Tom Waits on the most boring band in America: “About as exciting as watching paint dry”
Throughout music history, a handful of unconventional figures have risen to prominence despite their eccentricity. While Scott Walker’s later work may not receive much airplay on mainstream radio, and Tom Waits may have ventured into avant-garde territory that’s not necessarily prime-time material, the latter would always prefer this over cookie-cutter, mundane rock. In fact, he once described one band in exactly those terms.
From the very start, Waits has been a strange phenomenon seemingly misunderstood by his presence in cultural knowledge. For a lot of people, his musical identity is relegated to dingey bar corner pianos, writing tracks like ‘Martha’ or ‘Please Call Me Baby’ for sad drunks to slur out.
But Waits came up in the Californian rock scene which feels like a surprising fact considering Waits’ anything but hippie energy. But in the early 1970s, the musician was buzzing around the same musical sphere as names like America, Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and much to his own regret, the Eagles.
It wasn’t a crowd that Waits felt he belonged in or even desired to be in. Instead, his California centred around a different scene. Just as it had been in the 1960s when acts like Buffalo Springfield or Led Zeppelin were getting bit, figures like Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa continued to provide a refuge for musicians on the stranger side of the spectrum. In fact, the promote his debut album, Waits went on tour with Zappa’s band Mothers Of Invention, perhaps inspiring the more avant-garde choices he’d work with later in his career.
Despite all of his best efforts to separate himself from the more mainstream, radio-friendly LA music world, it seemed to keep trying to draw him back in. The pull always came from the band he liked the least, as Don Henley and the Eagles boys were always right there, taunting him with their easy-listening, endlessly palatable tunes. First, they became label mates as Waits was signed to Asylum Records, where Glenn Frey was encouraged by music executives to form the Eagles. He could handle that.
But then, the band seemed to extend a strange little olive branch of friendship or musical kinship. Despite Waits always wanting to be seen as more than just a man with a piano and always having more to him than the radio-played ballads that first made his name, that early iteration of his music stuck. Those tracks remain his biggest hits and have become standard in piano-led blues tunes thanks to their sharp storytelling and catchy hooks. That’s likely what got the Eagles into Waits despite the two artists feeling worlds apart in terms of musicality and style.
The reason for Waits’ dislike of the band was simple: he thought they were dull. While he would go on to have a boundary-pushing career, interested in telling stories and telling them in a totally immersive way, the Eagles seemed to coast along doing whatever would get them radio plays. Their pleasing but never too out-there sound is exactly why they got so big and became so successful in the 1970s, merging just enough counter-cultural sounds with mainstream pop to get all of the stations on their side. Their ethos and simple ambition to gain fans contradict Waits’ more avant-garde plans.
In 1974, only a year after Waits’ debut, the Eagles covered ‘Ol’55’ for their record On The Border. You only have to listen to the first minute with its intense slide guitars trampling over Frey and Henley’s happy-go-lucky, limp vocals to see exactly why Waits hated it. It contains none of the grit of the original as it’s ironed out into a boring and basic country rock song. If Waits already wasn’t a fan of the Eagles, after their attempt at one of his tunes, he hated them.
“I don’t like The Eagles. They’re about as exciting as watching paint dry. Their albums are good for keeping the dust off your turntable, and that’s about all,” he said of the band.
Of their cover version, he was cordially kind about their song choice but made his thoughts on their take on it known as he said, “I frankly was not that particularly crazy about their rendition of it. The song is about five years old; it’s one of the first songs I wrote, so I felt like it was kind of flattering that somebody wanted to do your song, but at the same time, I thought their version was a little antiseptic.”
As Waits released more music and found his way into stranger musical territories, he luckily got himself far away from the boring, radio-fodder bands he hated. It would be pretty funny, however, to see the Eagles attempt to tackle a later track and hear their attempt to turn ‘What’s He Building?’ into a mainstream, easy-listening hit.