I've been a Tom Waits fan for 30 years? JEEZ!

When I was a child, I might've spake as a child, but I had very good taste.

When I was 14 or so, I had a job in a record store at the Westmont Plaza. I used to take home the promotional LPs nobody else wanted, which did wonders for my new wave library. For some reason, my bosses at the store, who had good taste, weren't all that enamored of Tom Waits' Blue Valentine album. They each liked Tom Waits, but somehow I ended up with that record, thus beginning a musical enthusiasm that has been a staple of my life. I'be bought almost every record he's made since, and always within a week of release. When I don't like them, I take it personally. Very few songwriters have ever hit me that way. Not Randy Newman, nor John Prine, Dylan, Willie. Paul Westerberg is the only other one I ever got mad at.

(I only ever got mad at Dave Alvin for not writing new stuff.)


Waits has been through distinct periods as few of his cohorts have. His career is neither all about who's in his bands nor sudden complete changes in writing style (since Swordfishtrombones, anyway). His status these days is of a kind of elder statesman of a state only he occupies, so I guess he shares that with Captain Beefheart, and maybe now Los Lobos.

I've always loved his ballads, and not just the jazzier ones. His first two albums (Closing Time and Heart Of Saturday Night) definitely have their torch intact, but songs like "Ol' 55" 9covered by the Eagles), "I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You" (covered more recently by Hootie and the Blowfish)are as quintessentially 1970's David Geffen as anything Jackson Browne ever gave us, albeit better crafted. Waits was about 22 when he wrote those, and they'd've been enough to cement his rep as an emergent heavy hitter. He had adopted Prine's trick, of being a young man who can write old. Waits' "Martha" could have been about the woman in Prine's "Angel From Montgomery". I don't think it was.

As Waits moved through the seventies and into the eighties, he grew restless with his beatnick torch persona and entered a phase that would come to its full fruition in 1985, with Rain Dogs. That was the best band he ever had -- with Marc Robot and Ralph Carney -- and the songs and performances have the thrilling sound of a man inventing his own new music. Careless camparisons to Beefheart abounded, but I think that's because -- like Beefheart -- the new stuff didn't really sound like anybody else's music. And when he mounted live shows in 1985 (some of which were filmed for the concert film Big Time), we saw a band where Waits uber-personality had charismatic counterparts in Marc Robit and Ralph Carney, resulting in a band as interesting as its leader.

We are now 25 years since that band and their wonderful records, and Tom Waits at once is as classic as Willie Nelson but as cutting edge as anyone. Like Miles Davis managed to do, Waits has kept a new music feeling through his work, whether for good, bad, or ugly.

These three performances each typify a thing I love about Waits. I stayed away from the hits. I don't think "Purple Avenue" was ever officially released in a pristine form on a Waits album. Holly Cole recorded it on her first album, and it emerged as a bonus cut in conjunction with a version of "Once Upon A Town" on the One From The Heart soundtrack CD. The live version of "Heart Of Saturday Night" is vontage midseventies issue stuff, and "God's Away On Business" is about ten years old, and just fantastic.

I can't imagine any of my friends not knowing at least some of Waits' music. But if I'm wrong, sit down. This guy's fantastic.