SONOMA COUNTY, Calif. — Eccentric singer Tom Waits demanded all correspondence be brought to him in increasingly unorthodox ways, frustrated couriers confirm.
“The record company wants to send me checks in the mail—that’s just boring, man,” said Waits while feeding a tortoise that lives in a rusted Studebaker. “Their jobs must be incredibly dull, so I like to liven things up a bit for them. These days my checks are delivered by a big ol’ raven named Lloyd who wears a little top hat. Every time he drops off a check I give him some seeds and a shiny steel wartime penny. I used to have them fly a pedal-powered dirigible over the house and put the check inside a Burma Shave jar which would safely float to the ground on a tiny parachute, but I guess the FAA didn’t cotton to that so much.”
The raven’s owner says it was challenging to train the bird to deliver the checks.
“Lloyd is one of my smartest ravens,” said Ricky Llywelyn of Llywelyn’s Bird Academy. “Even so, I had a tough time getting him to conform to Mr. Waits’ seemingly arbitrary rules. For instance, the raven is to arrive after sunup but before the sunlight illuminates the pile of vintage spittoons in his yard. And if it’s raining, Mr. Waits insists Lloyd wears a tiny Mackintosh coat that once belonged to a 1930s circus monkey named Pipsqueak. Lloyd will wear the top hat and coat just fine, but he rejected the monocle that Mr. Waits had also requested.”
Longtime record industry executive Carlton Sweat says some artists seem to enjoy making things difficult for the administrators in the business.
“They resent the suits and often see us as impediments to their artistic expression, even though we’re the ones that get them paid—after taking our cut, of course,” said Sweat. “Sometimes they take it out on us in creative ways. For example, for a time Axl Rose would refuse to go on stage unless he had a fresh piece of straw to chew on like he did in the ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ video—and it had to be from his hometown in Indiana. We wasted a lot of money overnighting straw on that tour.”
At press time, Waits had further complicated his royalty payment process, now demanding that checks be printed on paper made from shredded pre-war horse racing forms.
