Flamingo
My introduction to music and flamingos came through Springsteen, not surprisingly.
The introduction was never even a B-side, with all of obscurity and none of the play or wax, just some ideological irony cut loose like a deuce or douche or something running in the night. But the magic of bootlegging saved it and made it alright, and for that I've been thankful.
The flamingo was born for me around 1975; Manfred Mann had formed his Earth Band and was about to make a psychedelic hit out of Springsteen's Blinded by the Light. Circulating the country-extended on tour, the younger was simultaneously reaching back into the elder Mann's catalogue and finding Pretty Flamingo.
Of course, I wasn't there. I missed the whole thing. Didn't even get around to being born for another five years. But when I eventually got into the old Springsteen tapes, finally there came the flamingo.
The song, as Springsteen sang it, cascaded.
All the guys … on my block … call her flamingo
'Cause her hair shines like the sun
And her eyes … light up the sky
And when she walks … she moves so fine … like a flamingo ….
The bird was unexpected but welcome. Even gentlemen who preferred brunettes could find their sympathies shifting under that light. And when the song faded gently, "Sha la la, la la la la, pretty flamingo …."
The end of the syllables were what grabbed me the most. Each trailed — "Fla-Ming-Go" — with the middle syllable almost curling up on the floor.
Where Tom Waits entered the picture was with a discussion of the Chamberlin 2000. Waits had bridged Jersey Girl and a whole new set of sha-la-las down the street to Springsteen. The Chamberlin 2000 was one of the first popular keyboard samplers.
Waits was talking to Jim Jarmusch of U.K. jazz magazine Straight No Chaser in 1993 when they got onto the topic.
Waits said he had used the strange instrument on the previous fall's "Bone Machine" as well as some earlier works. As he described it, offering as good a description as any, "it's a 70-voice tape loop, it's a tape recorder, an elaborate tape recorder with a keyboard."
Waits then got to talking about the instrument's complications, which include a bicycle-like chain among other parts. "It's like operating on a flamingo," he said.
"You don't even know where the heart is, nothing. If you touch there, you know, the world will end. If you touch this tape here, I dunno, you may lose your hand. It has that kind of danger about it."
The quote was curious because that dangerous flamingo wasn't the one I thought I was chasing; but it was one just the same, according to Waits, about 10 years younger. So maybe I was wrong. Maybe that flamingo was the one.
I had been reading Da Capo Best Music Writing 2003 a few weeks before when the bird had first appeared, deep inside a long Elizabeth Gilbert profile of Waits in GQ.
Gilbert had gotten him talking in a beat-up California bar about music and love and musical love, and in her rhythms and his words you could feel him mixing, cautiously.
He abhors patterns, familiarity and ruts. He stopped playing the piano for a while because, as he says, his hands had become like old dogs, always returning to the same place. Instead, he had fantasies of pushing his piano down the stairs and recording that noise. He is known to sing through a police megaphone. He once recorded a song in which the primary instrument was a creaking door. And on Blood Money, one of his new albums, he actually recorded a solo on a calliope–a huge, howling, ungodly pneumatic organ, best known for providing music for merry-go-rounds.
"I tell you," Waits says, "playing a calliope is an experience. There's an old expression, 'Never let your daughter marry a calliope player.' Because they're all out of their minds. Because the calliope is so flaming loud. Louder than a bagpipe. In the old days, they used them to announce the arrival of the circus because you could literally hear it three miles away. Imagine something you could hear three miles away, and now you're right in front of it, in a studio … playing it like a piano, and your face is red, your hair's sticking up, you're sweating. You could scream and nobody could hear you. It's probably the most visceral music experience I've ever had. And when you're done, you feel like you should probably should go to the doctor. Just check me over, Doc, I did a couple of numbers on the calliope and I want you to take me through the paces."
He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, 'What happened to your hand?' And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle."
That's a good day of work. A bad day is when the right sound won't reveal itself. Then Waits will pace in tight circles, rock back and forth, rub his hand over his neck, tug out his hair. He and Kathleen have a code for this troublesome moment. They say to each other, "Doctor, our flamingo is sick." Because how do you heal a sick flamingo? Why are its feathers falling out? Why are its eyes runny? Why is it so depressed? Who the hell knows? It's a fucking flamingo–a weird pink foreign bird. And music is just that weird, just that foreign. It is at difficult moments like these that Kathleen will show up with novel ideas. (What if we played it like we were in China? But with banjos?) She'll bring him a Balinese folk dance to listen to, or old recordings from the Smithsonian of Negro field hollers. Or she'll just take the flamingo off his hands for a while, take it for a walk, try to put some food into it.
I ask Tom Waits who does the bulk of the songwriting around the house–he or his wife? He says there's no way to judge it. It's like anything else in a good marriage. Sometimes it's fifty-fifty; sometimes it's ninety-ten; sometimes one person does all the work; sometimes the other. Gamely, he reaches for metaphors:
"I wash, she dries."
"I hold the nail, she swings the hammer."
"I'm the prospector, she's the cook."
"I bring home the flamingo, she beheads it …."
In the end, he concludes this way: "It's like two people borrowing the same ten bucks back and forth for years. After a while, you don't even write it down anymore. Just put it on the tab. Forget it."
