The punk rock mogul who saved Tom Waits from purgatory
The third act of Tom Waits’s glittering career began when his wife went to the dentist. Waiting her turn to open wide, in 1994, Kathleen Brennan happened upon a story in a reception-room copy of the financial magazine Forbes about Epitaph, an independent punk rock record label whose thumping success at the box office had astonished the wider music industry.
That the company’s owner and founder, Brett Gurewitz, had refused to speak with the author of the article piqued her interest. As the oracle of blue-chip credibility, Forbes was the home of the rich and boastful – reticence was not usually an option.
“I told Forbes magazine, ‘No, I will not do an interview with you,’” Gurewitz tells me. “And they said, ‘Why?’ And I said, ‘Because if one of my customers, a young punk rocker, were to see me in your magazine, they would not think that was cool’. Right? In fact, I think I said something along the lines that it would be infinitely uncool.”
This happenstance moment was the catalyst for a long and fruitful relationship. To date, Tom Waits has recorded five lavishly praised studio albums, one concert LP and a 56-track triple-disc of deep-cuts and new material for Epitaph. (Waits was the first artist to appear on the company’s Anti- label, which would go on to release albums by Kate Bush, Mavis Staples, Solomon Burke, and many more.) In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the poignant and sometimes weird Mule Variations, his first LP for the company, a new version of the song Get Behind The Mule has recently been made available.
Never mind that the name Tom Waits adorns the marquee, Kathleen Brennan is more than the moll of one of modern music’s most unorthodox and spectacular talents. As well as being her husband’s muse and artistic director, her name appears as co-writer on all but four of Mule Variations’ 16 tracks. In his induction speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 2011, Waits described his wife as an “incandescent light that has guided me and kept me alive and breathing and sparkling since we met”.
Waiting for her teeth to be looked at, in Forbes magazine, Brennan read about how Epitaph had struck platinum with the 1994 album Smash, by the Orange County punk rock group The Offspring, a record that was well on its way to becoming the most successful independent release of the 20th Century. She learned about the label’s artist-first ethics, and how this once commercially discountable minnow had done $60 million worth of business that year alone.
The company’s remarkable market presence afforded Brett Gurewitz the opportunity to show off his recalcitrant chops once more. That year, he turned down an offer from Sony, worth $50 million, for a 49 per cent stake in his operation.
Four years later, Brennan remembered what she had read. With her husband in the market for a new record label, she asked her friend and associate, the rock biz lawyer Donald S. Passman, to make a call to Epitaph. As it so happened, Gurewitz needed no introduction to the man seeking to speak with him; in fact, he owned, and had read, all 11 editions of Passman’s book, All You Need To Know About The Music Industry. Picking up the phone at his company’s office and warehouse on Santa Monica Boulevard, in Los Angeles, he told his receptionist, “Of course I’ll take the call”.
“So I got on the phone,” Gurewitz says. “‘Hey Brett, this is Donald Passman.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I know who you are – big fan.’ ‘Okay, what would you think about signing Tom Waits?’ And I said, ‘Well, if you’re not pulling my leg, all I can say is this. He’s one of my favourite artists of all time. If this is real, what I’ll do is send you a blank sheet of paper and you can make the contract anything you want so long as you let me make 50 cents a record. And that was the conversation.”
When it came to record deals, Tom Waits had enjoyed his share of luck. Following a decade on the songwriter-friendly Asylum label, for his career’s wild and wondrous second act, he signed to Island Records for a further 10-year tenure that saw the release of masterpieces such as Rain Dogs, Franks Wild Years and Bone Machine. The company didn’t seem to mind that not one of these LPs cracked the US top 100. In fact, so keen was Island founder and owner Chris Blackwell to sign the artist in the first place that he offered to issue 1983’s partially berserk Swordfishtrombones before he’d even heard it.
“I’m not a commercial artist,” Waits once told the writer Bill Holdship. “I don’t get a tremendous amount of airplay. It seems that I reach a certain amount of people by talking to magazines – you’d be more apt to see me in a magazine than you would to hear me on the radio. It’s kind of strange. It’s like reading about a bird in an electronics magazine. You hope that you’ll be on the radio… [but] the demographics of it [have changed]. There’s so much more money involved that it’s like network television, with a limited range and format.”
Over time, the music industry’s fondness for celebrated artists with limited commercial appeal began to wane. Although Tom Waits’s relationship with Island withstood its ￡180 million acquisition, in 1989, by the Polygram UK Group, eight years later the news that Chris Blackwell was stepping away from his role at the top of its tree caused great unease. Worse still was the announcement, in 1998, of the merger of Island and 14 other labels under the umbrella of The Island Def Jam Music Group. As Blackwell explained, “Tom’s contract was about to expire, and I think that he felt that as Island was now owned by a conglomerate, he would get less attention.”
There would be no such problems at Epitaph. When Brett Gurewitz met with Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan in a diner at a truck stop on Interstate 5, he explained that, alongside a campaign of adverts and promotional CDs, the singer would be promoted by a team of 20 staffers who between them would call 500 record shops in order to explain to buyers and owners why they should stock his LP. “We moved mountains for him,” Gurewitz says. “As I promised him we would do, and as I wanted to do.”
It was a far cry from the label’s earliest days. Epitaph was founded in 1980 with the help of a loan of a thousand dollars from Brett Gurewitz’s father, “Big Dick”, in order that his son’s teenage group, Bad Religion, could release their debut seven-inch single. This kindness would prove to be a significant moment in the annals of underground music. Eight years later, the release of the band’s third album, the brilliant Suffer, lit a fuse that would in time propel beneficiaries such as The Offspring and Green Day into the bedrooms of millions of young listeners all over the world.
But it was the decision, in 1994, by the taste-making LA radio station K-ROQ to place The Offspring song Come Out And Play on heavy rotation that catapulted Epitaph into the major leagues. As orders for its parent album, Smash, flooded in, Brett Gurewitz re-mortgaged his home in order to pay pressing costs and to hire storage space in facilities all over the city. In short order, his rapid elevation to the status of record industry wunderkind played havoc with his equilibrium. After seven years of sobriety, Gurewitz began using heroin and crack cocaine. According to Bad Religion singer Greg Graffin, his bandmate was in jail when he learned that the group’s album, Stranger Than Fiction, had gone gold.
“I thought I was bulletproof,” Gurewitz told me in 2018. “I think that along with success there are certain stresses that come with getting big overnight, but there’s also the feeling that you are bulletproof. I thought that I could use drugs and alcohol freely and successfully now because I thought I had arrived. I was successful. So I decided to see if I could do that, which was a famously failed experiment. That period lasted about three years… I did go to jail a couple of times.”
Gurewitz belonged to an LA punk scene and had long been lousy with drugs. “I was so f_____ up, I was so screwed up, I was so jacked up, couldn’t get any higher than that,” sang Keith Morris, of the Circle Jerks, on the 43-second long Wasted. When the brilliant X issued Nausea, a song about the horrors of a wall-eyed hangover, everyone in the scene assumed they were singing about heroin. Considering that Darby Crash, the frontman with Germs, died by deliberately overdosing on the drug in the same year, perhaps this was to be expected.
But even this most insular of communities had its heroes. Under cover of darkness, the punks took to gathering at Okie Dogs, a fast-food outlet on Sunset Boulevard. Dining on fries and frankfurters, sometimes they would see Tom Waits ambling the streets surrounding his long-term digs at the nearby rock and roll flophouse the Tropicana Motel. With awed fascination, they’d watch him buy cigarettes from the liquor store opposite Club Lingerie.
“We’d be going, ‘Oh my God that’s Tom Waits!’” he recalls. “We all had his records, although I don’t know how we heard of him. He was almost thought of as a demigod. He wasn’t a punk, but he was an iconoclast. He was avant-garde. He was in a category of his own. There were legends about how much he could drink. He was a poet. He was like a cross between Charles Bukowski and Captain Beefheart, and what could be more punk than that? So although his music wasn’t punk, his approach to life and his approach to art certainly seemed to be.”
So much so, in fact, that Waits and Kathleen Brennan were rather hoping that Mule Variations would be released on Epitaph itself, rather than on the adjacent Anti- imprint. The pair agreed to Gurewitz’s plans after it was explained to them that, really, the new label would differ from its parent company only in name and sound. The founding ethos, not to mention the personnel behind the scenes, would be the same.
“When I started Epitaph, I was able to build it on the cornerstone of Bad Religion,” Gurewitz tells me. “So I had something to start with. When I got that call from [Donald S.] Passman, I recognised that if I could work with Tom then I could start a label for all of the innovative and avant-garde and interesting and incredible music other than punk. He would be the cornerstone and the artistic mission statement that would form the editorial point of view of Anti-… that was the great freedom that allowed me to build a new company.”
It worked. After a week in the wild, Mule Variations debuted on the US Billboard Hot 200 at number 30, a hundred places higher than its predecessor The Black Rider. Not only was this the highest placing for a Tom Waits album since Blue Valentine, in 1978, but it was also the first time he’d cracked the American Top 40. As well as being awarded a gold disc in the United States, for sales in excess of 500,000, the 16-track collection was bought by as many people again up and across the world. As ever, its author had bucked conventional wisdom. Selling a million records usually means an artist has left an independent label.
Although Tom Waits hasn’t recorded an album for Anti- for 13 years, he hasn’t made one for anyone else either. As the grand old man of musical non-conformity enjoys his dotage, his and his wife’s relationship with the person who signed him has prospered and evolved. “We’re close,” Gurewitz says. “I’m close with his children, he’s close with my children, we’re family now.” Waits played the song Somewhere, from West Side Story, at the Epitaph owner’s wedding. All this from a refusal to speak with a reporter from Forbes magazine.
“It just goes to show, sometimes you don’t need to take everything that comes your way,” Brett Gurewitz tells me. “And sometimes turning something down because of your values will result in something better than you could have possibly imagined.”
