Tom Waits on Tom Waits Interviews and encounters

Tom Waits has been an idiosyncratic, eccentric singer/artist/actor with a devoted cult following for over 40 years. He has carefully guarded his private life, but, as this book shows, he has cooperated in many entertaining if not always informative interviews. The book covers Waits's entire career and focuses on interviews and interview excerpts about each of his albums. Maher (Jack Kerouac's American Journey), who compiled a similar book on Miles Davis (Miles on Miles), presents a wide range of interview styles and results. He interjects short narratives to highlight Waits's life events and progress from album to album. VERDICT For fans who have not discovered the interviews section of the comprehensive website devoted to Waitsana (www.tomwaitslibrary.com/interviews.html), this book will provide a wonderful overview of the artist and his many distinctive albums. Recommended for all Tom Waits fans.-Bill Walker, Stockton-San Joaquin Cty. P.L., Stockton, CA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The singer-songwriter-actor-playwright with a rare gift of gab gets a second anthology of interviews.Given the richness of Tom Waits' nearly 40-year career and his unique gifts as a word-drunk raconteur, a compilation of old interviews with the musician is a natural. In fact, editor Maher (Jack Kerouac's American Journey, 2007, etc.) has been beaten to the punch by Mac Montandon'sInnocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader(2005), which brought together many of the best pieces on Waits from top-flight periodicals. This book contains lesser stuff. Maher admits in his introduction that he couldn't afford to pay the permission fees for stories from higher-profile magazines. Thus, his compilation leans on B-team writers and work from sometimes obscure (and often now-defunct) music rags and alternative weeklies. Organized by album-release cycle, Maher's anthology attains a repetitive rhythm in the early going, which recounts the performer's 1970s development as the jazzy beat/boho poet laureate of the American underside; the narrative shifts gears after Waits' 1980 marriage to Kathleen Brennan, who became his writing collaborator and helped steer his music into riskier, more cacophonous realms. The package is messily edited, with flat-footed interstitial material. Writers' expositions of the vocalist's life and career, and some of Waits' gags, incessantly duplicate one another. British journalistsincluding Sylvie Simmons, Mick Brown, Pete Silvertonseem to fare best with Waits. Interestingly, some of the most revealing American interviews are with radio hosts: L.A. folk DJs Roz and Howard Larman and Philadelphia veteran Michael Tearson. But many of the interrogators are unable to hit their subject's obfuscating curve balls. Some, likeSpinmagazine's insufferable Bart Bull, flash plenty of subLester Bangs style to zero effect. The least of the material is perplexingly culled from press kits for record and movie projects. Though always entertaining, Waits conceals more than he exposes; as he notes to Amanda Petrusich in the book's most telling quote, "The fact is most of the things that people know about me are made up. My own life is backstage."Some entertaining yarns lurk among a great deal of garrulous dross.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.