Thomas Alan "Tom" Waits (born December 7, 1949) is an American singer-songwriter, composer and actor. Waits has a distinctive voice, described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding "like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car." With this trademark growl, his incorporation of pre-rock music styles such as blues, jazz, and vaudeville, and experimental tendencies verging on industrial music, Waits has built up a distinctive musical persona. He has worked as a composer for movies and musical plays and as a supporting actor in films, including Down By Law and Bram Stoker's Dracula . He was nominated for an Academy Award for his soundtrack work on One from the Heart .
Lyrically, Waits' songs frequently present atmospheric portrayals of grotesque, often seedy characters and places – although he has also shown a penchant for more conventional ballads. He has a cult following and has influenced subsequent songwriters despite having little radio or music video support. His songs are best-known to the general public in the form of cover versions by more visible artists, "Jersey Girl," performed by Bruce Springsteen and "Downtown Train," performed by Rod Stewart. Although Waits' albums have met with mixed commercial success in his native United States, they have occasionally achieved gold album sales status in other countries. He has been nominated for a number of major music awards and has won Grammy Awards for two albums, Bone Machine and Mule Variations .
Waits currently lives in Sonoma County, California with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, and three children.
Life and career
Origins and musical beginnings
Tom Waits was born at Park Avenue hospital in Pomona, California to Jesse Frank Waits and Alma Johnson McMurray, both schoolteachers. His father was of Scots-Irish descent and his mother was Norwegian. After Waits' parents divorced in 1960, he lived with his mother in Whittier, and then moved to National City, in San Diego County, near the Mexican border. Waits, who taught himself how to play the piano on a neighbor's instrument, often took trips to Mexico with his father, who taught Spanish; he would later claim that he found his love of music during these trips through a Mexican ballad that was "probably a Ranchera, you know, on the car radio with my dad."
By 1965, while attending the Hilltop High School within the Sweetwater Union High School District, Chula Vista, Waits was playing in an R&B/soul band called The System and had begun his first job at Napoleone Pizza House in National City (about which he would later sing on "I Can't Wait to Get Off Work (And See My Baby on Montgomery Avenue)" from Small Change and "The Ghosts of Saturday Night (After Hours at Napoleone's Pizza House)" on The Heart of Saturday Night ). He later admitted that he was not a fan of the 1960s music scene, stating, "I wasn't thrilled by Blue Cheer, so I found an alternative, even if it was Bing Crosby." Five years later, he was working as a doorman at the Heritage nightclub (now the Liar's Club) in San Diego—where artists of every genre performed—when he did his first paid gig for $25. A fan of Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, Lord Buckley, Jack Kerouac, Hoagy Carmichael, Marty Robbins, Raymond Chandler, and Stephen Foster, Waits began developing his own idiosyncratic musical style, combining song and monologue.
After serving with the Coast Guard, he took his newly formed act to Monday nights at The Troubadour in Los Angeles, where musicians would line up all day for the opportunity to perform on stage that night. In 1971, Waits moved to the Echo Park neighborhood of L.A. (at the time, also home to musicians Glenn Frey of the Eagles, J. D. Souther, Jackson Browne, and Frank Zappa) and signed with Herb Cohen at the age of 21. From August to December 1971, Waits made a series of demo recordings for Cohen's Bizarre/Straight label, including many songs for which he would later become known. These early tracks were eventually to be released twenty years later on The Early Years, Volume One and Volume Two .
1970s: The Asylum Years
Waits signed to Asylum Records in 1972, and after numerous abortive recording sessions, his first record — the jazzy, folk-tinged Closing Time — was released in 1973. The album, which was produced and arranged by former Lovin' Spoonful member Jerry Yester, received positive reviews, but Waits did not gain widespread attention until a number of the album's tracks were covered by more prominent artists. Later in 1973, Tim Buckley released the album Sefronia , which contained a cover of Waits' song "Martha" from Closing Time , the first-ever cover of a Tom Waits song by a known artist. The album's opening track, "Ol' '55," was recorded by his labelmates the Eagles in 1974 for their On the Border album.
He began touring and opening for such artists as Charlie Rich, Martha and the Vandellas, and Frank Zappa. Waits received increasing critical acclaim and gathered a loyal cult following with his subsequent albums. The Heart of Saturday Night (1974), featuring the song "(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night," revealed Waits's roots as a nightclub performer, with half-spoken and half-crooned ballads often accompanied by a jazz backup band. Waits described the album as:
...a comprehensive study of a number of aspects of this search for the center of Saturday night, which Jack Kerouac relentlessly chased from one end of this country to the other, and I've attempted to scoop up a few diamonds of this magic that I see.
In 1975, Waits moved to the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard and released the double album Nighthawks at the Diner , recorded in a studio with a small audience in order to capture the ambience of a live show. The record exemplifies this phase of his career, including the lengthy spoken interludes between songs that punctuated his live act. That year, he also contributed backing vocals to Bonnie Raitt's "Sweet and Shiny Eyes," from her album Home Plate .
By this time, Waits was drinking heavily, and life on the road was starting to take its toll. Waits, looking back at the period, has said,
I was sick through that whole period It was starting to wear on me, all the touring. I'd been traveling quite a bit, living in hotels, eating bad food, drinking a lot — too much. There's a lifestyle that's there before you arrive and you're introduced to it. It's unavoidable.
In reaction to these hardships, Waits recorded Small Change (1976), which finds him in a much more cynical and pessimistic mood, lyrically, with many songs such as "The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) (An Evening With Pete King)" and "Bad Liver and a Broken Heart (In Lowell)". With the album, Waits asserted that he "tried to resolve a few things as far as this cocktail lounge, maudlin, crying-in-your-beer image that I have. There ain't nothin' funny about a drunk I was really starting to believe that there was something amusing and wonderfully American about being a drunk. I ended up telling myself to cut that shit out." The album, which also included long-time fan favorite "Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)," featured famed drummer Shelly Manne and was, like his previous albums, heavily influenced by jazz.
Small Change , which was accompanied by the double A-side single "Step Right Up"/"The Piano Has Been Drinking," was a critical and commercial success and far outsold any of Waits's previous albums. With it, Waits broke onto Billboard' s Top 100 Albums chart for the first time in his career (a feat Waits would not repeat until 1999 with the release of Mule Variations ). This resulted in a much higher public profile, which brought with it interviews and articles in Time , Newsweek , and Vogue . Waits put together a regular touring band, The Nocturnal Emissions, which featured Frank Vicari on tenor saxophone, Fitzgerald Jenkins on bass, and Chip White on drums and vibraphone. Tom Waits and the Nocturnal Emissions toured the United States and Europe extensively from October 1976 until May 1977, including a performance of "The Piano Has Been Drinking" on cult BBC2 television music show the Old Grey Whistle Test in May 1976.
Foreign Affairs (1977) was musically in a similar vein to Small Change , but showed further artistic refinement and exploration into jazz and blues styles. Particularly noteworthy is the long cinematic spoken-word piece, "Potter's Field", set to an orchestral score. The album also features Bette Midler singing a duet with Waits on "I Never Talk to Strangers." The album Blue Valentine (1978) displayed Waits's biggest musical departure to date, with much more focus on electric guitar and keyboards than on previous albums and nearly no strings (with the exception of album-opener "Somewhere" — a cover of Leonard Bernstein's song from West Side Story — and "Kentucky Avenue") for a darker, more blues-oriented sound. The song "Blue Valentines" was also unique for Waits in that it featured a desolate arrangement of solo electric guitar played by Ray Crawford, accompanied by Waits' vocal. Around this time, Waits had a high-profile romantic relationship with Rickie Lee Jones (who appears on the sleeve art of the Foreign Affairs and Blue Valentine albums). In 1978, Waits also appeared in his first film role, in Paradise Alley as Mumbles the pianist, and contributed the original compositions "(Meet Me in
Barney & Friends - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It is ranked on TV Guide's List of the 50 Worst TV Shows of All Time at #50. ... Barney's farmer friend who appeared in the episode Down on Barney's Farm with a whole bunch ...
Barney and Friends . Storytime | PBS Kids
Barney & Friends Home | PBS Kids Home | Music | Games | Coloring | Storytime. Parents & Educators | TV Times
Barney Stinson Quotes - Classic TV Quotes
Barney: Christmas is a time when people are lonely and desperate, it's the ... Barney: Oh Robin, my simple friend from the untamed north. Let me tell you about a little thing I like to ...
Barney's Version - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
... rich TV producer back in Quebec. Bernard "Boogie" Moscovitch - Barney's best friend ... their time in Paris become best-selling feminist literature. Leo Bishinsky - Barney's friend from ...
Barney & Friends TV Listings
Barney & Friends TV Listings on TVGuide.com ... Channel Date & Time Episode; PBS : Fri, Nov 20 1:30 PM: For the Fun of It; Starlight, Star Bright
Cartoonito - Barney and Friends | We're a happy family | Kids TV ...
In this episode of preschool kids show Barney and Friends ... The Land Before Time; Baby Looney Tunes; Krypto the Superdog ... Enter your friend's name. Enter your friend's email address
Amazon.com: Barney: Everyone Is Special: Barney: Movies & TV
Amazon.com: Barney: Everyone Is Special: Barney: Movies & TV ... Run Time: 117 minutes; Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of ... The adventure continues when one friend announces a tiny ...
Cartoonito - Barney and Friends | Turtles | Kids TV Online Video
In this episode of preschool kids show Barney and Friends ... The Land Before Time; Baby Looney Tunes; Krypto the Superdog ... Enter your friend's name. Enter your friend's email address
Barney and Friends on TV.com
Barney and Friends ranks 13,937 out of the 18,430 shows on TV.com. The 172 users who ... loving show that took their time to say at the end "Hellow Again To Al My Friend's ...
Barney Martin on TV.com
Log into TV.com below and we'll link your Facebook ... and his portrayal of Morty Seinfeld to turn Barney ... Sorry there is no news for Barney Martin at this time.