Preview: Closing Time

It's important (though not very) to point out at the onset that this blog has no intention of being a good source of Tom Waits' biographical information. There are a lot of very talented people out there who have done a lot of work compiling the biographical/historical facts of TW's life, and it isn't particularly my intent to either confirm/dis- those facts, or even to repeat them. Where biography has obvious bearing on TW's music, I will refer to it, but I believe his music works pretty well without a lot of painstaking contextualization.¹

Disclaimer out of the way, here's a little biographical information which predates TW's first record, Closing Time (1973), upon which we'll begin a weeklong discussion tomorrow.²

• Thomas Alan Waits was born in Pomona, CA on Dec. 7 1949. He moved, with his mother, to San Diego in 1960
• He was signed to Herb Cohen's Bizarre/Straight label in 1971 and moved to LA
• Cohen negotiated TW's move to Asylum Records in 1972 and began working on his first record with producer Jerry Yester, who us young folk will only know as a guy who was once in the band which did that song, "Summer in the City" which was at the start of Die Hard With a Vengeance, before the first bomb goes off.
• That first record was released in March of 1973, and was titled Closing Time
• By all accounts, TW looked way more like a homeless person at this point in his life than he did at any other: see here

And that, folks, is all I have for today. Tomorrow, Closing Time.

-K

1 The reader will please be aware that I know very little about the biography of TW. I hope, obviously, to educate myself along the way, but I would be a very poor source of information even if it were my focus. I'm waiting for permission to link to a very good, very easily found Tom Waits site which is chock full of bio/discog/filmog/historiographical information, but until that permission arrives this is as good a place to start as any.

2All facts from wikipedia, pending permission referred to in previous fn

The Sun's Coming Up (Introduction and Mission Statement)

Well hey there friends, this is your old pal Kribs, a veteran of at least one unsuccessful blog in the past, back with a fresh new one that all the kids will soon be talking about. Truth be told the idea for this blog, which I'm calling "Time With Tom," came to me as a result of my getting a new job: Having previously been able to walk to work, I often did so in silence, but facing a daily commute which amounts to 35 minutes (or so) each way, I resolved to use that time productively by exploring the depths of my music collection, much of which was gathered en masse and so has never been listened to. Some time ago I considered working on Elvis's Sun Sessions CD, an "album" which is much praised and which I have owned for some time, but which I have never really listened to. Something prevented me from this, though what that was escapes me at the moment.

Tom Waits is not an entirely foreign entity to me. My older brother brought home Real Gone from college when I was a senior in high school, and as a college freshman I was given a mixtape (one which will be a subject of some conversation in subsequent posts) which contained at least three Tom Waits songs. I cultivated a strong appreciation for his music, particularly Mule Variations, Real Gone, and a decent smattering of the stuff on Orphans, in college but for whatever reason I left college with a sizable collection of his music to which I have not yet listened. I resolved, before I decided to write about it, to use my morning and evening commutes as an excuse to listen to my entire Tom Waits library and get to know what I already had.

Well, I can't say I really know what happened after that (let's hope it doesn't have anything to do with the recent success of Julie & Julia) but I eventually ended up with the notion that the interweb and I would both benefit from my listening to the entire Tom Waits catalog from front to back, one week at a time, and jotting down my thoughts about it. As I write this I have yet to settle on a permanent format for this blog, but this is my sketched idea:

• Thursday: First thoughts on this week's album, initial standout tracks.
• Friday-Tuesday: (Hopefully) Daily updates on my thoughts on the record (probably a little more brief than Wednesday/Thursday posts) and maybe little bits of TW related pop-culture ephemera that come to my attention.
• Wednesday: Wrap-up, inevitable recanting of everything said in previous Thursday's post, short tease of following week's album.

This is pretty loose at the moment, I admit, but a major reason for this project’s existence is as a practice space for my writing/blogging skills and a desire for a long and successful future of similar projects so I hope you’ll bear with me, O hypothetical reader, as we undergo stylistic and substantial changes. Enjoy “Time With Tom,” I know I plan to.