RETROSPECTIVE SERIES
Where’d They Go? Tom Waits
Crooning society’s underbelly
It’s hard to ignore the remarkable musicians of the mid to late 20th century.
We have Ray Charles: a blind man who wrecked the piano; and Bob Dylan, whose folk songs carried a generation. Dylan shook one individual from Southern California and became a musician because of him. This person is Tom Waits, and his legacy for personifying a washed-up jazz singer, then a homeless, poor rocker accumulated his vogue.
No matter how unpopular he was to a causal audience, nothing stopped Tom Waits from becoming the artist he dreamt of.
Tom Waits made a name for himself from being an indie darling to amassing a cult following. He produced plenty of albums in the ‘70s, masterpieces in the ‘80s, and reformed himself in the ‘90s through the early 2010s, so where’d they go?
Middle class to working class
Thomas Alan Waits was born on December 7, 1949 (Cool, we’re both Sagittarius) in Pomona, California. He’s the middle child of two sisters from Texas-born Scottish/Irish, Jesse Frank Waits, named after the James Brothers outlaws, and Oregon-born Norwegian Alma Fern (Nee Johnson). Alma was a regular church attendee, and Frank taught Spanish at a grade school. The…
