Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits [Paperback]

A lot of music fans would really love a good biography on Tom Waits, and the author Barney Hoskyns lets this desire overrun the question of whether or not he has the information for a decent biography.

Now, let's get to the problem with this book; Waits has no desire to play along with an unauthorized biographhy, and has requested that his friends honor his wishes to not play along. Hoskyns never forgives Waits for this.

Now, personally, I can see Waits's issue here. Hoskyns however makes a pretty big fuss over Waits excluding friends from his inner circle who don't honor his wishes to keep his private life private. Now this may sound cold, but two things; one, however cold it may sound, Waits is a grownup, his friends are grownups; there's never any evidence or even suggestion that Waits has treated people in any sort of dishonest, criminal or abusive way. Two, personall, I'm a private person if somebody was writing an unauthorized biography (I am in no way claiming to have done anything worth making me famous, or that anyone would be interested in my private life this is conjecture) yes, I would ask that my friends not blabber about my private life, and if they did anyway, I would be quite hurt.

I would love to know some of the stuff Hoskyns wants to know about. I would love to read interviews from the sidemen to get an inside story about the recordings of some of my favorite music, but again, Waits and his friends are grownups; if Waits would prefer that much for stories of his behind the scenes times get spread around, that's his time.

On that note, Hoskyns also conjectures quite a bit about Wait's marriage to Kathleen Brennan, suggesting that she's holding a Yoko-Ono type influence on his life, alienating his friends and affecting his work. We're not talking bout The Beatles here though, where there's a band to disrupt. The albums are issued under one person's name. A Tom Waits album is whatever Tom Waits says it is. If he says that a Waits album is with Kathleen Brennan over the old guys, than that's a Tom Waits album.

The great fault with this book, and as the book goes on Hoskyns seems to be apologizing for it and trying to excuse himself for it is that he signed on to do a book without accepting that he was never going to have access to the information that he wanted. As the book goes on, Hoskyns resorts to stacking up snarky asides against Tom, writing reviews of the later records and recycling stories from David Letterman interviews. Hoskyns's personal offence at Tom's love of privacy even manifests itself in an appendix where the author includes e-mails from Waits acquaintances refusing interviews.

Even if you utterly disagree with my view that Waits is justified in asking his friends not to play along with this project, and you feel that the author is absolutely justified in his disenchantment with Waits, it's hard to deny that the author's lack of necessary information substantially wrecks the latter half of the book.

Hoskyns isn't a terrible writer though, and while I can't recommend buying this book, Tom Waits fanatics will find this worth checking out for some entertaining chapters on the earlier portion of Waits's career and the construction of the drunken jazzbo mythos still follows him around.

More like a fraction of his life. It's a good account of Waits's younger days, but soon turns from a biography into the author's interminable opinions of the music--song by song by song--since he couldn't find out much of anything about his subject's adult life. Which apparently made him resentful, because we get a lot of foolish innuendo about the sinister control the Waits's have over their friends, and the even more sinister control Kathleen has over Tom. SUCH a wanker.

Some good anecdotes contained within but it was rather annoying to have to read Barney's opinion on nearly every Waits song ever released. No offence intended to Mr. Hoskyns but I am not interested.

He doesn't seems to enjoy Tom's most recent work, says things like "was Tom Waits finally chasing his own musical tail?" in regards to Real Gone [long answer: No], and when he went out of the way to slam songs like "Make It Rain" & "Lucinda" I tossed it into the trash.

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