I loved doing the "sometimes I get fries", but it was entirely the ad agency's idea. The blues riff for the main part, on the other hand, was all my doing. Thanks.

The blues riff for the main part, on the other hand, was all my doing. Thanks.

That was hella impressive. It sounded very Hendrix, really.

The blues riff for the main part, on the other hand, was all my doing.

That was excellent. Both ads are really great, Jon. I can't wait to see them on TV and yell "I know him!" at people!!

Also yay for Emmett's first concert. Mine was Herbie Hancock in Tokyo. Which is kind of strange - but we were right up front and it did give me a craving for live music that has never died.

Wow. Such a shame we can no longer get new output from this man. Wow.

Nick Drake, much like Elliot Smith and Jeff Buckley, are artists whose fame grew upon their deaths, but whose music remains timeless.

Jon, I finally managed to watch your White Castle ads. They're fantastic! I have to send the links to my dad, who has been threatening to build himself a theremin for years.

Thanks, Jilli!

Actually, I've been meaning to write to you. I finally got a copy of your story in the Toronto paper. Email me your snail mail address and I'll send it to you.

Random Tom Waits Notes Since They're Rambling Around In My Head

"Walking Spanish" is the same as being frog-marched. The guy walking spanish in the song of the same name is being lead to his execution.

"Black Mariah" is generally a slang term for a paddy wagon, though in this song it has the less common meaning of a horse drawn hearse.

The "Washburn jail" in "16 Shots From A Thirty-Ought Six" is a Washburn guitar. The character in the song is chasing a crow and intends to stuff it into his guitar and play the guitar so loud it drives the crow insane.

Tom Waits is famous for resisting his songs being used in commercials and has litigated successfully many times to prevent this. He's been very outspoken on the subject. However, he did do one commercial himself. (The circumstances were that he had just broken from his manager, discovered he had no money and had a child on the way and wanted to move to NYC.)

The stage version of Franks Wild Years was produced by Steppenwolf and directed by Gary Sinise.

One of Tom's regular bass players, Greg Cohen was (is?) married to the sister of Tom's wife. In other words, Greg is Tom's brother in law.

The other bass player Tom regularly uses, Larry Taylor, used to be in Canned Heat.

The movie Big Time was filmed at the Warfield in San Francisco (where I just saw Iggy) and the Wiltern in LA.

The character in "Frank's Wild Years" was originally Frank Leroux, but became Frank O'Brien by the time the play was produced.

The working title for Heart Attack and Vine was White Spades.

The working title for Rain Dogs was Evening Train Wrecks.

This may be obvious to everybody else, but I didn't realize that wasn't Tom Waits on the cover of Rain Dogs until I started researching this book.

At one point, Tom was going to write the words for Guy Peelaert's book on Las Vegas that was his follow up to Rock Dreams. Ultimately, however, Michael Herr wrote the words for The Big Room.

Though the three albums Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years are usually lumped together as the Frank Trilogy, the character Frank doesn't appear on Rain Dogs. That's because Tom was recording Rain Dogs at the same time he was writing/producing the play of Franks Wild Years and wanted to keep them as separate projects.

Tom hadn't actually listened to much Kurt Weill at the time he did Swordfishtrombones. It was only after people compared it to Weill that he started to listen to him more, and you see the effect on later songs like "Blow Wind Blow."

Tom wrote most of the songs for Swordfishtrombones when he was on his honeymoon with Kathleen in Tralee, Ireland. This was about March of 1981. It was a delayed honeymoon tacked onto a European tour since they'd been married in August of 1980. The songs weren't recorded until August 1982, and the record wasn't released until 1983.

In the second half of 1982 Tom recorded Swordfishtrombones, had his first child, broke with his management, broke with his record company and moved to NYC. Busy time.

When he moved to NYC he shared a studio/practice space with John and Evan Lurie. John is, of course, the leader of the Lounge Lizards. Evan - though less known - writes beautiful tango melodies, which I think probably influenced Tom.

In February 1989 Tom was in a play by Thomas Babe called Demon Wine in Los Angeles with Carol Kane, Bud Cort, Bill Pullman and Philip Baker Hall.

In all of Tom's lyrics, San Francisco only gets mentioned once, but East St. Louis has multiple mentions.

Tom hardly ever writes about Mexico, which is odd because he grew up around San Diego and the Southland and his dad was a Spanish teacher and they listened to mariachi and ranchera all the time and his dad used to take him to Tiajuana to get his hair cut.

His parents divorced when he was 10 and he didn't really see his dad after that.

Around age 14 he (continued...)

( continues...) suffered from hypersensitivity to sound. It was almost like his brain lost its ability to filter sounds and even the most innocuous sounds like a hand waving in the air, or brushing on cloth would overwhelm like a mighty roar. It would come on him in the night and he was afraid he was losing his mind. He outgrew it.

"Romeo is Bleeding" was inspired by a real incident where he went to buy cocaine after a concert in Miami and the dealer conducted the transaction while he was gut-shot.

The music for Alice was stolen from Tom and he had to buy it back from the thieves years later in order to put the album out. It was a whole shady cloak and dagger type transaction.

Similarly, a lot of the songs from Orphans had to be bought from a Russian bootlegger.

Tom was at Wondercon last year because his son is a big comics fan. He was standing right behind Sean Maher.

Tom's wife courted him by playing Let's Get Lost - they'd drive around and have adventures. She'd hop into bulldozers parked at construction sites and drive them around. (Tom's said a lot of aprocryphal things about his wife, but the heavy machinery operating recurs enough that I think this one is true.)

mr. flea was shown the White Castle ads and the Video Killed the Radio Star performance, and now he insists that Jon needs to put up a Youtube video of himself performing "My Humps" on the theremin.

Just throwin' that out there for you.

I think that "Push It" would work better on the theremin. IJS.