Tom Waits

Singer/songwriter Tom Waits is a one-man beatnik revival. He generally appears with a cap pulled over his brow, a cigarette dangling from his stubbled face, talk-singing and/or mumbling jive in a cancerous growl to the accompaniment of cool saxophone jazz; he also writes romantic ballads, which have been covered by the Eagles, Rickie Lee Jones, and others.

Waits claims he was born in a moving taxi. He grew up in California, where he listened to Bing Crosby, Stephen Foster parlor songs, and George Gershwin. He also developed an intense admiration for, and identification with, such Beat writers as Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski. As a teenager, Waits was living out of a car and working as a doorman at the L.A. nightclub the Heritage when he decided he should be performing and began writing songs based on overheard snatches of conversation.

He first played at L.A.’s Troubador club in 1969, and soon moved out of his car and into L.A.’s Tropicana Hotel (a favorite of visiting rock stars). Waits built up a strong cult following as an opening act. Working solo, he merged humorous Beat-influenced free-verse raps with his own compositions. In 1972 he signed to Elektra/Asylum Records, and his debut album was produced by ex–Lovin’ Spoonful Jerry Yester. Though the album sold poorly, one of its songs, “Ol’ 55,” was covered by the Eagles on their On the Border. In 1973 Waits toured with a sax-bass-drums trio, often opening for Zappa and the Mothers and usually drawing extremely adverse audience receptions. His second album, produced by Bones Howe, sold a little better than the first.

By 1975 Waits had built a small nationwide cult following and was still opening shows, but he had to cut his trio for financial reasons. Later that year, Waits and Howe assembled a sax-led quartet and an audience to record Nighthawks at the Diner (#164, 1975). In 1976 he conducted American and European tours, which were mildly received. In London that year, he composed tunes for his next album, the jazzy Small Change (#89, 1976). Foreign Affairs (#113, 1977) contained his duet with Bette Midler, “I Never Talk to Strangers,” and on Blue Valentine (#181, 1978) Waits introduced electric guitar for the first time.

Waits appeared as a honky-tonk pianist in Sylvester Stallone’s film Paradise Alley, in 1979. By this time, he was involved with Rickie Lee Jones, whose picture appeared on the back cover of Valentine. They broke up in 1980. Waits wrote and recorded the title song for Ralph Waite’s 1980 film about skid row, On the Nickel, and later recorded two songs for the 1985 documentary on Seattle street kids, Streetwise, as well as the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s 1992 film Night on Earth. In 1982 Waits’ soundtrack for Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart featured him in a number of duets with Crystal Gayle; the soundtrack was nominated for an Academy Award. Coppola cast Waits in several of his films, including Rumblefish, The Cotton Club, The Outsiders, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (in which Waits delivered a memorable turn as the fly-munching Renfield); he’s also acted in the Jarmusch cult film Down by Law, the big-budget Ironweed with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts.

Heartattack and Vine (#96, 1980), with Waits playing more electric guitar and an R&B slant to the music, was Waits’ best seller since Small Change, which gives a good indication of his low commercial profile. Waits then forsook any pretense to accessibility, instead making increasingly harsh and eccentric music. Swordfishtrombones (#167, 1983) was an experimental rock work with a surreal range of noisy instrumentation; Waits described it as “a junkyard orchestral deviation,” while critics compared it to both Captain Beefheart and Kurt Weill. Rain Dogs continued the experimental direction, with Waits often singing through a megaphone; it included “Downtown Train,” later a hit for Rod Stewart. (Other artists covering Waits tunes have included Bruce Springsteen with “Jersey Girl,” Marianne Faithfull with “Stranger Weather,” Bob Seger with “Blind Love” and “New Coat of Paint,” and Dion with “Heart of Saturday Night” and “San Diego Serenade”; Canadian vocalist Holly Cole has recorded a complete album of Waits material.) Frank’s Wild Years was based on songs from a musical play Waits wrote with the woman he married in 1980, playwright and script editor Kathleen Brennan; first staged by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Company, it was about a down-and-out lounge singer freezing to death on a park bench, reliving his life in hallucinatory fashion. Big Time was the soundtrack of a concert film-with-story that Waits produced himself.

In 1990 Waits won a lawsuit against snack-food giant Frito Lay, which in 1988 had hired a Waits impersonator to sing a tortilla-chip radio jingle closely modeled on Waits’ “Step Right Up” (from Small Change). Waits, who had consistently refused to perform in any commercials, won $2.5 million in damages through a decision ultimately upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The clattering Bone Machine won a 1992 Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music album. The Black Rider, with its demented Weimar-cabaret stylings, was the score from Waits’ theatrical collaboration with avant-garde stage designer/director Robert Wilson and author William S. Burroughs. Waits and Wilson collaborated again on a 1993 update of Alice in Wonderland. Waits also guested on Bay Area postpunk/fusion band Primus’ Sailing the Seas of Cheese, and on British composer Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, an unlikely 1994 U.K. hit in which Bryars orchestrated the “found” mumbling of a hymn by a London drunkard.

In 1999 Waits returned to the studio and the concert stage after a long absence. Mule Variations, released on the California-based punk label Epitaph, outsold his more recent major-label efforts - and reached #30, his highest-charting album ever - and preceded his first tour in a decade. It also won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. The following year, he collaborated with Wilson and Brennan on a Danish production of Woyzeck.

from the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001)