| January 25th, 2006 07:17 PM |
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Audi pays out to Tom Waits after ad chicanery
by Daniel Farey-Jones Brand Republic 20 Jan 2006
LONDON - American singer Tom Waits has successfully sued Volkswagen-Audi and a Spanish production company for adapting one of his songs and impersonating his voice in an Audi ad aired in 2000 in Spain.
A Spanish court awarded the singer, who has said his music will never be used in advertising, damages of €36,000 (£24,700) for copyright infringement and €30,000 for violation of his moral rights, which protect a person's personality and reputation.
Waits claimed he had rejected a request by Spanish production company Tandem Company Guasch to use his song 'Innocent When You Dream' in the ad, but then learned of the doppelganger version when visiting Spain in 2000.
The production company was also named in the lawsuit.
Waits said: "Now they understand the words to the song better. It wasn't 'Innocent When You Dream', it was 'Innocent When You Scheme'."
The singer has a similar lawsuit pending in Germany, against General Motors company Opel and ad agency McCann Erickson.
Opel also used a Waits impersonator in an ad that aired in Finland and Sweden.
Waits said: "Commercials are an unnatural use of my work. It's like having a cow's udder sewn to the side of my face. Painful and humiliating."
Last year, the singer said: "If I stole an Opel, Lancia, or Audi, put my name on it and resold it, I'd go to jail. But over there they ask, you say no, and they hire impersonators. They profit from the association and I lose -- time, money, and credibility. What's that about?"
Advertisers should know by now that Waits will sue. In 1993, he won £2m from Frito-Lay for mimicking his voice in radio ads.
The inspirational Mr Tom Waits
(Filed: 14/01/2006)
His rasping voice is unmistakable, his style harder to place. Over a 30-year career Tom Waits has established himself as one of the most idiosyncratic - and most influential - musicians in America. A new book of interviews charts his offbeat progress in his own words...
From PLAYBOY, March 1988
Interview by Steve Oney
SO Early in your career, some of your songs - for instance, Ol' 55, which the Eagles covered - became hits, and almost all, no matter how unconventional, relied upon pretty melodies. But lately you've moved from hummable tunes to what you call "organised noise." Why?
TW I was cutting off a very small piece of what I wanted to do. I wasn't getting down the things I was really hearing and experiencing. Music with a lot of strings gets like Perry Como after a while. It's why I don't really work with the piano much any more. Anybody who plays the piano would thrill at seeing one thrown off a building, watching it hit the sidewalk and being there to hear that thump.
SO To create a marketable pop song, do you have to sell out?
TW Popular music is like a big party, and it's a thrill sneaking in rather than being invited. Every once in a while, a guy with his shirt on inside out, wearing lipstick and a pillbox hat, gets a chance to speak. I've always been afraid I was going to tap the world on the shoulder for 20 years and when it finally turned around, I was going to forget what I had to say. I was always afraid I was going to do something in the studio and hate it, put it out, and it was going to become a hit. So I'm neurotic about it.
SO Considering your predispositions, which modern artists do you like to listen to?
TW Prince. He's out there. He's uncompromising. He's a real fountainhead. Takes dangerous chances. He's androgynous, wicked, voodoo. I like a lot of rap stuff, because it's real, immediate. Generally, I like things as they begin, because the [music] industry tears at you. Most artists come out the other side like a dead carp.
SO In your musical career, you've tried to retain maximum creative control; yet within the past few years, you've become more and more involved in the most collaborative of all media: theatre and film. What's the attraction?
TW It's thrilling to see the insanity of all these people brought together like this life-support system, to create something that's really made out of smoke. The same thing draws me to it that draws me to making records - you fashion these things and ideas into your own monster. It's making dreams. I like that.
SO If you were to give a tour of LA, what sights would you include?
TW Let's see. For chicken, I suggest the Red Wing Hatchery near Tweedy Lane in South Central LA. We're talking both fryers and ritual chickens. Hang one over the door to keep out evil spirits; the other goes on your plate with paprika. For your other shopping needs, try BCD Market on Temple. Best produce in town; also good pig knuckles, always important in your dining plans. Ask for Bruce. Below the Earth, on Hill Street, is the best spot for female impersonators; then you're going to want to be looking into those pickled eggs at the Frolic Room. Guy behind the bar has the same birthday as me, and his name is Tom. Finally, you have to take in Bongo Bean, who plays the sax on the sidewalk in front of the Hotel Figueroa. We're talking Pennies from Heaven time. Bongo is tall, good-looking, there most every night. Accept no substitutes.
SO Despite your reputation and songs that glorify hard living, you've been married seven years and have two children [Waits has now been married 25 years, and has three children]. How do you balance your domestic and creative lives?
TW My wife [Kathleen] has been great. I've learned a lot from her. She's Irish Catholic. She's got the whole dark forest living inside of her. She pushes me into areas I would not go, and I'd say that a lot of the things I'm trying to do now, she's encouraged. And the kids? Creatively, they're astonishing. The way they draw, you know? Right off the page and on to the wall. It's like you wish you could be that open.
SO Do you do all-American-dad things, such as go to Disneyland?
TW Disneyland is Vegas for children. When I went with the kids, I just about had a stroke. It's the opposite of what they say it is. It's not a place to nurture the imagination. It's just a big clearance sale for useless items. I'm not going back, and the kids won't be allowed to return until they're 18, out of the house. And even then, I would block their decision.
From NEWSWEEK, April 23, 1999
Interview by Karen Schomer
KS When you're writing with Kathleen, do you write together or separately?
TW Sometimes we write separately and bring it together. It's different every time. You know, "You wash, I'll dry." You find a way to work. "You wring its neck, I'll take all the feathers off him." Sometimes you got a line, nothing more than a line and you don't know where to go with it. It might have been something thrown away and Kathleen says, "Oh, no, hang on to that, we can make something out of that." She'll say, "I can cook that up." Writing together's been really good.
KS Does she like being the silent partner?
TW She doesn't like the limelight. But she sincerely has an incandescent contribution. We've been working together since [1983 album] Swordfishtrombones. We go back that far. We got married in '80. We were married in an all-night wedding chapel in Watts.
KS Did you know her for a long time before you got married?
TW Two months. [Raspy laugh] It's true, two months. You just met, and then - bang!
KS Whose idea was it to get married?
TW My idea. Kathleen was really the one that encouraged me to start producing my own records. At that point I had done all my records with a producer. I kind of got stuck. I needed something to kick me. I needed some kind of car wreck or something. She was the one that started playing bizarre music. She said, "You can take this and this and put all this together. There's a place where all these things overlap. Field recordings and Caruso and tribal music and Lithuanian language records and Leadbelly. You can put that in a pot. No one's going to tell you you can't. You like James Brown and you also like Mabel Mercer. There's nothing wrong with that." We're all that way. We all have disparate influences. And we all know people that don't know each other! Right? I mean, some people are afraid to have parties and invite them all.
From STRAIGHT NO CHASER, October 1992
Interview by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch
JJ Do you sometimes sketch out your songs with other musicians?
TW Yeah. Sometimes it's good to combine high music with low music, orchestral guys with guys that play in the train station. Then, through the conflict of background, you go to a new place. And there's a lot of orchestral guys who rarely get an opportunity to just abandon their history on the instrument, just play free, go to a totally free zone, and you fall into these Bermuda triangles of rhythm, melody. And lately those are the places that I like to go to.
But most of the songs I write are very simple. They're three-legged chairs, and you make 'em very fast. You provide just enough for them to be able to stand up… You paint 'em, let 'em dry, and move on to the next one.
JJ You collect a lot of wild sounds, and sound effects, right?
TW Yeah. There are so many sounds I want to record. I still haven't got a really good metal sound - when you see like swords in a real sword fight, or a real anvil with a real hammer.
JJ Some songs of yours are well-suited to a simple, say slightly country-tinged backdrop. You seem to find what's appropriate for the worlds you create. A lot of your songs are like little films for me. How about the song That Feel, that you did with Keith Richards - did you write it with him or did he just play on it?
TW No, we wrote it together. He's all intuition. He stands out in the middle of the room and does those Chuck Berry splits, y'know, and leans over and turns [his guitar] up to 10 and just grungg! I mostly just play drums. He plays drums, too, he plays everything. It was good. I'm just recently starting to collaborate in writing and find it to be really thrilling. And Keith is great 'cause he's like a vulture, he circles it, then goes in and takes the eyes out.
JJ Tell me about the drummer you used on the score for Night on Earth [Jarmusch's 1991 comedy-drama].
TW Mule Patterson?
JJ Yeah. How'd you meet Mule?
TW Well, for a man who has not bathed ever in his life, studio work with him has started to become a problem and people just won't play with him.
JJ He's the first drummer I've seen who shows up with no instruments and says, "Whaddya got?"
TW Mule "Whaddya got" Patterson.
JJ And the gun thing kind of made me nervous.
TW Yeah, y'know, I've talked to him, and we can't seem to reach him on that. That it's just no, y'know, you're gonna lose work.
JJ Yeah, the loaded gun…
TW The waving of guns around in the studio…
JJ The gun in the gym bag kind of made me nervous. There's a couple of beers in there and a loaded.38.
TW Some men fear him. Others admire him. He'll show up, and if he doesn't like what's going on in the session, he'll walk out.
JJ How about Greg Cohen? You've worked a lot with Greg Cohen, too, the bass player.
TW Greg's also an arranger and a stamp collector. He has a strong, very peculiar personal mythology he brings to all of his musical exploits. It's really great to watch Greg play both bass and drums at the same time. That's really something.
JJ You are, for a lot of people, very important just because your sensibility doesn't fall in the mainstream. You inspired me long before I met you. Then there are things you've done that have become mainstream in a way because of the sound of them, like the song Jersey Girl, covered by Springsteen, or Downtown Train, covered by Rod Stewart.
TW I'm in shoe repair, really, Jim. I'm like a cobbler, they come in, they've worn 'em out. I work on the instep.
JJ What things draw you to roles you play as an actor?
TW Well, I'm not really in a position where I make all of those choices myself. It's usually smaller parts that I'm thought of for. Sometimes it's smaller parts that I'm interested in. Y'know, they say there's no small parts, just small actors. But believe me, there are small parts. [Laughs]
JJ I think that sometimes smaller parts are much more difficult because you don't have time to develop the character. To create a character in three minutes on screen is not an easy thing.
TW If you make a breakthrough as an actor it'll help you make a breakthrough in music. Because I think all things really do aspire to this condition of music. Everyone keeps saying, well it has a musical quality to it, or want to find the music in this.
JJ Have you ever written stuff that would end up being like a text, that would exist as a book or as writing, rather than as music or as acting?
TW No, I haven't. I don't know; you see I'm always going for the sound of things. I have a hard time just writing things out, I have to hear them first. Sometimes I put it on a tape recorder, but then I transcribe it and it's lost its music. I love reference books that help me with words, dictionaries of slang, superstition, phrase and fable, the Book of Knowledge, things that help me find words that have a musicality to them. Sometimes that's all you're looking for. Or to make sounds that aren't words, necessarily. They're just sounds and they have a nice shape to them. I love slang, prison slang and street idioms and -
JJ You like rap music because of that, right?
TW Oh yeah, I love it. It's a real underground railroad.
JJ It keeps American-English living. Rap, hip-hop culture, and street slang is to me what keeps it alive, and keeps it from being a dead thing.
TW Yeah, it happens real fast, too. It's… and it moves on, in like three weeks maybe something that was very current is now passé. As soon as they adopt it, they have to move on.
JJ It's an outsider's code, in a way.
TW That talk came because you had to have conversations, that whole underground railroad thing where you had to be able to talk to somebody in the presence of law enforcement, and have law enforcement totally unable to understand anything of what you were saying. I don't know if people really acknowledge as much as they should how the whole Afro-American experience, how it has given music and lyricism, poetry to daily life. It's so ingrained that most people don't even give it credit. But, yeah, I love language.
JJ What writers do you like?
TW 'Course [Charles] Bukowski [the hobo poet and writer] - the one called You Know and I Know and Thee Know… there's some beautiful things in there, very mature, and with an end-of-the-world sadness. And Cormac McCarthy I like.
JJ What do you think about William Burroughs? Burroughs has always incorporated the language of criminals and junkies and street stuff into that process that he runs the words through.
TW Yeah, I love Burroughs. He's like a still, and everything that comes out of him is already whisky.
JJ Do you have particular memories of when you were growing up?
TW I had a midget prostitute climb up on a bar stool and sit in my lap when I was about 18 in Tijuana. I drank with her for about an hour. It was something. Changed me. Tender, very tender. I didn't go off to the room with her. She just sat in my lap.
JJ Have you ever been arrested in Mexico?
TW Oh many times, yeah. Bought my way out. As a kid, as a teenager down there raising hell. It was such a place of total abandon and lawlessness, it was like a Western town, going back 200 years - mud streets, the church bells, the goats, the mud, the lurid, torrid signs. It was a wonderland, really, for me, and it changed me. I used to go down there for haircuts with my dad, and he would go into the bars and drink, and I would sit on those stools with him and have a Coke.
JJ Where else have you been arrested? Of course, LA.
TW LA many times, yeah. Once I was jumped by four plain-clothes policemen. They all looked like they were from Iowa, wearing corduroy Levi jackets, tennis shoes, off-duty. Grabbed me and a buddy of mine, threw us into the back of a Toyota pickup with guns to our temples. Guy says, "Do you know what one of these things does to your head when you fire it at close range?" He said, "Your head will explode like a cantaloupe." I thought about that.
JJ Any other strange memories?
TW Well, I bought some coke one night about four in the morning from a guy in an apartment building in Miami, real down apartment, and he had a gunshot wound in his chest and he was bleeding through the bandage, you know, and we were counting out the money on a glass table and he kept grabbing for his shoulder, and that was a really scary night. And the lighting in there was like whoa! God! All low light, desk light, nothing above the knees. The place was like a black swimming pool at night. This was some hellish scene. Somebody had a phone number, and it was after a concert, and we had to drive over there. Real gangster stuff. Y'know, with a gun on the table and everything. Bad scene: black guy with suspenders [braces] and a terrible wound. "No cops, no doctors. I'll ride it out." But you're burnin' up, you're runnin' a 106, it's off the map, I can't even record your fever it's so high. "No cops."
THE ONION, May 29, 2002
Interview Keith Phipps
KP You have developed a reputation as a recluse. Does that bother you?
TW Hell, no. It wards off strangers. No, if people are a little nervous about approaching you at the market, it's good. I'm not Chuckles the Clown. I don't cut the ribbon at the opening of markets. Hit your baseball into my yard and you'll never see it again. I just have a close circle of friends and loved ones - the circles of trust, as they say.
KP There's actually a section on your website about fans who have spotted you in public. Do you have a problem going out?
TW I go where I feel like. I drove on a field trip once, to a guitar factory, to show all these little kids how to make guitars. So we're standing there, and folks are looking over at me, and I'm just waiting for someone to recognise me - you know, "Hey, aren't you that music guy?" Nobody. Nothing. We're there for, like, two hours, watching them put the frets on and all that, and I'm waiting and waiting… A week later, I took the same group of kids on a field trip to the dump, and as I pulled up, don't ask me how, but my truck was surrounded by people that wanted an autograph. It was a dump, for Christ's sake. I guess everybody knows me at the dump.
'Innocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader', edited by Mac Montandon (Orion Publishing Group, £14.99) will be published on Thursday and is available for £12.99 plus £1.25 p&p from Telegraph Books Direct on 0870 428 4112.
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| January 25th, 2006 08:43 PM |
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| keefjunkie |
dylans better |
| January 26th, 2006 01:29 PM |
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| FPM C10 |
quote:
keefjunkie wrote:
dylans better
..than most anything! Yes! I agree!
What's yer point?
You remind me of a buddy of mine who, like many drunks/substance abusers, went through an "I found Jesus" phase. At some point in the 80s I saw him and said "hey, did you hear so-and-so's new album? It's great!" (I forget who it was, maybe REM, embarassingly enough) and he said, very sternly, "is it better than JESUS?"
And I said, "Er...well...does it HAVE to be?" |
| January 26th, 2006 04:29 PM |
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| Sir Stonesalot |
Hey Flea...the dude that replied to you...he also said about The Strokes..."their the future".
Not "they're"..."their".
I think your reply sailed as far over his head as a wispy cirrus cloud.
We need to put the Squirting Murphy's back together. |
| January 26th, 2006 04:32 PM |
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| FPM C10 |
quote:
Sir Stonesalot wrote:
We need to put the Squirting Murphy's back together.
Their better than Jesus! |
| January 26th, 2006 04:38 PM |
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| Sir Stonesalot |
That would make a good album title. |
| January 26th, 2006 05:22 PM |
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| Dick Bush |
Funny guy!
http://www.youtube.com/player.swf?video_id=zcuHGmTVkPM&+Ronnie=&l=74&fs=1&title=The+Ghost+of+Tom+Waits+-+Backstage+with+%27Keef%27+ |
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