"Date to Church"

"I'll Be You" (Replacements) b-side, 1989

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In October 1987, Tom Waits told Musician magazine:

“I like the Replacements, I like their stance. They're question marks. I saw them at the Variety Arts Center downtown; I liked their show. I particularly liked the insect ritual going on at the foot of the stage. There was this guy trying to climb up, and they kept throwing him back, like a carp. No, you can't get in the boat! It was like something out of Mondo Cane. And it was really great to watch. And I liked the fact that one of the kids - Tommy? - had dropped out of high school. Being on the road with this band, the idea of all his schoolmates stuck there with the fucking history of Minnesota, and he's on a bus somewhere sipping out of a brandy bottle, going down the road of life.”

The following month, as the Franks Wild Years promo cycle continued, Tom told NME he likes “stuff that sounds unfinished… If it's too beautiful, too produced, I back off a little, start gettin' intimidated. You heard The Replacements? They seem broken, y'know? One leg is missin'. I like that. Songs that are scrawled on the wall with a nail.”

A month and a half later, Tom’s still raving about the band, now to Creem:

“Oh, I love the Replacements. I love them.” Have you heard Pleased To Meet Me? “Oh, yeah, I've heard them all. I saw them here in L.A. at the Variety Arts Center. It was like an insect ritual. It was very peculiar, and very thrilling. Paul Westerberg is a killer. He's a great writer.” Well, gee, you've probably heard everything I've heard. “I liked Hootenanny, all that raw stuff. And I liked Boink!”

In 1988, A&M released the Hal Willner-helmed tribute record Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films (I wrote about it in my 33 1/3 book on tribute albums, and interviewed the great Willner shortly before his passing). Tom covered “Heigh Ho” from Snow White on it. The Replacements covered “Cruella De Vil” from 101 Dalmatians. Disney didn’t like either. Tom said later, “Those were the two cuts they were trying to get rid of. Disney thought they were changing the lyrics and turning ‘Cruella’ into a striptease number. And they thought I bastardized ‘Heigh Ho.’”

The Waits-’Mats Appreciation Society went both ways. Replacements singer Paul Westerberg was an avowed Waits fan and said his 1987 song “Nightclub Jitters” was inspired by Tom’s ‘70s jazzbo-beatnik persona. So it was perhaps inevitable that they’d end up in a studio together. Which they did, in late summer 1988.

According to Bob Mehr’s authoritative Replacements bio Trouble Boys, the band met Waits and his songwriting-partner wife Kathleen Brennan at Formosa Café in West Hollywood. After the meal, the band invited the duo back to their studio to hear tracks they were recording for what would become 1989 album Don't Tell a Soul. Here’s what happened next, per Mehr:

The band invited Waits back to Cherokee to hear their new tracks. “Waits’s wife was with him, and he was being really mild-mannered,” recalled Matt Wallace. “And the band is drinking a lot, of course.” Around midnight, Brennan got tired and taxied home. The moment she left Waits reached for a bottle of Jack Daniels and began chugging. “And he just turned into Tom Waits,” said Wallace. “It was like Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.” 

Before long, they were playing covers as well as each other’s songs. “The drunkest men in the world,” recalled Westerberg, “me singing ‘Ol’ 55’ and him singing ‘If Only You Were Lonely.’” 

“Date to Church” comes from that inebriated sessions, as do a handful of other tracks that were recently released on a box set and we’ll get to eventually. “Date to Church” didn’t have to wait that long, though. It came out as the b-side of the Replacements’ 1989 single “I'll Be You.”

Here, again from Trouble Boys, is the story behind this song in particular:

Waits then set up behind a B-3 organ and began orchestrating another new tune, the stomping gospel number “Date to Church.” After a few passes at the song, things began to really warm up. “Let’s give it the fucking gusto,” said Westerberg. 

With the band on its feet, Waits began playing fat fills and delivering a wild hellfire preacher rap. “There was a whole track of him yakking behind Paul,” said Dunlap. “He was going, ‘Jesus has the tools! Jesus is the carpenter!’—all this religious stuff. Oh, man, it was awesome.”

It pains me to point out that the backstory is better than the song itself, at least in its original incarnation. For one, Tom is mixed fairly far back. You wouldn’t necessarily know he’s on there unless you were listening close (compare to, say, “Adios Lounge” where you can’t miss him). The organ is groovy as hell, and the drunken energy is infectious, but at its core it’s not a wildly memorable song. That audio of him yakking behind Paul frankly sounds more intriguing.

But wait! You can hear more of that yakking in the “Matt Wallace Remix” of this song that came out on the 2019 box set Dead Man’s Pop. The opening bit of chatter is wonderful, with Tom telling the band, “We’re gonna play a gospel thing.” And you can hear him much better in the song itself too. His sermonizing, bellowing in the background, etc. It adds over a minute of runtime, largely devoted to Tom’s restored vocals. This is the “Date to Church” worth listening to.