Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan made Bone Machine in a cement room built for chickens and Real Gone in an abandoned school. Neither building was a studio. That is not a colourful detail. It is the method.
Everything below follows from a single problem: the same performance is a different record in a different room. Waits solved that problem by moving until it sounded right, and the moving was frequently more decisive than the playing. Strike the source, change the building, listen to what the walls do to it.
This figure is interactive in the browser version: four room acoustics, four sources.
The pivot happened nine years before Bone Machine, and it is worth exactly one paragraph here because the rest of this piece is about rooms and hardware. Waits married Kathleen Brennan in 1980. By Swordfishtrombones in 1983 she had opened up his listening to Captain Beefheart, to Harry Partch, to field recordings and language records and things that did not sound like records at all, and she pushed him to produce himself. The version of Waits who walks into Prairie Sun in 1991 is already the one who believes a song is a location before it is a chord chart.
What arrives with Bone Machine is the harder rule underneath that: get the room right and the performance follows. On Bone Machine he found the room and built the drums out of whatever was leaning against the wall. On Real Gone, twelve years later, he arrived with the rhythm already recorded on a cassette in his own house, and the studio's only job was to not sand it down. Same principle. Opposite direction.
Read this pair across, not down. Almost every difference between the two records is visible in the floor plan.
A working chicken ranch before it was a studio. Waits had booked the real tracking room, Studio B, heard the first playback and did not want it. He rented microphones and preamps and tried recording at his own house instead; that did not work either. Back at Prairie Sun he walked the property, stopped at a junk-filled cement storage building down the drive and asked what it would sound like emptied out.reported
They emptied it. Concrete floor, redwood walls and roof, a small footprint with a surprisingly tall ceiling, a hot water heater in the corner, old-growth timber at least sixty years old. It was not soundproofed. It rained through the sessions and the cable runs went down the hill in the wet. The space did not exist as a recording room before this record; it has been called the Waits Room ever since.
Widely misreported at the time as the Mississippi Delta. Waits corrected it: the Sacramento Delta, near his own house in Sonoma County. An old school building, empty, chosen for the same reason as the hatchery: he was looking for somewhere with an unusual sound and no studio politics.confirmed
Mark Howard recorded and mixed it. Howard's practice is to carry his own rig and install it fresh in whatever building the record is happening in, then strip it out afterwards, so the schoolhouse became a studio for the length of the sessions and then stopped being one. The decisive detail is where he sat: in the room, next to Waits, rather than behind control-room glass.
Lower Studio C, Prairie Sun. Plan view, as described by the people who worked in it. Not to scale.
Sacramento Delta. Howard installed and later removed the entire recording system. Not to scale.
The record's pulse is a man alone on a cement floor with a small kit, a pile of scrap metal and a bass player for company. The songs were mostly written that way too: a drum, a voice, and no instrument capable of suggesting a chord.
Waits has been consistent about the writing method. Most of Bone Machine came out of a room with a drum in it and him shouting over the top, which is why so much of the album sits on one or two harmonic centres and moves by rhythm and register instead of changes. He described the songs of that period as three-legged chairs: made fast, structurally wrong, and stable anyway if you sit in them properly. This was the first Waits album where he played a serious amount of the percussion himself, and he has said plainly that he likes to play drums when he is angry, which tells you most of what you need to know about the take selection.
The physical problem with the hatchery was that it was fifty yards from anything that could record. The solution shaped the sound: get a preamp as close to the microphone as possible, then send an already-amplified signal down a long buried line to the console rather than sending a fragile mic-level signal the whole way.
| Item | Role | Standing |
|---|---|---|
| The cement room | Tracking space. Concrete floor, redwood shell, tall ceiling, hot water heater, no treatment. | confirmed |
| Shure SM7 | Waits's vocal while playing drums live, per a session assistant. | reported |
| Neumann M49 / U87 / U67 | Overdubbed vocals at various points. | reported |
| Trident Series 80 (Studio B), Trident TSM (Studio A) | Consoles at the far end of the tie-lines. | reported |
| ~50 channels of racked Neve | Preamps moved between rooms and placed at the source. | reported |
| Tech 21 SansAmp | Amp-in-a-box distortion, cited by Waits as part of the era's toolkit. | confirmed |
| Shure Level-Loc | A broken compressor, used because it was broken. | confirmed |
| Megaphone / bullhorn | Vocal distortion by acoustic means rather than electronic. | confirmed |
| The Conundrum | Welded percussion rack. Appears on “In the Colosseum.” | confirmed |
| Chamberlin | Tape-replay keyboard. “Earth Died Screaming,” “The Ocean Doesn't Want Me.” | confirmed |
| Sticks, 2x4s, firewood | Struck outdoors on asphalt by roughly nine people. | confirmed |
Waits's neighbour Serge Etienne, a sculptor and welder who built motorcycles down the road, made him a percussion rack and gave it to him. Waits called it the Conundrum. He has described it as looking like a big iron crucifix, or a Chinese torture device, with crowbars and Tijuana sabers and found metal hung off the frame, and said the sound is a jail door closing behind you.
Tap any hanging object. Each is a different metal geometry: different fundamental, different partial spread, different decay. The point is that none of them are in tune with each other and none of them are supposed to be.
Interactive in the browser version: six struck metal objects, individually and as a rack.
| Name | What they actually did |
|---|---|
| Tom Waits | Voice, drums and percussion, Conundrum, Chamberlin, guitar, piano, upright bass. First album where he drums extensively. |
| Kathleen Brennan | Co-writer on roughly half the record, associate producer, percussion and sticks. Decided arguments about which noises stayed. |
| Larry Taylor | Upright and acoustic bass. The other body in the cement room during basics. |
| Brain (Bryan Mantia) | Drums, including “Such a Scream” and “In the Colosseum.” |
| Ralph Carney | Alto and tenor saxophone, bass clarinet. The low, stacked, Ellington-shaped horn voicings. |
| Les Claypool | Electric bass on “Earth Died Screaming.” |
| David Hidalgo | Violin and accordion on “Whistle Down the Wind.” |
| Joe Gore, Waddy & Joe Wachtel | Guitars. |
| Keith Richards | Co-writer, guitar and voice on “That Feel.” They wrote enough material for a whole record. |
| Biff Dawes | Principal recording engineer. |
| Joe Marquez | Recorded two tracks, and played sticks and banjo. |
| Tchad Blake | Mixed most of the album. |
| Francis Thumm | Credited as musical security guard. Longtime musical confidant, Harry Partch Ensemble alumnus, and by Waits's account genuinely there to keep local kids out of the sessions. |
The best single illustration of the whole method. Jim Jarmusch had posted Waits a field recording of pygmy stick percussion and Waits wanted that sound. They tried sticks everywhere inside the room: different positions, different microphones, different sizes and species of stick. Nothing worked. They walked outside, put a microphone on the asphalt of the driveway, and it was immediately there.confirmed
Roughly nine people, including whoever happened to be walking past, hitting 2x4s and firewood on the blacktop. Les Claypool on bass, Chamberlin, and a low unison vocal overdub on top. Waits later said the experience taught him why there are no drums in church.
The one released appearance of the Conundrum. Brain on drums. The arrangement is essentially a beating administered in tempo, which is what the rack is for.
Carries the album's densest layer of found and manipulated noise. Waits wanted even more of it on the track; Brennan wanted less, and the dispute was settled over a hand of cards. He has said the texture sounds like it was made in hell, which he meant as an endorsement.confirmed
The title is a line the jazz saxophonist Teddy Edwards used to use on women in hotel lobbies. Ralph Carney's bass clarinet and saxes supply the low Ellington-shaped voicings that make the track feel like a funeral band rather than a rock band. An entire verse about Mata Hari was cut for length.
Built from a local newspaper report of a woman found floating. The coined word in it, strange angels compressed into one, came from Waits's daughter Kellesimone. Chamberlin again.
Waits wanted to throw it away. Brennan made him finish it. In the room it changed character entirely once they put it through a Marshall and turned it up, which is the whole record's logic applied to a song that could otherwise have been folk.
Written with Keith Richards, and by Waits's account genuinely written together rather than assembled from parts: Waits mostly on drums, Richards mostly on guitar. Waits described Richards's working method as circling a song and then taking the eyes out of it. Mixed separately from the rest of the album, in New York.
Brennan brought the Irish-shaped melody. Waits's phrase for his own contribution was that he saved it from the fire. Dedicated to a dump-truck-driving friend named Clyde.
Dedicated to the songwriter Tom Jans, a friend of both Waits and Brennan, dead since 1984. David Hidalgo's violin and accordion are the only conventionally pretty sounds allowed anywhere near the record.
Waits's own description amounts to three chords played very loud, which is accurate and is also the point. The guitar tone is doing the work the lyric is too deadpan to do.
Twelve years later the principle is unchanged and the execution is inverted. Nothing gets struck. Waits made the beats in his own bathroom, late at night, with his mouth, and the band's job was to play over a recording of his own breathing.
He has described the setup with unusual specificity: a four-track cassette machine, a Shure SM58, a very small tiled room with a long slap on it, and the input driven well past where it was supposed to go. He built cycles out of mouth rhythms and then played along with them. Then he overdubbed pots and pans on top of the grunting. Mark Howard, who recorded the album, tried to re-record those parts properly in the schoolhouse and could not beat them. Overloading the machine's preamp was producing a kick-drum thump that a kick drum was not producing, and the degraded quality was not a compromise, it was the sound.confirmed
Waits was careful to say these were not loops in the sequencer sense. The parts were played, repeatedly, by a person, because loops start feeling like wallpaper. And he was blunt about why anyone beatboxes at all: it is cheaper than hiring a drummer, you put a microphone to your mouth and overload something. He rated his own technique as crude and unprofessional.
Start with the mouth kick alone and add the layers in the order he did. Then turn the overload off, which is the one control that matters, and hear the record fall apart.
Interactive in the browser version: four mouth-percussion layers with switchable overload, cassette degradation and room.
Howard does not book rooms, he builds them. For Real Gone that meant carrying a hard-disk recorder, a set of preamps and a microphone collection into an empty school and wiring the building up. He is on record as disliking the dominant digital workstation of the period on both sound and reliability grounds, and his phrase for its users is that they listen with their eyes.
The discovery of the sessions was a beaten-up RCA 44 ribbon microphone from the 1940s, borrowed out of Capitol. They had been getting a good vocal sound from a Sony C-37A. Howard put the 44 up and the difference was not incremental.
For the first time in his career there are no keyboards. He had the piano moved into the schoolhouse and it was never played. People put drinks on it, then a coat, and eventually he could not see it. He offered no theory for why it did not work; it just didn't.
His stated rule is the opposite of minimalism: bring hundreds of instruments, because the one you leave at home is the one you will need. The piano failing the audition is not an aesthetic manifesto, it is an outcome. But the consequence is structural. With no keyboard there is nothing on the record filling in the middle of the chord. Bass states a root, guitars state intervals and noise, and the space between them stays empty, which is why the album sounds like it has holes in it even when six people are playing.
Same bass, same tempo, same voicing centre. Listen to what disappears when the keyboard goes, and then to what Marc Ribot's approach puts in the hole instead.
Interactive in the browser version: the same figure with and without keyboards, plus the flat-ninth interval in isolation.
| Name | What they actually did |
|---|---|
| Tom Waits | Voice, mouth percussion, guitar, Chamberlin on one track, shakers. The rhythm section, effectively. |
| Kathleen Brennan | Co-writer on the whole album and full co-producer. Howard's description of her function on the floor was editorial. |
| Marc Ribot | Guitar throughout; banjo on two tracks. The central instrumental voice of the record. |
| Larry Taylor | Bass and guitar on most tracks. The continuity with Bone Machine. |
| Les Claypool | Bass on three tracks including “Hoist That Rag” and “Clang Boom Steam.” |
| Brain (Bryan Mantia) | Hand drums and assorted percussion. |
| Casey Waits | Turntables, drums, percussion, claps. Around eighteen. His and his siblings' listening is why there is scratching on a Tom Waits record. |
| Sullivan Waits | Clarinet, voice. |
| Harry Cody | Guitar and banjo. |
| Al Bent, Mel Martin, Peter Welker | Horns on “Hoist That Rag.” |
| Mark Howard | Recording, mixing, plus bells and claps. Installed and removed the studio. |
Opens the record by putting the thesis first: a live band and a turntable playing along to a recording of Waits's voice doing percussion. Casey scratching, Ribot on a single-line figure, nothing underneath but the cassette.
The rhythm was an accident with a microphone. A mic left live in the bathroom picked up someone using it and then the door slamming. Waits asked what the sound was, and when Howard explained, told him to get somebody to slam the door and hit the wall with a piece of wood. Brain slammed the door and hit the wall, a kick drum was played against it, and that became the track.confirmed
Ribot plays it in the Cuban register he had already explored on his own records, over Claypool's bass and layered hand percussion. His solo runs something near ninety seconds: states a theme, then works the flat ninth against the harmony until the tension stops being decorative. Horns on top. Waits's summary of Ribot is that you never have to ask him to play like his hair is on fire.
Over ten minutes on a rock-steady pulse that Larry Taylor initially refused to play on genre grounds. Brain covers multiple hand drums. A sizzle cymbal is struck once, around four minutes in, and never again. Waits's stated position on this kind of arrangement is that silence is the essential part and he is always more interested in what is not there.
Effectively the raw bathroom recording with a perfunctory blues lyric laid over it. It exists so the method is audible undisguised at least once on the record.
Turntables and mouth percussion as the primary rhythm architecture. The dance-instruction lyric is a nineteenth-century form running on a twenty-first century rhythm bed.
The closer, and the album's one unarmoured moment: a soldier's letter home, written as a protest song that never raises its voice. Almost no processing, almost no rhythm, the 44 doing what a 44 does.
A hidden track, entirely voice. Waits considered making the whole album this way and pulled back, describing the all-vocal version as bread and water: the bare rudiments and nothing else.
Ribot's own framing of session work is to treat the guitar as a character in a play and ask what country the song is in and what decade. When he dislikes a part he has said his instinct is to ask how he can destroy it. Howard's account of a take where Ribot's feedback appeared to be entirely out of control is that he then reproduced it exactly on the next pass.
Both records mix two incompatible origins. Some tracks begin as a sound in a room that later acquired words. Some are songs that were written whole and then dressed in whatever the building had lying around. Filter the list and the difference between 1992 and 2004 stops being a matter of taste.
| Track | Record | Origin | What it started as |
|---|---|---|---|
| Earth Died Screaming | Bone Machine | sound first | A stick recording in the post from Jarmusch, chased until it was found outdoors. |
| In the Colosseum | Bone Machine | sound first | The Conundrum. The rack is the reason the track exists. |
| Such a Scream | Bone Machine | sound first | A pile of found and treated noise, then a song over the top. |
| The Ocean Doesn't Want Me | Bone Machine | both at once | A newspaper story and a Chamberlin texture arriving together. |
| Goin' Out West | Bone Machine | both at once | Three chords very loud: the tone and the song are the same decision. |
| Dirt in the Ground | Bone Machine | song first | A borrowed line from Teddy Edwards, arranged for low horns. |
| A Little Rain | Bone Machine | song first | Brennan's melody, finished under protest. |
| Whistle Down the Wind | Bone Machine | song first | An elegy for a friend; the arrangement stays out of the way. |
| I Don't Wanna Grow Up | Bone Machine | song first | Nearly discarded as a song, rescued by an amplifier. |
| That Feel | Bone Machine | song first | Written in a room with Keith Richards, drums and guitar. |
| Black Wings / Murder in the Red Barn | Bone Machine | song first | Narrative pieces; the room supplies atmosphere, not structure. |
| Top of the Hill | Real Gone | sound first | A bathroom cassette cycle with a band hired to follow it. |
| Clang Boom Steam | Real Gone | sound first | The raw method, barely dressed. |
| Shake It | Real Gone | sound first | A bathroom door slamming into a live microphone. |
| Metropolitan Glide | Real Gone | sound first | Turntables and mouth rhythm before anything else. |
| Hoist That Rag | Real Gone | both at once | A rhythmic frame and a Cuban guitar idea meeting in the room. |
| Sins of My Father | Real Gone | both at once | A groove held for ten minutes, with the song built inside it. |
| Don't Go Into That Barn | Real Gone | both at once | Percussion architecture and narrative arriving together. |
| How's It Gonna End | Real Gone | song first | Written as a story; the arrangement is deliberately thin. |
| Dead and Lovely | Real Gone | song first | A conventional song shape, played by an unconventional band. |
| Trampled Rose / Green Grass | Real Gone | song first | Melody-led, with banjo and voice carrying the weight. |
| Day After Tomorrow | Real Gone | song first | A letter home. Nothing was done to it. |
Roughly half of Bone Machine and all of Real Gone are co-written by Kathleen Brennan. Her production credit goes from associate producer in 1992 to full co-producer in 2004, which is the least interesting way to describe what changed.
Asked which songs were hers, Waits said he could not separate them, that they were mixed up together. What is documented is the friction: she wanted less of the hellish noise layer on “Such a Scream” and he wanted more, and it was settled with playing cards. She refused to let him bin “I Don't Wanna Grow Up.” She brought the melody for “A Little Rain.”
His own metaphor for the division of labour from this period is that he is the prospector and she is the cook: he brings it home, she decides what it becomes.
Waits described the split as not always even, sometimes seventy-thirty, and said she likes it backstage while he likes the spotlight. Howard, watching her work on the floor, described her function as editorial: you can say that, but move this. His view of the album is that it pushed further than it otherwise would have and contains sounds he would not have arrived at alone.
The record where he removed the piano and used his own mouth as a drum machine is also the record where her credit is largest. That is not a coincidence worth being coy about.
The frame most often attributed to her is the one that reduces his entire catalogue to two species of song: the grand weepers and the grim reapers. It is a joke, and it is also an operating system. Every Waits record since 1983 is a ratio between those two, and Bone Machine and Real Gone are the two albums that push the reaper side hardest without abandoning the weepers entirely, which is why each one closes with something tender after forty minutes of assault.
Neither album was assembled from whatever accumulated. Both were governed by rules set before anyone played, and both were stopped by a decision rather than by completion. This is the shape the process takes, drawn from what the two of them and the people around them have described.
Not a theme, a prohibition. On Bone Machine: strip everything down to percussion and voice, in a raw room, and hit things that were not designed to be hit. On Real Gone: no keyboards at all, and the voice does the job a drum kit would normally do. The constraint comes first and the songs are then obliged to survive it.
Not the studio, the building. Waits rejected a proper tracking room, tried his own house, and settled on a concrete outbuilding. Twelve years later he went looking for somewhere with an unusual sound and no studio politics and found an empty school. The room is chosen before the arrangements are.
His stated logic: the instrument you leave behind is the one the song will demand. Hundreds of instruments go in. The piano went in for Real Gone and became furniture. The Conundrum went in for Bone Machine and made one track.
Three-legged chairs. Songs drummed and shouted rather than composed at an instrument that suggests harmony, then written down in a private shorthand he has described as hieroglyphics. Titles, overheard lines and newspaper stories enter as raw material at this stage, not as themes decided in advance.
A slamming bathroom door becomes the groove. A broken compressor stays in the chain because broken is a sound. The outdoor take wins over four indoor attempts. The test applied is not whether it is correct, it is whether it tells you where you are.
Waits has described handing material to Brennan with a direct question about whether it is worthless, and has been explicit that you have to be prepared for the answer to be yes. This is the editorial gate, and it happens before the mixing decisions, not after.
His position is that nobody finishes anything, it gets taken away, and that with another thirty seconds everything might have been different. A song is not finished until it is recorded, and recording it requires medical precision and blind intuition at the same time. Sequencing, title and artwork then sit on top of a record whose identity was determined by the constraint in step one.
The building decides. A non-studio space chosen for its unusual sound, both times.
Larry Taylor and Brain. Two of the same players anchoring both rhythm approaches. Les Claypool appears on both.
Percussion before harmony. Rhythm is the writing tool in 1992 and in 2004.
Cheap, broken, overloaded. A broken compressor and a megaphone in 1992; a driven cassette preamp in 2004. Same instinct, different decade's hardware.
Kathleen Brennan. Co-writing and co-producing both.
Keep the accident. Asphalt in 1992, a bathroom door in 2004.
Where the beat comes from. A man hitting metal, versus a man's mouth into an overloaded input.
Keyboards. Chamberlin and piano present, versus banned by outcome.
Who is central. Waits's own drumming, versus Marc Ribot's guitar as the lead instrumental voice.
Family. A son on turntables and a son on clarinet: hip-hop enters the building through the children.
The recording system. Analogue console and tape fifty yards uphill, versus a portable hard-disk rig in the same room as the band.
Where the engineer sits. Behind glass and up a hill, versus in the room with no glass at all.
The honest summary is that these are the same record made by opposite means. Bone Machine puts a microphone in front of a violent physical event and lets the concrete answer. Real Gone commits the violence to cassette first, in private, and then hires people to play around the damage. In both cases the thing being protected is the same: the sound of a specific person in a specific room on a specific night, with nothing in the chain smart enough to clean it up.
House policy applies: paraphrase over quotation throughout, quotes kept short and attributed, no lyrics reproduced anywhere. Every claim carries one of five marks.
| confirmed | Stated on the record by a participant in a published interview, press kit, or credit list. |
| reported | Credible secondhand testimony, usually from someone present but not credited. |
| transcribed | Worked out by ear for this piece. My hearing, not anyone's statement. |
| disputed | Two primary sources disagree and neither has been resolved. |
| legend / editorial | In circulation without a traceable source, or a judgement call made here. |
| Bone Machine press kit | Island Records, 1992. Waits on percussion philosophy, the Conundrum, and the abandoned machine concept. |
| Jim Jarmusch interview | Straight No Chaser, 1993. The Jarmusch stick tape, writing method, Richards, Ribot. |
| Brian Brannon interview | Thrasher, 1993. The cement room and the water heater, in Waits's own words. |
| Oz Fritz | Tape Op #140 roundtable and related accounts. The origin of the Waits Room, told by an engineer who later worked in it. |
| Mark “Mooka” Rennick | Prairie Sun. Studio history and his assessment of Waits as a listener. |
| Magnet, October 2004 | The four-track, the bathroom, the SM58, and the piano as an end table. |
| Barney Hoskyns interview, 2004 | Rock's Backpages. The Sacramento Delta correction, the bring-everything rule, Brennan's role. |
| San Diego Union-Tribune, September 2004 | Beatboxing economics, directing Casey, the family-business framing. |
| Mark Howard | Tape Op #134, SoundStage! Xperience, and his memoir Listen Up! The RCA 44, the RADAR rig, the bathroom door, Brennan as editor. |
| Marc Ribot | Guitar World, 2024, and earlier interviews. Gear, session philosophy, and the destroy-it instinct. |
| Album credits | Discogs and sleeve credits for both records, for personnel and per-track instrumentation. |
Three things in here would change if better sourcing turned up. The four-track machine is named as a Fostex by Waits and a Tascam by Howard, describing the same tapes.disputed The Bone Machine microphone and console inventory rests on one well-informed assistant's account rather than a published credit.reported And the Conundrum's parts list beyond crowbars and Tijuana sabers has never been itemised by anyone who saw it.legend
The material most likely to move the needle next: the physical copy of Howard's Listen Up! for schoolhouse detail song by song, the Bone Machine promotional interview disc, and the long-form audio interviews with Oz Fritz that have never been transcribed.