Over the past three decades, Tom Waits has achieved the kind of top-shelf cult status most artists only dream about. In his varied career, he has acted alongside Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, and Lily Tomlin; his songs have been covered by artists as diverse as Bruce Springsteen, Sarah McLachlan, the Eagles, and the Ramones; he's won two Grammys, a Golden Globe, and been nominated for an Oscar; he's coined unforgettable phrases like "better a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy" and "champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends"; and he's made anyone who's ever listened to his music just that much cooler. Here is Tom Waits in all his mischievous splendor. From a New Yorker "Talk of the Town" in 1976 to an interview by Terry Gilliam in 1999; from album reviews by Luc Sante and David Fricke to conversations with Elvis Costello and Roberto Benigni; from a recent profile in GQ to "20 Questions" in Playboy and reviews of Waits's acclaimed new album, Real Gone, this is the must-have book for every fan of the artist Beck has described as a "luminary," and for music fans everywhere.
Spotlight customer reviews:
Customer Rating: Summary: Keeping Track of Articles. Comment: If you're a fan of an artist, it's difficult, time-consuming and expensive to keep track of all the interviews and articles written about your favourite artist. Fans of Tom Waits can rest assured - the most interesting articles and interviews are collected in this book, in chronological order, with a foreword by Frank Black of the Pixies.
Reading all these interviews and articles consecutively, you get a taste of the elusive Tom Waits - sometimes truthful, often wickedly confabulating and evading queries, but always amusing.
A must for Tom Waits' fans. Customer Rating: Summary: a must for tom waits fans. Comment: this is a thoroughly enjoyable book consisting of all things tom waits: interviews, reviews, articles, and such. mr waits comments on his approach to songwriting were the most consistently interesting aspect of the book for me and should be of great interest (for freshness of/and or off-kilter approach to song building) to all aspiring songsters. lacking a biography or autobiography, the world, for now, will have to make do with this well done book for an insight into this amazing artist. Customer Rating: Summary: Step Right Up and have a chat with the man himself. Comment: Excellent book. This book is a collection of interviews, show reviews and magazine and newspaper articles spanning Waits's career. Most of the interviews are from the perspective of the average reporter who has no way of getting at the center of the Waits Tutsie Roll Pop ("How many licks does it take to get to the center?") and that provides an interesting perspective in that the reader gets to see how Waits chooses to portray himself. However, some of the interviews are done by close friends, like Elvis Costello and Jim Jarmusch ("Down by Law" and "Night on Earth"), and the reader gets a glimpse of maybe who the true Waits is. It's a great contrast even if it wasn't intended to be the focus of the collection.
Another captivating aspect of the book is that the reader is provided details about all the unique methods Waits uses to make his music. For example, on "The Earth Died Screaming", sound effects are made by having people bang sticks and 2x4s on the pavement of the studio parking lot.
A must have for any Waits fan!
And it's nearly 400 pages long!! Customer Rating: Summary: Multiple perspectives on Waits Comment: In the absence of an autobiography, this collection of 38 interviews and profiles is essential for the Tom Waits fan. It opens with a foreword by Frank Black and an introduction by Mac Montandon.
Part One: Early Years, contains the following amongst many others: The 1974 press release for Heart Of Saturday Night by Waits himself; A short interview with Clark Peterson of Creem magazine from 1978 titled The Slime Who Came In From The Cold; from 1976, there is an article from Sweet & Sour, a long Zig Zag interview and a New Yorker article.
The 1977 Rolling Stone piece by David McGee is very informative and from 1979 there is a short Washington Post article. This section also contains a poem by Charles Bukowski with a short introduction noting that it captures the entire Waitsian world.
In Part Two: The Middle Years, I found the following to be the most compelling: Peter Sabbag's in-depth 1987 article from the Los Angeles Times Magazine, a long formal question and answer interview by Glen O'Brien in a 1985 Spin magazine, 20 Questions from a 1988 Playboy and another question and answer interview from 1989 with Elvis Costello in Option.
Part Three: These Days, offers inter alia the following informative pieces: A 1999 Billboard review of Mule Variations and a short 1999 live review by Jon Pareles from the New York Times. From the same year there is a short review by Luc Sante in The Village Voice and an engaging conversational piece by David Fricke in Rolling Stone. There is also a short question and answer session from a 2004 Vanity Fair.
This section concludes with Nirvana, a 1992 poem by Charles Bukowski. It was included because in an interview with Soma magazine in 2002, Waits referred to this as his favorite poem. The book concludes with a Discography and a Timeline from Waits' birth on 7th December 1949 to the release of his 2004 album Real Gone. The book documents his entire career and is perhaps better than any biography as it contain so many perspectives from so many different writers.
Customer Rating: Summary: If Tom's Work Intrigues You.... Comment: Tom Waits is enigmatic and flies under the commercial music radar. His work is interesting and deals with a part of life few people really care to discover. It's cool to read anything about Tom and try to discover what makes him tick. He's a human-interest story. The thing I think is weird about the book is that it seems most of the authors adopt a writing style imitative of Wait's work. It makes the authors seem pretentious and unauthentically(word?) bohemian. It is interesting reading because of the subject matter.
