The time Tom Waits dumped his ashtray in my guitar and beat it dead
by juli boggs
Yesterday while talking music with a coworker the dreaded question “What do you like to listen to?” was asked. This question is always difficult for me to answer. How does one pick a single artist that more or less represents the entirety of what they listen to? “Tom Waits,” I told him. “Who’s Tom Waits?” he asked.
Who is Tom Waits? This question proved more difficult than “What do you listen to?” How do you describe it? Tom Waits sounds like an ashtray, like a whiskey-sopped sailor obsessed with the wrong woman, like an angry, drunken piano. It’s experimental, yes, but it’s not rock, is it? It’s pre-rock and post-industrial at the same time. It’s raw, guttural, heavily percussive. It’s weird carnival music, a Victrola seducing you.
“It’s really good,” I told him. “It’s whiskey music.” If only I could have shown him this picture, I think he would have understood at once.
A friend of a friend tells a story of growing up in the north bay years ago and attending a neighborhood BBQ with his parents. Mildly disinterested, he wandered through the house until he found a guitar and took it out on the back steps to fool around. As he’s playing, an older guy comes and sits down. “Cool guitar,” he mumbles. It’s Tom Waits sitting there, equally bored, having been dragged along by his wife who’s acquainted with the guy’s mother through years in the PTA. “Mind if I play that for a minute?” Waits asks. The kid hands him a guitar and Waits exhales a stream of smoke looking out at the party. “Yep, here’s one I think all you kids like,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette and dumping the entire ashtray into the guitar. He begins to shake it back and forth like a rattle, crying out “Heeeey yaaaaaa” in his own liberally reinterpreted rendition of Outkast.
I can’t substantiate this story beyond the fact that it was told to me, but it sounds about right. Plus I like the idea of living in a world where things like this happen.
Feature photo: pulled it from a great Pitchfork interview with Waits. If you know who shot it, let me know.
Juli Boggs, no relation. 
Besides the inclusion of PTA and the omission of obsessive wallflower upon wallflower, it’s pretty accurate. But, Boggs being no Jayson Blair, I can let it slide, if only because it isn’t even my story, so perhaps you are truer that true.
Miss yr Boggsian repartee. Oh Boggsy, Where Art Thou?
Jayson Blair, sir?! I believe there’s a disclosure in the penultimate paragraph stating I cannot validate this story any more than you can. If you say there’s no PTA, then okay. But can we at least agree that a PTA bbq is as likely as any other in the north bay? Either that or some sort of demure soltice celebration near that artistically arranged pyre of driftwood in the Presidio.
How did you pick out the two bits I put in there to agitate you to dialouge and then twist them up so?
“Boggs being NO Jayson Blair” and “perhaps you are truer than true”!
Then to salt the snail, you didn’t even answer what I was really getting at, that I missed you and wanted to know where you were. Do you need a stress ball? Or one of those cheap plastic and metal hand strengtheners my grandfather uses to crush his building anxieties and disgust at his increasingly modern (see: useless) grandchildren?
Can’t wait to see how this message fails. Booyow, Sureyow!
Booyow! It’s been a long spring.
Where I Art: I’m still in Minnesota and nearing month three of 75 hours a week. I am so, so exhausted. Certainly hoping this will be the only job I work this year. Im ready for a seven month vacation where I may search for my lost sense of humor. Sureyow.
Dear Juli Boggs,
Probably you’re not expecting any further comments on this old post, expecialy from a Brazilian guy, but i’m so glad I read your text that I felt obligated to leave a reply.
First of all, contratulations for your writing, you are good. Second: i’ve never seen a better explanation of him than your’s “like a whiskey-sopped sailor obsessed with the wrong woman”. And last, nice history about the little boy and the guitar. I, just like you, like to beleive in a world where is possible to meet geniuses like this man out of nowere.
Salutes from Brazil!