Posted by Jay Livingston
Tom Waits is 69 years old today.
I don’t remember how I found my way to Tom Waits, though it happened fairly late in my listening life, or who showed me the way? Was it the jazz station DJ who played “Emotional Weather Report” early one morning as I was driving to New Jersey? Or my step-brother the huge Dylan fan? Or was it the friend who sent me a mix tape with the Tori Amos cover of “Time.”? (Waits’s songs do not lend themselves to covers. But Amos’s “Time” is an exception. And of course there’s Springsteen’s “Jersey Girl.”).
Waits’s lyrics, like Dylan’s, shine with novel imagery of the familiar world.
You’re east of East St. Louis
And the wind is making speeches
And the rain sounds
Like a round of applause.
But Waits, also like Dylan, often stays in his own room, inviting us in to look at the striking but puzzling pictures on the wall.
Oh and things are pretty lousy
For a calendar girl.
The boys just dive right off the cars
And splash into the street
And when they’re on a roll
She pulls a razor from her boot
And a thousand pigeons
Fall around her feet
Anyway, here’s the original, just Waits (voice and guitar) and an accordion sounding more like a concertina.
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