The inimitable Tom Waits - the eternal tramp from the gateways and a brilliant musician

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

What Tom Waits is doing on stage defies description … Because this is not just a song, it is a mesmerizing mixture of music, words, muttering, accompanied by strange body movements. Tom Waits is an outcast drunk with cheap whiskey and an alcoholic from the gateway, with an eternal cigarette in his teeth, a grimace and a city madman in tattered trousers and worn out boots …

Tom Waits is an impossibly picturesque and picturesque vagabond, poet and musician, living in his own world of unusual sounds and the same unusual verses … And those who love him do not care about his pants and boots. They are taken by the soul and will not let go of the unique music of the genius Tom Waits. Rough, rough, and at the same time lyrical …

It is rather difficult to describe his biography. He gives interviews in the same way as he writes his songs, and if someone is lucky, he can have a long and interesting conversation with him, braiding at the same time from three boxes, because "he does not consider it necessary to always and everywhere tell the truth." And it is completely incomprehensible whether or not to believe his stories that he was born in the back seat of a taxi, just a few meters from the hospital, about his wife who knows how to sleep on nails and can easily pierce her cheek, about pheasants who were plucked but eaten they never ate, etc. Although, it seems, it does not matter at all whether it is true or fiction.

But it is known for sure that he was born on December 7, 1949. Tom is inseparable from music from early childhood, just as he is not parted from a notebook in which he writes down the lines of poetry that arise in his head at any time of the day. Studying at school did not particularly inspire him, much more young Tom was attracted by the freedom of a big city, unexpected turns of fate, unexpected meetings …

While working as a doorman in one of the Los Angeles nightclubs, Tom made it a habit to write down some phrases from conversations of club visitors in his notebook. It was these recordings that later became the basis of his first album, which shows the world of the life-worn inhabitants of "one-story America", a world unfamiliar to tourists, and terminally ill with loneliness …

Critics and musicians reacted quite favorably to his work, but the audience did not delight in Tom's songs, on the contrary, during their performance one could often hear hooting and whistling. After releasing several more albums with similar songs, Tom falls into the most severe depression and, spitting on everything goes to Europe.

It was during these years that whiskey and cigarettes did their job, and his voice begins to acquire that unique emery timbre, about which they will say that it has “eight poods of wheezing”. Old Tom knows life firsthand, so a smoky voice through and through is honest. The wonderful words about Tom's voice have already become commonplace - "it is as if it was soaked in a barrel of bourbon, it was as if it was left in a smokehouse for several months, and then, when they got it, they drove over it."

It was during these years that whiskey and cigarettes did their job, and his voice begins to acquire that unique emery timbre, about which they will say that it has “eight poods of wheezing”. The wonderful words about Tom's voice have already become commonplace - "it is as if it was soaked in a barrel of bourbon, it was as if it was left in a smokehouse for several months, and then, when they got it, they drove over it."

And there, in 1976, in a drunken stupor in less than a week, he recorded his cynical-pessimistic album "Small Change", inhabited by losers and drunkards, which immediately elevates Tom to the top of the European musical Olympus.

And some more of his many albums:

Blue Valentine 1978

Swordfishtrombones 1983

In the 80s, Waits suddenly changed his skin and dramatically went into the vanguard. Music, lyrics change, outlandish instruments appear.

And she took him into the jungle of the avant-garde Kathleen Brennan, whom Tom married in 1980. They met while working together on Francis Coppola's film "From the Heart", Tom wrote the soundtrack, and Catherine was the screenwriter.

Rain Dogs 1985

Tom Waits hates his music from the seventies. "It's the same," he says, "like admiring your childhood photos, in which you have big ears." The songs on the new album are still co-written by him with his wife Kathleen Brannen. Waits assures that he himself can write only about specific things that he met in his life, and Kathleen's fantasy is arranged like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. “But we cannot be separated,” says the musician, “we are a family business, one father's and mother's wine and vodka shop. I am the breadwinner, I bring the flamingo home, she is the cook: she chops off the bird's head. I throw the bird into the water, it plucks feathers … And then no one wants to eat it."

And Tom Waits is also a rather unusual person. He and his wife collect clippings from local newspapers. Tom Waits knows a lot of the most incredible things. Once he asked a journalist:

And here is another cult figure. When sung by Yves Montand - an actor and singer who cannot but love - the soul sings.