"Do You Know What I Idi Amin"

Chuck E. Weiss album 'Extremely Cool, 1999

Every Tom Waits Song is an email newsletter covering just that, in alphabetical order. Find more info here and sign up to get it sent straight to your inbox:

The lyrics to “Do You Know What I Idi Amin,” a co-write between Tom Waits and longtime buddy Chuck E. Weiss and released on the latter’s 1999 album Extremely Cool, read a bit like ChatGPT writing a Tom Waits song. Like this verse:

Sharkskin Charles and Watermelon Head
Woke up this morning with weebles in their bed
And Hazel climbs the stairs, cause she don't give a damn
I'm gonna eat all the My-T-Fine pudding that I can

But the lyrics don’t matter, a fact that Waits and Weiss surely know, given that they abandon them halfway through. Most of the song is just them repeating the nonsense phrase “Do you know what I Idi Amin Amin / Do you know what I Idi Amin” over and over again. It’s a reference to the Ugandan dictator, but I don’t think there’s a point in the reference beyond the fact that his name kinda sounds like a scatted “I mean.”

Weiss said Waits was the brains behind this song, but I question whether brains factored in much at all. This is an idiotic song on paper that I find charming, if slight, in execution. The fact that the recording ends with one of them hacking up a lung indicates this is not something they sweated over for take after take. It’s the sound of two old friends goofing off and having fun.

Tom executive-produced Weiss’s album, and also appears on a far superior song, “Rains on Me” (his own version was later released on Orphans). When Weiss passed away a couple years ago, Tom gave a rare public performance doing this song at a tribute show in LA:

PS. For anyone who reads my other newsletter, that’s my recent interviewee—and longtime Chuck E. collaborator—JJ Holiday playing guitar on the left.