The pearl diver
Dear Tom Waits,
It's such a thing with searching. Some are perfectly organized, where life is in the best order, everything has its firm, immovable place. They know exactly where the key, the dog, the partner and even the happiness are - even if they are on the other side of the world. The others are constantly looking 24 hours a day. There is quite a ditch between the people. The organizers are on the safe side, always one step ahead - enviable, but boring.
The material seeker has hit harder. They are usually with one foot on the edge, are chaotic and unpunctual (yes, always have to find lost). It's frustrating. Unless you are someone like you. One who dives for the pearls in the pit of life and still finds his lost front door key at the end of the day. But on the way there, he met people and stories. The pick like "flowers from the bushes by the roadside" and make it "little films for the ears". The truth of the anecdotes is completely irrelevant. Honesty is an overrated virtue anyway, and a big liar is you, because you are more interested in good stories than in actual events. If you cry, you once told, catch the tears in a tablespoon. Exactly 120 fit in there. And each time you cry exactly the same amount. No more and no less. Truth or lie? No matter. Anyway, it is extremely comforting to hear that even the biggest grief fits in a small soup spoon.
For you, the pain is the most beautiful source of inspiration anyway. All the whores, gamblers, drunkards, all the lost, the heart-struck, the gutters and unlucky birds in their godforsaken coffers and run-down bars that owns your heart, to whom they sing their most beautiful songs. Dark, gloomy and yet full of tenderness, with a rusty-creaking voice. A voice that sounds as if it had matured for decades in a whiskey barrel.
They make life roll like a big, gentle wave. Let yourself drift, shake, land gently, sometimes a bit bumpy. You have already encountered happiness in this way, but you can only briefly record that, you once said. Then you have to let go again and look for something new. They searched for a long time.
We have to keep the devil down in the hole.
In the past, they've been collecting jobs, pizza makers, ushers, carwashers, pubs pianists, blues singers, and avid drinkers, living for years at the Tropicana Motor Hotel, a weird, run-down Rock'n'Roll dungeon in West Hollywood. Then you found your wife, Kathleen Brennan, "such a girl who can lie down on nailboards and continue to drink coffee without batting an eyelid." A great sparring partner anyway. And the life from which you sing until today was now a thing of the past. Secluded and abstinent, you and your wife and your three children live in the countryside of California. The luck has made you comfortable. Only a few new jobs have been added. Composer for example (for the Robert Wilson productions "The Black Rider", "Alice" and "Woyzeck") and actors (in the cult films "Down by Law" by Jim Jarmusch and "Short Cuts" by Robert Altman). Today you are your own fictional character with bowler hat, battered jackets and chunky boots, long arrived in the established cultural circus. A mix of fairytale uncle and magician. A great illusionist.
Tom Waits tells stories of the abyss
In Terry Gilliam's film "The Cabinet of Dr. Parnassus" you play the devil himself. A faithful companion. It says in one of your songs "We got to keep the devil down in the hole". "We have to manage to keep the devil down in the hole." He is somehow closer to you than the dear God, who too often goes about his own business and fails to take care of the people. The devil, on the other hand, is always there. He is on the brink. But there, the best stories are still waiting to be told by you anyway. That must be reassuring, because your biggest concern was "knocking on the back of the world for 20 years" and then, when the world turns around, forgetting everything you wanted to say. That would be a pity, finds
Your Tatiana Blobel.
