I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: Where stories are concerned, Tom Waits presents a “target rich environment” so naturally I have a few.
I got the call to photograph him from his label and rather than discussing visuals they asked that I coordinated everything with Mr. Waits on the phone.
A week before the shoot I got a call from Tom (whom I had never met) and we talked for about an hour, as the conversation turned to the shoot he had to jump off the phone. The following evening we discussed parasites, waterways, shopping malls and mice but when the conversation veered to the matter at hand he politely but abruptly suggested we continue our discussion another time. This pattern repeated itself every night until my assistant and I, prepared for nothing but ready for almost anything, boarded a plane for northern California.
What could possibly go wrong?
When we checked into the hotel there was a cryptic message from Tom to meet at sunrise where two roads intersected. During one of our calls he had mentioned a magical sunrise he encountered when he drove his kids to school. I was encouraged to think that perhaps he had been discussing the shoot and I had just failed to pick-up on it.
A couple of hours before sunrise my assistant and I were freezing our asses off stumbling around in a dark field setting up a portrait. At first light we could make out the rolling hills blanketed in a low fog that gave a gauzy, surreal quality to the sunrise. We were surrounded by knee-high wild grasses that disappeared into the distant fog where the faint blur of farms hung in the shadows. It was every bit as beautiful as he had described. To insure that no time would be wasted when Tom arrived, as the light changed we shot polaroids, each one more stunning than the last as the sun rose. Suddenly, as the sun peeked over the horizon, the magic evaporated with the fog.
We were breaking-down lights and packing up our gear when an old pick-up truck rattled off the road. The gravel under its tires made a sound similar to the distinctive voice that bellowed from the open truck window “Did ya’ see that sunrise? Told you it was somethin’! Damn!”. He turned his stare to the horizon and silently took it in with a long, deep breath. After a moment he snapped his head back in our direction , gave a wink and a grin and with the tip of his hat left as abruptly as he had arrived.
That set the tone for a day that would include driving for hours in his pick-up, drinking cold, stale coffee in a vacant conference room, searching in vain for an imaginary cat named “Bob” at the behest of a man who may, or may not, have been a member of the Eagles, negotiating rates at a hotel that only charged by the hour, destroying the roof of a passenger van that we had filled with rusty buckets and doll heads by slapping a heavy, wooden rowboat on top of it and sitting in an empty bar that was auditioning accordion players.
When a photographer looks at their work they tend to see the experience of making the image rather than the image itself and by that yardstick this was a wonderful session. I do not believe for a minute that anything that day was random. Tom, by leaving everything to chance and squarely accepting every situation as intent you allowed us to make images where none had existed. You elevated the day from another stroll in the park to a high-wire walk without a net.
Thank you Mr. Waits - the way you allowed the day to unfold resulted in one of my favorite collaborations.
