Tom Waits
Purchase
Available in two image sizes:
8″ x 10″ | $245
11″ x 14″ | $350
Custom sizes are available. Prices include domestic shipping.
Tom Waits’ images are Silver Gelatin Type LE (Laser Exposed) digital prints, professionally printed on Ilford Galeire Muligrade fiber paper, and processed individually.
Early June 1999
Evening in Portland, Oregon.
The most Waits-ian and moving moment I had through these photographs of Tom was not when I was with him or listening to him sing but twenty-two years later during my show at the Torrefazione Café.
A group of women came in: a mother with her three grown daughters. They sat quietly drinking coffee, looking around, not talking very much. When I said hello to them, they asked me if the photographer was in the café, and I introduced myself. They asked me when Tom Waits was coming—they’d heard he’d be there. I told them I was so sorry, that must be a rumor, he was not coming. They looked away from me or down to their hands. They left a bit later. One of the daughters came up to me as the rest walked out and thanked me for the show. She said that their sister had recently died of cancer in their mother’s home, and on what they all knew would be her last night, she asked them to play “Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night” until she died.
Late August 1977
Nighttime in Greenwich Village.
After Son of Sam had been arrested, the heat wave, the New York City blackout resulting in riots and thousands of fires mainly in the Bronx, and the release of “Star Wars,” I’d worked late, taken the 6 train, and walked three blocks to my apartment.
Tom Waits and Norman Savage, my boyfriend, were leaning against an Impala smoking. I ran up to my 4th-floor studio apartment for my Nikon F2 and took photographs in the ambient muggy light of University Place and East 11th.
They both started posing a bit; Waits started voguing, then we went to the Cedar Tavern.
The next day, Tom, Norman, their friend “Doc” (a psychiatrist), Norman’s brother Bobby, and I drove out to Coney Island because Tom and I wanted to ride the roller coaster, the Cyclone. They shut it down right when we got there because it started to rain. We went to a nearby diner with bulbous red booths and flappy menus. We hung out for a long time drinking watery coffee. At one point, I said I was from New Jersey, and Tom asked me what the Shore was like in summer and if the girls wore those spangly tops. I said what made the Shore the Shore in summer, besides everything else, was its smell. And that below their spangly tops, girls wore jean shorts that ended practically at the bottom of their zippers.
“Foreign Affairs” came out that September. On the back cover, it says, “Thanks to Norman Savage, David ‘Doc’ Feuer, and Bobby Savage. I’ll see you in Coney Island.”
“Jersey Girl” on “Heart Attack and Vine” came out in 1980—later Shore-ized perfectly by Bruce Springsteen. Tom wrote it for Kathleen Brennan, who became his wife and music partner. Doc’s phone number is listed upside down on the front cover. When asked why by Stephen Peebles in a 1980 interview, Tom said, “That’s not his real number. I can give it to you if you want… Actually, I put my phone number on the back of a record once and got lots of phone calls from people with real clinical problems. I never really knew what to say to them. So I told Doc I’d put his number on there and he could handle ’em.”
We all went to his SNL show when Tom came back in December. He played “Eggs and Sausage (In a Cadillac with Susan Michelson).” We couldn’t find him down on the set afterward and eventually saw him crouched on his heels behind a black curtain, smoking a cigarette. “Sucked,” he said. We went upstairs to the after-party. Belushi, Aykroyd, and Bill Murray showed up in leather around 2:00 am. They stood in a fist drinking until I heard Belushi say, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” When Tom came back from L.A. in March, we went to strip bars in the Bowery, then took the Staten Island Ferry over and back.
The last time I saw Tom was in 1999 in Eugene, Oregon, right after the release of “Mule Variations.” He entered at the back of the auditorium while his band played jazz on stage. He was silhouetted by a spotlight, wearing a bowler hat, throwing confetti over his shoulders, and tooting a toy horn as he walked down the aisle. His wife and three kids were in the audience. After an extraordinary hour of music, Tom cleared the stage except for a bass and piano. Instant cheering.
Tom sat down, rippled the keys for a while, then yelled out, “What do you wanna hear? New or old?”
“Old,” people yelled.
“Go to hell,” he yelled back and played “Tango Till They’re Sore.”
In the second encore, his son Casey played the drums for “I’m Big In Japan.” When Tom left the stage for the last time, he pointed behind him and yelled, “That’s my son.”
Twenty-one years later, when I took a break from teaching in Portland, Oregon, I finally developed these negatives at Safelight, a DIY darkroom, and had a few shows in Portland.
I sent a print of each photograph to Tom at Prairie Sun Recording Studio, located on a former 10-acre chicken farm in Cotati, California. A woman from the studio called me about a week later and thanked me. I’m glad Tom has them.
Never could get over not riding that Cyclone with him.