I’ve mentioned Tom on here before, in praise, in amused wonder, and so on.
Tom is top on my list of “people I’d love to just spend a night hanging out with”.
Of course the first reason to love Tom is the music. If you know, I don’t need to say more. If you don’t, allow me to point you to The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Tom Waits, which has a nice album summary and LOTs of MP3s to give you the flavour–although, taste being 95% subjective, the tracks he’s picked are not the ones I would have picked for the most part.
The second reason to love Tom, though, is for the character. The oil stain thing is probably fresh in your mind, but I’ve got some other Tom quotes to support what I assert. For instance, here’s Tom on Religion:
Q (1981): That line (there ain’t no devil, there’s just god when he’s drunk) about god is great.
TW: “The line was just…I was just sitting on the toilet, and there was this spider web in the corner, and I lit a match and a cigarette, and I held the match up to the spider and the spider started crawling up the web. So I got the match closer. I opened up a can of beer, drank the beer, tried to decide whether I should burn the spider off his web or let him go on his way… “I figured there must be somebody like that up there: has a coupla cocktails every now and then and there’s trouble on Times Square.”
And this is Tom on Life:
TW (1999): “We bought a house here several years ago right along the railroad tracks. And it was one of those things, they show you the house and you sit on the porch, and as you sit down on the porch there’s a train going by, right? And the engineer waves to you. And then a cardinal comes and sits down right near your shoulder, and you hear the train whistle blowing, and the sun is going down, you have a nice glass of red wine. You think, “This is it.” You buy the place, and the next day they say, “That was the last time that train ran. No cardinals have ever been seen around here. It must have been some freak thing.” Then you quit drinking, and you’re stuck with a house on a busy road, and the traffic noise is deafening.”
Tom’s been dry for a few years now, so I can’t spend a night drinking with him and shooting the shit, but I would be content just to sit around a diner and drink too much bad coffee late into the night and pick his brains.
Some Tom Links:
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