The Many Lives of Tom Waits by Patrick Humphries

Bohemian rhapsodists
Reviewed by Charles Shaar Murray
Published: 13 July 2007
Never has the word "goatee" seemed more appropriate than when describing the beard worn by the singer, composer and actor Tom Waits in the first few years of his career. There was something incontrovertibly goatish about Waits in his earliest 1970s manifestation: the lanky, hirsute body and elongated, lantern-jawed face made him seem like the Great God Pan, crash-landed to earth and incarnated as an amnesiac wino poet in thrift-shop threads, half-awakened from an alcoholic stupor in the gutter outside San Francisco's celebrated Beat bookshop City Lights sometime in the early 1950s. His personal hygiene may well have been immaculate, but he looked like he smelled really, really bad.

While never unduly troubling the pop charts, Waits has built a formidable body of work over the past three and a half decades, as a low-life laureate whose voice and sensibility are as unique and unmistakable as those of Bob Dylan or Lou Reed. His musical career has been paralleled by a notable sideline as a character actor in movies by directors as prestigious and varied as Francis Ford Coppola (Waits's Renfield to Gary Oldman's Dracula was to die for, dwarling), Terry Gilliam and Jim Jarmusch.

Born in 1949 in the same Southern Californian environs as Frank Zappa, Ry Cooder and Don "Captain Beefheart" Van Vliet, the young Waits couldn't have been further from the average Sixties-raised rock boy. His tastes inclined more towards Leadbelly, jazz and classic Tin Pan Alley songcraft. He threw himself wholeheartedly into the creation of his raffish-boho persona: dressing, singing and writing like a minor character from a Kerouac novel and utilising his impressive gift as a raconteur for self-mythologising shaggy-dog stories ("I was born in the back of a Yellow Cab in a hospital loading zone and with the meter still running. I emerged needing a shave and shouted 'Times Square and step on it!'") and the one-line zinger. Waits is widely credited for originating "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy."

He spent the 1970s in the unlikely setting of David Geffen's Asylum record company for the succession of Beat Noir albums which founded his cult - alongside the cocaine-cowboy Mellow Mafia of Linda Ronstadt and The Eagles (who recorded one of his early songs). He toured incessantly, while residing in an LA motel and subsisting on a diet of whiskey and cigarettes. The next phase of his musical career - considerably more complex and substantial - found him mutating into what Howlin' Wolf would have sounded like if the Wolf's favourite songwriters had been Brecht and Weill and his recording sessions orchestrated and produced by Harry Partch. Collaborating with his wife and songwriting/producing partner Kathleen Brennan on albums like Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Frank's Wild Years, Waits found his best and truest voice.

As has his biographer, Patrick Humphries. The author of several other books, including the definitive works on Nick Drake and Fairport Convention, Humphries has always been a perceptive, literate and conscientious writer. Nobody who has had the misfortune to read far too many rock and pop biographies could possibly construe that assessment as damning with faint praise.

However, this book says bye-bye to sobersides: under the influence of his subject's penchant for tall tales, low life and wisecracking wordplay, Humphries channels his inner Chandler for the snappiest prose of his career. "Like desolation row with a zip code... here's where bedlam gets into bed with squalor... where the hoods from West Side Story slunk off to open all-nite drugstores so that when times got really hard they could rob themselves". At its best, it's almost as much fun to read Humphries's book as to listen to Tom Waits.

The Many Lives of Tom Waits, Omnibus £19.95 (354pp) £17.95(free p &p) from 0870 079 8897.

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