Tom Waits for everyone
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Musician Tom Waits, the subject of the new book ‘Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits,’ did not help author Barney Hoskyns with the biography. Instead, he and his wife sent e-mails to friends asking them to keep mum -- some of which appear in the book. But his lack of cooperation was only to be expected -- marriage, quitting drinking and seclusion have made Waits a very private public figure.
Waits ‘emerged in 1971 as a flophouse poet and beat-influenced boozer’ Erick Himmeslbach writes in his review of the book.
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... Being a dodgy enigma makes Waits both a fascinating subject and frustrating challenge.
Waits’ early boozing years were in keeping with his public persona, but after he cleaned up and got married to Kathleen Brennan, things changed. Brennan ‘is a hero and a villain,’ Himmeslbach writes, ‘Hoskyns portrays her as a Svengali with a Yoko Ono-like grip on her husband.... And yet, if Brennan were a calculated string-puller in regard to her husband, it’s difficult to argue with the results.’
Their guarded privacy may have allowed Waits to maintain a personal life that’s entirely different from the half-mad, often dark rumble-voiced character of his songs. Maybe someday there will be a biographer that gets to ask him about that directly. Until then, there is ‘Lowside of the Road.’ And the music.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
