"I'n not a huge star. I'm not even a twinkle. I'm just a rumor"
~Interview in New Musical Express, Nov. 29, 1975
"People who like what I do have come to expect this narrative; this I-don't-give-a-shit shuffle that I've been doing for a few years."
~same interview
"In cities like Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Boston and Denver. I'm a very bizarre cultural phenomenon."
~same interview
"'Step Right Up' - all that jargon we hear in the music business is just like what you hear in the restaurant or casket business. So instead of spouting my views in "Scientific American" on the vulnerability of the American public to our product-oriented society, I wrote 'Step Right Up'."
~Rolling Stone interview, 1976
" I don't want to be a has-been before I've even arrived. That would be hard to live with. Yeah...hard to live with. I don't want to think about it, man. Let's go get a pizza."
~same interview
"I'd rather play a club with vomit all around me, than a clean little college with sassy little girls and guys with razor-cut hair and coke spoons around their necks. "
Time, Nov 28, 1977
"Life is picking up a girl with bad teeth, or getting to know one of those wild-eyed rummies down on Sixth Avenue."
~same interview
"It was a tiny community. The main drag was a transvestite and the average age was deceased."
~same interview, about National City, CA
"I have an image that has been cultivated, derived from the way I am. I just try to steer a course between the pomp and the piss."
~same interview
"Yeah, I've spent a couple of nights in the barbed wire hotel. All dressed up and no place to go."
~same interview
"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. I just hope I'm able to touch that feeling before I find myself one of these days double-parked on easy street."
~Newsweek, June 14, 1976
"I've got an eagle tattooed on my chest. Only on this body it looks more like a robin."
~Creem Magazine, March 1978
"Blue Oyster Cult and Black Oak Arkansas stayed in the same hotel with me in Phoenix. It was a real thrill for me, ya know, being only three doors away from your heroes." (He once said he enjoyed the Cult about as much as listening to trains in a tunnel.) "I like them, of course, I also like boogers and snot and vomit on my clothes."
~same interview
"I've had it up to here with Crosby Steals The Cash. I need another group like that like I need another dick. I'd rather listen to some young kid in a leather jacket singing a song like 'I want to eat out my mother' than to hear some of these insipid guys with their cowboy boots and embroidered shirts doing 'Six Days On The Road.'"
~same interview
"Being there was more like a prison sentence (laughs). Hard time. When I moved there I stayed at the Chelsea and then got an appartment nearby and joined the McBurney Y.M.C.A....actually, I just went to New York to have a drink. It was a very expensive drink"
~Promo interview for Heart Attack and Vine
"The new band is all midgets, they share a room, they don't want to be paid for their work. They all have a basic persecution complex and they want me to punish them for things that have happened in their past life and I have agreed - I've just signed something."
~New Musical Express, October 19, 1985
"A hero ain't nothing but a sandwich. It's tough on the heroes, all they really want to do is strip you of your name, rank and serial number. It's like a hanging, a burlesque. it's spooky. They have you all dressed up with a hat on, make upand a stick that goes up the back of your neck. Then they take a 12-gauge shotgun and blow your head off."
~Same interview
"'Rain Dogs' is like, well, I don't want to sound too dramatic but I wanted there to be a connection between the tracks. I was going to call it 'Beautiful Train Wrecks' or 'Evening Train Wrecks'."
~same interview
"It was called the Globe Theatre and they had some unusual double bills. I saw 'The Pawnbroker' on the same bill as '101 Dalmations' when I was 11. I didn't understand it and now I think the programme director must have been mentally disturbed or had a sick sense of humour"
~same interview
No, he's been borrowing money from me for so long that I had to put a stop to it. He's a gentleman, he came into the studio and took his hat off and all these birds flew out."
~same interview, about how Keith Richards came to work on Rain Dogs
"I was going to throw that song out. I said call the dustman, this one's chewing on the dead. But somebody said, there's something there. Hell I said, there isn't. Then he came in - on the clock he stands with his head at 3 and his arm at 10. I said how can a man stand like that without falling over, unless he has 200 lb test fishing line suspending him from the ceiling? It was like something out of 'Arthur', he comes in with his guitar valet and it's 'Oh Keef, shall we try the rickenbacker?'"
~same interview, talking about the song Union Square and Keith Richards again
"The Pogues I like, they're ragged and full of it. They seem to come on traditional and eccentric. They shout, I like the shouting. I like Agnes Bernelle, Falling James and The Leaving Trains, Jack Drake and the Black Ducks, they play a drunken reverie, no instruments, they just bang on things. I like some of that metal music, making music out of things that come to hand."
~same interview
"Champagne for your real friends, real pain for you sham friends. I tell them it's good to write on instruments you don't understand."
~same interview, on advice to future musicians
"Jesus Christ, I'm 19 years old and you're asking me how I want to be remembered. On my gravestone I want it to say 'I told you I was sick'. Achievement is for the senators and scholars. At one time I had ambitions but I had them removed by a doctor in Buffalo. It started as a cyst, it grew under my arm and I had to have new shirts made, it was awful. But I have them in a jar at home now."
~same interview
"it's always nice when someone covers your songs, some of them are orphans, they need a home."
~same interview
"You see things like the $400 shoe followed by the $500 ballgown stepping into the pool of blood from the bum that was killed the night before."
same interview, about New York
GB. Did you write the book?
TW. I wrote it with Kathleen Brennan.
GB. How did you collaborate?
TW. With great difficulty.
GB. Did you work together or did you send stuff back and forth?
TW. Well, she's my wife. We sent stuff back and forth. Like dishes, books, frying pans, vases.
~Spin, November, 1985, about the play and album, Frank's Wild Years
GB. Ever work with your wife before?
TW. No, this is a first. And a last.
GB. Do you think it's hard to be critical with somebody that you're close to?
TW. Yeah. Or it's hard not to be critical.
~same interview
"I do a Fourteenth Street version of "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood", where everybody's out of work and selling drugs on the corner."
~same interview
GB. I'm really interested in the songs that don't make it onto albums.
TW. I end up dismantling them. It's just like having a car that doesn't run. You just use it for parts. "The rest of the guys are gonna have to go out there and stick together. Bob, you look out for your younger brother there. And all of you go out there into the world of radio and performance value." I feel like Fagin. It took a long time to record this album, two and a half months. The recording process has a peak, and then it dissipates. You have to be careful that it doesn't go on too long. Then you start to unravel everything. Nowadays, if you want a certain sound you don't have to get it now, you can get it later. When you're mixing,
electronically. I wanted to get it now, so I felt I cooked it and I ate it. You can establish percussion sounds later electronically. But I ended up banging on things so I felt that it really responded. If I couldn't get the right sound out of the drum set we'd get a chest of drawers in the bathroom and hit it real hard with a two-by-four. Things like that. That's on "Singapore". Those little things made me feel more involved thatn sampling on a synthesizer.
~same interview
GB. How do you audition a road manager?
TW. Well, you take a couple of candidates out to the Mojave Desert and you leave the car by the side of the road and you walk for a couple of days, and when you get to a stream, the guys that want to drink from a cup, those are they guys you don't want. It's the guys that throw themselves headlong into the stream and just drink, those are the best soldiers. What I'm really looking for, though, is an all-midget orchestra. They could all stay in the same room and on stage they could all share the same light.
~same interview
"New York is like a ship. It's like a ship full of rats, and the water's on fire. People move to Brooklyn and say, 'I feel isolated.' That's insane."
~same interview
Hope you enjoyed these...I'll have more Tom Waits quotes later...
