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