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In May 1977, Waits and close friend Chuck E. Weiss were arrested for fighting with police officers in a coffee shop. They were charged with two counts of disturbing the peace but were acquitted after the defense produced eight witnesses who refuted the police officers' account of the incident. In response, Waits sued the Los Angeles Police Department and five years later was awarded $7,500 in damages.
He changed the setlist for each performance; most of the songs chosen were from his two Island albums. In July 1978, Waits began the recording sessions for his album Blue Valentine. Part way through the sessions, he replaced his musicians in order to create a less jazz-oriented sound; for the album, he switched from a piano to an electric guitar as his main instrument. For the album's back cover, Waits used a picture of himself and Jones leaning against his car, a 1964 Ford Thunderbird, taken by Elliot Gilbert. From the album, Waits's first single was released, a performance of "Somewhere", from the musical "West Side Story", but it failed to chart.
The Black Rider, Bone Machine, and Alice: 1989–1998
Waits began touring and opening in America for such artists as Charlie Rich, Martha & The Vandellas and Frank Zappa. As the decade unfolded, Waits gained increasing critical respect and a loyal cult audience with his subsequent albums The Heart of Saturday Night ; Nighthawks at the Diner ; Small Change ; Foreign Affairs ; Blue Valentine and Heartattack and Vine . It was an incredibly prolific period for Waits, establishing his reputation as a visionary songwriter. The Tom Waits Library is the largest website where everything about Tom Waits can be found. The site contains 1,518 pages, 8,122 images, 337 interviews, all performances, all song lyrics, all official albums, unofficial albums, movies, plays, the musicians Waits worked with etc.
Hoskyns noted that Babenco's film put Waits "on the mainstream Hollywood map as a character actor". In Fall 1987, Waits and his family left New York and returned to Los Angeles, settling on Union Avenue. In summer 1988, he appeared as a hitman in Robert Dornhelm's film Cold Feet, filmed in Gallatin National Forest, and that year he provided his voice for Jarmusch's film Mystery Train. Lang by appearing in a "Black and White Night" at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel to celebrate the life of singer-songwriter Roy Orbison, of whom Waits was a fan.
Swordfishtrombones and New York City: 1980–1984
Waits has been determined to keep a distance between his public persona and his personal life. According to Hoskyns, Waits hides behind his persona, noting that "Tom Waits is as much of a character created for his fans as it is a real man". In Hoskyns's view, Waits's self-image is in part "a self-protective device, a screen to deflect attention".
1988 saw Waits contribute a cover of the song "Heigh Ho" in Hal Willner's Disney-themed album, Stay Awake. Returning to the U.S., he travelled to New Orleans to appear in Jarmusch's film, Down by Law. Jarmusch wrote Down by Law with Waits and Lurie in mind; they played two of the three main roles, with Roberto Benigni as the third.
Jazz Pros
Waits recorded his eighth studio album, Rain Dogs, at the RCA Studios in mid 1985. Waits called the album "kind of an interaction between Appalachia and Nigeria". Keith Richards played on several tracks; Richards later acknowledged Waits's encouragement of his first solo album, Talk is Cheap.
In 2004, Waits related that "Wilson is my teacher. There's nobody that's affected me that much as an artist". Waits was scheduled to write the music for the play, and at the suggestion of Allen Ginsberg, Waits and Wilson approached the Beat poet William S. Burroughs to write the play. To do this, they flew to Kansas to meet with Burroughs, who agreed to join their project. Waits travelled to Hamburg in May 1989 to work on the project, and was later joined there by Burroughs.
He developed a love of R&B and soul singers like Ray Charles, James Brown, and Wilson Pickett, as well as country music and Roy Orbison. Bob Dylan later became a strong influence, with Waits placing transcriptions of Dylan's lyrics on his bedroom walls. He was an avid watcher of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and The Twilight Zone. A number of events have been held for fans of Waits's work, such as "Waiting for Waits" in Mallorca and the "Straydogs Party" in Denmark. Various cabaret shows have been held devoted to Waits's songs, including Robert Berdahl's Warm Beer, Cold Women and Stewart D'Arrietta's Belly of a Drunken Piano. When the actor Robert Carlyle formed a theatre, he named it the Rain Dog Theatre after Waits's album.
Among the celebrities who have described themselves as Waits fans are Johnny Depp, John Oliver, Jordan Peterson, Jerry Hall, Megan Mullally, and Nick Offerman. In Britain, prominent figures who have described themselves as Waits fans include the historian Simon Schama, the writer Raymond Briggs, the presenter Graham Norton, and the actor Colin Firth. Bob Dylan, who was a major influence on the young Waits, stated that Waits was one of his "secret heroes". In 1989, Waits began planning a collaboration with Robert Wilson, a theatre director he had known throughout the 1980s.
Again produced and engineered by Howe , the recording was released as Nighthawks at the Diner in October 1975. The songs from both works later appeared on Alice and Blood Money, the albums Waits released in 2002. In the early-Seventies Tom Waits worked as a doorman at the Heritage in San Diego, a nightclub where artists of every genre performed.
On his return to Los Angeles, he joined his friend Chuck E. Weiss by moving into the Tropicana motel in West Hollywood, a place that already had an established reputation in rock music circles. He was living in what biographer Hoskyns later called a "pastiche of poverty"; Waits told the Los Angeles Times that "You almost have to create situations in order to write about them, so I live in a constant state of self-imposed poverty". Waits worked at Napoleone's pizza restaurant in National City, California, and both there and at a local diner developed an interest in the lives of the patrons, writing down phrases and snippets of dialogue he overheard.
Waits was nominated for the 1982 Academy Award for Original Music Score. During these years, Waits sought to broaden his career beyond music by involving himself in other projects. Waits became friends with the actor and director Sylvester Stallone and made his first cinematic appearance as a cameo part in Stallone's Paradise Alley ; Waits appeared as a drunk piano player. With Paul Hampton, Waits also began writing a movie musical, although this project never came to fruition. Another of the projects he began at this time was a book about entertainers of the past whom he admired.
As of 1982, Waits's musical style shifted; Hoskyns noted that this new style "was fashioned out of diverse and disparate ingredients". Noting that he had a "gravelly timbre" to his voice, Humphries characterized Waits's voice as one that "sounds like it was hauled through Hades in a dredger". His voice was described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding as though "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". One of Waits's own favorite descriptions of his vocal style was that of "Louis Armstrong and Ethel Merman meeting in Hell".
He decided to then record the songs he had written for both Alice and Woyzeck, placing them on separate albums. For these recordings, he brought in a range of jazz and avant-garde musicians from San Francisco. The two albums, titled Alice and Blood Money, were released simultaneously in May 2002.
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