Tom Waits, Don Lane, Kurt Vonnegut and bad interviews

I'm currently about half way through "Innocent when you dream", a collection of interviews, reviews and writings about Tom Waits that's just been release here in Australia. The subject of Tom Waits is almost a full-time extra- curricular activity for me, so it's no secret that I'm loving the indulgence, but like so many other things Waits-related it's got me heading off onto a complete mental tangent. Aside from the usual obscure metaphors and junkyard philolsophy, it's a great chance to see read how some of the poor bastards who are forced to interview Waits react when he decides to re-invent parts of his life mid-interview: he hasn't named his kids yet, but just calls them something different every day, usually after an object lying around the house. Stuff like that has the potential to get under peoples' skins.

After a while you get used to, and sometimes a little bored with, Waits' infantile playfulness and his need to amuse himself, and suddenly the whole book starts to tell you more about the journos interviewing Waits than the man himself. According to a Guardian journalist who's had the pleasure of catching Waits in a reticent mood, most of his answers begin with "I don't know", and are followed by a dribble of "umms" "ahhhs" or "oohhs". In one of the most famous interviews of Wait's career, Don Lane interview Tom on his Aussie chat show. It's unusual, because there's footage of this and everything, but here's a selection, but check out the rest here:

D: Well, at 29, (as Don leans in, Tom sits back in his chair) My god! It's the first time I've seen you up straight! Pardon me, I didn't mean to say straight. (mimes ventriloquy (?) with Tom) Well, how are you tom? (In funny voice:) good, thank you, everything's fine! (Back to normal voice:) At 29, you write about all these things that have happened to you, sorta like these lowlife things that have happened to you...

T: You read that right off the page!

D: No I didn't!

T: Ah, you did. It says lowlife, right there

D: Ah, yeah, well I won't mention that. You don't want that question used? You got a pen? Can I borrow a pen? (Stagehand gives Don a pen.) Well, I'll go through the list, Tom, and you can tell me what you'd like to answer and I'll do it. How long have you been singing? You answered that, though, didn't you?

T: I've been on the road for about seven years.

D: Seven years. We got that. (writes) Seven years. How does a guy with a voice like that decide to be a singer and succeed?

T: Well, it was a choice between entertainment or a career in air conditioning and refrigeration.

I'm glad Tom stayed in entertainment. Watching these types of interviews is akin to watching car-crash tv, or Big Brother: they're a chance to view the ugly reality of humanity that most of us don't get to see in the press often enough. Journalism schools will tell you that as an interviewer you should be almost invisible to the reader when the copy is finished - doubly so for hard news interview pieces. But dealing with artists (and I don't mean the standard celeb who pops up on Rove Live, although the Don Lane interview is an exception) is frought with danger for the interviewer. So often it's the interviewer who feels like they're getting rough treatment from which ever artist they're interviewing on any given day, and they want readers to know it.

I remember the Australian running an exlusive interview with famous author and poet Kurt Vonnegut over in New York earlier this year. Nason met Vonnegut, and thought him a washed up old liberal intellectual, who's far past his best: too bitter and nothing to say. And Nason let us know it, with his rambling piece (hey, I can't talk, but this is only a blog), which gave Vonnegut an almighty slap and treated the author with almighty contempt, complaining of his views on Iraq and the Middle East. The point is that Nason's feature said more about Nason than it did about Vonnegut. So much so that there's now a fire David Nason petition (check it out here) that you can sign to pressure the Aus to get rid of him.

These are some of the more extreme examples; but how a jouno, especially one covering the arts beat, handles difficult interview subjects can tell you a lot about their biases, ego and skill as an interviewer. Hey, if you come away from reading the piece thinking more about the journo who wrote it than you do the subject, then someone's doing something wrong. And it's not the artist.

Enough from me today. This has been the first real post from The Verbose Ghost, so I'm off to celebrate with a drink.