Tom Waits: Live at Mike Douglas Show (1976)
“Mr. Waits was a vivid and unusual presence in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, when he began recording for Dacid Geffen’s label Asylum Records, home to performers like Jackson Browne and the Eagles. He was the antihippie, a saloon singer who wore greasy ties and pointed shoes, anything but laid back.
“He was never going to be,” as one observer puts it, “the fourth member of Crosby, Stills and Nash.”
How much of Mr. Waits’s wino-dirtball routine, Mr. Hoskyns wonders, was an act? Where did Tom Waits end, and “Tom Waits” begin? Mr. Hoskyns suggests that the persona may have been an around-the-clock bit of performance art that simply became his reality.”
“Mr. Hoskyns quotes one admirer who asks: “Who needs alcohol and drugs when you have Tom Waits?”” Dwight Garner, New York Times
