Happy birthday Tom Waits. What do you get if you combine Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac,Louis Armstrong, HowlinWolf, The Gershwins, Rogers and Hart and a little Charles Bukowski? You get Tom Waits. A true musical gumbo. Tom is a true original...I have simply never heard anything like him... I bought Toms first album in 1973.I was living in Portland,Oregon. I was a full time musician..one of my regular haunts was Music Millennium ...the Burnside location...I heard Toms first record playing in the store..I bought the album...I did not digest this album for about a year...It took me a while to get it...fast forward 40 years...Tom has released many records...I always buy em...it always takes about a year before I get em...I wonder...is 40 plus years long enough to establish a pattern? I have written about Tom Waits in a previous blog...I wonder if my stories coincide?. I dont wonder enough to check.. I stumble across songwriters that change the way I approach my own songwriting..Bob Dylan,Townes Van Zandt and Steve Earle are a few examples...the writing is so good and at such a high level that just listening to them is inspiring and exasperating by turns... Tom Waits is on that list...maybe the top of that list..Tom does not release many records..he certainly does not bend to any trend or fad..I dont expect him to show up as a judge on a musical game show competition...I picture Tom in the woods somewhere..maybe not quite visible to other humans...out of some kind of smoke you hear a sound you have never heard before..as you try to approach the sound...it vanishes...behind you you hear the the best song you have ever heard being played on a squeeze box from the 1700s... Tom Waits...one of a kind.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 16:10:32 +0000
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