The enigmatic singer-songwriter emerges as a fascinating, if frustrating, subject to tackle.
Self-mythologizing is as much a part of rock as the 15-minute guitar solo. Tom Waits knows the drill: He's been messing with our heads for a full generation. Like Bob Dylan, he has proven a canny master of disguise, creating an impenetrable wall to keep his life from a discerning public.
But more like David Bowie than Dylan, Waits has utilized exaggerated theatricality as his mask of choice. He emerged in 1971 as a flophouse poet and beat-influenced boozer. When that conceptual well ran dry, he became a sonic junk man, a cockeyed carnival barker shilling opaque shards of sound.
For Waits, these costumes are both performance art and defense mechanisms. “People think I'm down on Fifth and Main at the Blarney Stone, throwing back shooters and smoking a cigar, but I'm really on the top floor of the health club with a towel in my lap, watching Johnny Carson," he told British rock journalist Barney Hoskyns in 1985.
Being a dodgy enigma makes Waits both a fascinating subject and frustrating challenge, as Hoskyns' Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits illustrates. Hoskyns builds his story from dozens of sources and archival interviews, but Waits did not talk to him directly for the book.
Indeed, as a character, Waits is an angry ghost here, shaking his fist at Hoskyns for daring to rummage through his life. Nor do we hear from those in the musician's orbit: They were asked to keep mum by both Waits and his wife Kathleen; Hoskyns includes some e-mails with those who turned down his interview requests.
Yet in spite of such barriers, Hoskyns commendably shadow boxes with the Waits myth, revealing some real flesh underneath the artifice.
Waits seemingly emerged on the music scene of the early 1970s as a middle-aged man -- “I wanted to skip growing up and rush all the way to 40," he once said -- but he was really just a kid. Lowside of the Road traces the roots of his persona to San Diego in the late 1960s. Just out of his teens, Waits was already a man out of time, eschewing prevailing hippie vibes for the beat prose of Jack Kerouac.
“ 'On the Road' opened Waits' eyes wide to the choices he had in life," Hoskyns writes. He worked as a doorman and occasional performer at San Diego's Heritage Club before moving to Los Angeles in 1971. Here, he became a fixture at the Troubadour, where his offbeat performances were in stark contrast to prevailing musical fashions.
