Tom Waits’ debt to Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs et al, and how he repaid it, by SYLVIE SIMMONS.
WHEN TOM WAITS discovered the Beats, he bought some black shades and a subscription to Downbeat magazine.
He was curious about the style more than anything, he said.
As for poetry, Waits hated being called a poet. The word had a “stigma”, he said, doubtless a hangover from school days. It was in the role of “storyteller”, he insisted, that he started attending the Wednesday night Poetry Workshops at Beyond Baroque in Venice Beach, LA.
The place dated back to 1968 when the neighbourhood was cheap. The founder’s intention was to publish an experimental literary magazine and books, and the Beats were his muse. Over time it grew into a large cultural centre, its workshops hosting countless noted poets and musicians including Patti Smith and later John Doe and Exene Cervenka of LA punk group X.
Among the first things Waits tried out there was Diamonds On My Windshield – which was also published as a poem in The Sunset Palms Hotel ’zine. Waits demoed it in 1971 and recorded it in 1974 for The Heart Of Saturday Night – an album he told KPFA radio was written in Kerouac’s honour. How much of Nighthawks At The Diner was premiered at Beyond Baroque is unknown but the Beat style is all over it. Waits loved the sound of spoken word with bebop jazz. He likened the way Kerouac used words to the way Miles Davis played trumpet.
The Beats never really left Waits.
Among many places the relationship reappeared was the song Jack & Neal/California, Here I Come on Foreign Affairs in 1977. On the album Jack Kerouac Reads On The Road from 1999 Waits teamed up with Primus on a track titled in tribute to On The Road, which turned up again on Waits’ Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards rarities compilation in 2006. O
