Waits Tom - Tom Waits

As great American songwriters go, it is impossible and irresponsible not to recognise Tom Waits singular genius in speaking for the underdog. Music historians and critics have studied him for decades like religious scholars do the Scriptures. He has always communicated in his own, singularly unique musical language and lyrical dialect to millions of fans for decades, astounding and confounding outsiders. Without any outside interpretation required to justify his record sales or loyal following, Waits listeners were fluent from the moment they first heard him mirror their story in a way they could relate to.

Waits words wind through the fringes and frays of lifes most authentic moments, in terms both of errant adventure and consequence after the thrill is gone. Told through a sympathetic lens and narrative much in the way a rapper speaks defensively of a pimp or drug dealer, Tom Waits was an advocate for the urban dwellers who were arguably the white counterpart to the black working-class artists like Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder represented in the early Seventies.

Waits was one of the all-night diner patrons; the broken-down waitress who served them; the 3am newsstand regular who knew all the prostitutes by name; the hooker who couldnt shake her lifestyle; the small-time bookie who placed bets for gamblers he knew could never pay but did so anyway out of habit; the bum in the alley or the hobo riding by railcar aimlessly from town to town; the junkie stripper dancing to support a child or an alcoholic boyfriend who beats her with routine; the down and out loser living in a hotel that rented by the week; or perhaps the deadbeat laying low in a seedy strip club to avoid the realities and responsibilities of family life.

At the same time, Waits was the lonely truck driver on the open road, free of the commitment or consequence of settling down; the small-town gas station attendant living in his own head; the recently paroled convict trying to go straight, leading a regular life devoid of all excitement; the average family Joe who hates his job but sucks it up because he loves and takes pride in providing for his kids; or the young forbidden lovers who go for it anyway in spite of the consequences. Waits melodic commonwealth covered every facet of the human experience the sunny days and romantic nights; the glory of dreams and the sadness of their failure to blossom into truth; and the lies we tell ourselves and others to get by; the ways we live with those lies inside ourselves. Waits songs were like modernised passages from SE Hinton novels like Rumblefish and The Outsiders, which gave an identity and sympathetic light to the underdog.

Tom Waits sung in almost constant metaphor in the context of cause and effect, playing a chord harmonious with everyones inner demons and desires, and the helpless and often simultaneous indulgence of both of those opposing entities. He also spoke of the consequences whether impending or already cast as the characters in his songs made their way through the wreckage of human mistakes in a societal framework. He spoke broadly for and to the drifters, the castaways, the conned, the broken-hearted and the corrupted anyone who once had promise they either betrayed by some misfortune of their own doing or who were victims of the lies those promises turned out to be. Waits lyrics were graphic passages from the diary of societys underbelly naked, gripping confessions that came at our most random and vulnerable moments, secrets sloppily spilled which soaked into our conscience like bloodstains that could not be cleaned up from innocences murder.

Delving into the creative cocoon hed created for himself amid that world, Tom began by recalling years later to Mojo that when I was writing, I kind of made up my own little Tin Pan Alley so I could sit at the piano, like a songwriter, with a bottle and an ashtray and come out of the room with a handful of songs, as they did, adding to the BBC that in the old days, I would go into a room with a piano and an ashtray and a bottle and come back with all the songs. Setting up shop at the appropriately seedy Tropicana Hotel in Hollywood, Tom explained of his decision to stay in the heart of Hollywood rather than drift into its more luxurious hills like many of his peers had been an effort to have a genuine, authentic artistic experience, adding in the same comments to GQ that, to that end, I had a piano in the kitchen, and in those days Id stay up all night, sleep half the day.

Soaking up the scene that so inspired him, Tom recalled years later to the Star Tribune that in doing so I was living out my dream I stayed in hotels where I thought stories grew. Id get a chance to inhale all those things that happened in rooms before I was born. My idea of going on the road was not the Holiday Inn or Hyatt House. It was some kind of older dream, like a vaudeville dream. The singer-songwriter shared his memory with Rocks Backpages that when I moved into the Tropicana in LA, that place it was nine dollars a night. But it became a stage, because I became associated with it, and people came looking for me and calling me in the middle of the night. I think I really wanted to kind of get lost in it all, so I did. When they painted the pool black, thats when I said this has gone too far. It was a pretty heavy place at times. I had a good seat at the bar, and I could see everyone in the room.