Interview #8: Alex Harvey

The British TV director, who headed to the West Coast and has penned a potent portrait of Tom Waits during his LA years, talks exclusively to Rock and the Beat Generation

A new biography of a singer-songwriter long associated with the Beat writers, Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles, is about to be published by Reaktion Books in the UK. Rock and the Beat Generation reviewed the title in recent days. Now we catch up with is author Alex Harvey, who confirms a passion for Waits and a long-running, if changing, taste for the Beat Generation novelists and poets. And he also explains why a successful UK television programme maker – he previously worked on the leading political show Panorama and the acclaimed culture digest The Late Show – ended up in the City of Angels…

Song Noir has a firm handle on the unique geography and cultural strains of Los Angeles. How, Alex, does a Brit accumulate such a solid working knowledge of the physical layout and evident understanding of the city of Los Angeles?

​I moved to Los Angeles in 2008 so I've lived in the city for almost 14 years now. As a director and a cinephile I had always been deeply interested in LA's film and cultural history, the number of great writers, directors, actors and musicians who have lived and worked in the city.

I've explored the work and lives of various cultural figures who have interested me in a series of essays for Los Angeles Review of Books and London Review of Books: Aldous Huxley who moved to California in the mid-1930s, Scott Fitzgerald who spent his last years and died in LA in 1940, the figure of Salka Viertel who was the patroness of the German exile community and a close friend of Brecht, Schoenberg, Lubitsch, Garbo, and many others.

And then there are also the novelist and screenwriter Alfred Hayes, the British film critic and novelist Gavin Lambert, the writer/directors Herman and Joseph Mankiewicz, and of course Tom Waits, who explored the city's rich cultural legacy in the 1970s and early 1980s.

LA is a fascinating place precisely because it has been so extensively filmed and written about through the 20th century, it has been refracted and represented in so many different artists' work, whether in cinematic, literary or musical form.

You are plainly a Tom Waits fan, but have you been a reader of Beat Generation writers? If so, how did you come to them and what are your favourite works? 

The two main literary influences for Waits, as I explore in Song Noir, are Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski (who, while not 'strictly' a Beat writer, is often grouped with them). Waits is also an admirer of Ginsberg and Corso, to a lesser degree.

I encountered the Beats as a teenager – On The Road of course is such a seminal book and a powerful influence on any adolescent mind. I read much of Kerouac at that age, – Desolation Angels, The Dhama Bums, The Subterraneans, Big Sur, etc. – as well as Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.

I have to say that as I've grown older the work of Kerouac has lost some of its early appeal, whereas the poetry of Ginsberg, particularly Kaddish for example, has retained it power and hold over me. I'm particularly interested in the so-called Beat Hotel, that period when Ginsberg, Corso and Burroughs were all, for a time at the end of the 1950s, living in the same run-down Paris establishment.

You closely explore the issue of identity in your Waits book. Notions of authenticity are contested in popular music commentary. Where do you feel this artist stands in relation to that debate?

​Waits is extremely interesting in terms of the question of identity and authenticity. In Song Noir, I try to show how he moves away from his earlier ideas of a Romantic aesthetic sensibility, trying to live the life that he explores in his music, closing the gap between the artist and his subject matter, and, at the end of his time in LA, embracing a more Brechtian idea of the performer who can be protean, shape-shifting and inhabit all kinds of personas, foregrounding the role as one of performance, revelling in its artificiality, if you like, in order to explore wider poetic truths.

It's clearly no accident that his career as a movie actor really took off around the same time and he has revelled in the opportunity to play all kinds of different 'selves'. The irony, of course, was that Waits' jazz/bohemian Beat poet persona, one which lasted him most of the 1970s and was so effective that people could never tell whether he was 'in character' or not at the time, actually hardened into a mask he couldn't easily remove.

It's not until the forcible violence of Swordfishtrombones, when he literally deconstructs himself, that we see how limiting it had become and how extraordinary his range of different voices could be. ‘Underground’ the opening track of Swordfishtrombones is, in this sense, almost a manifesto – a declaration of all these trapped subterranean energies and alternative selves that burst to the surface.

Is there any political dimension to this singer-songwriter? Do his portraits of street life possess a social critique in any sense?​​​

Waits is most definitely political, although not in any conventional party-political sense. His project is very much akin to the great photographer Robert Frank (who was, of course, very close to the Beats) in his iconic book The Americans in which his images of the lives of ordinary Americans are powerful documents to the harsh social reality of the American experience.

Waits is always on the side of the exploited, the underdog. He's written and sung very movingly of the young women who are forced into prostitution and whose lives and dreams are shattered. He has no illusions about how vicious American racism can be nor the brutal economic realities that underpin life in the States for so many millions. His empathy for the victims, the alcoholics, for example, celebrated in ‘Tom Traubert's Blues’, which begins 'Wasted and wounded…', is deep and present throughout his entire career.

He has also recorded explicit anti-war songs such as ‘Hell Broke Luce’ on Bad As Me (his last album) which surely reflect on America's wars in the Middle East. One of his very last recordings is a version of ‘Bella Ciao’, an Italian partisan song from the resistance to Mussolini, which he made with the guitarist Marc Ribot. It's very moving in its pared down simplicity and he released it at the height of Trump's authoritarian madness.

Might we see a new documentary or even a biopic of Waits at some point?

​I am a filmmaker as well as a writer and would love to make a film in one form or another about Waits. The documentaries are not particularly good. Nothing I've seen has in any way captured the protean, elusive, strangeness of his creative world. But then, perhaps, it's better that way.

Note: A review of Alex Harvey’s Tom Waits volume, ‘Book review #7: Song Noir’ appeared in the pages of Rock and the Beat Generation on July 15th, 2022.