Hobo Hip
At the Public Library today, where all the educated bums loiter, I found a copy of Tom Waits' 2009 CD-rom "Glitter and Doom (Live)" -and checked it out. His voice is improving. His cirrhosis of the liver act is the best in the business! The raunchy jokes on Disk 2 were a new experience for me (never having been to a Waits show).
Tom Waits is an acquired taste. I first heard of Waits listening to the radio in 1975, after the release of his song, “Eggs and Sausage,” on the album, Nighthawks at the Diner. The song goes like this:
Nighthawks at the Diner
Of Emma's 49er...
The song was a game changer, for me. It would not be an exaggeration to call it life-changing. I was a voracious pop music listener since 10-transistor, pocket AM radios, were the latest high tech gadget. Does anybody else (still kicking) remember the 1964 song, “King of the Road,” by Rodger Miller?
The hobo is generic in American literature. He stands for absolute independence. Other nations do not tolerate vagabonds. Americans do not all agree about this, granted, but neither is there a consensus for the totalitarian alternative. There are greater threats to freedom than sleeping on a park bench.
Enough about me. I want to talk about me. In 1975, I was a year out of High School, certain of nothing but an infatuation with art. It seemed like everybody I talked to wanted to know what I intended to do with my life. "Art," I replied. They said good luck with that.
Then, one time, I was riding around with a High School buddy, in October, of '75, a year after graduation. Waits' “Eggs and Sausage,” was playing on the car radio. It was the first time I heard it. It struck a chord with me that reverberates to this day. I didn't buy the record, but it stuck with me, over the years -Waits' voice, that is.
By 1975, most of our High School acquaintances had gone on to college or married or enlisted. Here I was, my buddy and I, rolling around on a weekday looking for kicks like a couple of slow learners. I remember we were literally at a junction in the road, trying to decide whether to go right or left, listening to the Diner song:
Burgers and fries,
What kind of pies?
That gave my buddy a clue to get lunch. It gave me a clue, too. Nighthawks, the 1948 painting by Edward Hopper, which I had seen many times at the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. I had known that picture since childhood, since I learned to walk. It occupies as permanent a place in my consciousness as anything. I immediately picked-up on Waits' allusion to it in his song. He was grooving on what was probably a postcard he got at the Museum.
What's going on here, I said to myself? I had been noticing correspondences of this kind, as I said, for some time. Call them references, or quotes, or allusions -they were often plagiarisms. Usually, they had to be explained to me, and others I figured out myself. I was even warned against going too far, of finding delusions of reference, which advice I would have heeded, had I known at the time what it was.
Mostly, it was lyrics quoting lyrics I descried, or music borrowed from music, and most commonly lyrics from literature. Finding a reference to Hopper's Diner in Waits' Diner was a first (for me), -song lyrics quoting art. It was a song about art, without explicitly naming the artist, a charade, almost like playing a game of trivia. Like a typical artist, I never cared much for games, but there was no denying the satisfaction of catching the intellectual ball, so to speak, in this instance.
All I knew was that I saw connections everywhere, what we now call intertextuality, a global dialog. I “got it,” and I also realized, suddenly, that I had a lot more to learn. The subliminal was hiding everywhere, stalking, ready to pounce. It was a thing bigger than myself and, at the same time, it absorbed me. It was the first of many panic attacks.
Now here I am, a long, looong time after, defending the use of bums and losers as subjects for art. Tributes are often self-serving. Will you believe I'm being sincere, when I say Tom Waits has been an influence on me, and my work?
One-of-a-kind works of art can be viewed at: https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/1840403