Heavy Waits

SPOTLIGHT

Tom Waits sings of the dented and rusted-out with a voice in need of an oil change. He has been at it since the early 1970s, playing for the devoted in clubs and on college campuses, comfortable on the outskirts of American pop: a thirty-six-year-old, well-known Little Known. It seems that over the years Waits's mournful, sardonic tales of late nights and last ditches came to inhabit him; he carries their pool-hall sadness in his walk and his talk—but mostly under his eyes. Francis Coppola noticed this and nudged him in front of the camera for small parts in Rumble Fish and The Cotton Club; now Waits has worked his tics and jive in a feature role, in Jim Jarmusch's recently released Down by Law.

"It's a kind of neo-Beatnik adventure fantasy," Waits says. He plays a DJ. who finds himself behind bars in New Orleans. He and his cell mates, played by Roberto Benigni ("a comedian, really big in Italy, kills 'em") and John Lurie, star of Jarmusch's charming dead-end-road movie, Stranger than Paradise, bust out. "We run through the swamp," Waits explains, "and, with the bloodhounds nipping at our heels, search for fulfillment and happiness."

Waits doesn't know when he'll get around to recording a follow-up to last year's Rain Dogs, the album critics loved (and Kurt Weill would have). He and his wife, Kathleen Brennan, have been busy polishing the script of Frank's Wild Years, an extrapolation for the stage of a barstool soliloquy from his 1983 Swordfishtrombones LP. The show, which had its first production last summer, with Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, will open Off Broadway in New York sometime this season with Waits as the star.

"You can't keep wearing the same shoes, dragging the same luggage," he says. "I'm the kind of guy who's always expecting the worst—the legs fall off the piano, they chase me with torches and spears. Can't complain, though. You might say my dance card is full."

GERALD MARZORATI