In the past thirty years Tom Waits has been a highly prolific and influential writer of musical and poetic masterpieces. He has experimented with every facet of the song-form, from instrumentation to vocal stylings and lyrical exploration. With a flare for theatrics, he has also proven his stage presence, and has appeared in dozens of films. In general, I would call him a songwriter, because that is what I think of him as. This as a title, however, does not represent the colossal body of work he has created. His ability to take on many artistic endeavors at once and somehow still have an endless supply of creativity will always be an inspiration to me.
Waits, born on December 7, 1949 in Pomona, California, moved around the state many times. Part way through high school, he dropped out and began working a couple jobs including a pizza parlor and a night club. It was the seedy underbelly of the night life that inspired him to begin writing down and out folk songs about every kind of loser there was. When he relocated to L. A. in the early seventies, he began performing and immediately drew a cult following. .
After Waits' folk songs began to receive critical acclaim, his style started to change a little. He began developing a "beatnik hipster" persona which was accompanied by a snappy jazz combo (upright bass, drums, piano and occasional horns) and the acoustic guitar was left at home for this period. He started telling really bad (but funny) old man jokes from the stage, and replaced his innocent tenor vocal style with more of a raspy, spoken barfly sound. He was once quoted saying "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.".
The biggest shift in Waits' career was in the early eighties. He began to use marimbas, vibraphones, horns, banjos and dobros. As far as percussion went, anything that could be struck with a stick, that would produce a thump or a clang, would make the cut for the Tom Waits percussion section (buckets, barrels, bottles and cans).