Music and motors - Crazy Ol' Tom, in tales of ordinary madness, loves 'em both, writes Kilian Doyle
MY BRAIN HAS been addled these past few days, filled with visions of sumo wrestling bouncers and trampled roses with tattooed tears.
Cognoscenti among you will have twigged that I have had the honour of recently seeing Tom Waits.
Now, there are two types of people in this world: those who worship at the Altar of Tom, and those who think he sounds like an asthmatic cat trapped in a well. I am firmly of the former persuasion.
There was a lot of guff prior to his gigs about the price of tickets. But think of it this way: two bad meals, or two hours with Tom Waits? No contest. But then, he could've sat on a commode humming Hungarian peasant songs to himself and I'd have left happy.
For me, he is sui generis, sans pareil, a unique enigma floating above the sea of mediocre dross that pollutes the airwaves.
His tales of ordinary madness give the rest of us the chance to live the wild life vicariously through his rollicking tales of "brawlers, bawlers and bastards".
Anyway, enough gushing. This is a motoring column, after all.
Luckily for me, Tom is car-mad. But not in the rock star supercar-fetishising way. Rather, he favours cars that are like the ramshackle characters littering his songs: battered, broken and, above all, thirsty.
Waits, a notorious yarnspinner, claims to have been born in a taxi in a hospital parking lot. Which may explain why many of his songs are littered with motoring references, from admonitions to St Christopher to hang on "through the smoke and the oil" to a drunkard's admission that he's lost his equilibrium, his car keys and his pride.
One ditty, The Pontiacfrom the album Orphans, is even a partial list of cars he's owned, from a Fairlane with shot bushings to a Thunderbird that Aunt Evelyn ruined by driving to Indiana with no gear oil, to a Caddy "with the power to repair itself" that he sold to your Mom.
For Waits, real beauty is "oil stains left by cars in a parking lot", while happiness is him and his wife on Route 66 "with a pot of coffee, a cheap guitar, pawnshop tape recorder in a Motel 6, and a car that runs good parked right by the door".
Admirably, Waits has steadfastly refused throughout his career to whore himself, describing having his work appear in ads as like having a cow's udder sewn to the side of his face: "Painful and humiliating".
He famously sued Audi for using a Waits impersonator in an ad, while Opel also felt his wrath for a similar breach. Tom, who donated the proceeds of these suits to charity, said afterwards: "I'm glad to be out of the car sales business once and for all".
Crazy Ol' Tom once told a hapless interviewer that while he was fascinated by CD players that hungrily gobble the silver discs out of your hands, he didn't have one in his ancient Caddy, favouring a grumpy "little old string band in the glove compartment" instead.
Speaking of which, he once mused that the massive sound systems favoured by some wannabe gangsters were prone to rattling all the bolts out of their cars with the bass vibrations, leaving their owners sprawling on the road atop piles of twisted, unattached panels of metal - which I'd pay to see.
He also informed his rapt audience at one of his Dublin gigs that he bought Henry Ford's last breath on eBay. He said he keeps it in a bottle in the boot of his car. As you do.
Finally, some word of advice from Tom: "Never trust a man in a blue trench coat. Never drive a car when you're dead."
Follow that and you'll come to no harm. It's worked for me
. . . So far.