Quotes: Childhood

"I guess most entertainers are, on a certain level, part of the freak show. And most of them have some kind of wounding early on, either a death in the family, or a break-up of the family unit, and it sends them off on some journey where they find themselves kneeling by a jukebox, praying to Ray Charles. Or you're out looking for your dad, who left the family when you were nine, and you know he drives a station wagon and that's all you've got to go on, and in some way you're gonna become a big sensation and be on the cover of Life Magazine and it'll somehow be this cathartic vindication or restitution."

Parents Descent

Tom Waits (1983): "My grandmother lived by an orange grove and I remember sleeping at her house and hearing the Southern Pacific go by. This was in La Verne, California. My father moved from Texas to La Verne and he worked in the orange groves there." (Source: "One From The Heart ... One For The Road ". New Musical Express. Kristine McKenna. October 1, 1983)

Tom Waits (1983): "My father is from Texas, Sulphur Springs. His name was Jesse Frank. My mother is from Grant's Pass, Oregon." (Source: "The Beat Goes On". Rock Bill magazine (USA). October 1983, by Kid Millions)

Tom Waits (1985) introducing Cemetery Polka: "I want to do something about all my relatives - everybody's relatives - actually, on my mother's side we have all the professors and the attorneys and on my dad's side we have all the psychopaths and the alcoholics. This is kind of a family reunion right in here, it's the only time they've ever really spoken to each other." (Date: New York, 1985)

PS (1985): 'I don't think it's that important to tell the truth,' he once said. Like the boy who cried wolf, he is disbelieved even when he's being honest. Waits, I'd said, was an unusual name. 'Well, he deadpanned, my name was Waitsosky and then we dropped the -osky." Oh really, said gullible me. TW: "No, Waits is a musical term. It's the guy that puts out the lights at the end of the day and sings all the stories of what's happened in the town.'." (Source: "The Sultan Of Sleaze", YOU magazine, by Pete Silverton. Date: New York. Early October, 1985)

Tom Waits (1985): "My father was Scots-Irish, a schoolteacher, teacher, a translator, a radio repair man, pretty much everything at different times. I was brought up in Los Angeles, El Paso, Missouri. We travelled around. I remember lullabies, my father singing "Molly Malone" and I remember hearing Mexican dance songs on the radio." (Source: "Dog Day Afternoon" Time Out magazine. Richard Rayner. New York. October 3-9, 1985)

Tom Waits (1986) introducing Cemetery Polka: "This is dedicated to all my dead relatives - who are still arguing from the grave with each other. On my father's side we had all the psychopaths and alcoholics and on my mother's side we had all the evangelists so they were finally united at the grave - this is a little family tree really." (Source: "WXRT-FM Radio Interview" Date: Chicago. July 11, 1986)

Tom Waits (1987): "All the psychopaths and all the alcoholics are on my father's side of the family, On my mother's side, we have all the ministers." (Source: "Tom Waits Makes Good" Los Angeles Times: Robert Sabbag. February 22, 1987)

Tom Waits (1987): "My dad's from Texas. His name is actually Jesse Frank, he's named after Jesse and Frank James. When you came to California in the 40s it was a lot hipper to be named Frankie, after Frank Sinatra, than to go with Jesse - they think you're from the dust bowl. "What did you get here in, a Model A?" (Source: "Tom Waits Is Flying Upside Down (On Purpose)" Musician magazine (USA), by Mark Rowland. Date: Traveler's Cafe/ Los Angeles. October, 1987)

BF (1987): "My father had a friend when he was a kid in Texas, in a place called Sulphur Springs," says Tom Waits, in a corrugated voice custom-built for tales of travel, tears and two-bit hoods. "He was kind of the local James Dean, and he used to race the train to the crossing on an Indian motorcycle. He was always talking about getting out of town. That was his big thing: getting out of town. But he always went to the edge of town and turned around and came back. And whenever the train would go through, it would have to slow down to pick up the mail. They had a hook that would come out and catch the mail sack and then keep going. And one day he was racing the train and he met it right at the crossing, and crashed into it. And he was pinned to the hook." Waits pauses and stares up from the table. "But it did take him all the way to the next town." (Source: "Better Waits Than Ever" Music ... Sound Output (Canada/ USA), by Bill Forman. Vol. 7, No. 11. October, 1987. Date: Travelers Cafe, Los Angeles. October, 1987)

Tom Waits (1988): "The names (in Ireland), you know. It's like Callahan is from "calloused hands". Waits is really Scotch-Irish too - and Waits was the guy who came out in town at the end of the night and said "All is Well". And sang out the town news and put the street lights out. So they called him "a waits". He sang, like a town crier." (Source: "Title: A Flea In His Ear", City Limits magazine (UK), by Bill Holdship. Date: Traveler's Cafe/ Los Angeles. May 12-19 , 1988)

Tom Waits (1992): "My name is in all the music dictionaries you know. "Waits" - those are the people who go through the city singing carols and singing the story of the day and putting out the lights. The town crier. All is well, it's 10:00 and all is well and Mrs O'Malley's cow has died and Charles Foster was hit by a train and Bill Bailey was run in with his own sword. The quintuplets are now three years old. That's what my name means in the music dictionaries." (Source: "Telerama Interview", Date: September 9, 1992)

Tom Waits (1999): ''My name defines a calling as well. The Waits traditionally turned out all the lights and put the town to sleep. I've spent a lot of time researching the meaning of names. ''Hmmm . . . ,'' he adds, as if intending to continue the thought. He doesn't. He was clearing his throat." (Source: "Talking With Tom Waits Is Like Trying To Converse With A Ghost In A Fog", The Toronto Star (Canada), by Greg Quill. Date: August 19, 1999)

TG (2002): Now you said your father listened mostly to the Mexican station and to Mariachi music. Was your father Mexican? TW: No my dad's from Texas. He grew up in a place called Sulpher Springs, Texas. And my mom's from ehm... Oregon. She was into church music you know all that "Brothers ...(?)... " (laughs). She used to send money into all the preachers you know." (Source: Fresh Air interview with Tom Waits: "Fresh Air with Terry Gross", produced in Philadelphia by WHYY" Date: show aired May 21, 2002)

Tom Waits (2002): "Say, where is Sulphur Springs? That's where my father's from." AC: It's kinda northwest from Austin. TW: "My dad left there in the Thirties. Came west, because in those days, if you had any kind of bronchial problem, they'd say, "Aw, move to California!" Jesse Frank Waits." AC: What is Waits, English? TW: Scotch-Irish, I think. Waits is a musical term. A "waits" is the man who put out the lights at day's end and sang the song of the day. "It's 8 o'clock and all's well." Then he told the things that happened that day: Somebody's cow ran away, Mrs. Ferguson was found bound and gagged in the barn, it rained like hell ... whatever. That's what a Waits was." (Source: "This Business Called Show'. Austin Chronicle (USA) Vol. 21, No. 26. May 10-16, 2002 by Margaret Moser)

Birth

Tom Waits (1973): "I'm from San Diego, really. I was born in Whittier, California, that's where President Nixon was from, in fact he used to go to our church on occasion, I think. That was a long time ago, he's come a long way since Whittier. Then I moved to San Diego and I guess I kind of grew up around San Diego, I moved there when I was about 10." (Source: Folkscene 1973, with Howard and Roz Larman (KPFK-FM 90.7). Date: Los Angeles/ USA. August 12, 1973)

Tom Waits (1976): "I was born at a very young age in the back seat of a yellow cab in the Murphy Hospital parking lot in Whittier, California. It's not easy for a young boy growing up in Whittier. I had to make decisions very early. First thing I did was pay, like, a buck eighty-five on the meter. As soon as I got out of the cab I went out looking for a job. The only job I could land was as labor organizer at a maternity ward for a while. I got laid off, got a little disenchanted with labor." (Source: Intro from live performance at Princeton, New Jersey. April 16, 1976)

Tom Waits (1976): "I was born in LA at a very young age. I was born in the back seat of a yellow cab in Murphy Hospital parking lot. I had to pay a buck eighty five on the meter to move. I didn't have my trousers on yet and I left my money in my other pants. I lived around LA and moved around LA. My dad's a Spanish teacher, so we lived in Whittier, Pomona, LaVerne, North Hollywood, Silver Lake, metropolitan areas surrounding Los Angeles." (Source: "Watch out for 16 year old girls wearing bell bottoms...": "ZigZag" magazine. Peter O'Brien. London. May, 1976)

Tom Waits (1976): "Well, I was, uh, born at a very young age and I was born in the back seat of a Yellow Cab at Murphy Hospital parking lot in Pomona, California." (Source: "Tom Waits for no one?" Northeastern Ohio SCENE, by Jim Gerard. Volume 7, no. 51. Date: December 23 - 29, 1976)

High School

Tom Waits (1973): "I used to go to a lot of dances. I played in a band in junior high called The Systems... I played rhythm guitar and sang. I listened to a lot of black artists, quite a few black artists. I had a real interest in that - James Brown and the Flames were real big, I went to O'Farrell Junior High School, all black junior high school." (Source: "Folkscene 1973, with Howard and Roz Larman" (KPFK-FM 90.7). Date: Los Angeles/ USA. August 12, 1973)

Tom Waits (1975): "I dropped out of high school, I worked at restaurants, I was a bartender, I worked as a firefighter for a while, I drove delivery trucks in town and worked at a jewelry store and several gas stations, washed dishes, I was a janitor, a cook" (Source: WAMU Radio Interview. Date: Washington, DC. April 18, 1975)

Tom Waits (1976): "I lived in San Diego, went to high school in San Diego.... I was working a lot of jobs during school. I didn't find much in school. I was just getting in a lot of trouble so I hung it up." (Source: "Watch out for 16 year old girls wearing bell bottoms...": "ZigZag" magazine. Peter O'Brien. London. May, 1976)

Tom Waits (1978): "I dropped out of high school when I was 17. When I was about 19 I started songwriting and then a year later I was performing, and all self-taught." (Source: "Sleazy Rider - A man who works at being a derelict". RELIX magazine by Clark Peterson. Date: May - June, 1978. Vol. 5 No. 2)

Tom Waits (1979): "Well my folk split up when I was about 10, so I moved around quite a lot. I'd sometimes live with my mother and two sisters. I felt really peculiar when I was going through puberty. That was a very peculiar period for me. I worked when I was 14 - I got a job but I stayed in school. I worked every night until four in the morning." (Source: "The Neon Dreams Of Tom Waits". "New Musical Express" magazine. John Hamblett. London. May 12, 1979)

DL (1980): He sports an elaborate tattoo on his arm emblazoned with the word 'Nighthawk', which was the name of a 'car-club' he belonged to as a teenager and he can readily run off a list of the wheels he's owned, including his current emerald green '64 T-bird. About the rest of his childhood he is fairly reticent, however, admitting that he was often picked on at school for being skinny and 'funny looking'." (Source: "Tom Waits: A Sobering Experience", "Sounds" magazine. Dave Lewis. August 4, 1979)

Tom Waits (1980): Yeah "Walking The Dog" by Rufus Thomas. That brings back a lot of memories for me. I used to dance quite a bit when I was in high school. I went with a girl named Suzy MonteLongo and she wouldn't have it any other way. And she dragged me to every dance in town. And her brother was a leadsinger in a group and this was his big number." (Source: "Radio appearance for "Radio-Radio" on W-PIX102 FM. New York. February 17, 1980)

Tom Waits (1985): I played the bugle at school. When the flag was raised in the morning and lowered in the afternoon. That happens every day at every school in America. Da-da-DA. I can still remember the smell of that bugle case. Bad eggs and a stale shirt." (Source: "Dog Day Afternoon". "Time Out" magazine. Richard Rayner. New York, October 3 - 9, 1985)

TG (2002): You dropped out of high school. Why did you drop out? Was there something that wanted to do instead or did you just hate going? TW: "Oh, I wanted to go into the world. Enough of this! I didn't like the ceilings in the rooms, I didn't like the wholes in the ceiling. The little tiny wholes in the cardboard and the long stick used for opening the windows... Aaargh I just hated all that stuff! I was real sensitive to my visual surroundings and I just wanted to get out of there... I had very good teachers, I had some... My folks broke up when I was about 11 and... so I had teachers that I liked a lot and I kinda looked up to them and... But then THEY seemed like they couldn't wait to get out into the world themselves and do some hanging around and learning and growing. So I thought maybe they were encouraging me to leave. (laughs)" (Source: Fresh Air interview with Tom Waits: "Fresh Air with Terry Gross", produced in Philadelphia by WHYY" Date: show aired May 21, 2002)

Q (2009): I wanted to ask you about being from Los Angeles. You grew up there... Tom Waits: "Yeah, Whittier, La Habra, Downey, that whole area. Yeah, Los Lobos, they're from Whittier. So is Nixon. I remember Nixon's market. He had his own family market" Q: He was? For some reason I thought he was from the Midwest. TW: "No, California, and we used to get a visit every year from the Oscar Meyer wiener mobile, which was an enormous vehicle shaped like a hot dog. The driver was a Dwarf, and the wiener mobile would broadcast music while he sang the song "I wish I was an Oscar Meyer wiener." He drew quite a crowd. Pretty exciting for a shopping center" (Source: "Irrelevant Topics - Tom Waits & Beck Hansen". Beck official site. July 8/ 17, 2009)

Tom Waits (2009): "Like I was telling you my dad taught school at Belmont. We lived on Union Ave". Q: Oh, that’s down in McArthur Park. Pico Union? TW: "Yeah this was Union between Temple and Beverly. Like, seven churches on this street. Parades". Q: What kind of neighborhood was it then? TW: "Well, split. Latino, Central American, Korean and… " (Source: "Irrelevant Topics - Tom Waits & Beck Hansen". Beck official site. July 8/ 17, 2009)

Trumpet

Q (1973): Did you always want to be a musician? TW: "Yeah, I guess so, I couldn't think of anything else I really wanted to be, seems to be today nobody wants to be anything but, nobody wants to be a baseball player anymore or anything - everybody wants to be a rock n roll star. I was always real interested in music, it never really struck me to write until I guess about the late 60's, about '68 or '69 I started writing, up until then I just listened to a lot of music, played in school orchestras, played trumpet in elementary school, junior high, high school, went through all that and hung around with some friends of mine that played classical piano and picked up a few little licks here and there, played guitar and stumbled on the Heritage." (Source: "Folkscene 1973, with Howard and Roz Larman" (KPFK-FM 90.7). Date: Los Angeles/ USA. August 12, 1973)

Tom Waits (1985): "I played the trumpet when I was a kid, but I gave it up. I like it because it was easy to carry. It was like carrying your lunch. A piano, you have to go to it. You never hear anybody say "Pass me that piano, buddy."" (Source: "The Beat Goes On". Rock Bill magazine (USA). October 1983, by Kid Millions)

Tom Waits (1985): "I played the bugle at school. When the flag was raised in the morning and lowered in the afternoon. That happens every day at every school in America. Da-da-DA. I can still remember the smell of that bugle case. Bad eggs and a stale T-shirt." (Source: "Dog Day Afternoon" Time Out magazine (UK), by Richard Rayner. Date: New York, October 3-9, 1985)

Tom Waits (1987): "A Cleveland Greyhound (trumpet). It was a silver trumpet, and I played taps at the end of the school day and got there early and played reveille as the flag went up." It was the first and last instrument on which Waits took lessons. From cheap Mexican guitars he moved on to the piano - and from playing Jerome Kern and George Gershwin he moved on to playing around with music of his own." (Source: "Tom Waits Makes Good" Los Angeles Times: Robert Sabbag. February 22, 1987)

Q (1988): You played trumpet in junior high, didn't you? TW: First trumpet. I had a Cleveland Greyhound silver trumpet, which was given to me by my uncle, and I played reveille and taps for the raising and lowering of the flag each day, which was one of my early performances, I guess. FT: Why did you abandon the trumpet in favor of the guitar? TW: I always liked the shape of the guitar and, of course, the hole in the middle. I think that's what most boys are attracted to in a guitar - the curves." (Source: "Tom's Wild Years". Interview Magazine (USA), by Francis Thumm. October, 1988)

JS (2003): "Tom Waits allowed that trumpet was his first instrument and that playing bugle for the Cub Scouts was his first gig." (Source: "Raitt, Waits, Buffalo jam with S.F. schoolkids" Joel Selvin, Chronicle Senior Pop Music Critic. Thursday, October 23, 2003. San Francisco Chronicle)

The Systems

Tom Waits (1973): "I used to go to a lot of dances. I played in a band in junior high called The Systems... I played rhythm guitar and sang. I listened to a lot of black artists, quite a few black artists. I had a real interest in that - James Brown and the Flames were real big, I went to O'Farrell Junior High School, all black junior high school, and I went out to Balboa(?) and saw James Brown - he knocked me out, man, when I was in 7th grade. So I've kept up on that scene too and I listen to as many different kinds of music as I can." (Source: "Folkscene 1973, with Howard and Roz Larman" (KPFK-FM 90.7). Date: Los Angeles/ USA. August 12, 1973)

Tom Waits (1976): "I did a few rock things; I was in a group called the Systems, I was rhythm guitar and lead vocalist. We did Link Wray stuff. Hohman: Link Wray - that's the guy who made all those killer rock instrumentals back in the late '50s, Rumble, Rawhide, Comanche, The Swag... TW: Yeah, Rumble was his first hit. I've been trying to pin down Frank Zappa's guitar style for a long time and I think Link Wray is the closest I can get. I think Frank is trying to be Link Wray. We did stuff by the Ventures, too, a lot of instrumentals. I finally quit that band; we had a drummer with a harelip and a lead guitar player with a homemade guitar. Actually, there were only three of us, so in a sense we were sort of like pioneers." (Source: "Bitin' the green shiboda with Tom Waits". "Down Beat" magazine. Marv Hohman. Chicago. June 17, 1976)

DF (1977): "Around this same time Waits formed his first group, soulfully named The Systems. "I played rhythm guitar and sang," he comments. "Rhythm and blues - a lot of black Hit Parade stuff, white kids trying to get that Motown sound. I went to an all-black junior high and was under certain social pressure. So I listened to what was around me." Tom dropped out of high school during his junior year, because he was already working by that time - not as a musician, but as a cook. Several years on the graveyard shift at an all-night diner in San Diego, besides providing him with what would become fuel for subsequent songs and stories, convinced him that there had to be a better medium through which to channel his energies and words. As he told the Los Angeles Times, "I knew when I was working there I was going to do something with it. I didn't know how, but I felt it every night." (Source: "Tom Waits - Offbeat Poet And Pianist". Contemporary Keyboard magazine, by Dan Forte. April, 1977)

Tom Waits (2002): "Heck I don't know if it (The Systems) was a soul band. It was surf and soul. I played guitar and sang. In those days, you didn't play a lot of gigs. You'd play a dance every now and then. I knew I wanted to do something with music, but navigating that seems almost impossible. It's like digging through a wall with a spoon, and your only hope is that what's on the other side is digging with the same intensity towards you... The band was called the Systems. Up until that point, you know, I played the ukulele when I was a kid and I played a guitar - my dad gave me a guitar. There was always music in the house. Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte and Louis Armstrong and Mexican radio." (Source: "Tom Waits". SOMA magazine. July, 2002 by Mikel Jollett)

Parents Divorce

Tom Waits (1975): "My family's pretty much split up, I live in LA, so does my dad, my mother lives in San Diego and I got a sister in San Diego and one in LA, I hang out with my father when I'm at home " (Source: WAMU Radio Interview. Date: Washington, DC. April 18, 1975)

Tom Waits (1978): "My parents split up when I was young so I kinda took care of my mother and sisters. I started working when I was 14. I drove taxis, sold vacuum cleaners and encyclopedias, worked in gas stations and liquor stores, and had a paper route. I sold night crawlers to fishermen -- you can buy live worms in the mail, you know. I dropped out of high school when I was 17. When I was about 19 I started songwriting and then a year later I was performing, and all self-taught." (Source: "Sleazy Rider - A man who works at being a derelict". RELIX magazine by Clark Peterson. Date: May - June, 1978. Vol. 5 No. 2)

Q (1979): What sort of childhood did you have? TW: "Well my folk split up when I was about 10, so I moved around quite a lot. I'd sometimes live with my mother and two sisters. I felt really peculiar when I was going through puberty. That was a very peculiar period for me. I worked when I was 14 - I got a job but I stayed in school. I worked every night until four in the morning. My brother-in-law, who weighed about 300 pounds, was working in a small Italian restaurant and they decided that there was no room for him in the kitchen. So they sacked him and I got the job." (Source: "The Neon Dreams Of Tom Waits". "New Musical Express" magazine. John Hamblett. London. May 12, 1979)

Tom Waits (1981): "My father was a Spanish teacher. When I was ten we lived on a chicken ranch in Baja California for about five months. I spent a lot of time in Mexico but I hardly go back now." (Source: "Tom Waits: Waits And Double Measures". Smash Hits magazine by Johnny Black. March 18, 1981)

Q (1985): How did Frank's Wild Years turn into a musical? TW: "The song was like a fortune cookie, after I wrote it I thought what happened to this guy. Everybody knows guys like that, people you haven't seen in a long time, what happens to these people? What happened to John Chrisswicky? Oh Jesus, John's second wife left him and he went to work in a slaughterhouse for a while. Then he was in a rendering unit, of course his dad was always in the wine business - that didn't interest John, I hear he ended up as a mercenary soldier. People go through these permutations in different stages of their life, perceived by someone else it can look strange. I imagined Frank along those lines. Y'see my folks split up when I was kid and ... hey, look, let me give yo $100 and I'll lie down on the couch over there, you take notes and see if we can't get to the bottom of this." (Source: "Hard rain". New Musical Express: Gavin Martin. October 19, 1985)

PS (1986): What kind of child were you? Your father (Frank) left your mother, didn't he? TW: "Shouldn't I be laying down for this. All of a sudden I feel like I want to see your credentials... Oh, here it is. It's D.R." PS: Just a B.A. TW: "Oh, just a B.A. Then you'll get nothing but B.S." (Source: "Waits Happening". Beat magazine. Pete Silverton. New York, 1986)

Tom Waits (1992): "I like things that are kind of falling apart, 'cause I come from a broken home, I guess. I like things that have been ignored or need to be put back together." (Source: "Composer, musician, performer, actor - Tom Waits is a Renaissance man whose musique noir captures the sound of the Dark Age". Pulse! Derk Richardson. September 1992)

Tom Waits (1999): "My dad was a radio technician during the war, and when he left the family when I was about eleven, I had this whole radio fascination. And he used to keep catalogues, and I used to build my own crystal set, and put the aerial up on the roof." (Source: "Tom Waits: A Q...A About Mule Variations" Epitaph promo interview (MSO), by Rip Rense. Also re-printed in "Performing Songwriter" July/ August, 1999. Date: ca. April, 1999)

Tom Waits (1999): "I guess most entertainers are, on a certain level, part of the freak show. And most of them have some kind of wounding early on, either a death in the family, or a break-up of the family unit, and it sends them off on some journey where they find themselves kneeling by a jukebox, praying to Ray Charles. Or you're out looking for your dad, who left the family when you were nine, and you know he drives a station wagon and that's all you've got to go on, and in some way you're gonna become a big sensation and be on the cover of Life magazine and it'll somehow be this cathartic vindication or restitution." (Source: "Mojo interview with Tom Waits ". Mojo: Barney Hoskyns. April 1999)

NW (2002): Significantly, his father left when he was 11. The young Waits, desperate for an adult male role model, found that when he visited friends he didn't want to spend time with them at all. He preferred to seek out the company of their fathers. "I'd end up sitting in the den talking to their dads. Eventually they'd start putting on records so I was listening to old timers' stuff. I felt like an old man when I was about 12 and I couldn't wait to grow old." (Source: "Dirt music". The Sydney Morning Herald. (Australia), by Nigel Williamson. April 27, 2002)

Tom Waits (1981): "My own background was very middle class- I was desperately keen to get away. My parents were divorced when I was 10 years old, my father's been married about three times, and my mother finally remarried a private investigator. "I was at home with these three women, my mother and two sisters, and although they were there, I was on my own a lot... I loved Kerouac since I first discovered him. "I discovered him at the time I could have ended up at Lockheed Aircraft, a jewellery store or a gas station, married with three children, lying on the beach... a lot of Americans went off on the road, just get into a car and drive, for 3,000 miles, East or West." (Source: "Heart Of Saturday Morning" Melody Maker. March 14, 1981 by Patrick Humphries)

WORD (2006): Your parents separated when you were 11 What effect did that have on you? Tom Waits: Huge. But I didn't understand why at the time. It was an extreme loss of power, and totally unpredictable, as you can imagine. I was in turmoil over it for a long time. I stayed with my mother and two sisters. But when I think back on it, my dad was an alcoholic then. He realy left - this is getting a little personal - to sit in a dark bar and drink whatever, Glenlivet. He was a binge drinker. So there was no real cognisance of his drinking problem from my point of view. So he kind of removed himself - he was the bad tooth in the smile, and he kind of pulled himself out. So in a sense I come from a family of runners. And if I had followed in my father's footsteps I'd be a runner myself, and so would my kids. WORD: So do you think that has a hereditary aspect that you've had to be alert to? Tom Waits: Well, like anything, the genetic pull to following your father's footsteps, whether he teaches at Harvard or died on the Bowery... there's a path that he left for you. And you get to a crossroads eventually and you see his path, and there's a magnetic quality to it, so yeah I was pulled. But he was a great story-teller, so in a way what I've done was a way of honouring him." (Source: "My Wild Years And The Woman That Saved My Life", Word magazine (UK), November 9, 2006. By Mick Brown)

WORD (2006): "I understand after your father left home you'd go to your friends' homes and hang out with their fathers. TW: [Laughs] That's true. I was in the den, listening to Bing Crosby while my friends were out shooting hoops. "Tom! What are you doing, man? Talking to my Dad?" I'd say, "Yeah, - what of it? You're not using him. I'm borrowing your father, for God's sake. You don't appreciate your father: He's been working for ETNA for 29 years..." WORD: So that's where you got your taste for double-knits and Hoagy Carmichael. TW: I probably did! It's kind of like you start imitating the things that are around you, whatever they are. I took note of Frank Sinatra. I liked the scar on the side of his face. He had this tremendous birthmark that he was always careful to obscure in photographs, but I saw one photo that showed this - it almost looked like a burn on the side of his face." (Source: "My Wild Years And The Woman That Saved My Life", Word magazine (UK), November 9, 2006. By Mick Brown)

Tom Waits (2006): "Kerouac's nephew had this song of Jack's, or at least some of his words he wanted me to record. I guess Jack was at a party somewhere and snuck off into a closet and started singing into a reel-to-reel tape deck, like, 'I left New York in 1949, drove across the country....' I wound up turning it into a song, and I performed it at a memorial for Allen Ginsberg... "I found Kerouac and Ginsberg when I was a teenager, and it saved me. Growing up without a dad, I was always looking for a father figure, and those guys sorta became my father figures. Reading On The Road added some interesting mythology to the ordinary and sent me off on the road myself with an investigative curiosity about the minutiae of life." (Source: "Tom Waits: Haunted songster's revelatory dispatch from the Twilight Zone", Now Magazine (Canada). Vol. 26, no. 11. November 16 - 22, 2006. By Tim Perlich)

Napoleone Pizza House

Tom Waits (1974): Intro to The Ghosts of Saturday Night: "It's about National City which is primarily a sailor town, a suburb of San Diego, where the infamous Mile Of Cars is on National Avenue and at the north end of National Ave is the Burge Roberts Mortuary and the Golden Barrel, Escalante's Liquor Store, sandwiched in between a Triumph Motorcycle shop and Burge Robert's is Napoleone's Pizza House, it's been there for a good 25 years and I worked there when I was real young. I've worked since I was 15 there and I guess not till I was away from it for a long time I could really sit down and write something constructive about it. This is called Ghosts Of Saturday Night or Looking Out From Napoleone's." (Source: Folkscene 1974, with Howard and Roz Larman (KPFK-FM 90.7) Source: audio tape. Date: Los Angeles/ USA. July 23, 1974 (June 10?))

Tom Waits (1979): "National City is this naugahyde town in Southern California and it's a sailor town, lots of vinyl white booted go go dancers, I worked until 4 in the morning in a pizza house as a cook, started off as a dishwasher, worked for Sal Crivello and Joe Sardo, worked there for 5 years as a matter of fact. That's where the mile of cars is, that's where I got snookered in a deal for $125, I bought a 1955 Buick Roadmaster down there." (Source: WAMU Radio Interview. Date: Washington, DC. April 18, 1975)

At 14, he got a job as a dishwasher at Napoleone's Pizza Parlor in San Diego. TW: "Hookers would come in, grab and play with me. The point was to wash enough dishes as you could go outside and smoke a cigarette. I wish I had my old job back." (Source: "Tom Waits For No One". Circus Weekly, by Stan Soocher. Date: January 23, 1979)

Tom Waits (1983): "Soldiers? Yeah. I worked in National City in a crummy restaurant for a long time, full of soldiers most every night, tattoo parlor next door, country-and-western diner-dance type of place down the street, Chinese restaurant, Chinese laundry, pool hall all real close, walking distance. So I called up some of my memories of that time. Sit out on the sidewalk, wearing the apron, paper hat, watching the traffic go by, you know?" (Source: "Tom Waits For No Man". Melody Maker. Brian Case. October 29, 1983)

Tom Waits (1983/ 1984): "I remember I worked in a restaurant for several years and Sal Crivello who I worked with for 6 years - I never saw him in anything but a paper hat and a white linen shirt and dirty apron and white socks and black tractor tread shoes and one night, it was Christmas Eve I think, I stayed late, he left early and he changed, he went into the little closet and he changed, it was like watching Superman. He went into this little closet and he came out with a sweater shirt and a little gold pepper around his neck and slicked his hair down, tight, stay pressed slack job there and loafers, wild socks and apparently an unbelievable itinerary. He was going to a bowling alley with a girl who was about 6 foot 7, weighed about 220, and I always remember that, the thrill of seeing him dressed as somebody else. I thought he wore that little white uniform everywhere he went. Just like I always thought jazz musicians slept in their clothes and stayed in 4 dollar rooms, drank cheap booze, and lived this whole life of self denial, kind of, you know, in the name of the music, and I found out all these guys wear panty hose, sit out by the swimming pool, play golf in the afternoon, it was really hard for me." (Source: Swordfishtrombones Interview (interviewer's tape). Date: 1983/ 1984)

Tom Waits (1999): "I thought I was gonna be a cook... That's about as far as I could see. But what also happened was that I was mystified by the jukebox, and the physics of how you get into the wire, and come out of a jukebox. That's where that came from. I'd listen to Ray Charles singing Time and I can't stop loving you, and I'd think, goddamn, that's something". (Source: "Tom Waits, Hobo Sapiens ". Telegraph Magazine: Mick Brown. April 11, 1999)

Tom Waits (1999): "When I was fourteen I worked in an Italian restaurant in a sailor town. Across the street was a Chinese place, and we'd trade food. I'd take a pizza to Wong's, they'd give me Chinese food to bring back. Sometimes Wong would tell me to sit in the kitchen, where he's making all this food up. It was the strangest galley: the sounds, the steam, he's screaming at his co-workers. I felt like I'd been Shanghaied. I used to love going there." (Source: "The resurrection of Tom Waits ". Rolling Stone. David Fricke. June 24, 1999)

Tom Waits (2005): "I didn't really know what I wanted to do when I was a kid. I thought I'd probably wind up in the restaurant business. You know, cause my first job was, I was fourteen I worked at a Pizza place. I mean half of you knows what you wanna do and the other half, I don't know, hopes that what you end up doing recognizes you. You know?" (Source: "Cool Ivories", American Routes radio show, by Nick Spitzer. February 16-22, 2002)

The Heritage

Tom Waits (1973): "I played around San Diego quite a bit for a couple of years while there were clubs still open down there - it's very difficult to find a place to play now - Folk Arts - Lou Curtis still has that outfit going on weekends, I used to play at The Heritage, it's closed now, they turned it into a spiritual book store or something. Bob Webb owned it and I used to sit on the door, I used to hoot down there and then I gave that up and I said I'll sit on the door, made 5.00 a night and then I started doing a weekend occasionally." (Source: Folkscene 1973, with Howard and Roz Larman (KPFK-FM 90.7). Date: Los Angeles/ USA. August 12, 1973)

Tom Waits (1975): "My musical education began at a small folk club - the Heritage, I'm sure some people here are familiar with the Heritage which is now just nothing but a memory, a small club in San Diego which had a lot of traditional music, a lot of country artists, bluegrass, that sort of thing. I soaked it in like a sponge. I sat on the door and I listened to as much as I possibly could." (Source: Folkscene 1975, with Howard and Roz Larman (KPFK-FM 90.7). Date: Los Angeles/ USA. January 12 (February 13?), 1975)

Tom Waits (1975): "I dropped out of high school, I worked at restaurants, I was a bartender, I worked as a firefighter for a while, I drove delivery trucks in town and worked at a jewelry store and several gas stations, washed dishes, I was a janitor, a cook, I just took all the odd jobs everybody takes odd jobs when you're just kicking around, ended up I was taking tickets on the door at a coffee house in Mission Beach and I was the official bouncer. I got bounced every now and then. You get these big, obstinate conventioneers that come down to the Beach to go slumming and they come elbowing their way through. They gave me like the leg of a chair to defend myself with. Slowly I worked up to where I was doing a weekend now and then and I was playing a little guitar, a little piano, doing Mississippi John Hurt songs and Reverend Gary Davis and it was basically a traditional club with the emphasis on stringbands, banjo, fiddle, bluegrass folk music, traditional blues, very few songwriters. I was just one of many and it was kind of a beach community musical school where people come and hang out, just local talent, no big thing." (Source: WAMU Radio Interview. Date: Washington, DC. April 18, 1975)

Tom Waits (1976): "I first got on stage in a small club in San Diego. It was a folk club where I got "blue-grassed" to death. I was working the door, taking tickets at the time and listening to all kinds of groups. The reason I got the doorman job was because I knew I was going to play there. I was sitting there incognito - like in the inner sanctum of this club, hob-nobbing, doing some low-level social climbing. I knew one day I would perform myself, but I was trying to soak up as much before I did so I wouldn't make an ass of myself." (Source: "The Ramblin' Street Life Is The Good Life For Tom Waits". "Rambler" magazine. Rich Trenbeth. Chicago. December 30, 1976)

Tom Waits (1996): "I was about 19, and his (Ramblin' Jack Elliott) record was one of the most-played at this little coffee house. Jack's record was on the turntable all the time the one where he's on the cover with his horse and he's roping something. "It had '912 Greens' on there, spoken out, the song that so moved me. It had his version of "Tennessee Stud' and some Woody Guthrie songs," says Waits. He paused, then added that Elliott "was a real hero of mine - the idea of meeting him one day and recording with him is pretty fantastic." (Source: "On the road". San Francisco Examiner. Edvins Beitiks. August 4 1996)

Early Musical Memories

Tom Waits (1973(: "Actually the first real songwriter I really saw and really got enthused about was Jack Tempchin and that was in about 1968 at the Candy Company on El Cajon Boulevard, he was playing on the bill with Lightning Hopkins and he was real casual and everything, it was just something I wanted to try my hand at, so I tried my hand at it, I don't know, I guess you get better as you go along, the more music you listen to and the more perceptive you become towards melody and lyric and all. The only place really to play in San Diego were folk clubs." (Source: "Folkscene 1973, with Howard and Roz Larman" (KPFK-FM 90.7). Date: Los Angeles/ USA. August 12, 1973)

Q (1979): What was the first gig you ever saw? TW: "James Brown and The Famous Flames on the bill with... er... it was an all-black act, a spade flush you might say. There was Martha Reeves and The Vandellas - I opened a show for her in Detroit once and I was murdered. Yeah, that was one of the first things I ever saw. I was amazed. It was like church; he played something like a 27-minute version of 'It's A Man's World'. I couldn't believe it. My sax player Herbert Hardesty used to play with him." (Source:"The Neon Dreams Of Tom Waits". "New Musical Express" magazine. John Hamblett. London. May 12, 1979)

Q (1979): When did you first begin to write songs? TW: "Oh, when I was about 19 or 20 I guess, but they weren't very good. I think I'm improving. I wrote 'Blue Valentine' in a month. The whole thing. I wish I could've put my liquor bill on the expenses." (Source: "The Neon Dreams Of Tom Waits". "New Musical Express" magazine. John Hamblett. London. May 12, 1979)

Tom Waits (1979): "I remember when I was a kid I heard a songwriter in a club and it gave me some purpose and an idea that I also wanted to be a performer. I didn't know anything about it, but I knew what I didn't want to do and just narrowed it down to that." (Source: "Tom Waits: A Sobering Experience", "Sounds" magazine. Dave Lewis. August 4, 1979)

Tom Waits (1983): "I played the trumpet when I was a kid, but I gave it up. I like it because it was easy to carry. It was like carrying your lunch. A piano, you have to go to it. You never hear anybody say "Pass me that piano, buddy."" (Source: "The Beat Goes On". Rock Bill magazine (USA). October 1983, by Kid Millions)

Tom Waits (1983): "I think my dream is a feeling more than a geography. Some of my dreams have come true. Going on the road and playing nightclubs was an enormous dream for me. I can remember working in a restaurant and hearing music come out of the jukebox and wondering how to get from where I was, in my apron and paper hat, through all the convoluted stuff that takes you to where you're coming out of the jukebox." (Source: "One From The Heart ... One For The Road ". New Musical Express magazine. Kristine McKenna. October 1, 1983)

Tom Waits (1983): "There was a lot of music in my family. Eh, I had an uncle Robert who was a blind organist at a Pentecostal church. Eh... he had a pipe organ in his bedroom. And eh... I remember going to see him when I was very young, and eh... See, my mother used to sing in a kind of a Andrew Sisters type of quartet. My dad, he listened to Mexican music. I don't know, I didn't have a lot of encouragement to be honest. But sometimes that's good you know? What you end up doing is a reaction to all that. So primarily eh... black music, eh... New Orleans music. Eh... James Brown I listened to in the sixties, eh Wilson Picket, The Four Tops, The Temptations, Ray Charles eh..." (Source: "Saturday Live Interview With Tom Waits". BBC Radio One (UK) by Richard Skinner. October 22, 1983)

Tom Waits (1985): "My father was Scots-Irish, a schoolteacher, teacher, a translator, a radio repair man, pretty much everything at different times. I was brought up in Los Angeles, El Paso, Missouri. We travelled around. I remember lullabies, my father singing "Molly Malone" and I remember hearing Mexican dance songs on the radio." (Source: "Dog Day Afternoon" Time Out magazine. Richard Rayner. New York. October 3-9, 1985)

Tom Waits (1985): "The earliest music I remember was mariachi, ranchera, romantica - Mexican music. My father used to tune that in on the car radio. He didn't listen to jitterbug or anything like that." (Source: Rain Dogs tourbook, 1985)

Q (1985): What's the first song you recall? TW: "Molly Malone". I was tiny (starts singing). "In Dublin's Fair city where the girls are so pretty." (Source: "Lower east side story". The Face: Elissa van Poznak. Ca. October 1985)

Tom Waits (1988): "Things are now a little more psychedelic for me, and they're more ethnic. I'm looking toward that part of music that comes from my memories, hearing Los Tres Aces at the Continental Club with my dad when I was a kid." (Source: "Tom Waits 20 questions". Playboy magazine: Steve Oney. -- March 1988)

Tom Waits (1993): I have learned a great deal about music from other musicians, and from listening to the world around me. But when I was a kid growing up in Whittier, there was a red-headed boy named Billy Swed who lived with his mom in a trailer by the railroad tracks. Billy is the one who taught me how to play in a minor key. Billy didn't go to school. He was already smoking and drinking at the age of 12, and he lived with his mom at the edge of a hobo jungle on a mud rain lake with tires sticking up out of it. There was blue smoke, dead carp, and gourds as big as lamp shades. You could get lost trying to find their place--through overgrown dogwood and pyrancantha bushes, through a culvert under a freeway, and through canyons littered with mattresses and empy paint cans." (Source: "Tom Foolery - Swapping stories with inimitable Tom Waits". Buzz Magazine: May 1993)

Tom Waits (1998): "My dad was very musical, my mother also. They both sang.. We had music in the house. We had Bing Crosby. We had Harry Belafonte. We had Marty Robbins... Uh, A lot of Mariachi music. My dad loved, and still loves. He's a Spanish teacher, so that's what we listened to more than anything else, really. I wasn't allowed to listen to any of that hot rod music."(Source: "Morning becomes Eclectic ". KCRW radio Interview: Chris Douridas. Original broadcast August 1992. Rebroadcast January 2 1998)

Tom Waits (1999): "There was a time when I was a kid and I had my little crystal set and my aerial on the roof, listening to Wolfman Jack, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Johnny Horton, Floyd Cramer. The radio was a pretty great thing.'' (Source: "Waits plays out `Variations' on a twisted persona". San Francisco Chronicle: James Sullivan. April 1999)

Tom Waits (1999): "When I was first trying to decide what I wanted to do, I listened to Bob Dylan and James Brown. Those were my heroes. I listened to Wolfman Jack every night. The mighty ten-ninety. Fifty thousand watts of soul power." (Source: "Tom Waits: A Q...A About Mule Variations" Epitaph promo interview (MSO), by Rip Rense. Also re-printed in "Performing Songwriter" July/ August, 1999. Date: ca. April, 1999)

Tom Waits (2002): "Maybe I was 12 years old and I heard the song Abilene - 'Abilene/Prettiest town I've ever seen/Women there don't treat you mean/In Abilene'. And I saw Lightning Hopkins when I was about 15 and he was doing, I don't know, Black Snake Moan or something, and I just thought, 'Wow, this is something I could do'. I don't mean I could play guitar like him, I just mean that this could be a possible career opportunity for me. Perhaps I could train at home and keep my present job." (Source: "Lying in Waits". The Age (Australia) by Patrick Donovan. May 10, 2002)

TG (2002): What was the music that you grew up listening to because your parents were listening to it. I mean before you were old enough to choose music yourself. What was the music in your house? TW: Eh really Mariachi music I guess. My dad only played the Mexican radio station. And you know eh Frank Sinatra and later Harry Belafonte. And then you know I would go to my friends' houses and I would go into the den with their dads and find out what they were listening to (laughs). That's what I was really... I couldn't wait to be an old man... I was about 13 you know, I didn't really identify with the music of my own generation but I was very curious about the music of others. I think I responded to the song forms themselves. You know Cakewalks and waltzes and Barcarolles and parlour songs and all that stuff. Which are just really nothing more then jell-o-moulds for the music. But I seemed to like the old stuff: Cole Porter and eh you know Rodgers and Hammerstein, eh Gershwin all that stuff. I liked melody... But the early songs I remember was Abeline. When I heard Abeline on the radio it really moved me. And then I heard you know: "Abeline, Abeline, prettiest town I have ever seen. Women there don't treat you mean. And Abeline..." I just thought that was the greatest lyric you know "Women there don't treat you mean". And then eh you know "Detroit City" eh... "Last night I went to sleep in Detroit City". (sings) "And I dream about the cotton fields back home". I liked songs with the names of towns in them and I liked songs with weather in them and something to eat (laughs). So I feel like there's a certain anatomical aspect to a song that I respond to. I think: "Oh yeah, I can go into that world. There's something to eat, there's the name of a street, there's a saloon, okay." So probably that's why I put things like that in my songs." (Source: Fresh Air interview with Tom Waits: "Fresh Air with Terry Gross", produced in Philadelphia by WHYY" Date: show aired May 21, 2002)

TG (2002): What was your first instrument? TW: I don't know pffft... I don't know... probably a box... TG: No I mean the first instrument-instrument. TW: Oh, I think I played guitar when I was about 9. You know I learned "El Paso". Actually I learned it in Spanish cause he (his father) wouldn't purchase any... you know any English speaking records. (laughs) He didn't like them." (Source: Fresh Air interview with Tom Waits: "Fresh Air with Terry Gross", produced in Philadelphia by WHYY" Date: show aired May 21, 2002)

Tom Waits (2002): "As a kid, I put the grass between my thumbs and tried to make it squeak. I loved the sound of cherry bombs. I like the clang and the boom and the steam." (Source: "I hope more people misunderstand me". USA Today, by Edna Gundersen. Published: June 17, 2002)

Tom Waits (2002): "It (seeing James Brown And The Famous Flames in the early Sixties) was like you'd been dosed or taken a pill. I didn't recover my balance for weeks. When you're a teenager music is a whole other thing. You're emotionally fragile, and the music is for you; it's talking to you. It was like a revival meeting with an insane preacher at the pulpit talking in tongues. To have that and Bob Dylan, who I saw during the same period playing in a college gym, it set me reeling." (Source: "Everything Goes To Hell". Uncut 5th Anniversary Special. Take 61, June 2002 by Gavin Martin)

Tom Waits (2002): "I remember one particular song that really moved me when I was a kid. You know that song "Abilene"? "Abilene, Abilene, the prettiest town you never seen, the women there don't treat you mean." God I loved it. When I heard that, it moved me. My folks had split up and I was sitting listening to a radio that my dad had given me." (Source: "Tom Waits". SOMA magazine. July, 2002 by Mikel Jollett)

Miscellaneous

Tom Waits (1976): "I've had a million cars. The first car I had was when I was 14... It's kind of an American tradition. Getting a license is kind of like a Bar-Mitzvah." (Source: "Watch out for 16 year old girls wearing bell bottoms...". ZigZag magazine. Peter O'Brien. London. May, 1976)

Tom Waits (1976): "I started out playing a country club in Los Angeles. The golfers would come in wearing their doubleknits and saying stuff like, 'Uh, got me a 22 handicap and shot a double birdie on the rise, er ahhhhh,' and I'd be over there in the sand trap piano bar trying to play original tunes. I lasted one night, and made ten bucks because one lady asked me to play "Stardust," which I happened to know. A bad start. I slept a lot after that. Slept right through the sixties. Never went through an identity crisis, never had no Jimi Hendrix posters on the wall, never ate granola, never had any incense. I was like a lion ready to pounce on the music scene, but I ended up being a short-order cook and janitor in San Diego...good day job, real steady...sweeping every day, just lucky, I guess." (Source: "Play It Again Tom". New Times magazine (USA), by Robert Ward. Date: Unicorn Club, Ithaca/ New York. Published: June 11, 1976)

Tom Waits (1976): "The '60's weren't particularly exciting for me, I wasn't into sand castles and I didn't have any Jimi Hendrix posters on my wall. I didn't even have a black light." (Source: "Sweet and Sour ". Newsweek: Betsy Carter with Peter S. Greenberg. June 14 1976)

Tom Waits (1976): "When I was a kid, I was pretty normal. Used to go to Dodger Stadium, was a real avid Dodger fan. I did all the usual things like hang around parking lots, had paper routes, vandalized cars, stole things from dime stores and all that stuff." (Source: "The Ramblin' Street Life Is The Good Life For Tom Waits". Rambler magazine. Rich Trenbeth. Chicago. December 30, 1976)

Q (1979): What is the strongest memory you have of your childhood? TW: "Ha, I remember my father taking me into bars when I was very young. I remember climbing up a bar-stool like a Jungle Jim, getting all the way up to the top and sitting there with my dad. He could tell stories in there for ever. I also remember that we traveled around in Mexico a lot, because my dad was a Spanish teacher. I remember once we were on Goodyear Boulevard, about 1957 and a hotrod was idling with us side by side at a red light on an intersection. And there was this guy in it with blonde hair all greased back in a D.A. like a waterfall, and a tattoo, and an I.D. bracelet, shades and a cigarette. He was with his girlfriend and she had black eye make-up on, and they were drinking beer and listening to Fats Domino on the radio. And my dad looked over at me and said: 'If you ever grow a D.A. I'll kill you.' (laughs) I remember that very clearly. We had a '57 Chevrolet station wagon." (Source: "The Neon Dreams Of Tom Waits". "New Musical Express" magazine. John Hamblett. London. May 12, 1979)

DL (1979): He sports an elaborate tattoo on his arm emblazoned with the word 'Nighthawk', which was the name of a 'car-club' he belonged to as a teenager and he can readily run off a list of the wheels he's owned, including his current emerald green '64 T-bird. About the rest of his childhood he is fairly reticent, however, admitting that he was often picked on at school for being skinny and "funny looking" then skimming swiftly over the rest of his background with memories of his mother singing in a group "kind of like the Andrews Sisters", his father picking around on a guitar a bit, of his two sisters, confiding that one is pregnant and the other a communist so he hasn't got much in common with either of them." (Source: "Tom Waits: A Sobering Experience", "Sounds" magazine. Dave Lewis. August 4, 1979)

Tom Waits (1981): "When I was a kid, I was out on the cusp, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't want to be a bricklayer or a cabdriver or work in an aircraft company. Didn't want to be a butcher or a shoemaker or...I knew what I didn't want to do. Singing and writing and travelling attracted me at that age - like running away to the circus, I guess. In '72 I went on the road for the first time. I opened up shows for Frank Zappa and Billy Preston and Charlie Rich and Jerry Jeff Walker and Buffalo Bob and Martha And The Vandellas and The Temptations..." (Source: Tom Waits: The Beat Buff Speed Poet Home Booze Hayseed" New Musical Express (UK). Ian Penman. March 28, 1981)

Tom Waits (1983): "When I was a kid I used to stare in the gopherholes for hours and hours sometimes. I tried to think my way down through the gopherhole and imagine this kind of a 'journey to the center of the earth'-kind of thing." (Source: "Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones". Island Promo interview. 1983)

Q (1983): What kind of a kid were you? TW: "I was real repressed. I had what I thought was a really adult attitude when I was young. When I was a kid, I wanted to skip growing up and rush all the way to 40. I wanted to go from 10 to 40." (Source: "The Beat Goes On". Rock Bill magazine (USA). October 1983, by Kid Millions)

Tom Waits (1983): "I wanted to join the Navy when I was a kid. But, you know the expression, the Navy's not just a job, it's $39 a month. When I turned 18, I got tattoos and thought that was it. I think the Navy is no longer a career opportunity for me but it's nice to know it's there." (Source: "The Beat Goes On". Rock Bill magazine (USA). October 1983, by Kid Millions)

Tom Waits (1983): "I have a very early memory of getting up in the middle of the night and standing at my doorway by the hall in the house and having to stand there and wait while a train went by. And after the train passed I could cross the hall into my parent's room. KM: Was there a trainyard nearby where you grew up? TW: Not at that particular house, but there were trains in all the places I grew up. My grandmother lived by an orange grove and I remember sleeping at her house and hearing the Southern Pacific go by. This was in La Verne, California. My father moved from Texas to La Verne and he worked in the orange groves there. I also have a memory of wild gourds that grew by the railroad tracks, and putting pennies on the tracks."(Source: "One From The Heart ... One For The Road ". New Musical Express. Kristine McKenna. October 1, 1983)

Tom Waits (1983): "My parents had a friend who was an Indian woman, she used to paint Christmas scenes on the store windows during the holidays. We used to take her milk and eggs in the middle of the night. Then she inherited a lot of money and moved away... "A friend of mine called Chipper who had polio, we used to race to the bus stop every morning. My father knew a couple who owned a chicken ranch, she was a hypochondriac and he was an alcoholic. She looked like an exotic bird, she looked like a canary in a wet suit and he looked like Errol Flynn. As I remember something though I'm changing it too, I mean he probably didn't look like Errol Flynn at all". (Source: "Swordfish Out of Water: Tom Waits" Sounds magazine by Edwin Pouncey. November 15, 1983)

Tom Waits (1985): "My father played a little guitar and I had an uncle who played a church organ. They were thinking about replacing him because every Sunday there were more mistakes than there had been the Sunday before. It got to the point where 'Onward Christian Soldiers' was sounding more like 'The Rites Of Spring' and finally they had to let him go. They tore the church down and he took the organ and installed it in his house, he had the pipes going right through the ceiling. He was also a botanist, he lived in the middle of an orange grove where a train went by and we used to visit him when I was very small and impressionable. I played a piano that had been out in the rain, of all things, some of the keys were stuck and didn't operate so I learned to play the black keys." (Source: Rain Dogs tourbook interview, 1985)

PS (1985): Just once in our conversation he found himself talking about his father. Instantly he changed tack. He says he was something of a tearaway as an adolescent. TW: "I enjoyed the thrill of breaking the law, stealing, you know. All kids like that. But what sort of a child was I? I can't really answer that point-blank. But, you know, I liked trains and horses, birds and rocks, radios and bicycles." (Source: "The Sultan Of Sleaze". "YOU" magazine. Pete Silverton. New York, early 1985)

Tom Waits (1985): "Childhood is very important to me as a writer, I think the things that happen then, the way you perceive them and remember them in later life, have a very big effect on what you do later on. That one [Kentucky Avenue] came over a little dramatic. a little puffed up, but when I was 10 my best friend was called Kipper, he had polio and was in a wheelchair - we used to race each other to the bus stop." (Source: "Hard rain". New Musical Express: Gavin Martin. October 19 1985)

GM (1985): Films and childhood seem important to your work. Where did you first see films when you were a kid? TW: "It was called the Globe Theatre and they had some unusual double bills. I saw 'The Pawnbroker' on the same bill as '101 Dalmations' when I was 11. I didn't understand it and now I think the programme director must have been mentally disturbed or had a sick sense of humour. I liked going to movies but I didn't get lost in them. Some people would rather spend time in the movies than anywhere else. On certain days, I would watch ten movies, spend all day from ten in the morning to midnight going from movie to movie. But then it's the world outside that becomes the film, the time in between takes on a very weird arrangement, that's what you watch, not the movies." (Source: "Hard rain". New Musical Express: Gavin Martin. October 19 1985)

Tom Waits (1987): "My dad wanted to have a chicken ranch when I was a kid. He's always been very close to chickens. Never happened, you know, but he has twenty-five chickens in the back yard. And my dad was saying there are still places, down around Tweedy Boulevard in south-central L.A., where you can buy live chickens, and most of the business there is not for dinner. It's for ritual." (Source: "Tom Waits Is Flying Upside Down (On Purpose)". Musician, Mark Rowland. October 1987)

Q (1987): Were your folks encouraging? TW: "I think when children choose something other than a life of crime, most parents are encouraging. Music was always around when I was a kid, but there wasn't a lot of "encouragement"- which allowed me to carve my own niche. When you're young you're also very insecure, though. You don't know if you can lean on that window, if it'll break. It goes back to what I was saying about flying upside down by choice. There's a time when you don't understand, when you're not focused, not like the sun through a magnifying glass burning a hole in the paper. I used to do that every day when I was a kid. And when the glass broke I'd get another. It was no big deal. I didn't really know what I was doing when I started. I have a better idea now. In a way, I'd like to start now. A lot of great guys, only one third of them is visible, the rest is beneath the ground. Took them ten years just to break the surface. But when I started I thought, "Ah, I'd better get something going here." I still have nightmares about the stage where everything goes wrong. The piano catches fire. The lighting comes crashing to the stage, the curtain tears. The audience throws tomatoes and overripe fruit. They make their way to the front of the stage, and my shoes can't move. And I always play that in my head when I'm planning a tour. The nightmare that you will completely come unraveled." (Source: "Tom Waits Is Flying Upside Down (On Purpose)". Musician, Mark Rowland. October 1987)

Tom Waits (1987): "Staying in touch with your childhood becomes more and more difficult, but also more and more important. You can pick up anything and play it - you just have to know what to consider valid and what to consider invalid. When we were doing Down By Law, John Lurie [Waits' co-star who also leads the Lounge Lizards] picked up a big old drain pipe out in the swamp and started blowing through it. And it sounded like a didjeridoo, you know? If you can get yourself to that place where you can attack things like a kid and not be so adult about it, then it opens a window to things." (Source: "Better Waits Than Ever". Music ... Sound Output (The Magazine For Performers And Producers)/ (Canada/ USA), by Bill Forman. Vol. 7, No. 11. October, 1987)

Tom Waits (1988): "When I was a kid and I was... I wanted to be an entertainer, my stepfather gave me a... a wild shirt... (laughs) I mean, cause his concept of entertainment was... Vegas baby! Eh.. y'know it was sown together with like 200 different fabrics and these big Kontiki buttons made out of wood and... y'know? 29 different shades of green... Ehm.. I always got a kick out of that. I hung on to the shirt as long as I could. Eh, always been fascinated with those guys, the eh... Vegas guys. (laughs)" (Source: Fresh Air Interview Source: National Public Radio's broadcast of Fresh Air. Hosted by Terry Gross. Produced by WHYY (Philadelphia). September 28, 1988)

Tom Waits (1988): "I guess when I was a little kid I eh used to try to make my voice lower... Cause I wanted to grow up real fast so I could be an old man and play golf... You know, I couldn't wait to get there. Wear wild slacks and drink coffee and smoke cigars and talk about finance and eh... It happened very, very fast y'know? I started talking like this eh... You know I saw the clubs, they appeared in the corner of the room. So... I don't know... I guess you get the voice that you deserve...(Source: Fresh Air Interview Source: National Public Radio's broadcast of Fresh Air. Hosted by Terry Gross. Produced by WHYY (Philadelphia). September 28, 1988)

Tom Waits (1992): "I can't have a dog because I am a dog so we already have a dog. Dogs show up a lot in songs, you find things that you like to put in songs. Everybody has certain material they feel they can use." (Source: "Egos ... Icons - Skid Romeo" Muchmusic television special, by Denise Donlon. October, 1992)

Tom Waits (1993): "I used to make skateboards out of plywood and go down to a roller rink called Skate Ranch and buy just the wheels. We used to skate down this hill called Robert Avenue and it was a great curve and you dug up a lot of speed. It went by our neighbor Mr. Stitcha. He lived in the beauty of the curve, where all the momentum culminated in a beautiful slough of cement. It took you right past his house but as close as you could get to his porch. Mr. Stitcha drank to excess. This was common knowledge in the neighborhood. He had the thick glasses and the red face and the red wine stains down the front of his t-shirt. That' s like I look now. Anyway it was the only place to get that kind of speed and thrill, so the front of his house became sort of a festival for all the skateboarders in the whole area. On Halloween he had a heart attack and died on his front porch and we were all told he died because we skated by his house and that each and everyone of us killed him in our own way. And we were all left with the memory that we all had a hand in his murder. It was like a Shakespeare thing, everybody had their hand on the knife. So I carry this with me, but I just want to say here and now, in Thrasher Magazine, that I did not kill Mr. Stitcha. It took a lot of therapy and it took a lot of liquor. Mr. Stitcha rest in peace." ("Tom Waits". Thrasher Magazine: Brian Brannon. February, 1993)

JJ (1993): Tell me some stuff about when you were a kid. TW: "I was in the ocean when I was about seven years old. It was getting dark and I heard my father calling, he has a very unique whistle that he could send anywhere I was and I would hear it and I would know that's my dad whistling and I had to come in. So I was in the water, up to about my chest, and it was summer, and I was out a little deeper than I should be, and I got that feeling on the beach when it's starting to get dark and you know you've gotta go in. And a fog came over this part of the ocean -- this was in Mexico. I was about seven, we had a trailer down there. And a pirate ship, an enormous pirate ship came out of the fog. I was close enough to where I could touch the bow of the ship where there was a cannon, and there was smoke coming off the sails that were burning and there were dead pirates hanging on the mast and falling off the deck. And I was stopped, I was just -- because I knew I saw it. It came out of the fog, and I reached to touch it and it turned and it went back into the fog and disappeared. And I told my parents about it, and of course they looked at me like, "Pirate ship, huh? Well, boy. Saw a pirate ship, huh? Honey, Tom saw a pirate ship out there." And I'm like, okay. But I did, I really did, and it was a death ship with a skull and cross bones, the whole thing." (Source: "Straight No Chaser". Jim Jarmusch. October 1993)

Tom Waits (1993): "When I was a kid I built radios. My dad was a radio expert in the army, and in addition to bicycle repair, he had me building my own radios and sending away for kits and creating my own little shortwave radios. And I picked up things when I was a child that I swore were extra-terrestrial, and maintain to this day that I made contact, or at least I was on the receiving end of a relationship with an extra-terrestrial but was unable to communicate with him because my radio couldn't transmit. JJ: Were they voices, or sounds or what? TW: It was a language that did not exist. It was not Russian, I was picking up Russia and Poland and Hungary and China." (Source: "Straight No Chaser". Jim Jarmusch. October 1993)

MR (1994): At 14, Waits went through a period when he was certain he had a disease no one else had. At night, just as his heart slowed for sleep, all the sounds in his room, in his house, out in the street, would increase in volume and size like monsters. TW: "My hand across the sheet sounded like I was doing it across a live microphone," Waits says. "My fingers would roar around my face in the air trying to make it stop. Just scratching and clawing at my face was maddening, it was so loud. It was a violent and terrifying thing to me as a child. I knew whatever it was, a doctor could not help me, and I was probably going to die." Waits told no one, not even his parents, and slowly developed his own meditation techniques for isolating the sounds and decreasing their volume. After curing himself, Waits began sampling sounds and studying them, recording on wobbly reel-to-reel machines, amplifying his guitar by listening to it with an ambulance driver's stethoscope stuck in the body while he played." (Source: "The music of chance" Spin Magazine: Mark Richard. June, 1994)

Tom Waits (1999): "My dad was a radio technician during the war, and when he left the family when I was about eleven, I had this whole radio fascination. And he used to keep catalogues, and I used to build my own crystal set, and put the aerial up on the roof." (Source: "A Q...A about Mule Variations". MSO: Rip Rense. January/ April 1999)

KS (1999): What was Whittier like [when you were growing up?] TW: "Lot of orange groves. A lot of vacant lots. Open space, vacant lots." KS: What was your house like? TW: "My dad built the house. He used to stop at a vacant lot and he'd take a shovel out and dig up a tree or a plant and bring it home and plant it in our yard. We had errant, illegal foliage at our house. I was a tree guy. I was always into trees, growing up. If your cat was trapped in a tree, you'd go get Tom. Tom would get in the tree and get the cat out." KS: Really! TW: [shifty] "Yeah. It was just a way of showing off for me. And I ate spinach so I could get stronger, so I could beat up the bullies. Ate a whole can of spinach once and got in a big fight. I was really surprised that spinach wouldn't actually pop out of the can. I was really embarrassed that I had to open it with a can opener." KS: You brought it with you to the fight? TW: "No, I kind of hid the can opener and opened it very slowly, and then when the top was off I threw it in my mouth. I had this big wad of spinach flying toward my mouth. And then I crushed the can together. I was concerned with image from a very young age." (Source: "Holding On: A Conversation with Tom Waits". Newsweek: Karin Schoemer. 23 March 1999)

Tom Waits (1999): "... it [San Diego] was a sailor town. The military was the centre of life. Everyone I knew came from navy families. My dad was gone for good, and their dads were in the Philippines for eight months at a time. So nobody had dads around. I remember living next door to a family, woman's name was Buzz Fletterjohn. She was, like six feet nine with no fingernails, husband was chief bosun in the navy and I think he was in Guam for a year and a half. She raised four boys, and their backyard was this strange place with carp in the bathtub. I was never allowed in Buzz Fletterjohn's yard, that was the big thing. We actually made up a song about it, but it didn't wind up on the record. Then we had a big dog, a boxer, and whenever our dog got out, all the kids in the neighbourhood would shout, Pepper's out!! Pepper's out!! It was like an air-raid warning. All the kids would scramble and hide in the trees." ("Mojo interview with Tom Waits". Mojo: Barney Hoskyns. April, 1999)

Tom Waits (1999): "My dad was a radio technician during the war, and when he left the family when I was about eleven, I had this whole radio fascination. And he used to keep catalogues, and I used to build my own crystal set, and put the aerial up on the roof. And I remember making a radio on my first crystal set, and the first station I got on these little two-dollar headphones was Wolfman. And I thought I had discovered something that no one else had. I thought it was comin' in from Kansas City or Omaha, that nobody was getting this station, and nobody knew who this guy was, and nobody knew who these records were. I'd tapped into some bunker, or he was broadcasting from some rest stop on a highway thousands of miles from here, and it's only for me. He was actually broadcasting from San Ysidro near the border. What I really wanted to figure out is how do you come out of the radio yourself." (Source: "Tom Waits: A Q...A About Mule Variations" Epitaph promo interview (MSO), by Rip Rense. Also re-printed in "Performing Songwriter" July/ August, 1999. Date: ca. April, 1999)

BH (1999): Do your early memories of Mexico still filter through your songs? TW: As much as anyone's memories do. I'll start out with pictures of things that have happened, then slowly they start to get more like paintings, and then maybe they just turn into shapes. Then slowly they fade to black, I guess. My dad taught Spanish all his life, so we went down to Mexico. Used to go down there to get my haircut a lot. And that's when I started to develop this opinion that there was something Christ-like about beggars. See a guy with no legs on a skateboard, mud streets, dogs, church bells going... I'd say, yeah, these experiences are still with me at some level. (Source: "Mojo interview with Tom Waits ". Mojo: Barney Hoskyns. April 1999)

Tom Waits (1999): "When I was a kid, I had a friend whose dad was a truck driver. His name was Gale Storm. We had moved to National City, and his dad was coming through town, and he picked me up and he took me back up to L.A., to Whittier, to stay for a weekend. And I rode in the truck all the way up there. I was just like, "I'm gonna -- I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I'm changed." (Source: "Gone North: Tom Waits, Upcountry" L.A. Weekly, by Robert Lloyd. Date: Santa Rosa. April 23-29, 1999)

Tom Waits (1999): It's a metaphor [The eyeball kid ] for people that get into show business, because they usually have some kind of family disturbance or are damaged in some way or another. (Source: "The Man Who Howled Wolf ". Magnet: Jonathan Valania. June/July 1999)

Tom Waits (1999): "Mr. Sticcha was my neighbor when I was a kid. He didn't like kids and he didn't like noise. All the kids would go past his house yellin' and making noise, and you would see his fist out the window and he'd threaten to call the cops. His wife used to say, "You're gonna give him a heart attack if you keep this up." And he finally had a heart attack and he died, and his wife told us that it was our fault, that we had killed him as a group. We all had to distribute that guilt and live with it, and it was upsetting: "Sticcha died and we killed him." We might just as well have plotted his murder." ("The Man Who Howled Wolf ". Magnet: Jonathan Valania. June/July, 1999)

Tom Waits (1999): "I was sent away when I was a kid on the back of a comic book and I could get a signet ring with my own initials on it and eh and I didn't read the small print. And then I got like 12 cases of salve that I was supposed to sell in order to get the ring and everything. It was a scary time for me. And I hid the salve and I wore the ring and then I got a letter from a lawyer saying that you know, I was supposed to be in court that Monday and I was like 7." (Source: "KBCO Interview With Tom Waits". KBCO-C studios Los Angeles (USA), by Bret Saunders. October 13, 1999)

Tom Waits (2002): "I couldn't wait to be old. I had a cane at a very young age. I used to imitate old men. When I went to my friends' houses, I didn't want to talk to them, I wanted to talk to their dads. About real man stuff. Like insurance. The lawn. That was more interesting. And their dads' record collections were much hipper than my friends'." (Source: "This Business Called Show". Austin Chronicle (USA) May 10, 2002 by Margaret Moser)

TG (2002): You know how you said when you're in your early teens music is almost like a certain type of collar or certain type of accessory. When you started listening to older music and relating to that, did other things accompany that like a certain way of dressing or speaking or behaving? TW: "Oh yeah, sure. You know I wore an old hat, I drove an old car. I bought a car for 50 bucks from Fred Moody(?) next door who's from Tennessee. A 55-Buick special (laughs), AM-radio in there. I guess, yes sure. I walked with a cane (laughs). You know, I was really, I was going overboard perhaps with it..." (Source: Fresh Air interview with Tom Waits: "Fresh Air with Terry Gross", produced in Philadelphia by WHYY" Date: show aired May 21, 2002)

TG (2002): What are some of the things that scared you as a kid, that scared you in the real life or movies or music that you found frightening? Interesting but frightening? TW: ... Oh I don't know. I guess like the plastic covers on sofas scares me (laughs). The sound that it makes when you sit on a sofa that's covered with plastic and it crinkles. I don't know, I used to watch Alfred Hitchcock and the Twilight Zone. That was captivating, those little tales. TG: Monstermovies... TW: And Monstermovies, yeah sure. But things that REALLY scared me, I don't know eh... I guess you know I could conjure up to just about anything and scare myself. If I heard a sound at night you know, it would get larger and larger and stranger and stranger and then I would get afraid to get out of bed and I think I had some kind of a disorder. The way I heard things. If I moved my hand across in the air I heard like "Whoooooohh" you know? TG: Wow really? TW: ... and cars going by sounded like planes. And eh, yeah very small sounds in the house got enormous. But I think it was just a temporary condition." (Source: Fresh Air interview with Tom Waits: "Fresh Air with Terry Gross", produced in Philadelphia by WHYY" Date: show aired May 21, 2002)

Tom Waits (2004): "I wanted to be an old man when I was a little kid. Wore my granddaddy's hat, used his cane and lowered my voice. I was dying to be old. I paid a lot of attention to old people. The music I listened to as a teenager was old people's music.. Yeah I heard the Beatles, but I didn't really pay attention. I was suspicious of anyone new and young. I don't know, probably a respect thing? My father left when I was about 11 - I think I looked up to older musicians like father figures. Louis Armstrong or Bing Crosby or Nat King Cole or Howlin' Wolf - I never really thought about it that way, but maybe it was that I needed parental guidance or something." (Source: The Mojo Interview. Mojo magazine by Sylvie Simmons. Issue October 2004)

Tom Waits (2004): "I was always kind of backwards in lots of ways - in fact when I was a teenager I tried to get a job at a piano lounge at a golf course in San Diego. It was a little pathetic. I put on a suit, I didn't even know enough songs to pull it off really, I learned some Frank Sinatra and Cole Porter. But it was interesting that that was the world I wanted to be part of, plaid pants and golf." (Source: The Mojo Interview. Mojo magazine by Sylvie Simmons. Issue October 2004)

Tom Waits (2004): "Well I had shot a friend of mine - by accident. I was shooting cans in a canyon and he walked in front of me and my gun went off and I hit him in the hip and it came out the inside of his leg. He was fine. The first thing he said to me - his name was Pat Gonzales - was `Tom, why did you do it?`, like it was a western. I picked him up - fortunately he was smaller than me - and ran 3 miles, put him in the car, drove him to hospital.. While he was recuperating, he had people come and visit - a cousin who had been in San Francisco and he had hair down to here, an earring, everything - really bizarre to see. I became curious about SF from that point on. When I went up there I went to City Lights bookstore, looking for Jack Kerouac, determined to find someone at least who used to know him. I knew the bars he went to from the books, so I used to look around. I remember meeting Laurence Ferlinghetti, got his autograph on a book, and I would go and sit by the window with a cup of coffee and look out at the street and spend hours there trying to conjure up that world. I think that was my first entrance into youth culture - but I was a little late on that one." (Source: The Mojo Interview. Mojo magazine by Sylvie Simmons. Issue October 2004)

Tom Waits (2004): "My father was a singer, mariachi music was his big love, and Harry Belafonte, so I learned all these Mexican folk songs when I was a kid - Woody Guthrie too. And music really is a language, so maybe when I was learning Spanish as a kid I felt at the same time I had a propensity for music, because he was showing me things on the guitar. My dad - his name's Jesse Frank, named after Jesse and Frank James, a double shot there of rebellion - he was really a tough one, always an outsider. He slept in the orange groves and learned Spanish at a young age. If you went to a restaurant in Mexico with my dad, he would invite the mariachis to the table and give them 2 dollars for a song, and then he would wind up leaving with them and we would have to find our way back to the hotel on our own, and dad would come home a day later, because he fell asleep on a hilltop somewhere looking down on the down." (Source: The Mojo Interview. Mojo magazine by Sylvie Simmons. Issue October 2004)

Tom Waits (2004): "But my dad - I think it was a rebel raising a rebel. That's kind of what my kids are dealing with right now." (Source: The Mojo Interview. Mojo magazine by Sylvie Simmons. Issue October 2004)

Q (2004): Do you recall your first pivotal moment with music? TW: "Well, I definitely remember listening to (legendary disc jockey) Wolfman Jack on the radio, a crystal set with an Ariel (antenna) on a broomstick, at two in the morning, all by myself. I thought I had a radio station nobody had ever heard before; I thought he was in some bar in Mexico and it was all illegal, which only added to the (allure of the) music when I heard people like Little Willie John and all that." Q: How old were you? TW: "Maybe 14, 15." Q: Was there any immediate cause and affect, or were you already musically active? TW: "Not really. I had heard "Abiline" on the radio and "El Paso," things that captivated me because of the stories. I also heard Roy Orbison. When I met Roy (years later), I said: "Where'd you get that voice, man?" Nobody was singing like that when he came up. He said he used to hear a band playing miles away, across the plains, and by the time it reached him it sounded all watery like that. He said: "So I wanted to sound all watery when I sang." (Source: "Tom Waits Interview" San Diego Union Tribune (USA). By George Varga. October 3, 2004)

Tom Waits (2005): "I think that when I was a kid I trusted older music cause I thought it had more authority. And the people that had played it were older then me and I respected them. Bing Crosby, you know, Frank Sinatra. You know Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong. You know, people like that." NS: Aha, so you grew up kinda in that period of Rock 'n Roll and the British Invasion in the 60's/ 70's... TW: Yeah, yeah but I really liked all the old men music you know. I really kept living my life upside down. I really wanted to be an old man when I was a kid, and now I think I'm going to my teens. Finally... It's a little confusing and all. Kids don't really understand." (Source: "Cool Ivories", American Routes radio show, by Nick Spitzer. February 16-22, 2002)

Q (2006): When Tom Waits was a boy, he heard the world differently. Sometimes, it sounded so out-of-kilter, it scared him. The rustle of a piece of paper could make him wince, the sound of his mother tucking him in at night might cause him to curl up as if in pain. 'It wasn't a cool thing,' he says, shaking his head lest there be any doubt. 'It was a frightening thing. I mean, I thought I was mentally ill, that maybe I was retarded. I'd put my hand on a sheet like this [rubbing his shirt] and it'd sound like sandpaper. Or a plane going by.' He is rocking back and forward on his seat as he recalls this and you can tell that traces of it still linger. 'I think I was having a spell,' he says, his creased, weather-beaten face crinkling even more. 'It would descend upon me at night when the house got quiet, and I'd say to myself, "Uh-oh, here they come again."' He rocks some more. They? I say, surprised. Did he think he was possessed? 'I really didn't know. Couldn't figure it out.' Did he tell anyone? 'I think I told my mum. I'm not sure. See, I thought I'd outgrow it. Like acne. Or masturbation.' And he did eventually, though the thought of it still haunts him. 'I've read that other people, artistic people, have experienced it, too,' he says, still rocking. 'They've had periods where there was a distortion to the world that disturbed them.' (Source: "Off Beat", The Observer Magazine (UK), October 29, 2006. By Sean O'Hagan)

Q (2006): "Why, I ask, were the Beats so crucial to him? TW: "'They were father figures,' he says softly, his long fingers tracing small circles in the coffee spill on the table. 'They were the ones I looked to for guidance. See, my dad left when I was 10, so I was always looking for a dad. It was like, "Are you my dad? Are you my dad? What about you? Are you my dad?" I found a lot of these old salty guys along the way.'" (Source: "Off Beat", The Observer Magazine (UK), October 29, 2006. By Sean O'Hagan)

Tom Waits (2006): "I'd read Kerouac when I was a teenager. That was profound... And you know, I immediately wanted to get on the road and start hitchhiking. And I did. I went all over - I went to Arizona, Oklahoma, Texas - just to get out there and see what it feels like. Everybody wants to try and jump off something that's higher than he can handle, just to see if he'll float quietly to the ground or break up on the rocks. Everybody wants to see what the world's made of and wants to see what they're made of. I think that was the best time to hitchhike. Back then you didn't worry so much that the next driver would have a cigarette lighter or a chainsaw going [makes the sound of a chainsaw cutting through flesh] REHHHHH." (Source: "Tom Waits: Weird Science". Harp magazine (USA). December 1, 2006. Telephone interview by Mark Kemp)

Q: What brought you back (to Los Angeles)? Tom Waits (2009): " For someone who wanted to be in music, it was Oz. I was picked up hitchhiking - I had a guitar, I was on the side of the freeway - I was picked up by a guy named Eden Ahbez. You know who that is? He wrote a song called “Nature Boy” [sings] There was a boy / A very strange enchanted boy. / And he traveled very far, very far. A big hit for Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole and a lot of other people. He was in an old VW bus. Hair down to his waist. That was encouraging to me. It kind of validated me somewhat; I got picked up by somebody who was really in the business. Or someone who, in my mind, was really in the business. Who had written a song that had some meaning. So that was really one of those early defining moments, in terms of me going to a place that, in my mind, had great cultural diversity and endless possibilities. I was really there to absorb as much of the atmosphere and the life there as I could. Most of the things that you absorb, ultimately you secrete in one way or another. I was counting on that. I kicked around in a lot of different neighborhoods, lived a lot of different places. You’d have a kind of collision of cultures. You’d have a mariachi band on one street corner and a Pentecostal preacher on another, competing for the same audience" (Source: "Fifty Years Of L.A. Rock" by Alex Pappadema. men.style.com (GQ magazine blog)/ USA. March 12, 2009)

Further reading: Interviews (complete transcripts)