Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits

In British music journalist Barney Hoskyns’ new Tom Waits bio, the singer awakens from a nightmare. He’d seen himself at a Salvation Army, browsing through old vinyl, when he spotted a copy of one of his own LPs. It might have been 1976’s Small Change, with its gurgling drinker’s odes like ”˜Bad Liver and a Broken Heart.’ Waits decides to kill the guy who made that record.

Waits’ beatnik barfly persona never quite fit in with L.A’s Seventies hippie singer-songwriter vibe, and he wasn’t punk enough to sprinkle New Wave trimmings over his songs about late-night deadbeats and miscreants. Had he not found himself at the crossroads in that dream, he might be considered a has-been today, rather than the composer of a string of ambitious, creative and unpredictable works like his Nineties apocalyptic classic, Bone Machine.

Waits is legendary for his self-mythologising, so Hoskyns had to do some major sleuthing to get the details on the singer’s suburban childhood, his boozy fling with Rickie Lee Jones and his sober years with his current wife and musical collaborator, Kathleen Brennan. As shadowy as Waits is, perhaps the most mysterious character is Brennan, who is characterised as both a saviour and a controlling figure who drove “a stake” between the singer and his old friends. “I don’t blame Tom for it,” one source tells the author. “I blame Kathleen.” But as another source puts it, “You can’t really overestimate how much she brought positively to the table in a creative sense. His new music was so revolutionary.”