Tom Waits

The Asylum years

Thomas Alan Waits was born on 7 December 1949 in Pomona, California, and grew up in Whittier and Chula Vista. He started at the Heritage coffeehouse in San Diego, where he worked the door in 1969, then played the Troubadour in Los Angeles, where Herb Cohen signed him in 1971 and David Geffen brought him to Asylum. Closing Time, produced by Jerry Yester, came out on 6 March 1973 and did not chart in the United States. Stephen Holden of Rolling Stone called it a remarkable debut album, and the Eagles covered Ol' '55 on On the Border the following year.

Bones Howe produced the albums that followed, beginning with The Heart of Saturday Night in 1974. Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) was recorded live in a Los Angeles studio over two nights in July 1975, with tables, a bar and an invited audience, because Howe and Herb Cohen wanted to bring out the jazz in Waits. Small Change (1976) was his first charting record, reaching number 89 in the US, and opens with Tom Traubert's Blues. Foreign Affairs (1977) brought a duet with Bette Midler, and Blue Valentine followed in 1978. Heartattack and Vine (1980), with its fuzz-guitar title track, was his last album for the label.

Starting over at Island

Waits married Kathleen Brennan in August 1980, and she became his co-writer and co-producer. In 1982 he scored Francis Ford Coppola's One from the Heart. Asylum then declined to release his next record, and Chris Blackwell of Island approached him instead. Swordfishtrombones (1983) was the first album Waits produced himself. He wrote it on a two-week trip to Ireland, and Brennan introduced him to Captain Beefheart and Harry Partch. It used banjo, accordion, bass marimba, calliope and harmonium, and Waits described the sound as all different, with no saxophones. NME ranked it the second-best album of 1983, and Spin named it the second-greatest album of all time in 1989.

Rain Dogs (1985) followed, written over about two months in a basement room in Manhattan and recorded at RCA in New York. Keith Richards and Marc Ribot, who was working with Waits for the first time, played on it. It carries Jockey Full of Bourbon and Downtown Train, and it went Gold in the US, the UK and Canada. NME named Rain Dogs album of the year, and Rolling Stone made Waits its Songwriter of the Year. Franks Wild Years (1987), drawn from a Chicago stage musical, completed what is called the Frank's Wild Years trilogy. In 1988 Waits sued Frito-Lay over a Doritos ad that used a singer imitating him on Step Right Up, and he won a settlement of $2.6 million in 1992.

Bone Machine

Bone Machine (1992) was made in a cement-floored cellar at Prairie Sun in Cotati, California, nicknamed the Waits Room. It was the first Waits album on which he played drums and percussion extensively, and it won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album. The Black Rider, a 1993 album of songs from a theatre piece made with director Robert Wilson and William S. Burroughs, came next. That year Levi's used Screamin' Jay Hawkins's cover of the title track of Heartattack and Vine in a jeans advert against Waits's wishes. He sued in a European court and won, and Levi's published an apology in Billboard.

Anti- and after

When his Island contract expired he signed with Anti-, an Epitaph offshoot he called a friendly place. Mule Variations, released on 16 April 1999, won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Alice and Blood Money arrived together in 2002, Real Gone was recorded in an abandoned schoolhouse in Locke, California, and Orphans collected 54 songs on three discs in 2006. The Glitter and Doom tour of 2008 produced a live album the next year. Bad as Me reached number 6 in the US in 2011, the year he entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Neil Young giving the induction speech.

Island's Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, Bone Machine and other titles were reissued in 2023 under his and Brennan's supervision. Waits has also acted in films including Domino, Seven Psychopaths and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Barney Hoskyns tells his story in the unauthorised biography Lowside of the Road, and setlist.fm lists 874 of his shows between 1970 and 2022.