By Andrew Poretz***Polymath Thomas G. Waites is a man of many talents—an actor, director, acting teacher, singer/songwriter and a musician who plays piano and guitar. He’s probably best known as an actor, though, particularly from roles in John Carpenter’s horror sci-fi film The Thing with Kurt Russell and The Warriors.
[Editor’s note: the following is a transcript of an interview conducted on Zoom in advance of Waite’s September show at The Cutting Room. It contains unedited thoughts of a man of passion, with strong “language.”]
We discuss Target, his film currently streaming; his songwriting process; and the fact that other films and songs share the film’s title and that of his song “One Last Kiss” (from Bye Bye Birdy).
“Titles aren’t copyrightable, are they. I didn’t know Bye Bye Birdy, and I don’t write with any kind of concept in mind. I write purely from feeling. I get a feeling, and if something happens to me emotionally, then I sit down at the piano, and the guitar, and I just fool around until I … in fact I just wrote a song about Ukraine called “Why.” I’m experimenting with different time signatures, and trying to write more instead of just 4/4, trying to explore 6/8, and with the accent on the 5 One two three four FIVE six and that’s tricky to do. We ended up just doing 6/8 time regular, straight 6/8 time.
I’m not a trained musician, I’m a trained actor. But I have a great love for music, and it’s been certainly a great companion for me for many years. It’s gotten me through some dark tunnels of life, where sometimes you just don’t know what to do in a situation, and you write a song. I just can’t bear what they’re doing to these poor people in Ukraine, and for no fucking reason whatsoever, mate. It would be like if
I just came over to your house and punched you in the mouth and decided to just take all your shit, and I don’t even know you! Like, why would I do that? They don’t have enough land in Russia? What’s he doing? And the suffering… I have a student who’s in my class, who’s from Ukraine, and she keeps me informed. I have another friend of mine that speaks Russian, and he listens to the Russian news and it’s just so … Didn’t we get enough of this in the second World War? I mean, I’m a love child from the 70s! What the fucking fuck! What happened to peace, my brother? So much of this has to do with Trump.”
Waites is rather passionate about antisemitism and racism. This chat occurred well before the current war in Israel.
“See my children are Jewish… So I get very… grrrrr… My fangs come out, and the warrior in me comes out when I hear people make antisemitic remarks, or start to blame the Jews… Them and the blacks. I have a place in my soul…. We built this country on the blacks of the black people, and now you want to teach that slavery had an upside? You go be a slave for a day, motherfucker, and you be my fucking slave for a DAY, and tell me about the upside.
This is what I’m trying to do with my music, so it’s moving away from so much romantic stuff, which drives it a great deal, but now it’s starting to become more political, and I think they are more objective and more interesting. I think songs … great songs, I think, always have a question in them.
“Imagine” is sort of a question, isn’t it? “Desperado.” It’s a question. Why won’t you let yourself b
e loved? So, I’m striving for that in my songwriting.”
How did Waites go from “tone-deaf” actor with no musical experience to musician?
“What happened with me is I was an acting student at Juilliard and I had a director from the Moscow Art Theater direct me in a play called The Lower Depths. It’s about the absolutely basement bottom of the barrel when it comes to where people were in Russia right before the Revolution. (The director told him:) “You have to learn to play the guitar and sing.” I was stone cold tone deaf. You played an E flat on the piano, I would sing anything except an E flat. And the guitar I didn’t even know how to hold the guitar.
I’m a very hard worker. In four weeks I learned how to play this extremely difficult Russian ballad… I had to play and sing it. I was in Juilliard with the greatest musicians in the world and you go up to a stairwell where everyone smoked pot, and I tried to play it, and the musicians would be like (holds hands over ears) “Dude, I don’t know how to tell you what you’re not doing. Your voice!” Eventually, I stayed up all night. I mean, if you want a partied cleared, you give me the guitar. But I finally learned how to tune it, and I finally learned how to play it, and I played that song and sang it, and you would never have known that I didn’t know what I was doing. I acted my way through it. And then, it seemed like every part I would get cast in after that they would say, “You have to sing this song as you come in.” I’d better get musical! Then I started to take guitar lessons and some singing lessons, and then mostly self-taught. In the 80s I had a band called The Push
ups. I used to do one-handed pushups, played CBGBs.”
The band fell apart. Years later he returned to his music.
“I wrote a musical called McCair. I was hired to transfer a story by Robert Louis Stevenson. He wrote a play called McCair. He wrote three plays. They weren’t very good. And they were very dark. And I was hired to take it and turn it into a musical. I wrote the music for it, and it ended up having a reading done on the West End in London with Kelsey Grammer playing the lead, and they said this is lovely, let’s do it. We’ll do the equivalent of Off-Broadway. I wrote all the songs, and the words, then the pandemic came and it went out the window.
Then I met Tony (Daniels)… and he responded to my music, and having his support, his precision, because music is about both being precise and spontaneous simultaneously. Just likes acting. And we have a young kid who plays with us who’s our secret weapon, and he’s got an amazing voice. The kid is incredible. His name is Cedric Allen Hills, and when you hear him sing, you’ll see what I mean. Tony’s arranged a lot of really cool harmonies, like ninths, elevenths, I mean, things you normally wouldn’t hear in harmony, and it works well with my music.”
On creating new music with the help of Tony Daniels, who produces and arranges his songs, and leads his band.
“Tony lives upstairs. He moved in upstairs and it’s great. You know, like Sunday 
morning, I go, “Listen, I just wrote this song, I’ve got to record it,” and he’s like, ‘Come on up!’ And in an hour we’ve got a rough draft to work around, and he fixes all my mistakes… and then we build on it… we’re gonna add a violin.
I did write a song about our country being torn in two called “Look Away,” and I hope that has some sort of healing effect. At least I’m trying to.”
How did he meet Tony Daniels?
“Tony came to an autograph signing of The Warriors, and his wife fell in love with the dog we had at the time.”
Waites’ influences as a songwriter.
“I think I was most moved initially by Springsteen, the Darkness on the Edge of Town album. I was this young actor, and all of a sudden I had all this success, and I was making money, and I bought a loft in Soho. I was as poor as a church mouse, and now I have a loft, a sound system, and I just listened to that album over, and over and over again, and it spoke to my soul, because I grew
up in a very similar environment to Bruce. And that was my initial… but I’d say, John Lennon, before that, was the biggest influence, because of his point of view. And Jackson Browne was a big influence on me, and Dylan. I would say they are the main influences.”
Other influences
“I’m a big Shakespeare guy. And poetry: Yates, Keats, Emily Dickenson. I’m very influenced by poets, and often before I write, I’ll read their poetry, and it will stimulate me to get an idea and try to let my own subconscious get free enough to write.
I don’t have to prove anything. I’m just lucky people want to play with me!”
What’s given him the most satisfaction out of acting, directing, teaching, and music? What makes for a good director or teacher?
“I would say what makes you a good director is being a good person. What makes you a good teacher is being a good example. I get the most satisfaction out of directing my own writing, and then writing music to my own stories.”
I tried to bare my soul for the world to see and try to make it a better place as a result.”
Learn more about Thomas G. Waites at https://thomasgwaites.com
