totalitarianism today: music

SUZANNE - Leonard Cohen

SUZANNE - Peter Gabriel

Leonard Cohen said the song was about meeting Suzanne Verdal, the then-wife of sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, in Montreal. The song refers to a chapel near the harbor, Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, which faces the morning sunrise.

Leonard says: At a certain point, I bumped into Suzanne Vaillancourt, who was the wife of a friend of mine, they were a stunning couple around Montreal at the time, physically stunning, both of them, a handsome man and woman, everyone was in love with Suzanne Vaillancourt, and every woman was in love with Armand Vaillancourt. But there was no... well, there was thought, but there was no possibility, one would not allow oneself to think of toiling at the seduction of Armand Vaillancourt's wife. First of all he was a friend, and second of all as a couple they were inviolate, you just didn't intrude into that kind of shared glory that they manifested. I bumped into her one evening, and she invited me down to her place near the river. She had a loft, at a time when lofts were... the word wasn't used. She had a space in a warehouse down there, and she invited me down, and I went with her, and she served me Constant Comment tea, which has little bits of oranges in it. And the boats were going by, and I touched her perfect body with my mind, because there was no other opportunity. There was no other way that you could touch her perfect body under those circumstances. So she provided the name in the song.

Suzanne is now homeless in Venice Beach, where she lives out of her automobile. She says she never had sex with Leonard; and Leonard confirms her story. The truth is that he only imagined having sex with her; the scent of tangerines wafting through her skirts.

Suzanne says: I was the one that put the boundaries on that because Leonard is actually a very sexual man and very attractive and very charismatic. And I was very attracted to him, but somehow I didn't want to spoil that preciousness, that infinite respect that I had for him, for our relationship, and I felt that a sexual encounter might demean it somehow.

Suzanne says she has met Leonard twice since the song became popular. One time she met him after a concert performance in the 1970's. Another time she met him "in passing" in the 1990's; she says she danced for him. But he did not speak to her or provide any indication that he recognized her.

Sources include 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 + 10 + 11

Since there are so many mediocre interviews with Tom Waits in which one must pore over pages to come across a gem, The Omnipresent is here to cull the best of journalistic sources for the best of Tom Waits. The words of all characters in this conversation are entirely their own (see sources at the end). Unfortunately, there is no source for The Omnipresent apart from this post, but all The Omnipresent's statements are original to him/her/it.

The Omnipresent: Today I found myself reveling in The Heart of Saturday Night, as I am wont to do weekly, which made me wonder about Tom Waits. Being omnipresent means I get to see everything all at once, but I rarely get to focus on one thing in particular. So I like to spend rainy days focusing. And today my focus is Tom Waits. Who is Tom Waits?
David McGee: Tom Waits is a twenty-six year old composer and performer who looks like an urban scarecrow. He wears a ratty black cap pulled down over his left eye, a coat that is simultaneously too big and too small, paper-thin pointy black shoes, and a couple of days' worth of beard. He appears to have slept in a barrel.
The Ominpresent: So he was. But who is he now?
Todd Everett: Tom Waits is a poet.
The Omnipresent: Obvious and mundane. Tell me something I don't know about Tom Waits.
James Stevenson: In 1977, Tom Waits' band was called the Noctural Emissions. They played softly.
Tom Waits: Poetry is a very dangerous word.
The Omnipresent: Tom Waits himself has joined the conversation. What's so dangerous about poetry that you felt you had to join the conversation?
Tom Waits: I don't like the stigma that comes with being called a poet-- so I call what I'm doing an improvisational adventure or an inebriational travelogue, and all of a sudden it takes on a whole new form and meaning. If I'm tied down and have to call myself something, I prefer "storyteller".
The Omnipresent: Alright storyteller, tell me a story.
Tom Waits: I was born in LA at a very young age. I was born in the back seat of a yellow cab in Murphy Hospital parking lot. I had to pay a buck eighty-five on the meter to move. I didn't have my trousers on yet and I left my money in my other pants.
The Omnipresent: Why did you become a musician?
Tom Waits: Well, it was a choice between entertainment or a career in air-conditioning and refrigeration.
The Omnipresent: Air-conditioning is perhaps the greater good. But, then again, you are a star.
Tom Waits: I'm not a big star. I'm not even a twinkle...I'm just a rumor.
The Omnipresent: What you are, Mr. Waits, is a man indulging in false modesty. I never called you a "big star". I only called you a "star". And stars can be bought pretty cheaply nowadays. On that note, how would you describe your music?
Tom Waits: Well, you know...most of my songs are kinda travelogues. It's difficult to say exactly where they come from. You gotta sleep with one eye open.
The Omnipresent: Why just one?
Tom Waits: Everything here eventually turns into something else. It's not good if you're insecure.
The Omnipresent: And keeping both eyes open is a sign of insecurity? I've always thought giving interviews is a sign of insecurity. Maybe we are both a little insecure. Without invoking Leo Strauss, I'd venture to suggest that perhaps modernity breeds insecurity. What do you think?
Tom Waits: There's a common loneliness that just sprawls from coast to coast...It's like a common disjointed identity crisis. It's the dark, warm, narcotic American night.
The Omnipresent: Yes, I like narcotics. They stand the test of time. What do you like, Mr. Waits?
Tom Waits: I like smog, traffic, kinky people, car trouble, noisy neighbors, crowded bars, and spend most of my time in my car going to the movies.
The Omnipresent: And Burroughs. You like William Burroughs, don't you?
Tom Waits: Yeah, I love Burroughs. He's like a metal desk. He's like a still, and everything that comes out of him is already whiskey.
The Omnipresent: So you tend to like life and home-made whiskey. That's interesting. But not as interesting as what you hate. So what, if your soul permits, do you hate?
Tom Waits: I guess the only thing I hate is bluegrass played poorly.
The Omnipresent: Do you worry about a lot about success or achievement?
Tom Waits: I worry about a lot of things, but I don't worry about achievement... I worry primarily about whether there are nightclubs in heaven.
The Omnipresent: You have children, which means that at one point you had a baby daughter, since you now have an older daughter. What is she like?
Tom Waits: Well, we haven't picked a name yet. I told her that when she's eighteen she can pick any name she wants. In the meantime, we'll call her something different every day.... Max today. She's been everything. We just can't seem to make up our minds. When she meets somebody and likes them she takes their name. She speaks seventeen languages. She's now in military school in Connecticut. I only get to see her on weekends. At night when I get home all the kids line up in their uniforms and Joe Bob's got my martini and Max has my slippers and Roosevelt has my pipe. They all say, "Hello, Daddy!"
The Omnipresent: How droll. So you like to keep mum about your family? A real family man...
Tom Waits: I'm also colorblind, which is kind of interesting. I juggle with brown and green and blue and red, and green looks brown, brown looks green, purple looks blue, blue looks purple. I don't see the world in black and white...
Alina: That's the worst pick-up line I've ever heard. Got any more?
Tom Waits: The laws that govern your private madness when applied to the daily routine of living your life can coagulate into a collision.
Alina: Almost as lame as an Ivy League alma mater ring. I had no idea you were so trendy...
Tom Waits: Jazz developed nylon socks...
Alina: Blah.
The Omnipresent: I keep hearing voices from the proletariat interrupting our conversation and bringing down the intellectual bar that we have set so highly, Mr. Waits. How do we deal with the din?
Tom Waits: It's hard, because we're so product-oriented that our only real spiritual leadership comes from that angle, chasing the dollar. It's like it's okay if you get enough money for it. Selling out is alright as long as you get enough.
The Omnipresent: "Selling-out" was never an issue in the Middle Ages. Times have changed, haven't they?
Tom Waits: I was on 9th and Hennepin years ago in the middle of a pimp war, and 9th and Hennepin always stuck in my mind. "There's trouble at 9th and Hennepin." To this day I'm sure there continues to be trouble at 9th and Hennepin. At this donut shop.
The Omnipresent: So things stay the same at 9th and Hennepin, but that is hardly an argument for anything. Times still change. What are you trying to say?
Tom Waits: Make hay while the sun shines.
The Omnipresent: But night has no sun.
Tom Waits: Satudaynightistis..it's what happens to your arm when you hang it around a chair all night at the movies or in some bar, trying to make points with a pretty girl.
The Omnipresent: I've never done that. Pretty girls rarely change the world. It's the Madeline Albrights, Janet Renos, and Hillary Clintons, not what any seeing-eye dog would call pretty, that matter. But I do love chicken. Where can I get good chicken?
Tom Waits: I suggest the Red Wing Hatchery near Tweedy Lane in South Central L.A. We're talking both fryers and ritual chickens. Hang one over the door to keep out evil spirits; the other goes on your plate with paprika.
The Omnipresent: So you're an L.A. man, then? Is that where you are living now?
Tom Waits: I don't know where I'm living. Citizen of the world. I live for adventure and to hear the lamentations of the women... I've uprooted a lot. It's like being a traveling salesman...There's a certain gypsy quality, and I'm used to it. I find it easy to write under difficult circumstances and I can capture what's going on. I'm moving towards needing a compound though. An estate. But in the meantime I'm operating out of a storefront here in the Los Angeles area.
Robert Lloyd: You ever go down to San Francisco?
Tom Waits: I go down sometimes-- in for a weekend of excitement. Watch women's wrestling, or mud wrestling. Midget female mud wrestling. It's big there-- it's huge. It's bigger than the opera-- in fact, they call it "The Little Opera".
The Omnipresent: This is my conversation. I'd like to speak to Mr. Waits without all you journalist hangers-on. You guys get to chase him all the time. This is my moment.... Mr. Waits, I just want a little one-on-one with you. Being Omnipresent is a spectacle of the lowest common denominator. Rarely do I get to see midget female mud wrestling.... What do you want? What thoughts give you goosebumps?
Tom Waits: An all-midget orchestra. They could all stay in the same room and on stage they could all share the same light.
The Omnipresent: You have a soft spot for midgets...
Tom Waits: I had a midget prostitute climb up on a bar stool and sit in my lap when I was about eighteen in Tijuana. I drank with her for about an hour. It was something. Changed me. Tender, very tender. It was like I didn't go off to the room with her. She just sat in my lap.
Craig MacInnis: He did not explain the reason for the Band-Aid over his right eye or the bandages wrapped around his hand and wrist.
The Omnipresent: Right you are, Craig. But it seems like such an obvious question that I refuse to ask it. I think he just wants to get attention. And I asked the journalists to please back off from my conversation.
Alina: Attention is the petri-dish of interviews and conversation.
The Omnipresent: Please, no gadflies or Socratic ambitions. You can't enter this conversation without a byline. Or even with a byline. This conversation is mine, mine.....Now Mr. Waits, let's talk about your albums, your music, your favorite dentist, all that noise you make with pots and pans. The Heart of Saturday Night is the reason I got stuck at a point in time seeking you. Which Saturday night comes to mind?
Tom Waits: I've tasted Saturday nights in Detroit, St. Louis, Tuscaloosa, New Orleans, Atlanta, NYC, Boston, Memphis.
The Omnipresent: But why an album to these nights? What is the album about?
Tom Waits: If you're ever pursued by a crocodile, run in zigzag fashion. They have little or no ability to make sudden changes in direction. But they're fast, they're very fast. In fact, there are probably more people killed by crocodiles than there are by.... anything.
Brian Brannon: A lot of your songs have a certain melancholy, what's that from?
The Omnipresent: Brian....
Tom Waits: Too much wine. Half of me, I feel like a jackhammer, I love to holler and stomp my feet and throw rocks. But there's another side of me that's like an old man in the corner that's had too much wine. I'm probably too sentimental for my own good sometimes.
The Omnipresent: Okay, before Brian butts in again, let's discuss Rain Dogs, not your best work but loved by many chumps. Explain.
Tom Waits: Maybe I should say something about the title of the album... You know dogs in the rain lose their way back home. They even seem to look up at you and ask if you can help them get back home. 'Cause after it rains every place they peed on has been washed out. It's like Mission Impossible. They go to sleep thinking the world is one way and they wake up and somebody moved the furniture.
The Omnipresent: I'd never thought about that. Life can be very difficult for dogs in your time. They seem to be peripherally involved in the status-seeking wars between humans. I imagine I'd be so miserable and even dejected if my owner didn't value me enough to purchase a camouflage rhinestone collar for my dog-neck. How do you deal with this sort of issue?
Tom Waits: Your world is only as large as you make it. What you decide to include and to affect you is very much up to you. What you ultimately do with it is something else.
The Omnipresent: I feel like you are trying to tell me that your dogs don't have rhinestone collars. But you can't just be direct and say so.
Tom Waits: I usually have a hard time talking about things directly, you know? I don't like direct questions, I like to talk.
The Omnipresent: So talk...
Tom Waits: When I was twenty-one, I was just happy to be on the road, away from home, riding through the American night y'know, out of my mind. Wild-eyed about everything. Now, I think more about it, like what can we do that's cheaper, simpler, and better? I think maybe we should just have a stage no bigger than a hatbox. I'll probably go on the road, with devil horns and angel wings and dry ice and a toy guitar. The band will all be cutouts.
The Omnipresent: Why not aliens? Aliens would be more compelling than cutouts. Do you believe in aliens?
Tom Waits: I believe there is intelligent life, but we are the ones who define what intelligence is, so I'm sure it would fall outside of our intelligence or ability to perceive it, which leads me to believe that they may be here among us and we are unable to see them, or understand that they're here.
The Omnipresent: Your metaphysics is rather broad, Mr. Waits.
Tom Waits: Dogwood is what the cross was made out of. And they say after Jesus went up to heaven that the blossoms on the dogwood developed a red cross in the bloom, and you can see it in the dogwood blossom. And that wasn't until after he had risen.
The Omnipresent: I didn't know you were religious... How do you bring religion to your music?
Tom Waits: "All Stripped Down" is kind of a religious song, 'cause you can't get into heaven until you're all stripped down.
The Omnipresent: Mule Variations, give me something to think about.
Tom Waits: Kathleen and I...
The Omnipresent: Wait a second, Kathleen is your wife. Right? Okay, go on..
Tom Waits: Kathleen and I came up with this idea of doing music that's "surrural"-- it's surreal and it's rural, it's surrural. (Sings) Everybody's doin' it doin' it doin' it. Surrural. She'll start kind of talking in tongues, and I take it all down. She goes places... I can't get to those places. Too, I don't know...pragmatic. She's the egret of the family. I'm the mule.
The Omnipresent: What are you trying to say?
Tom Waits: Hold on. We're all holding on to something. None of us want to come out of the ground. Weeds are holding on. I thought that was a real positive thing to say. It was an optimistic song. Take my hand, stand right here, hold on. We wrote that together, Kathleen and I, and that felt good. Two people who are in love writing a song like that about being in love. That was good.
The Omnipresent: I feel like you're digressing. I want to talk about music and you keep bringing up your wife. Let me be specific-- I heard that Les Claypool played on Bone Machine. Care to verify?
Tom Waits: He came up and played on "The Earth Died Screaming." He was in between fishing trips at the time. He's great, he's got such an elastic approach to the instrument: a fretless, spastic, elastic, rubberized, plasticine approach. He's like a fun house mirror. He can take and elongate his face. He's a real pawnshop weasel, endlessly in pawn shops. I think that's why he tours.
The Omnipresent: If you humans had any brains, you'd call your pawn shops "museums" and turn your museums to pawn shops.
Tom Waits: Happiness is never perfect.
The Omnipresent: Guess not... Your music says as much. On the cover of your 1976 album, Small Change", you don't look very happy even though there is a willing stripper a few feet away. On the cover of Blue Valentine, you've got Ricki Lee Jones but still no smile worthy of remark. Maybe happiness is not only imperfect-- maybe it is a flat-out lie. Have you read anything by Karl Marx or Dale Carnegie?
Tom Waits: This is getting really metaphysical... I do believe in the mysteries of things, about myself and the things I see. I enjoy being puzzled and arriving at my own incorrect conclusions.
The Omnipresent: Ah-ha! Finally, an epiphany! You are a materialist, Mr. Waits-- a man who believes in "things" and appreciates incorrect conclusions. My time spent trying to talk to you is redeemed by this discovery. Communism is, in fact, everywhere, including the sub-ruralurbs of L.A. The Cold War has become a gang war.... Any final words of wisdom before I return to the eternal recurrence?
Tom Waits: Break windows, smoke cigars, and stay up late.
The Omnipresent: Maybe in another life I'll finally get my own pavement princess. One can dream...

In this interview, Tom Waits' words can be directly traced to the following sources. Tracing the game of hopscotch I played to cut and paste these quotes into this interview, however, is impossible.

David McGee, "Smellin' Like a Brewery, Lookin' Like a Tramp", Rolling Stone, January 1977
Tom Waits, The Heart of Saturday Night press release, 1974
Betsy Carter with Peter S. Greenberg, "Sweet and Sour", Newsweek, 14 June 1976
Peter O'Brien, "Watch Out for Sixteen-Year-Old Girls Wearing Bell Bottoms Who Are Running Away From Home and Have a Lot of Blue Oyster Cult Record Under Their Arm", ZigZag, July 1976
"Proust Questionnaire", Vanity Fair, November 2004
f James Stevenson, "Blues", The New Yorker, 27 December 1976
The Don Lane Show, Channel Nine, April 1979
Todd Everett, "Not So Much A Poet: More a Purveyor of Improvisational Travelogue", New Musical Express, 29 November 1975
Johnny Black, "Waits and Double Measures", London Trax, 18 March 1981
Robert Sabbag, "Tom Waits Makes Good", Los Angeles Times Magazine, 22 February 1987
Glenn O'Brien, "Tom Waits for No Man", SPIN, November 1985
Craig MacInnis, "Waits Never Lets Guard Down", The Toronto Star, 7 October 1987
Mark Rowland, "Tom Waits is Flying Upside Down (On Purpose)", Musician, October 1987
Adam Sweeting, "The Mellower Prince of Melancholy", The Guardian, 15 September, 1992
Jim Jarmusch, "Tom Waits Meets Jim Jarmusch", Straight No Chaser, October 1992
Steve Oney, "20 Questions", Playboy, March 1988
Robert Lloyd, "Gone North: Tom Waits, Upcountry", LA Weekly, 23 April 1999
Karen Schoemer, "Holding On: A Conversation with Tom Waits", Newsweek, 23 April 1999
Elvis Costello, "Summit Talk: Eavesdropping on Elvis Costello and Tom Waits," Option, July 1989

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