Misfit King
An Ode to Tom Waits
“I wanna pull on your coat about something here tonight.”
I was 15 years old — a moody, swooning teen shut up in a fern-papered bedroom, spinning tunes and parsing Kerouac— when I discovered Tom Waits. I was weaned on jazz and blues by my sweet poet daddy. The culture gave me dreamy Jackson Browne, mischievous Tull, psychedelic Floyd, and a funk backbeat. Throw in Tchaikovsky and some Barber, big band and bebop, and you have a rough sketch of the soundtrack of my childhood. I think my mom may have snuck some Streisand in there, but 1970s me was all about the boys.
Then, like a foghorn from a new country, I heard Tom.
“An inebriated good evening to you all …”
Here was the one, the only, the growl from the belly of the brilliant beast. Misfit voice. It shook me, broke me, built me up new and showed me the parallel reality that I suspected all along.
Almost forty years later, I’m still on the ride.
Tom is humor and pathos, bathos and brine. Huckster magician, snake oil salesman, carnival barker. Downtown Shakespeare, a dreamer gone to ground. Trains and tears, crows and crooners and always the moon. Tom is vaudeville and broadway, burlesque and bowery, all thrown in a blender…
