Scared, Like a Baby

"Wherever you may wander/ Wherever you may roam/ You've got to always keep a diamond in your mind."

When asked how he found himself on stage in front of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Tom replied, “I’m no fool. It’s a spiritual insurance policy. Hell, at my age, the next group I put together, everyone may be playing a harp. All kidding aside, I owed His Holiness a favor. He did all my papers in school.”

In 2007, at a concert in New York’s Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, Tom Waits and the Kronos Quartet performed a few songs to support a fundraiser for the Tibetan Health Initiative.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama was there.

The highlight was Waits’ performance of “Diamond in Your Mind,” a song he wrote with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, and made famous by Solomon Burke on his 2002 album Don’t Give Up on Me.

Waits—precocious and playful—opens with a couple of crowd loosening one-liners:

“So, His Holiness goes to bed at 7:30… That’s not the Holiness I used to know.”

A roar of laughter.

“He had a whole other look going.”

More laughs. Then a coy and boyish:

“Sorry. Sorry.”

His Holiness gets it. The joke isn’t on him—but on the pieties of the occasion. Waits and His Holliness commune in the humor and the great of human connection that laughter brings.

His comic set-up melds perfectly with the first verse:

I shook the hand of the president and the pope in Rome
I’ve been to parties where I’ve had to be flown
They said everything was sacred, nothing was profane
And money was something that you throw off the back of trains

Tom Waits, his raspy manipulation of tone—amusing, and then suddenly, it’s something else, something you didn’t know was there.

His songs, ephemeral burlesque picaresques, are beautiful, brutal, and deeply American in their invocations of shanty blue-light motels, the windy backs of trains, and the contrasting twilight of deserts and diesel fuel and drifters and drunks and carnivals and sideshows and sad waitresses grinding out math on greasy receipts.

Here Waits, suspicious of the sentiments of the evening, is brave enough to be at peace with the flaws as he toils and unites the audience into the beauty of the moment, reminding us that if you keep that diamond in your mind and in your heart and in your soul, that alone will be enough.