Tom Waits Korner, Volume 4
But who is Kathleen Brennan? Hard to know, exactly. She's the most mysterious figure in the whole Tom Waits mythology. Newspaper articles and press releases always describe her the same way, as "the wife and longtime collaborator of the gravelly-voiced singer." You will see her name on all of his albums after 1985. ("All songs written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan.") She's everywhere, but invisible. She's private as a banker, rare as a unicorn, never talks to reporters, but she is the very center of Tom Waits- his muse, his partner, and mother of his three children... and sometimes, when he is playing live, you will hear him mumble, almost to himself, "This one's for Kathleen," before he eases into a slow and tender rendition of "Jersey Girl."
...He has called her "an incandescent presence" of life in his music. She's "a rhododendron, an orchid, and an oak." He has described her as "a cross between Eudora Welty and Joan Jett." She has "the four B's: beauty, brightness, bravery, and brains." He insists that she's the truly creative force in the relationship, the feral influence who challenges his "pragmatic limitations" and stirs intrigue into all their music. "She has dreams like Hieronymous Bosch... she'll start talking in tongues and I'll take it all down." He says, "She speaks to my subtext, not my context." He claims she has expanded his vision so enormously as an artist that he can barely stand to listen to any of the music he wrote before they met. "She rescued me," he says. "I'd be playing in a steak house right now if it wasn't for her. I wouldn't even be playing in a steak house. I'd be cooking in a steak house."
..."We met on New Year's Eve," Tom Waits tells me.
He loves talking about his wife. You can see it, the pleasure it gives him. he tries not to go too nuts with it, of course, because he does want to protect her privacy (which is why he sometimes dodges interview questions about his wife with typical Waitsian nonsense stories. Yeah, he'll say, she's a bush pilot. Or a soda jerk. Runs a big motel down in Miami...
They met in Hollywood, back in 1980. Waits was writing the music for the Coppola movie, One from the Heart, and Kathleen Brennan was script supervisor on the film. Their courtship had all the drunken, spinning, time-warping delirium of a good New Year's Eve party in someone else's house...
"We'd end up in Indian country,' Wait remembers. "Out where nobody could even believe we were there. We were going into these bars- I don't know what was protecting us- but we were loaded. God protects drunks and fools and little children. And dogs. Jesus, we had so much fun." They got married at the Always Forever yours Wedding Chapel on Manchester Boulevard in Watts. "It was planned at midnight for a 1 a.m. wedding. We made things happen around here!" They'd known each other, what? Two months? Maybe three? They had to page the guy who married them. A pastor carrying a beeper. The Right Reverend Donald W. Washington.
"She thought it was a bad omen that it was a seventy-dollar wedding and she had fifty bucks and I only had twenty. She said, 'This is a hell of a way to start a relationship.' I was like, 'C'mon, baby, I'll make it up to you, I'll get you back later...'"
There wasn't much of a honeymoon; soon after the wedding, the couple realized they were dead broke. Waits was already a celebrated musician, but he'd made some serious young-artist mistakes with contracts and money, and now it was looking like maybe he was dried-up. Plus, he was on the splits with his manager. And legal headaches? Everywhere. And studio producers trying to put corny string sections behind his darkest songs? And who owned him, exactly? And how had this happened?
It was at this point that his new bride stepped in and encouraged her husband to blow off the whole industry. Screw it, Kathleen suggested. You don't need these outside people, anyway. You can produce your own work. Manage your own career. Arrange your own songs. Forget about security. Who needs security when you have freedom? The two of them would get by somehow, no matter what. It was like she was always saying: "Whatever you bring home, baby, I'll cook it up. You bring home a possum and a coon? We'll live off it."
The result of her dare was swordfishtrombones- a big, brassy, bluesy, gospel-grooved, dark-textured, critically-adored declaration of artistic independence. An album like none before it. A boldly-drawn line, running right through the center of Tom Waits's work, dividing his life into two neat categories: Before Kathleen Brennan and after Kathleen Brennan .
I ask Tom Waits who does the bulk of the songwriting around the house- he or his wife? He says there's no way to judge it. It's like anything else in a good marriage. Sometimes it's fifty-fifty; sometimes it's ninety-ten; sometimes one person does all the work; sometimes, the other. Gamely, he reaches for metaphors:
"I wash, she dries."
"I hold the nail, she swings the hammer."
"I'm the prospector, she's the cook."
"I bring home the flamingo, she beheads it..."
In the end, he concludes this way: "It's like two people borrowing the same ten bucks back and forth for years. After a while, you don't even write it down anymore. Just put it on the tab. Forget it."