Tom Waits

Paste: Interesting menu here … Like that old National Lampoon fake Chinese menu, with Twice Chewed Lobster in Hissing Sauce and Sweet ’n’ Sour Land Shrimp …

Tom Waits: Nobody chews my lobster but me, I’ll tell ya. But you’ve heard about regular people who’ve been in car accidents or suffered a stroke or something, or had some kind of injury at work, like a blow to the head. And as a result of the injury, they are now gourmands. They crave only the most exotic foods. And they’re usually working-class people, so all of a sudden at the dinner table, you’ve got Fred Flintstone getting very effete, until his whole family doesn’t know who in the hell he is. They’re like, “What—did you have your brain replaced?”

P: This first question is rather odd, but bear with me. Have you ever seen the Joe Dante film Gremlins? Or met Dante at all? Because there’s actually a Nighthawks-era Tom Waits gremlin in the film, murmuring to himself in the gremlin bar. Or at least it looks that way.

TW: No! Really? I dunno—I probably have seen it somewhere, ’cause I’ve got kids. But I’ve never sat down and watched it front to back.

P: Well, that shoots down my whole theory.

TW: Backup! Do you have backup for this?

P: I’m smarter than I look. I’m curious about how your persona—or early perception of it, at least—has become intertwined with pop culture.

TW: Gee, I dunno … That’s a tough one. My own personality intertwined with pop culture … Oh, the character. Yeah. But I don’t have a lotta contact with it—I’m on the road a lot. But you mean unshaven, cigarette, eggs and whiskey, sleeping ’til three in the afternoon? I don’t know where that fits into pop culture, because I’m not really an expert on pop culture. But it’s kinda like a Cantinflas character. But it’s a ventriloquist act, ya know. There’s me, and then there’s that. And that’s not me.

P: I’m left with all these remarkable visuals of you, though. Like you working that chewing gum as the diner guy in Rumblefish, saying “Think about it—35 summers …” and trying to keep Rusty James in line.

TW: Rumblefish—I love that picture. Yeah, that was a good moment, really cool. Francis just said “Write your own dialog.” He says, “I’m not even gonna tell ya what to say—man, this is your diner, this is your apron, your spatula. I’m not gonna give you any lines. You just make it all up.” So it was fun. And that’s what I’d rather do in every picture, ’cause I can’t remember lines. … But the “35 summers” thing—it was because I was 35, I’d had 35 summers.

P: And then there’s the image of you as Renfield in Dracula, eating what appeared to be real bugs.

TW: Oh, yeah—I did eat bugs! They have a bug wrangler on every film, ya know. If there are bugs in the movie, there’s a bug wrangler. And they were mealworms. Protein, ya know. But I’ve eaten earthworms as a child.

P: But mealworms have huge pincing mandibles. They bite back.

TW: So you have to kill ’em with your jaws. You have to kill ’em first. And the wranglers don’t like it, ’cause these are their little actors. “Floyd! He’s been with me for 30 years! In the name of God, what have you done?” I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a bug wrangler on a film, but I found out.

P: When did you first start to realize that you’d formed your own stark visual identity?

TW: Gee, I dunno. But like any business, whether you’re a fisherman or you repair refrigerators or you’re an airline pilot or a lion tamer, at a certain point you realize you have to ask yourself a question—“Can I parlay this into a business? Can I make money off this?” And at a certain point you realize—yeah, I can take this somewhere. But it’s always a gamble. What I was really pursuing was my dream of it all, about being in music. I was in music, ya know. The way it appears visually, or whatever perspective from other people’s vantage point is one thing. But mine’s from the inside. I have all these heroes, and I love music and I wanna be a part of it. I’ve been inspired, and now hopefully someday I’ll get an opportunity to inspire somebody else. And that’s how it works, really. People who make songs don’t go to school to learn how to do it. You sit down next to the record player, and you write down the words and try and figure out these changes, and that’s how everybody does it. And as far as whether you think you can make it, well, there are levels of “making it.” For me, I was happy to be making another record, going on the road, putting the band together and doing it.

P: But you’ve always understood the importance of other art besides music—books, films, paintings. And you have to seek them out. As a kid back in Indiana, I learned that early—we really had to fight for culture out there.

TW: That’s why so many American presidents come from the Midwest—because it’s so flat, they have to dream. Roy Orbison? I said, “Where’d you get that voice, man? What—did you listen to opera all your life?” And he goes “Nah, man—if there was a dance a hundred miles away on Saturday, I heard the sound of the dance coming across the plains, and by the time the voice reached me, it was all watery. So when I was a kid, that’s the way I wanted to sound, like those dances sounded.” … I thought that was a fascinating little anecdote …