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'Bones' Howe & Tom Waits the Odd Couple?

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When label boss David Geffen teamed respected engineer 'Bones' Howe with an unknown and very strange songwriter called Tom Waits, he set in motion one of the great artist-producer partnerships.

PHOTO: Bones Howe, Crystal Gayle and Tom Waits during the recording of 1982's “One From The Heart" soundtrack.

There might not have been an odder long-term pairing in the music business than 'Bones' Howe and Tom Waits. The engineer and producer was responsible for a string of the artist's classic albums from the 1970s and early '80s; yet, on the face of it, the two could not have been more different.

Howe was born in 1933, in Dayton, Ohio, the son of a stockbroker. Growing up in Florida, Howe had the seemingly classic experience common to those who would become audio engineers later in life, taking apart radios and putting them back together, which put him on a course for engineering studies at that most slide-rulish of institutions, Georgia Tech, where he also played drums in a jazz band.

Tom Waits, on the other hand, was the paradigmatic lounge lizard, barely coherent before the break of noon and apt to prowl the seedier boulevards of Southern California till the wee hours, his pungent character observations of hookers, voyeurs, junkies, small-time crooks, pimps and other social debris later set to music on the guitar and the piano. It took an eye and ear particularly sensitive to the unusual to see the gems in Waits' scraggly goatee. But sighted they were, by Herb Cohen, who managed the equally idiosyncratic Frank Zappa and the Mothers Of Invention. Cohen signed Waits in the early 1970s and brought him to another maverick, David Geffen, who had recently started Asylum Records, home to the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt. Geffen clearly had a sense of what would work for pop music, and his judgment was borne out by the Eagles' cover of Waits' 'Ol' 55', which transformed the slit-eyed nocturnal visions of the raspy-voiced composer into soaring harmonies that glistened on FM radio.

Bones Howe, by this time, was already a respected engineer and producer. He became one of the staff engineers at Radio Recorders in May, 1956, where he turned his jazz sensibilities on artists like Mel Torme, Ella Fitzgerald and Ornette Coleman (see box opposite), as well as doing scores of pop sessions with crooners like Frank Sinatra. In 1961 he took up an offer from Bill Putnam, who had founded Universal Audio, to take a staff position at his new studio in Los Angeles, United Recording (Putnam later bought Western and joined the two facilities) cutting tracks and sometimes playing drums on records for artists like the Grass Roots, Jan & Dean and the Beach Boys.

Howe was one of the first of his cohort to make the move to freelancing, and engineered for the legendary producers Lou Adler (the Mamas & The Papas' 'California Dreamin') and Snuff Garrett (Gary Lewis & the Playboys' 'This Diamond Ring'), before he moved into production himself. His first pass at that resulted in the number one hit for the Turtles, a cover of Bob Dylan's 'It Ain't Me, Babe' in the summer of 1965. Howe followed that up with hits for the Association, the 5th Dimension ('Up Up And Away' and 'Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In' were both top 10 singles) and others, and by the end of the decade had made a move into film and television, becoming the chief engineer for the 1967 Monterey Pop concert movie and Elvis Presley's critically acclaimed 1969 Christmas special broadcast.

Tom Waits, meanwhile, was blossoming into a serious composer, albeit a strange one, more attuned to the beat poetry of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg than the surf and pop hits that were Howe's meat and potatoes. David Geffen put them together, and their shared affinity for jazz kept them that way for a decade.

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