Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits

Barney Hoskyns

Broadway Books

By Rob O’Connor

Tom Waits refused to cooperate. And he, his wife and management team apparently discouraged others from speaking with an “unauthorized” biographer. Barney Hoskyns catalogs the email rejections in the book’s endnotes for their amusing, cryptic, sometimes paranoid appeal and to give the reader a taste of the obvious frustration he faced while attempting his dutiful research. An unabashed fan, Hoskyns, the author of the fine Band biography Across the Great Divide and the much recommended books on the Los Angeles music scene Waiting for the Sun and Hotel California, never looked to write a hatchet job and didn’t. He admirably resigned himself to writing this biography with his handful of personal interviews and encounters, a voluminous collection of interviews Waits has done with others and with the insights of those like producer Bones Howe and musician Ralph Carney, who went on record since Waits no longer returns their phone calls anyhow.

Hoskyns never lets his frustrations taint the proceedings. There’s no sense of petty payback. If anything, Waits should regret not getting involved, since it’s obvious from the quotes here that no one is better at expanding on Tom Waits better than ol’ Tom himself. He’s not the most reliable narrator, but he gets the colors right. And that’s something Hoskyns understands. His analysis of Waits’ work will send you back to the albums to hear them anew, to think about songs you may have overlooked or completely forgotten. And to mourn the obvious truth that no one, Waits’ protestations to the contrary, is more responsible for Tom Waits being perceived as the mythological “Tom Waits” than the man himself.  

The skinny kid from Whittier, California, home of Richard Nixon, who grows up to be a beatnik, late-night piano bum, a discordant after-hours lounge act, a retro-raconteur, a next generation Captain Beefheart avant-garde showpiece and a Grammy-Award Winning “Alternative” and “Folk” act lived this life for the world to see. It was Waits who intuitively understood the importance of clinging to a public persona in order to stand out in the crowd. With the assistance of his wife, Kathleen Brennan, he took control of his career at the turn of the 1980s when it could have just as easily spiraled into the cut-out bins and began building--against the odds, considering the very unusual style he embraced -- the loyal cult following and the first-rate branding that has made him into the one aging weirdo that comes with NPR approval.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. But as actor and novelist Steve Martin notes (does Hoskyns mean the comedian, by chance?), “Sometimes, a journalist will lean in and say ‘You’re very private.’ And I mentally respond, ‘Someone who’s private would not be doing an interview on television.’”

It’s Waits’ own insistence to control the press like he’s running the Bush White House and his own insistence on staying in “character” for interviews that makes for the uncomfortable put-on. As Hoskyns makes clear, there is no reason the dedicated family man living somewhere in the wilds of Northern California can’t record the demon-seeded incantations of Bone Machine or the Weimar-era ballads of Alice. The art speaks for itself and many of the book’s most revelatory passages catalog the unusual ways Waits recorded his material, using un-soundproofed utility rooms on the studio grounds and encouraging his musicians to embrace their mistakes.

It’s to Waits’ strongest credit that he has lived his career almost inverse to accepted, common wisdom. Waits’ artistic resolve arguably improved upon achieving domestic bliss. His wife did not hinder his process, but accelerated it, encouraged it and nurtured it. Hoskyns makes no secret her vital, often understated, contributions to Waits’ work. By attaining an inner equilibrium, Waits threw his music into vertigo.

If some fans prefer the well-placed pathos of Small Change and Blue Valentine over the chaotic assaults of Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs or Mule Variations, that is their right, but no one can claim Waits lost his artistic ambitions. Keep in mind, as well, that he began this process of rediscovery during the 1980s, a decade that most music veterans now admit was “lost” for them.

Sure, it’s a less colorful world when you’re no longer living out of the Tropicana Motel and carrying on an affair with Rickie Lee Jones, who’s singing her version of that life in her own songs. But those moments are brief and art is long. “I think it’s important now to be able to separate yourself as a performer and writer from whom you actually are,” Waits told Mick Brown in 1981. “A guy who writes murder mysteries doesn’t have to be a murderer.”   

But to Hoskyns’ (and our) chagrin, there are no new words from Keith Richards, no further insights from director Jim Jarmusch, nothing from recent guitarists Joe Gore and Smokey Hormel, so the closer one gets to the present-day Waits, the more the circle tightens -- as if any of them would say anything beyond glowing appraisals anyway. The one thing becomes clear throughout the years is that Waits has engendered a great amount of respect and good will. Men like Bones Howe and Ralph Carney come across as disappointed friends who wouldn’t mind hearing from their old pal, not disgruntled ex-employees with axes ready to grind.

So what is Waits building in there? Probably not much more than he ever was. As Waits put it himself years ago, “You want to make sure that your demand is much higher than your supply. The public is a wild animal. It’s better not to feed them too well.” He may have tried to starve Barney Hoskyns, but Hoskyns still managed to pull off a biography as dignified and complete -- and one would have to say more honest -- than any “authorized” tome would compare. Sure, some of the Waits mystique rubs off as the cobwebs are dusted and facts come to the surface. But there’s enough poetry and plain common sense in Hoskyns’ own journalistic soul to know where to leave well enough alone. Lowside of the Road is the Waits biography worthy of its subject -- that is until its subject wises up and goes on record for the “updated” edition due in, what do you say, 2012, Tom?

That is, provided Hoskyns hasn’t moved on by then to a more agreeable subject like, say, Scott Walker or Van Morrison.