Tom Waits

• Born: December 7, 1949
• Place of Birth: Pomona, California

AMERICAN ROCK SINGER, SONGWRITER, PIANIST, GUITARIST AND FILM-SCORE COMPOSER

A prolific singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Waits is best known for his gritty, blues-inflected vocal style with evocative lyrics depicting bygone eras and snapshots of life on the road.

The Life

Tom Waits was born Thomas Alan Waits in Pomona, California, to Jesse Frank Waits and Alma Johnson McMurray. He grew up in Southern California, learning to play piano and performing in a soul band during his high school years. In 1971, Waits recorded his first demos for Herb Cohen and Frank Zappa’s Los Angeles–based Bizarre/Straight Records. The following year he signed a contract with Asylum Records, on which he would release Closing Time, his first album, in 1973.

Over the course of the 1970s, life on the road began to take its toll on Waits, leading to alcoholism, a subject that appears in many of his songs from that era. In 1980, Waits began working with director Francis Ford Coppola, writing music for the feature film One from the Heart (1982). He met playwright Kathleen Brennan through his work on the film, and their marriage in August 1980 had a positive impact on Waits’s health and career. His interest in film and theater would grow over the following years, resulting in a number of film scores, musical-theater pieces, and even acting roles. While Waits’s music had always conveyed a strong sense of drama, his relationship with Brennan heightened his creative and artistic process, influencing both his staged and his unstaged musical works.

Although Waits’s recordings have rarely achieved wide commercial success, his music has attracted a devoted following of fans, including prominent recording artists. The most commercially successful cover of a Waits song was Rod Stewart’s 1989 version of “Downtown Train,” which reached number three on the Billboard charts. Testifying to both his critical success and his musical eclecticism, Waits won a Grammy Award for his album Bone Machine (1992) in the best alternative album category and another for Mule Variations (1999) in the best contemporary folk album category.

The Music

Although Waits began his career as a crooning balladeer and a lounge pianist, he matured musically with the development of his gravel-voiced hobo persona. In his portraits of life on city streets, at truck stops, in smoky saloons, and at carnival sideshows, Waits conjures images of broken people in decrepit surroundings—the seedy yet honest underside of Americana. His songwriting draws on the musical storytelling tradition of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan as well as the poetic prose of Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski. To match this troubadour lyricism, Waits’s musical palette features gravelly vocals, reminiscent of Louis Armstrong, backed by an eclectic blend of instrumental ensembles and stylistic traditions. Indeed, his compositions run the stylistic gamut from blues, folk, country, rock, swing, and soul to avant-garde jazz and classical music.

Early Ballads. After the release of Closing Time, Waits released a series of albums in quick succession: The Heart of Saturday Night (1974), the double live album Nighthawks at the Diner (1975), Small Change (1976), Foreign Affairs (1977), and Blue Valentine (1978). In these early albums, Waits established his drifter aesthetic and refined his Beat poet lyricism. In one noteworthy example from Small Change, his semiautobiographical “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)” spins a melancholic yarn about a drunk stranded and rambling about in a foreign country. The recording is typical of Waits’s early ballad style, featuring the composer on piano with an intimate string accompaniment. In “Step Right Up,” another track from the album, Waits plays the role of a traveling salesman, pitching dozens of imagined products with comically hyperbolic claims. The jazz trio accompaniment with a repeated acoustic bass ostinato here typifies Waits’s early up-tempo compositions.

Experimentation. Swordfishtrombones (1983) completed Waits’s shift from blues-tinged balladeer to avant-garde maverick. With this recording, Waits began experimenting with new atmospheric and industrial effects that would also appear on Rain Dogs (1985) and the Grammy Award–winning Bone Machine. Mixing the percussive sounds of hubcaps and pans with marimba, bagpipes, organs, and the angular, near-atonal lines of guitarist Marc Ribot, Waits developed a new sound to complement his poetry. He describes this diverse sonic palette of modern electric and acoustic instruments coupled with found objects and instrumental oddities including the Stroh violin and Chamberlain as a “junkyard orchestra.” On the song “Cemetery Polka,” from Rain Dogs, Waits uses such an ensemble to great effect, performing on Farfisa and pump organ with an accompaniment of metal and wood percussion effects evoking the rattling of bones.

Music for Theater. During this period, Waits became more involved in music for theater. Following an Academy Award nomination for his music for Coppola’s One from the Heart, Waits collaborated with Brennan on the musical-theater piece Frank’s Wild Years, which was produced at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater in 1986 and which starred Waits in the title role. Following a number of other film and theater projects, Waits collaborated with director Robert Wilson and Beat author William S. Burroughs on the production of The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets (1990), based on the German folktale Der Freischütz and performed in Hamburg in 1990. Waits drew inspiration for the musical from the collaborations of composer Kurt Weill and author Bertolt Brecht.

Later Works. In 1998 Waits released a compilation album entitled Beautiful Maladies, and in 1999 he released the Grammy Award–winning Mule Variations. Nominated in the best contemporary folk album category, the album highlighted the blues and country-roots-music side of Waits’s influences while retaining the odd musical timbres of his previous work. On the album’s final track, “Come on up to the House,” Waits offers a lyrical viewpoint that reflects a newfound maturity.

In 2002, Waits simultaneously released albums of music from two recent theatrical projects: a musical based on Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1913) entitled Blood Money and an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) entitled Alice. Eschewing the rustic tone of Mule Variations, his 2004 album Real Gone is notable for its frenetic, guitar-driven songs, with Waits’s signature piano accompaniments replaced by the singer’s beatboxing. In 2006, Waits released Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, a limited-edition three-CD box set of fifty-six songs, of which thirty were brand new compositions. Orphans was met with overwhelming critical acclaim and attained gold status from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for selling more than five hundred thousand copies in the United States. Bad as Me (2011), Waits's seventeenth studio album, was similarly well received and was nominated for a Grammy Award for best alternative music album.

After Bad as Me, Waits stepped away from the spotlight and remained a somewhat reclusive figure. He appeared in small roles in several film projects, including the zombie comedy The Dead Don't Die in 2019 and the 2021 coming-of-age drama Licorice Pizza.

Musical Legacy

Waits’s body of work in the fields of popular music, film, and theater will be remembered as a major contribution to the American maverick singer-songwriter tradition. Waits has made his mark in popular music with his unmistakable voice and his lyrical drifter persona. His critical successes as well as the numerous recordings of his compositions by other musicians also testify to the impact of Waits’s music.

Principal Recordings

ALBUMS: Closing Time, 1973; The Heart of Saturday Night, 1974; Nighthawks at the Diner, 1975; Small Change, 1976; Foreign Affairs, 1977; Blue Valentine, 1978; Heartattack and Vine, 1980; Swordfishtrombones, 1983; Tom Waits, 1984; Rain Dogs, 1985; Frank’s Wild Years, 1987 (with Benoit Christîe); Bone Machine, 1992; The Black Rider, 1993 (with William S. Burroughs and Robert Wilson); Mule Variations, 1999; Alice, 2002; Blood Money, 2002; Real Gone, 2004; Bad as Me (2011).

Bibliography

Humphries, Patrick. The Many Lives of Tom Waits. Omnibus Press, 2007.

Jacobs, Jay S. Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits. Rev. and updated ed., ECW Press, 2006.

Jurek, Thom. "Tom Waits." All Music, 2024, www.allmusic.com/artist/tom-waits-mn0000615119. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

Maher, Paul, Jr., editor. Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters. Chicago Review Press, 2011.

"Tom Waits." IMDb, 2024, www.imdb.com/name/nm0001823/. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.