Tom Waits

With his trademark throaty growl, he's a piano bar crooner and a Coney Island barker, singing songs of loneliness and desperation.

By Anthony York

May 8, 2001 | Anyone seeking the distilled essence of Tom Waits can find it in a song that he didn't even write. Waits is an inimitable song stylist (take a look at efforts by the Eagles and Rod Stewart to cover his songs if you don't believe me), but it is his cover of a show tune that may help explain him best.

Growing up in Southern California, I spent countless hours in my parents' car. Unfortunately my father owned all of four cassettes, which were in heavy rotation for the better part of 16 years. And even worse, one of those cassettes was a tape of show tunes sung by Barbra Streisand. As a captive in the back seat, there was little I could do.

When Babs delivers her melodramatic rendition of "Somewhere" from "West Side Story," it is utterly uncompelling. When she sings the song's opening line, "There's a place for us/Somewhere a place for us," it's impossible to feel anything real. We all know that place she sings of is among brie platters and chardonnay on the terrace of a $27 million Malibu estate. Tough life.

But when Waits delivers the same line to open his 1978 album "Blue Valentine," the song is transformed. Through Waits' raspy wail, the song moves closer to its own spirit -- an ode to the freak, a tragic vision of a nonexistent Utopia where all of Waits' characters can roam free.

And imagine if they all were there. The one-eyed dwarf captain shooting dice along the wharf, the prostitute in a Minnesota jail who fabricates stories about a trombone-playing sugar daddy, Big Mambo kicking his old gray hound around the neighborhood; the list goes on and on. Certainly this bunch would not know what to do with the "peace and quiet and open air" that await in some distant somewhere. These are people trapped in what a patient Christian might call the tunnel toward salvation.

For the rest of us, this is just as well. To live in Waits' world is to celebrate loneliness and desperation. Sure, he can sing the ballad of the last man at the bar, but Waits is more than just a piano bar crooner. He's also the Coney Island carnival barker shining a soft blue spotlight in the back alleys of New Orleans. And he does it all with such style, singing about the same characters Charles Bukowski wrote about, in a throaty growl strangely derivative of Louis Armstrong.

Waits has cited as influences everyone from Hound Dog Taylor to his Uncle Vernon, from Prince to Blue Oyster Cult. He once said he enjoyed listening to BOC "about as much as listening to trains in a tunnel." But in a 1978 interview with Creem magazine, Waits explained that, coming from him, that was an endorsement. "I like them. Of course, I also like boogers and snot and vomit on my clothes."

Not your typical rock-star aesthetic, to be sure. But Waits has also had an extensive and eclectic film career, beginning with Sylvester Stallone's 1978 "Paradise Alley." In the 23 years since, he's had memorable roles in movies such as Jim Jarmusch's "Down by Law" as well as in some more forgettable ones, like 1999's "Mystery Men."

But through it all, he has maintained his place as the ultimate hobo boho, a Jack-in-the-box cum storyteller. He brings a certain savvy to almost everything he touches -- whether it's sticking a live fish down his pants while fishing with John Lurie on the Independent Film Channel, or playing Zack the DJ convict in "Down by Law," or prancing around drunk opposite Lily Tomlin in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts." Waits is the King Midas of cool.

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Tom Waits was born in the back seat of a taxicab in Pomona, Calif., on Pearl Harbor Day, 1949. He once told Rolling Stone he began to come into his own musically when he "started writing down people's conversations as they sat around the bar. When I put them together I found some music hiding in there."

His first albums were your basic white-boy blues efforts. In fact, when two albums of his early recordings were rereleased in the early 1990s, I was half-convinced they were some sort of elaborate prank.

"The Early Years" Vols. 1 and 2 are striking in the context of Waits' body of work. To hear them is to listen to a singer who has not yet found his voice. Songs like "Pancho's Lament" and "Goin' Down Slow" sound like they could be Randy Newman tunes, for chrissakes. But listening to these songs confirms something else -- that Waits is the ultimate character actor. Even in these fledgling efforts there are signs of where he wanted to go. He just hadn't yet developed the means to get there.

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