An Unfamiliar America

Essays in American Studies

Ari Helo, Mikko Saikku

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000218336
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This collection focuses on conceptions of the unfamiliar from the viewpoint of mainstream American history: aliens, immigrants, ethnic groups, and previously unencountered ideas and ideologies in Trumpian America. The book suggests bringing historical thinking back to the center of American Studies, given that it has been recently challenged by the influential memory studies boom. As much as identity-building appears to be the central concern for much of the current practice in American history writing, it is worth keeping in mind that historical truth may not always directly contribute to one's identity-building. The researcher's constant quest for truth does not equate to already possessing it. History changes all the time, because it consists of our constant reinterpretation of the past. It is only the past that does not change. This collection aims at keeping these two apart, while scrutinizing a variety of contested topics in American history, from xenophobic attitudes toward eighteenth-century university professors, Apache masculinity, Ku Klux Klan, Tom Waits's lyrics, and the politics of the Trump era.

Part I
Facing and Adapting to an Unfamiliar America

1 “Hoist That Rag”

Tom Waits, the Uncanny, and the Old, Weird America

Jeffrey L. Meikle

Among Americans of a certain age, the name Tom Waits evokes a hoarse, raspy, gravelly voiced singer channeling a tipsy cocktail lounge piano player, a screeching blues vocalist, or a junkyard percussionist. His lyrics conjure up the margins of society – hoboes and tramps, gamblers and thieves, traveling salesmen and con artists, burlesque dancers and streetwalkers, circus performers and carnival freaks, sailors on shore leave, tenant farmers and village idiots, the homeless and the crazed – all pursuing raggedy dreams forever out of reach. Active since the early 1970s as singer, songwriter, musician, performer, actor, and chronicler of American byways, Waits has remained on the margins of popular acclaim despite continuous lyrical and musical innovation throughout 20 albums of original songs. Receiving his first Grammy in 1992 for “best alternative music album,” Waits complained, “Alternative to what?! What the hell does that mean?!”¹ What it means is that Tom Waits has never been a household word, not even among people who keep up with trends.

Waits’s main fan base consists of college-educated, middle-class baby boomers who, regardless of their socioeconomic status, identify with folks who live close to the bone, whose lives seem to exude authenticity untouched by homogenized consumer culture. The lyric and sonic dissonance of Waits’s music made him also popular during the 1980s and 1990s among punks and Goths 20 years younger than his original fans. His skewed perspective has also brought acclaim in Europe as an artist who not only portrays the seamy side of American life but also appears to exemplify it. At the turn of the century, he remained on the radar screen of alternative culture’s “roots” contingent, but today’s gentrified hipsters are oblivious to his influence. His strange characters, unexpected lyric juxtapositions, and abrasive instrumentation are too provocative, too disruptive, for meticulously curated lives. The more distantly his obscure, outdated sources recede into the past, the more uncanny his music becomes, vaguely familiar from cultural memory or folklore, yet also strikingly unfamiliar, inexplicable, even threatening.

The unique perspective on American life offered by Waits’s music can be explored through the concept of “the uncanny” defined by Sigmund Freud in 1919.² Freud’s influential essay sought to explain a feeling of supernatural dread that suddenly surfaces during an otherwise ordinary moment, when a peculiar shift in perspective renders what is familiar into something utterly strange. The founder of psychoanalysis described this uncanny state as an eruption into consciousness of feelings or perceptions previously repressed. The moment in question felt both unfamiliar and eerily familiar, much like the déjà vu experience. Freud’s interpretation of the uncanny revolved around connotations of the German word unheimlich, which in English translates as uncanny or eerie but literally means unhomely or, more prosaically, unfamiliar, referring to a situation or experience in which we fundamentally do not feel comfortable, do not feel at home.

For Nicholas Royle, a literary critic, the uncanny is “something familiar unexpectedly arising in a strange and unfamiliar context” or “something strange and unfamiliar unexpectedly arising in a familiar context.” Either way, it involves “liminality, margins, borders, frontiers,” an awareness of “something unhomely at the heart of hearth and home.” While discussing the “aesthetics of discomfort,” Frederick Luis Aldama, another literary critic, defines the uncanny in more contemporary terms. An artist whose intent is “to disturb, discomfort, disquiet, and repulse” does so by “unsettl[ing] us and tak[ing] us away from our comfort zone.” For most people, the home is a comfort zone, but in the songs of Tom Waits, cited by Aldama as an example of a discomforting artist, broken homes and drifters who can’t find their way home are recurring themes. This essay explores the uncanny as a central element of Waits’s disturbing lyrics, his discordant sound, his constructed persona, his contrived performance style, and his troubling representation of America.³

The future singer’s birth on December 7, 1949, in Whittier, California, placed him at the leading edge of the baby boom, those Americans born between 1946 and 1964, from whose ranks his most dedicated fans were to come. He grew up in a postwar suburban landscape of low-slung ranch houses, new shopping centers, bright new schools, and fast-moving freeways.⁴ On the surface, the Waits family was typical of an expanding middle class popularly exemplified by southern California. Both his parents were schoolteachers, and a friend recalled Waits’s mother as a “standard type of June Cleaver person,” referring to an impeccably coifed television mom who wore pearls and high heels while vacuuming.⁵ Waits had two sisters, one older, one younger. A photo in the 1968 yearbook of Hilltop High School in Chula Vista, California, shows Waits, then a senior, clad in a light-colored, button-down Oxford shirt, his hair kempt but fashionably shaggy, peering into a microscope during biology class.⁶ That photo could have been a still from another television sitcom, Happy Days, which during the 1970s nostalgically portrayed the high school years of so many of Waits’s fans.

But this clean-cut postwar surface was deceiving. When Waits was about ten, his father moved out, an event the singer has discussed variously in interviews. Jesse Frank Waits, reputedly named for the outlaw James brothers, remained a presence in his son’s life, but more as an unusual apparition than a normal father. Waits remembered Frank, as he was called, picking him up for impromptu trips across the Mexican border to Tijuana to sit in cantinas and listen to mariachi music. Although Waits’s mother Alma maintained middle-class standards after her husband left, the family moved often within the San Diego area. The father’s departure seems to have had a severe effect on his son. In his early teens, Waits suffered from an auditory condition in which, as he was lying in bed, ordinary sounds in the house or on the street were magnified to a monstrous degree. Even scraping “my hand across the sheet,” he recalled, “sounded like I was doing it across a live microphone.” He scratched at his face, “trying to make it stop.” Convinced he was “probably going to die,” he eventually learned to control the phenomenon by mentally isolating each sound and decreasing its volume.⁷ A more uncanny or unheimlich affliction, at home in one’s own bed, is difficult to imagine.

Frank’s departure from the family left his son with conflicting desires, for an idealized sense of home and for the wandering life he imagined his father enjoying. Waits maintained in interviews that most “entertainers” become “part of the freak show” of performance owing to “a death in the family, or a break-up of the family unit.” In his case, this “wounding” sent him looking for “father figures,” whether singer Ray Charles or writer Charles Bukowski – “I was looking for those guys all the time.”⁸ Because he came “from a broken home,” he was drawn to “things that are kind of falling apart… that have been ignored or need to be put back together.”⁹ Years later, in 1999, married to Kathleen Brennan with three children of his own, Waits sang in a warm, country-inflected voice about an abandoned “House Where Nobody Lives,” with cracked windows and peeling paint begging the question, “Did someone’s heart break or did someone do somebody wrong?”¹⁰ Earlier, in 1983, Waits took a different perspective on broken homes when he created a character pointedly named Frank after his father. In a song called “Frank’s Wild Years,” Waits imagined him, in a supremely unheimlich gesture, torching his suburban home after pouring gasoline on it and then driving north on the freeway. Frank was so central to Waits’s conceptual world that the song’s character became the central figure in a play running two months in Chicago and a concept album derived from that production.¹¹

Around age 15, Waits took an after-school job at Napoleone’s Pizza House on the main drag of National City, which bordered San Diego’s large US Navy base. Moving up from dishwasher to cook over several years, Waits was fascinated by a continuous parade of sailors and their girlfriends, used car salesmen, pawnbrokers, prostitutes, loan sharks, small-time conmen, petty thieves, and other flotsam and jetsam along this street. The quiet, hard-working Waits kept his ears open for vernacular rhythms and figures of speech, hard-luck stories, vulgar jokes, and extravagant tall tales. He discovered Jack Kerouac at about the time he left Napoleone’s to become doorman at a folk music coffeehouse. There he was described as always having his nose in a book and scribbling notes. He had decided to write songs and become a musician, and dropped out of school shortly before graduation, almost as if just to make a point. Seven years later, he confessed that although he had “come from a good family,” he had “over the years developed some ways about me that just aren’t right,” some “kinks.”¹² This folksy admission suggests Waits was sometimes startled by his own uncanny ways.

Standard biographical accounts have Waits ignoring the countercultural 1960s and developing a backward-looking, Beat-oriented performance persona derived from Kerouac’s writings. Waits invoked the Beats when discussing his origins, claiming he was born in the back seat of a taxi on the way to the hospital, a middle-class variant of the myth that Beat avatar Neal Cassady was born in a car passing through Salt Lake City.¹³ Waits’s family background may have merged in his bookish mind with the Depression wanderings of the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939). In 1930, at about age 8, Frank Waits had traveled with his parents from Sulphur Springs, Texas, to La Verne, California, where they “worked in the citrus industry.”¹⁴ Tom’s later tale of hitchhiking to Arizona with a high school friend is the least convincing of early interview stories.

During the mid-1970s, after several years playing folk music clubs in San Diego and Los Angeles brought him a recording contract, the singer could hardly open his mouth without praising Kerouac. Waits explained that his spoken-word pieces with jazz backing were inspired by Poetry for the Beat Generation (1959), his favorite record, on which Kerouac read prose selections to piano accompaniment by Steve Allen. Waits also bragged about owning a signed first edition of Kerouac’s Visions of Cody (1959).¹⁵ In 1976, a journalist spotted both artifacts among the debris of Waits’s small bungalow, which looked “like the neglected back room of a slumping thrift shop.”¹⁶ In a press release for his second album, The Heart of Saturday Night (1974), Waits adopted a scholarly tone, declaring his record “a comprehensive study of a number of aspects of this search for the center of Saturday night, which Jack Kerouac relentlessly chased from one end of this country to the other...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Facing and Adapting to an Unfamiliar America
• Part II Conservatives and Liberals in the Unfamiliar Trumpian America
• Part III African-American History and the Present
• Index