Tom Waits

But somewhere along the way his voice dropped an octave and he became Tom Waits. You can chalk it up to bourbon and cigarettes, but that seems too easy. Certainly, this evolution was complete by the time "Blue Valentine" was released. By then, Waits had become the hissing cobra of spilled Chablis along the midway, the guardian of Latino thugs getting cooled while stealing diamond rings, the chronicler of the rain washing memories from the sidewalks.

Waits says he began searching for that voice at an early age. "I learned that Uncle Vernon had had a throat operation as a kid and the doctors had left behind a small pair of scissors and gauze when they closed him up," he said in an interview with Creem. "Years later at Christmas dinner, Uncle Vernon started to choke while trying to dislodge an errant string bean, and he coughed up the gauze and the scissors. That's how Uncle Vernon got his voice, and that's how I got mine -- from trying to sound just like him."

This all culminated in 1983's "Swordfishtrombones," which still stands as Waits' masterwork. On the album, Waits ditched the simple guitar, drums and piano and added bagpipes, trombones, calliopes, strings, hurdy-gurdies, a little sizzle in the high hat, clanging lead pipes, an accordion -- anything and everything.

Waits said the transformation was liberating. "Anybody who plays the piano would thrill at seeing and hearing one thrown off a 12-story building, watching it hit the sidewalk and being there to hear that thump," Waits told Playboy magazine. "It's like school. You want to watch it burn."

Freed from the confines of the standard jazz trio, Waits continued to experiment. He found music in "dragging a chair across the floor or hitting the side of a locker real hard with a two-by-four, a freedom bell, a brake drum with a major imperfection, a police bullhorn."

He also learned the art of evocative storytelling. Never in his later years would he make the mistake of overstating his case. His lyrics wouldn't have to tell you he was your "late night evening prostitute," as he sang on Vol. 1 of "The Early Years." It was in the music. Waits says this evolution began when he stopped romanticizing the life of a drunk.

"I tried to resolve a few things as far as this cocktail-lounge, maudlin, crying-in-your-beer image that I have," he said in a Rolling Stone interview. "There ain't nothin' funny about a drunk. You know, I was really starting to believe that there was something amusing and wonderfully American about a drunk. I ended up telling myself to cut that shit out."

Watching Waits on-screen, or listening to a record, is to watch or hear an elaborate act. But instead of being some kind of extravagant UFO fantasy, Waits' shtick seems to be about being himself, only more so. In that sense, he is the anti-glam rocker. Whereas David Bowie, for example, was always taking on new identities, creating and inhabiting new characters, Waits is a study in becoming who you already are. He's the guy who eats cold chow mein out of the box, revels in a new deck of cards with girls on the back. Bowie is from outer space. Tom Waits is from down in the hole.

"My thing is the best songs come out of the ground, just like a potato," he once said in a conversation with Roberto Benigni, which was published in Interview Magazine. "You plan and plan, and then you wait for the potato."

As far as life philosophy, Waits had this to say to a Time magazine reporter in 1978: "Life is picking up a girl with bad teeth, or getting to know one of those wild-eyed rummies down on Sixth Avenue."

And though his sensibilities may be dive-bar chic, Tom Waits isn't cool the way a pool hustler is cool. Waits is cool like saffron -- exotic and rare. He keeps himself in relative seclusion north of San Francisco, which only adds to the allure. Any time Waits plays a gig it becomes an event. He rarely tours anymore, though he did hit the road for a few dates in support of 1999's "Mule Variations." Those shows were his first since he emerged from a self-imposed exile in 1995 to play a single benefit concert at Oakland's Paramount Theater. The show was expensive -- $75 a ticket -- and sold out in less than an hour.

But Waits didn't miss a beat. When a woman sitting near the front yelled out, "Hey, Tom, where you been?" Waits had a reply at the ready, as if it were rehearsed.

"I been around. Where you been? You still living out by the airport?"

Pitch perfect.

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