funnily enough I was just reading about Waits in this extract from a Rickie Lee Jones memoir:
"When I was 23 years old I drove around LA with Tom Waits. We’d cruise along Highway 1 in his new 1963 Thunderbird. With my blond hair flying out the window and both of us sweating in the summer sun, the alcohol seeped from our pores and the sex smell still soaked our clothes and our hair. We liked our smell. We did not bathe as often as we might have. We were in love and I for one was not interested in washing any of that off. By the end of summer we were exchanging song ideas. We were also exchanging something deeper. Each other.
Tom had two tattoos on his bicep. He liked to don the vintage accoutrements of masculinity: sailor hats and pointed shoes. The more he tried to conceal his tenderness, the more he revealed a chafed and childlike nature. I adored him. He was my king. In bed he was the greatest performing lion in the world. I mean to say that Tom was never not performing."
I was gonna go for another pint last night but I thought better of it.well, we all could apart from catalog
No idea actuallyLinebaugh how do you say your name phonetically.
Is it lineboff? Or linebow?
Yeah Nick Cave forms the trinity here.besides the quality of making both very boring yet very obnoxious music, the original connection I thought was with the fan bases and the type of reverence both whip up in those who enjoy them. A figure to help build a personality around and project onto. I wonder if the 'acting' they both do attracts that.
“…she's got big plans that don't include you…”Tom Waits did the soundtrack to one of my favorite films, One From the Heart, so for that alone I would vote for him. If I was going to vote.
Waits and Cave, with their drearily locatable schtick, are the twin menaces of overly literary songwriting imo. Seems like all you ever get from them is an already well-upholstered world drawn from classic cult fiction. It’s all so rehearsed and second hand, there’s hardly any reason for any of it to exist as song.
I had to play-check a Waits album I had in before listing recently (I think it was ‘Bone Machine’) and it was fucking excruciating. His lyrics read like a tidy compendium of beat/hardboiled cliches. They come at you with ticker-tape regularity…and he thinks he’s making this thing full of texture and life, lol. There’s probably a fucking app to help you write like that these days. And then the put-on voices: the wino with the buzzy sibilants, alternating like clockwork with the huckster with ragged lungs. All that lumber of tired allegory: circuses, sideshow freaks, flop-house prophets, sailors raising hell on leave, it’s like he squares the worst of lyrical Dylan with the worst of singing Beefhart.
Bowie may be acting but it’s an entirely different thing, far less locatable, far more rarefied, refracted and elusive. There’s no fake-real, yknow, ‘lived-in fuck mattress’, for want of a better image, under everything. He was and is entirely brilliant, of course.