Tom Waits

Tom Waits

by Cath Carroll

"Waits has become the apotheosis of the American eccentric"

Part of The Music Makers series of books published by Unanimous, Tom Waits weighs in at 138 pages.

The Music Makers is a series of opinionated biographies of artists whose careers have resisted easy classification and whose success is best measured off the charts, in their influence on our popular culture. Rolling Stone says,

Tom Waits offers a succinct yet authoritative overview of the breadth of Waits' influence on his contemporaries, detailed biographical information, and an extensive discography.

Cath Carroll has written for many publications, most notably the UK's legendary music paper- New Musical Express.

For more articles, interviews and reviews by Cath Carroll - past and present - visit our scribe page.

Reviews

At cosmic.com...

BOOK: TOM WAITS by Cath Carroll (Thunder's Mouth Press)

This new volume in the Thunder's Mouth Press "Kill Your Idols" series lives up to the high standard I've found in previous releases. This time the subject is Tom Waits, the enigmatic performer whose reputation and influence has always outstripped his commercial success.

As in previous KYI editions, the book is divided into three sections - The Story, The Music and The Legacy. The story in this case is an excellent brief biography with some of the oft-told tales of Waits early tenure at Hollywood's Tropicana Motel with Rickie Lee Jones and Chuck E. Weiss, and more information than is generally available on the course he took after those fabled days. As he grew out of the wild years and settled into a more routine family life, Waits became increasingly jealous of his privacy. Cath Carroll has done a fine job of gathering the generally available information about his more recent life and career and fleshing it out with fine journalistic research.

The Legacy does a good job of putting one of the most unpredictable performers of popular music into current context and provides some interesting speculation on possible future trends. It's The Music that provides the most fascinating part of the book for me, though, with solid critical analysis of his entire catalog, including song by song insights and stories.

If Waits life and work have been to some degree a purposeful puzzle, Cath Carroll has provided, if not the entire solution, some valuable clues and insights.

© 2001 - Shaun Dale

At Shepard Express:
August 30, 2001

"... Witness the estimable "Penguin Lives" and, more to the point here, the "Kill Your Idols" series (Thunder's Mouth), compact volumes focusing on some of the most significant musicians of the '60s and beyond. Each of the latest three, Tom Waits, Beck and Elvis Costello, concisely summarizes their lives, discusses their music track by track and ends with an essay on their legacy. And none is longer than 140 pages!

The writing is consistently good, although the prose in Cath Carroll's Tom Waits shines most brightly. All of the writers are sharp critics (even when occasionally wrongheaded) who tease out the larger meaning of the body of work they examine while weighing the merits of particular songs or performances. David Quantick's Beck is especially studded with telling observations on the culture to which his subject is a sometimes unwilling participant. Of the eclectic artist's hardscrabble background he writes: "It's easy to listen to Beck's varied, bric-a-brac approach to music-making and hear the voice of a man who was forced to make do with whatever he could lay his hands on-whereas rich kids always make bad heavy metal or something equally handed down by someone else who did all the work..."

BY Dave Luhrssen

Customers found the following review helpful at Amazon:

**** stars (out of 5)

Not the definitive Bio but it will do for now, January 13, 2001

Reviewer: Soheyl Dahi from San Francisco, CA.

This is a small book in every sense of the word but amazingly is well researched and packs in a lot of fact and fiction (mostly generated by Tom himself!)about the bard of low-down losers of every town skidrows. This is not the definitive bio of the still the most underrated songwriter in America but it will do for now. I read it one sitting but I might go back to it again. Get your own copy it fits in your back pocket quite nicely.

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