10 Great Tom Waits’ Quotes
Recently, Facebook friend and music publicist Mitchell Schneider posted an old album review he wrote up for Crawdaddy, a monthly newsprint-style magazine published 1966-1979. Anyone remember that? It was such a great resource for all things musical.
I hadn’t thought about Crawdaddy in many years. Luckily, Mitchell sent me a link with old archives of the back issues, and of course I dived down the rabbit hole.
His review (see here) was on a Tom Waits‘ album. Funny, I always thought of Waits as being way too authentic to make it as superstar. He was too honest to compromise. But he also developed a much deeper and more devoted following than the merry-go-round masquerade of flash in the pan hit records and here today/forgotten tomorrow stadium concerts. Now 76, Waits could certainly have been much bigger, but he’s probably far happier and more satisfied with driving along the service road and stopping in every small town, rather than taking the fast lane on life’s highway.
My plunge into the “Tom Waits rabbit hole” yielded these gems. I have to share them. Here’s ten great quotes from the singer-songwriter-composer:
“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”
“If you record the sound of bacon in a frying pan and play it back, it sounds like the pops and cracks on an old 33 1/3 recording. Almost exactly like that. You could substitute it for that sound.”
“Making it in music isn’t about the sales or the money. Really making it in music—is if you’re going by a schoolyard and you hear children singing your songs, playing jump-rope, or on the swings. That’s the ultimate. You’re in the culture.”
“Most people don’t care if you’re telling them the truth or if you’re telling them a lie, as long as they’re entertained by it. You find that out really fast.”
“When you’re a kid and you’re trying to find your own voice, it’s rather daunting to hear somebody like Howlin’ Wolf, because you know that you’ll never achieve that.”
“I think this whole division between the genres has more to do with marketing than anything else. It’s terrible for the culture of music.”
“My theory is the best songs have never really been recorded. We’re listening to things that made it through, but there’s so many songs that have never made it.”
“I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I’m a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.”
“Mostly I straddle reality and the imagination. My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane. Math is hard. Reading a map. Following orders. Carpentry. Electronics. Plumbing. Remembering things correctly. Straight lines. Sheet rock. Finding a safety pin. Patience with others. Ordering in Chinese. Stereo instructions in German.”
“If you’re a writer, you know that the stories don’t come to you – you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that’s where the stories were.”
Pretty good stuff.
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