record that conceded exactly nothing to his record label, or the critics, or his fans. There aren't many love stories where the happy ending sounds like a paint can tumbling in an empty cement mixer. (Okay, or as spare and beautiful as "Johnsburg, Illinois.")

Kathleen Brennan was sorely disappointed in Tom Waits’ record collection. She expanded his musical range exponentially. She forced him out of his comfortable jazzbo pocket to take in foreign filmscores and German theater and Asian percussion. These two stories of a man creating that elusive American second act, and also finding the perfect collaborator in his wife will give the book a natural forward drive.

For this book I'd consciously avoid stale Waitsisms about his "gravelly voice." If you dropped a cherry bomb down a fiberglass clown’s painted mouth, that would sound like Tom Waits. But that’s just one of the voices he inhabits. There’s also his Prince fan's falsetto and his gargle of glass and turpentine shaken in a bullhorn and his confidential wiseguy aside and his Beefheart bellow and his pensive whisper. (continued...)

( continues...) Musically his voice is limited. As an instrument to express character and language? It's vast.

I'd explore Waits' language, which is distinctively allusive, playful, and mythic. He has a unique gift for braiding metaphors out of nursery rhymes and carny barker spiels and blues tropes and Mississippi brags . On Swordfishtrombones he traded in his Edward Hopper imagery for something closer to Brueghel. If Brueghel worked for the WPA.

Tom Waits writes famously beautiful melodies and lyrics. Without abandoning either talent, on this record he built a sexy, lurching, inexorable groove chassis out of washtubs and wagon wheels and bedsprings. He's a serious rhythm slut. This needs to be told.

In the seventies there might have been such a thing as a casual Tom Waits fan. Not any more. The music demands more. You're either all the way in, or you don't bother. Since the Frank Trilogy Tom Waits has established himself as something more than a gifted songwriter. He's become an icon to musicians and music fans, a figure of uncompromised vision and integrity. This Tom Waits is capable of a towering snit. He'll get litigious on your ass. For all the romance of failure he once courted, his cranky integrity wouldn't allow his soul to be sold for Fritos. He's also deeply, bountifully loyal to his friends. His rare performances over the last decade have almost all been benefits or memorials. There's an unyielding spine in his sloppy posture; he's a scarecrow that spins in the wind, but won't fall over. He was nobody's drunk, nobody's joke, nobody's shill. Morrisey and Dylan may be the only other songwriters who inspire such obsessive devotion.

I don't see a particular need to interview Tom Waits; there is a vast store of Waits interviews to reference, all carefully maintained online by his devotees. Though if given the opportunity I would be compelled to ask these three questions:

1. Shane MacGowan - blow-dried prettyboy or countrypolitan crooner?

2. Bob Dylan once described himself as some combination of Sleepy John Estes and Mortimer Snerd. What combination of puppet and blues musician best characterizes your music?

3. Interviews have typically described your apparel as "shabby," "rumpled," and "non-descript" - completely ignoring your fashion innovations with hairnets, moustache wax in the eyebrows and alligator shoes. Do you feel like you've been misunderstood as a fashion icon?