Orphans and Father Figures

If you haven't already, you really should read Sean O'Hagan's great feature article on Tom Waits that appeared in the Guardian over the weekend.  Among other things, I still find it difficult to wrap my own sober brain around the fact that Waits hasn't touched alcohol in over a decade.  Just doesn't seem possible.  Anyway, it made me look forward to Waits' new album even more, if that's even possible.  Here's an excerpt from the article:

Both his parents were schoolteachers, but his comfortable middle-class childhood was ruptured when they divorced in 1960. This may have been around the time when he started hearing the world differently. It was definitely the moment he became obsessed with finding another father. I had read somewhere that, as a child growing up in San Diego, he couldn't wait to get old, that he'd even pretend to be an old guy, wearing a hat and talking to the neighbours about hi-fi and home insurance. Salvation of a sort came when he discovered Kerouac and Ginsberg in the Sixties, literary hipsters from the previous decade. Until his wife came along two decades later, the Beat writers were his most important influence. He pays homage to them one more time on Orphans, singing Kerouac's forlorn road song 'Home I'll Never Be', and reciting Bukowski's beautiful poem 'Nirvana', both, in their own way, odes to rootlessness, restlessness, the fleeting, irrevocable moment when things could have been different. The essence, in fact, of a good many Tom Waits songs. Why, I ask, were the Beats so crucial to him?

'They were father figures,' he says softly, his long fingers tracing small circles in the coffee spill on the table. 'They were the ones I looked to for guidance. See, my dad left when I was 10, so I was always looking for a dad. It was like, "Are you my dad? Are you my dad? What about you? Are you my dad?" I found a lot of these old salty guys along the way.'

For those of you who've never read the Bukowski poem mentioned above, I'm making it available below the cut. 

nirvana

not much chance,
completely cut loose from
purpose,
he was a young man
riding a bus
through North Carolina
on the way to
somewhere
and it began to snow
and the bus stopped
at a little cafe
in the hills
and the passengers
entered.

he sat at the counter
with the others,
he ordered and the
food arived.
the meal was
particularly
good
and the
coffee.

the waitress was
unlike the women
he had
known.
she was unaffected,
there was a natural
humor which came
from her.
the fry cook said
crazy things.
the dishwasher,
in back,
laughed, a good
clean
pleasant
laugh.

the young man watched
the snow through the
windows.

he wanted to stay
in that cafe
forever.

the curious feeling
swam through him
that everything
was
beautiful
there,
that it would always
stay beautiful
there.

then the bus driver
told the passengers
that it was time
to board.

the young man
thought, I'll just sit
here, I'll just stay
here.

but then
he rose and followed
the others into the
bus.

he found his seat
and looked at the cafe
through the bus
window.
then the bus moved
off, down a curve,
downward, out of
the hills.

the young man
looked straight
foreward.
he heard the other
passengers
speaking
of other things,
or they were
reading
or
attempting to
sleep.

they had not
noticed
the
magic.

the young man
put his head to
one side,
closed his
eyes,
pretended to
sleep.
there was nothing
else to do--
just to listen to the
sound of the
engine,
the sound of the
tires
in the
snow.

Comments

[David Morrison]

when I was a child no one in my family was artistic ,my father was violent and silent but not at the same time really, it was either one or the other. one day on my 2oth birthday I stuck my thumb out to hitch a ride because I had read Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America when I was 16 and couldn't get the freedom it spoke to me about which was so different from what I had witnessed living the life I led with my parents. They were destroyed that I would just hit the road and leave. No one had ever done that in the family before. I am sure I scared them at that time beyond repair. I found myself 3 or 4 days later on a bus headed south through New Mexico sing "The midnight Speacial" a Leadbelly song, on guitar to a bus full of Afro- American OLD TIMEY folk and one white girl who was beside me, late into the night, miles from my home. It was there where I remember being free and safe until the bus stopped and the music stopped and the girl decided to get off along the side of the road to nowhere and asked me to join her. The fear rose inside me that no I could not. I have been trying to relive the moment where and when the whole bus was singing as if chanting lke a mantra..." Let the midnight speacial shine a light on me, let the midnight speacial shine its ever lovin' light on me!". I spent my 20's in the 70's chasing the 60's all the while fighting the demons my own father left me with. He never knew he did the damage he did. I hung to the pain like a wounded man yielding a crutch. I still carry a metaphorical crutch of sorts because it seems to make me whole. Loving the pain gives me solace even though my father dieed in 90 or 91....it's still a blurr just like the 80's and the 90's which were creatively painful because creative they were not. Alas we all have demons and those of us that can shine like Tom Waits battered ,poetic,wise,worn and bewildered are blessed. In fact we all are,for better or for worse.
I must say that i am pleased to share this with you my friend.
I life is full of pain and suffering but to turn it all around somehow into no loss in some way is a soul searching life for us all really.
Thank God for the poets.
thanks again
Joe Calabria

[PV]

Beautiful. Bukowski rules.