Jay S. Jacobs – Wild Years. The Music and Myth of Tom Waits

Автор: Jay S. Jacobs
Название книги: Wild Years. The Music and Myth of Tom Waits
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Музыка
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Newly updated to include his critically acclaimed post-millennial work, this look at Tom Waits–both the reality and the myriad myths–reveals how a self-taught, drunken hipster in roach-killers and a dirty beret has influenced a generation of musicians with his sound, warmth, and willingness to take chances

Aseedy skid-row bar. A defective neon beer sign sputters and a television
drones on, unwatched. A tired bartender with a hard face mops the
bar top with a towel. A cocktail waitress, aged before her time, sits alone,
occasionally casting glances at the joint’s only patron. He motions once in
a while for a refill and continues to gaze at the battered, varnished wood
of the bar and the little bubbles in his glass.
Such scenarios come to most people’s minds when they think of Tom
Waits. A 2:00 a.m. world where the disenfranchised struggle to forget life’s
little indignities. Here, love is a fleeting ideal. Dreams never come true,
but they are relentlessly manufactured, a comfort, a way to get through
the night.
Tom Waits is the poet laureate of homesick sailors, down-on-theirluck
traveling salesmen, dance-hall girls — anyone seeking refuge from
life’s disappointments at the bottom of a glass. Waits’s vision is an American
Gothic of three-time losers, lost souls, and carnival folk. Driving this
vision is the artist’s understanding of such people. He refuses to look
down on them. Some of his critics have said that he has sentimentalized
them, but this is rarely true. Waits habitually respects his subjects because
of —not despite —their faults and weaknesses. To him there has always
been a shabby nobility about surviving in a hard, cold world. And sometimes
the bravest thing a person can do is stay the course and hold on to
his dreams and ideals.
In 1976, Waits told Newsweek, “There’s a common loneliness that just
sprawls from coast to coast. It’s like a common disjointed identity crisis.
It’s the dark, warm, narcotic American night.”1 This, more than anything
else, is what intoxicates Tom Waits. Not alcohol, not drugs, not fame, not
fortune . . .