![]() Waits is hoping to coax a woman's voice from the machine, but its wooden pins and spinning chain-driven gears and tape loops are visibly dusty and brittle. ![]() "I saw it and said, 'I'll take you home now, dear'," Waits recalls. Waits bought it from some surfers in Westwood who were making fun of the instrument. Yet here we are, in the control room where Mike Kloster, the second engineer, is patching in Waits' Chamberlain Music Master 600, a broken-lidded, organ-like contraption with over 70 sounds and voices on tape loops. "It would be like watching someone bathe," he says. Waits is reluctant at first to let anyone into the studio while he is working. Burroughs, which has been a hit in Europe and more recently in New York. Waits is here mixing the songs and music he wrote for "The Black Rider", an opera he collaborated on with Robert Wilson and William S. We are in Los Angeles to talk to Waits about his creative process. I don't know why it's what I want, it's just what I want." "It came to me the other day," he says, "that what I really want to drive is a '66 Electra Glide Harley with San Francisco Police written on the side of it. On his way back in the studio, Waits stops and looks at his car. "Let's do this periodically," says Waits, and we do. Waits says he likes the way the cut sounds now, but just to make sure, we all slide out of the Cadillac on the passenger side because the driver's door is broken shut, and climb into Dawes's BMW to listen there. Listening to the cut, Waits rocks violently back and forth against the steering wheel in the way special children will when intent on the sounds of an interior world. Waits says the car stereo is always either switched off, or so loud his kids fly around in the backseat like they have lost their minds. Waits listens to most things in his car, trusts his car, tells Dawes that the car listened to "Bone Machine", Waits' last album, and the car liked the album very much.ĭawes plays the cut and Waits turns it up to full volume. No, Waits tells Dawes, he doesn't know exactly what kind of system it is, just the kind where you drive into some place, and they install it. A bit of the master tape has been transferred to cassette, and Dawes puts it in the system in Waits' car. Tonight Waits is working, mixing his latest album, and he does not trust the low end of the Sound Factory's studio speakers. Tonight the blue moon is so bright that people are cruising headlight less. Waits - broken porkpie hat, black jeans, and T-shirt he'll wear most the next three weeks - turns the ignition. Up in the front seat, Biff Dawes (1) , first engineer of the Sunset Sound Factory (2), fiddles with the stereo system. ![]() Waits left the gas cap at a self-serve the previous night. The upholstery is sprung, the floorboards are deep with superhero appendages, words-of-wisdom books, pony blankets, food things. I am sitting in the back seat of Tom Waits' Cadillac. Mark Richard explores the methods to this virtuoso's madness in a rare glimpse into the creative process. Key words: Biff Dawes, Bone Machine, Mike Kloster, Creative process, Experimental instruments, Childhood, The Black Riderīohemian Brahmin Tom Waits has made a career of obliterating artistic boundaries. Transcription by Larry DaSilveira as sent to Raindogs Listserv Discussionlist, June 21, 1999 ![]() Source: Spin magazine (USA), by Mark Richard. ![]()
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