Tom Waits’ poem to Keith Richards "The big 80 is here"

By editorial board on December 18, 2023

Tom Waits has written a new poem to mark Keith Richards‘ 80th birthday. Called ‘Burnt Toast To Keith‘, the poem appears in the January 2024 edition of Uncut.

The Rolling Stones co-founder has revealed that he’s very keen to collaborate with Tom Waits again. "I spoke to him a couple of months ago,” said Richards. “There was a point where he was going to be at the Willie Nelson birthday party concert. I was looking forward to that, but it didn’t happen. We’re in touch. I have letters from him in his beautiful writing hanging on the wall.”

 

 

 

“With Tom, it’s no sweat. We didn’t have to do anything together, we just did it because we were together,” he added. “Sometimes we write things together and sometimes we’ll have dinner or something."

Richards and Waits have worked together several times in the past, starting with Waits’ popular 1985 album, Rain Dogs. In a new interview with Uncut, Richards said the pair have never failed to have “great fun” together.

Keith Richards and Tom Waits have been buddies for decades now, a friendship that dates back to the 1980s. Richards first got a taste of the legendary growler's unique recording style on Waits' 1985 album Rain Dogs.

“Tom’s music is so American — probably more folk-American than anything, but somehow modern,” said Richards. “He’s a weird mixture of stuff, a great bunch of guys.”

“I was impressed by the amount of weirdo instruments he had hanging around. It’s an amazing collection. I thought, ‘Hello!’ He had a Mellotron, like an early version of the synthesiser, which was loaded entirely with train noises.”

This revelation, incidentally, is shared with us by none other than Keith Richards, who tells Uncut about his long, predictably colourful friendship with Waits as part of our cover story – from one old devil to another.

For his part, Keith felt honored to have been allowed in to that creative part of Tom Waits' reclusive psyche. "Tom, blessings, it was great to work with him," he said in an interview posted to his official YouTube channel. "It was only found out later that he never writes with anybody else, he only ... writes with his wife, Kathleen. So I realized that was an extra honor, to work with a guy that ... is not a collaborator."

 

Besides Richards’ warm and insightful recollections, there’s a deep dive into Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years – an extraordinary trio of albums that recast Waits as a master of creative daring. “I asked Tom if there was anything he was looking for,” one collaborator tells Graeme Thomson. “He put his hands up to his mouth and stretched them out in front of himself, and said, ‘I need more…’ and made a long whooshing sound.”

“There’s nobody in the world like him,” Waits says of his friend and collaborator, Richards. Speaking to NPR’s Fresh Air, he spoke of their time working on Waits’ iconic Rain Dogs together stating: “We wrote songs together for a while and that was fun [but] he doesn’t really remember anything or write anything down. 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.”

Quoted on the Tom Waits Library, guitarist Mark Ribot said that Waits would begin recording without any rehearsing and use enigmatic instructions like, "Play it like a midget's bar mitzvah." The gritty singer/songwriter would rather get his percussions by swinging a two-by-four around a dingy basement bathroom than use a sample. "It wasn't a mechanical kind of recording at all,"

Read More: https://www.grunge.com/293910/a-look-into-keith-richards-friendship-with-tom-waits/

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