145 Facts About Tom Waits

Thomas Alan Waits was born on December 7,1949 and is an American musician, composer, songwriter, and actor.

Tom Waits began in the folk scene during the 1970s, but his music since the 1980s has reflected the influence of such diverse genres as rock, jazz, Delta blues, opera, vaudeville, cabaret, funk and experimental techniques verging on industrial music.

Tom Waits was born and raised in a middle-class family in Pomona, California.

Tom Waits relocated to Los Angeles in 1972, where he worked as a songwriter before signing a recording contract with Asylum Records.

Tom Waits repeatedly toured the United States, Europe and Japan, and found greater critical and commercial success with Small Change, Blue Valentine and Heartattack and Vine.

In 1980, Tom Waits married Brennan, split from his manager and record label, and moved to New York City.

Tom Waits has influenced many artists and gained an international cult following.

Tom Waits's songs have been covered by Bruce Springsteen, Tori Amos, Rod Stewart and the Eagles and he has written songs for Johnny Cash and Norah Jones, among others.

Thomas Alan Tom Waits was born on December 7,1949, in Pomona, California.

Tom Waits's father, Jesse Frank Waits, was a Texas native of Scots-Irish descent, and his mother, Alma Fern, hailed from Oregon and had Norwegian ancestry.

Tom Waits recalled having a "very middle-class" upbringing and "a pretty normal childhood".

Tom Waits attended Jordan Elementary School, where he was bullied.

Tom Waits later recalled that it was an uncle's raspy, gravelly timbre that inspired his own singing voice.

Bob Dylan later became an inspiration; Tom Waits placed transcriptions of Dylan's lyrics on his bedroom walls.

Tom Waits walked through a door, and slammed the door behind him, and on the door it said, I swear to God, 'KEEP OUT.

Tom Waits later described himself as a "rebel against the rebels", eschewing the hippie subculture which was growing in popularity for the 1950s Beat generation, especially Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs.

Tom Waits was an avid watcher of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone.

Tom Waits worked at Napoleone's pizza restaurant in National City, California, and both there and at a local diner developed an interest in the lives of the patrons, writing down phrases and snippets of dialogue he overheard.

Tom Waits worked in the forestry service as a fireman for three years and served with the Coast Guard.

Tom Waits enrolled at Chula Vista's Southwestern Community College to study photography, for a time considering a career in the field.

Tom Waits continued pursuing his musical interests, taking piano lessons.

Tom Waits began frequenting venues around San Diego, being drawn into the city's folk scene.

Tom Waits began to sing at the Heritage; his set initially consisted largely of covers of Dylan and Red Sovine's "Phantom 309".

Aware that San Diego offered little opportunity for career progression, Tom Waits began traveling into Los Angeles to play at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.

In early 1972, after quitting his job at Napoleone's to concentrate on his songwriting career, Tom Waits moved to an apartment in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, a poor neighborhood known for its Hispanic and bohemian communities.

Tom Waits continued performing at the Troubadour and there met David Geffen, who gave Waits a recording contract with his Asylum Records.

Biographer Barney Hoskyns noted that Closing Time was "broadly in step with the singer-songwriter school of the early 1970s"; Tom Waits had wanted to create a piano-led jazz album although Yester had pushed its sound in a more folk-oriented direction.

Tom Waits supported Tom Rush at Washington DC's The Cellar Door, Danny O'Keefe in Cambridge, Massachusetts's Club Passim, Charlie Rich at New York City's Max's Kansas City, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas in East Lansing, Michigan, and John P Hammond in San Francisco.

Tom Waits began composing songs for his second album, and attended the Venice Poetry Workshop to try out this new material in front of an audience.

Tom Waits joined Zappa's tour in Ontario, but like Dalton found the audiences hostile; while on stage he was jeered at and pelted with fruit.

Tom Waits moved from Silver Lake to Echo Park, spending much of his time in downtown Los Angeles.

Back in Los Angeles, Cohen suggested Tom Waits produce a live album.

Tom Waits told the Los Angeles Times that "You almost have to create situations in order to write about them, so I live in a constant state of self-imposed poverty".

In July 1976, Tom Waits recorded Small Change, again produced by Howe.

Tom Waits recalled it as a seminal episode in his development as a songwriter, the point when he became "completely confident in the craft".

Tom Waits went on tour to promote the new album, backed by the Nocturnal Emissions.

Tom Waits began 1977 by touring Japan for the first time.

Tom Waits appeared with him at the Troubadour to sing the song; the next day he repaid the favor by performing at a gay rights benefit at the Hollywood Bowl that Midler was involved with.

Tom Waits befriended actor and director Sylvester Stallone and made his film debut as a drunken piano player in Stallone's Paradise Alley.

In July 1978, Tom Waits began the recording sessions for Blue Valentine.

Tom Waits's support act on the tour was Leon Redbone.

Tom Waits was dissatisfied with Elektra-Asylum, who he felt had lost interest in him as an artist in favor of their more commercially successful acts like the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Carly Simon and Queen.

Tom Waits joined Jones for the first leg of her European tour, but then ended his relationship with her.

Tom Waits initially lived in the Chelsea Hotel before renting an apartment on West 26th Street.

Tom Waits considered writing a Broadway musical based on Thornton Wilder's Our Town.

Tom Waits was excited, but conflicted, by the prospect; Coppola wanted him to create music akin to his early work, a genre that he was trying to leave behind, and thus he characterized the project as an artistic "step backwards".

Tom Waits nevertheless returned to Los Angeles to work on the soundtrack in a room set aside for the purpose in Coppola's Hollywood studios.

Tom Waits was nominated for the 1982 Academy Award for Original Music Score.

Tom Waits was grateful, both for the revenue that the cover brought him and because he felt appreciated by a songwriter he admired.

Tom Waits grew up Catholic, you know, blood and liquor and guilt.

Hoskyns noted that with Brennan, "Tom Waits had found the stabilizing, nurturing companion he'd always wanted", and that she brought him "a sense of emotional security he had never known" before.

Tom Waits makes a small cameo as a trumpet player in a crowd scene.

Newly married and with his Elektra-Asylum contract completed, Tom Waits decided that it was time to artistically reinvent himself.

Tom Waits wanted to move away from using Howe as his producer, although the two parted on good terms.

Tom Waits began to use images rather than moods or characters as the basis for his songs.

Tom Waits wrote the songs for Swordfishtrombones during a two-week trip to Ireland.

Tom Waits recorded it at Sunset Sound studios and produced it himself; Brennan often attended the sessions and gave him advice.

Tom Waits wanted to leave the label; in his view, "They liked dropping my name in terms of me being a 'prestige' artist, but when it came down to it they didn't invest a whole lot in me in terms of faith".

Tom Waits did not tour to promote the album, partly because Brennan was pregnant.

In 1983, Tom Waits appeared in three more Coppola films: as Benny, a philosopher running a billboard store in Rumble Fish; as Buck Merrill in The Outsiders; and as the maitre'd in The Cotton Club.

Tom Waits was determined to keep his family life separate from his public image and to spend as much time as possible with his daughter.

Tom Waits found New York City life frustrating, although it allowed him to meet many new musicians and artists.

Tom Waits befriended John Lurie of the Lounge Lizards, and the duo began sharing a music studio in the Westbeth artist-community building in Greenwich Village.

Tom Waits began networking in the city's arts scene, and, at a party Jean-Michel Basquiat held for Lurie, he met the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch.

Musically, Tom Waits called the album "kind of an interaction between Appalachia and Nigeria".

Tom Waits had devised a musical, Franks Wild Years, loosely based on "Frank's Wild Years" from Swordfishtrombones.

In late 1985, he reached an agreement that the play would be performed by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago's Briar Street Theatre Tom Waits starred as Frank, whom he described as.

Tom Waits has a poet's heart and a boy's sense of wonder with the world.

Tom Waits initially considered a run in New York City but decided against it.

Tom Waits continued interacting and working with other artists he admired.

Tom Waits was a great fan of the Pogues and went on a Chicago pub crawl with them in 1986.

At rehearsals, Tom Waits looked like any moment he might break at the waist or his head fall off his shoulders on to the floor.

Tom Waits costarred in Hector Babenco's Ironweed, as Rudy the Kraut.

Tom Waits appeared as a hitman in Robert Dornhelm's Cold Feet and lent his voice to Jarmusch's Mystery Train.

In November 1988, he brought a lawsuit against Frito-Lay for using an impersonator performing "Step Right Up" in an advertisement for Doritos; it came to court in April 1990, and Tom Waits won the case in 1992.

Tom Waits received a $2.6 million settlement, a sum larger than his earnings from all of his previous albums combined.

In 1989, Tom Waits began planning a collaboration with Robert Wilson, a theater director he had known throughout the 1980s.

Tom Waits traveled to Hamburg, Germany, in May 1989 to work on the project, and was later joined there by Burroughs.

In June 1989, Tom Waits travelled to London to play a Punch and Judy puppeteer in Ann Guedes's film Bearskin: An Urban Fairytale.

Tom Waits proceeded to Ireland, where he was joined by Brennan and spent time with her family.

Tom Waits made a brief appearance as a plainclothes cop in The Two Jakes and played a disabled war veteran in Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King.

Tom Waits had a cameo in Steve Rash's Queens Logic and played a pilot-for-hire in Hector Babenco's At Play in the Fields of the Lord.

Tom Waits appeared as himself fishing with John Lurie on Fishing with John.

Tom Waits was Renfield in Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Tom Waits starred as Earl Piggot, an alcoholic limousine driver, in Robert Altman's Short Cuts.

Tom Waits was angered at this, describing many of his early demos as "baby pictures" that he would not want released.

In 1992, Tom Waits quit drinking alcohol and joined Alcoholics Anonymous.

Tom Waits wanted to explore "more machinery sounds" with the album, reflecting his interest in industrial music.

Tom Waits's most affecting and powerful recording, even if it isn't his most accessible.

Tom Waits decided to record an album of the songs written for The Black Rider, and did so at Los Angeles's Sunset Sound Factory.

Tom Waits characterized the songs he wrote for the play as "adult songs for children, or children's songs for adults".

Tom Waits thought the play itself was about "repression, mental illness and obsessive, compulsive disorders".

Tom Waits decided to reduce his workload so as to spend more time with his children; this isolation spawned rumours that he was seriously ill or had separated from his wife.

Tom Waits signed to a smaller record label, Anti-, recently launched as an offshoot of the punk-label Epitaph Records.

Tom Waits had been recording the tracks at Prairie Sun since June 1998.

The tracks often dealt with themes involving rural life in the United States and were influenced by the early blues recordings made by Alan Lomax; Tom Waits coined the term "surrural" to describe the album's content.

Also in March 1999, Tom Waits gave his first live show in three years at Paramount Theater, Austin, Texas as part of the South by Southwest festival.

Tom Waits subsequently appeared in an episode of VH1 Storytellers.

In 2000, Tom Waits began writing songs for Wilson's adaptation of Georg Buchner's Woyzeck, which had earlier inspired Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck.

Tom Waits decided to then record the songs he had written for both Alice and Woyzeck, placing them on separate albums.

In May 2001, Tom Waits accepted a Founders Award at the 18th annual American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Pop Music Awards in a ceremony at Los Angeles's Beverly Hilton Hotel.

In September 2003, Tom Waits performed at the Healing the Divide fundraiser in New York City.

Tom Waits appeared in Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes, having a conversation with Iggy Pop.

In 2004, Tom Waits released his fifteenth studio album, Real Gone.

Tom Waits had recorded it in an abandoned schoolhouse in Locke.

Tom Waits followed this with a performance as an angel posing as a tramp in Wristcutters: A Love Story.

In 2006, Waits was a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where he played "Day After Tomorrow".

That year, Tom Waits embarked on his Glitter and Doom Tour, starting in the US and moving to Europe.

Tom Waits continued acting, playing Mr Nick in Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and Engineer in The Book of Eli, a post-apocalyptic film by the Hughes brothers.

Tom Waits found himself in a situation similar to his earlier one with Frito Lay in 2000 when Audi approached him, asking to use "Innocent When You Dream" for a commercial broadcast in Spain.

Tom Waits declined, but the commercial ultimately featured music very similar to that song.

Tom Waits undertook legal action, and a Spanish court recognized that there had been a violation of Tom Waits's moral rights in addition to the infringement of copyright.

Tom Waits later joked that they got the name of the song wrong, thinking it was called "Innocent When You Scheme".

In 2005, Tom Waits sued Adam Opel AG, claiming that, after having failed to sign him to sing in their Scandinavian commercials, they had hired a sound-alike singer.

In 2007, the suit was settled, and Tom Waits gave his proceeds to charity.

In 2010, Tom Waits was reported to be working on a new stage musical with director and long-time collaborator Robert Wilson and playwright Martin McDonagh.

In early 2011, Tom Waits completed a set of 23 poems, Seeds on Hard Ground, which were inspired by Michael O'Brien's portraits of the homeless in his book, Hard Ground.

In March 2011, Tom Waits was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Neil Young.

In 2012, Tom Waits had a supporting role in McDonagh's crime comedy Seven Psychopaths as a retired serial killer.

On October 27,2013, Tom Waits performed at the 27th annual Bridge School Benefit concert in Mountain View California; Rolling Stone called his performance a "triumph".

Tom Waits was accompanied by Larry Taylor on upright bass and Gabriel Donohue on piano accordion, with the horn section of the CBS Orchestra.

In 2016, Tom Waits pursued litigation against French artist Bartabas, who had used several of his songs as a backdrop to a theatrical performance.

Claims and counterclaims were made, with Bartabas claiming to have sought and been granted permission to use the material but with Tom Waits claiming that his identity had been stolen.

In 2018, Tom Waits had a feature role in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a Western anthology film by the Coen brothers, as the Prospector.

Also in 2018, Tom Waits provided the recorded narration for performances of McDonagh's play A Very Very Very Dark Matter, which was performed at the Bridge Theatre, London.

In 2021, Tom Waits had a supporting role in Paul Thomas Anderson's coming-of-age film Licorice Pizza.

Tom Waits has taken influence from a wide variety of different artists and styles from across time.

Tom Waits is known for his eclectic use of instruments, some of his own devising.

Tom Waits writes more from her dreams, I wrote more from the world, or from the newspaper.

When Barney Hoskyns was researching his unauthorized 2009 biography, Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits, Waits and his wife asked people not to talk to him.

Tom Waits has been determined to keep a distance between his public persona and his personal life.

Tom Waits dislikes touring, but Hoskyns added that Waits has "a strong work ethic".

Tom Waits toured with the saxophonist Teddy Edwards and played on his album Mississippi Lad.

Tom Waits sang with Ramblin' Jack Elliott on "Louise " on his album Friends of Mine.

That year, Waits produced and funded Chuck E Weiss's album Extremely Cool as a favor to his old friend.

Tom Waits produced John P Hammond's Wicked Grin which consisted largely of covers of Waits songs, some written for the project.

Tom Waits appeared on Los Lobos's The Ride, Eels's Blinking Lights and Other Revelations and Sparklehorse's Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain.

Ken Nordine, whose "word jazz" influenced Tom Waits, performed "Circus" for a video with animation by Joe Coleman.

Tom Waits was one of many guests on Dan Hicks's Beatin' the Heat.

Bob Dylan, a major influence on the young Tom Waits, called Tom Waits one of his "secret heroes".

Tom Waits was included on Rolling Stone's lists of 100 Greatest Singers and 100 Greatest Songwriters.

Holly Cole released an album of Tom Waits covers, Temptation, as did Scarlett Johansson with Anywhere I Lay My Head.

Norah Jones included a song Tom Waits wrote for her, "Long Way Home", on her album Feels Like Home.

Kazuo Ishiguro recalls how Tom Waits influenced his novel The Remains of the Day:.

Tom Waits's songs have been used in film, television and theater.