Tom Waits Pens a Poem in Honor of His Old Buddy Keith Richards
By Jeff Giles August 14, 2015 11:38 AM
Tom Waits has published a poem in honor of his long friendship with Keith Richards for a special issue of Rolling Stone dedicated to the legendary guitarist.
Titled simply “Keith Richards … ,” the poem celebrates the long friendship between the two, which dates back to the sessions for Waits’ 1985 Rain Dogs album. As Waits told Pitchfork, it all started with his flippant response to a record company query about the possibility of enlisting special guests for the recording.
“I said, ‘What about Keith Richards?’ I was just joking, but somebody went ahead and called him. And then he said, ‘Yeah.’ And I said, ‘Now we’re really in trouble,’” he recalled. “I was really nervous. He came with about 600 guitars in a semitruck. And a butler.
We were in these huge studios in New York, like The Poseidon Adventure. Huge, high ceilings in these rooms like football fields. They’d fill these things up with orchestras and we were in there with five guys. It felt a little weird. He killed me. I was really knocked out that he played on all those things.”
The two have collaborated more than once over the ensuing years, including spending a substantial period of time together working on songs for Waits’ 2011 effort Bad as Me — not that any of those compositions made the cut, or even made it out of the room where they were written.
“We wrote songs together for a while and that was fun [but] he doesn’t really remember anything or write anything down,” he said later. “So you play for an hour and he would yell across the room, ‘Scribe!’ And I looked around. ‘Scribe? Who’s the scribe?’ And he’d say it again, now pointing at me. I was supposed to have written down everything we said and dreamt of and played, and I realized we needed an adult in the room.
I’ve never been the one that one would consider the adult. It was an interesting dynamic.”
That interesting dynamic is reflected in “Keith Richards … ,” which opens with the lines “He can run faster than a fax machine / His urine is blue” and concludes, “Keith once took my 10,000 dollar overcoat / To put down across a mud puddle / To allow an octogenarian laundress / Named Clementine Moorehouse to cross the street / Comfortably / That’s Keith always the gentleman.”
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Waits & Keef, what a pair!! Waits might not yet have been "On the Wagon" at the time of Rain Dogs in 85, so I'm sure that woulda been a real hoot!! Keef plays and sings/warlbles along on Bone Machine's closing song ,"That Feel". Sure sounds like some drunken lads, but i think Tom had sobered up by then. 😉
Getting a song (Dave Letterman) or poem written for you by Tom is on a top-shelf of coolness in this ol' idiot's book.
EAPFSangin'
Well there's one thing you can't lose
It's that feel
Your pants, your shirt, your shoes
But not that feel
You can throw it out in the rain
You can whip it like a dog
You can chop it down like an old dead tree
You can always see it
When you're coming into town
Once you hang it on the wall
You can never take it down
But there's one thing you can't lose
And it's that feel
You can pawn your watch and chain
But not that feel
It always comes and finds you
It will always hear you cry
I cross my wooden leg
And I swear on my glass eye
It will never leave you high and dry
Never leave you loose
It's harder to get rid of than tattoos
But there's one thing you can't do
Is lose that feel
You can throw it off a bridge
You can lose it in the fire
You can leave it at the altar
But it will make you out a liar
You can fall down in the street
You can leave it in the lurch
Well you say that it's gospel
But I know that it's only church
And there's one thing you can't lose
And it's that feel
It's that feel....
