"Eyeball Kid"
'Mule Variations', 1999
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“Eyeball Kid” is one of my favorite Tom Waits songs, but I never knew the Kid’s extensive backstory before researching this entry. Turns out he was inspired by Robert Redford and Nicolas Cage.
Indirectly.
Redford played the second of the two titular characters in the classic 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Sixteen years later, a comic artist named Eddie Campbell was brainstorming names for new characters. As he recalls in the introduction to his collection Bacchus Omnibus, “The title ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ rolled around in my head until it became ‘Joe Theseus and the Eyeball Kid’.” Thus the Eyeball Kid was born.
Campbell goes on to note he “had to find a myth to explain a grotesque character with multiple eyes.” Yes, the original Eyeball Kid was not one giant eye, like Tom’s, but a person with a bunch of eyes. Here’s the Eyeball Kid’s introduction on paper:
Then, on the facing page, The Eyeball Kid’s dramatic full-page first appearance:
This Eyeball Kid, the comics one with a bunch of eyeballs, came with quite a backstory—that myth Campbell said he had to create to explain him. Turns out he was the grandson of Argus, a figure in Greek mythology with a hundred eyes, who was murdered by Hermes. Eyeball, as he was known, in Campbell’s myth ended up murdering Zeus.
The Eyeball Kid must have been a hit. Within a few years, he was starring in his own spinoff series of comics, in early 1992:
And, by the way, he apparently found the opportunity to try to avenge his grandfather’s murder by Hermes. More than one opportunity, seemingly.
How does this all lead to the song? Well, apparently Tom had gotten back into comic strips from a famous friend. He told an interviewer who asked about the song, “Nic Cage…reintroduced me to comic books. I hadn’t thought about comic books since I was a little kid, but he seemed to carry that mythology with him. It was inspiring to see him keep alive some of those principles that we associate with childhood, to the point where he named himself after Cage, the comic-book hero.”
Elsewhere, Tom says he wasn’t actually super familiar with the specifics of Eddie Campbell’s character. He mostly just liked the name, which would explain why his Eyeball Kid would look nothing like the comic-book one. He wrote in the press kit for his new album:
“There’s a superhero called the Eyeball Kid that I’ve grown fond of. Actually, I’ve just heard the name. But I had my own image of what that is. I imagined it was just a guy with just nothing but an eyeball. Born without even a brow. And he could roll into places, and have a terrific view of anything that he wants. There is a comic book character, the eyeball kid, but he’s different. He has a lot of eyeballs—about eight [it’s even more than that Tom!]. And that’s great, too.”
That album press kit I quoted was not, as you might expect, for Mule Variations—the album with the song “Eyeball Kid.” It was for Bone Machine, seven years earlier. That’s where The Eyeball Kid made his first Waits appearance, in the song “Such a Scream.” The lyric begins:
Well Pale Face said to the Eyeball Kid
She just goes clank and boom and steam
That’s it. Just one of many zany-sounding character names that come and go in Tom’s songs. Pale Face didn’t get his own dedicated song any more than Peoria Johnson or Satchel Pudding or Horse Face Ethel or a million other Waitsian characters. But Tom clearly thought the Eyeball Kid had more to offer. So, a couple albums later, he gave him a proper song.
In fact, he at one point considered titling the entire album The Eyeball Kid. Clearly he related to this circus-freak character. He told another interviewer, “Most of us, in some form or another, are fascinated with anything that makes us different. Most of us from time to time have felt that way and can relate on a certain level, whether it’s internal or external… It’s really more autobiographical than anything else.”
The birthday Tom gives the Eyeball Kid—December 7, 1949—is his own.
Ranking “E” Songs
When I finish with a letter, I rank all the songs that began with it. So here’s my ranking of all 6 “E” songs (not very many songs start with “E,” it seems):
This song was so well done that “Tabletop Joe” never had a chance.
Finally, the long-awaited interview snippet where your Tom Waits newsletter overlaps with my Nicolas Cage book