TOM WAITS: A POEM TO KEITH RICHARDS
He can run faster than a fax machine
His urine is blue
He smells like a campfire
He was once slapped by the Queen
He has walked the equivalent of three times
Around the Earth
Like Keith, the Phengaris rebels caterpillar strums
His bottom like a guitar and the chord attracts the females
At one concert in Java in the 70’s
Men screamed, women fainted, and a small boy
Broke his arm in the chaos
And it rained thousands of black worms the size of Honeybees
He wrote his share of songs from Sticky Fingers
In a henhouse in Malta
He once won the Hope Diamond in a poker game
And in the same night lost it in a game of craps
He owns a lug wrench and a tire jack made of solid gold
He was born in a cloak room and has always been prone
To fits of weeping followed by hysterical laughter
One of his first jobs was cleaning out the lion cage
At the London Zoo
Like the praying mantis he has only one ear and
It is located between his legs
He can hold a note up to 6 minutes and has 7 or 8 notes
More than the ordinary voice
And there are equally sonorous and clear
Hands like a woodworker
Arms like swabby
A back like a soldier
A mind like a detective
Shoulders like a boxer
A voice like a choir boy
And a country western face
His tunings are furiously guarded secrets…
He claims an open tuning he utilizes was inspired
While waiting for a train in Detroit
In a vacant lot, the remains of a barbed wire fence
Were half circling the remains of an old foundry
And there, amidst tin cans, old mattresses and dolls’ heads
It occurred to Keith that a guitar is
At its most rudimentary level
Wire that has been stretched across wood that when
Strummed produces a pleasant relationship between
Disparate components
Noticing the wire fence in effect
contained these same ingredients
Keith took the lid off a discarded paint can
& Strummed the tightly stretched fence wires
Violently, rhythmically and repeatedly
Thus satisfying his curiosity and releasing the peculiar
Voicing of the chord we now all know to be the chord
At the beginning of Jumpin Jack Flash
Transcribing the notes and adapting them for guitar
Keith lost none of the angular chord’s mystifying and
Natural jaggedness and thus, the “fence chord” was born
Keith once took my 10,000 dollar overcoat
To put down a across a mud puddle
To allow an octogenarian laundress
Named Clementine Moorehouse to cross the street
Comfortably
That’s Keith always the gentleman
(Tom Waits 2015)
KEITH RICHARDS' FRIENDSHIP WITH TOM WAITS
"Keith Richards and Tom Waits have been buddies for decades now, a friendship that dates back to the 1980s. Richards first got a taste of the legendary growler's unique recording style on Waits' 1985 album Rain Dogs. Quoted on the Tom Waits Library, guitarist Mark Ribot said that Waits would begin recording without any rehearsing and use enigmatic instructions like, 'Play it like a midget's bar mitzvah'. The gritty singer/songwriter would rather get his percussions by swinging a two-by-four around a dingy basement bathroom than use a sample. '"It wasn't a mechanical kind of recording at all,' said Ribot.
Waits found that Richards responded well to his perplexing recording style. ‘There was something in there that I thought he would understand,’ Waits said in the comments to the song Big Black Mariah posted to the Tom Waits Library. 'I picked out a couple of songs that I thought he would understand and he did. He's got a great voice and he's just a great spirit in the studio. He's very spontaneous, he moves like some kind of animal. I was trying to explain 'Big Black Maria' and finally I started to move in a certain way and he said, 'Oh, why didn't you do that to begin with? Now I know what you're talking about.' It's like animal instinct." Keith is featured on three of the album's tracks, and that connection they created through movement and music in the studio lasts to this day.
Fans of Tom Waits will know that his biggest collaborator and creative inspiration is his wife Kathleen. For the longest time, he only wrote songs with her, but he saw something in Keith that made him want to break that trend. 'There's nobody in the world like him', Waits told NPR in 2011. ‘We wrote songs together for a while and that was fun. I had never really written with anybody besides my wife, so it was unique and a little scary at first.’
For his part, Keith felt honored to have been allowed in to that creative part of Tom Waits' reclusive psyche. ‘It was great to work with him’, he said in an interview posted to his official YouTube channel. ‘It was only found out later that he never writes with anybody else, he only ... writes with his wife, Kathleen. So I realized that was an extra honor, to work with a guy that ... is not a collaborator’.
Tom called their collaboration ‘an interesting dynamic.’ Unsurprisingly, Keith doesn't bother with writing anything down, or even remembering what he plays. Tom said they'd play for a while and then the Rolling Stone would shout, ‘Scribe!’ and expect him to write what they'd been playing. ‘I realized we needed an adult in the room,’ said Tom. 'I've never been the one that one would consider the adult.'
LOADING MERCURY WITH A PITCHFORK
