“she speaks to my subtext, not my context.”

“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 interviewers’ 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. Or this: He once claimed he fell
for Kathleen because she was the first woman he’d ever
met who could “stick a knitting needle through
her lip and still drink
coffee.”)

And
yet he wants
to talk about her because —
you can just see it — he loves the way
her name feels in his mouth. They met in
Hollywood, back in the early 1980s. Waits was
writing the music for the Coppola movie One from the
Heart, and Kathleen Brennan was a 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. When
they were first falling in love, they used to drive wildly around L.A. at all hours
and she’d purposely try to get him lost, just for the entertainment value. She’d
tell him to take a left, then hop on the freeway, then cross over Adams
Boulevard, then straight through the ghetto, then into a worse
ghetto, then another left… “We’d end up in Indian country,”
Waits remembers. “Out where nobody could even
believe we were there. Places where you
could get shot just for wearing
corduroy.”

…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, anyhow. 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’s like she was always saying:
“Whatever you bring home, baby, I’ll cook it up. You bring
home a possum and a coon?
We will 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. “Yeah,” Waits
says, and he’s still all dazzled about
her. “She’s really radical.”