Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits [Hardcover]

Barney Hoskyns (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 19, 2009

With his trademark growl, carnival-madman persona, haunting music, and unforgettable lyrics, Tom Waits is one of the most revered and critically acclaimed singer-songwriters alive today. After beginning his career on the margins of the 1970s Los Angeles rock scene, Waits has spent the last thirty years carving out a place for himself among such greats as Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Like them, he is a chameleonic survivor who has achieved long-term success while retaining cult credibility and outsider mystique. But although his songs can seem deeply personal and somewhat autobiographical, fans still know very little about the man himself. Notoriously private, Waits has consistently and deliberately blurred the line between fact and fiction, public and private personas, until it has become impossible to delineate between truth and self-fabricated legend.

Lowside of the Road is the first serious biography to cut through the myths and make sense of the life and career of this beloved icon. Barney Hoskyns has gained unprecedented access to Waits’s inner circle and also draws on interviews he has done with Waits over the years. Spanning his extraordinary forty-year career from Closing Time to Orphans, from his perilous “jazzbo” years in 1970s LA to such shape-shifting albums as Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs to the Grammy Award winners of recent years, this definitive biography charts Waits’s life and art step by step, album by album.

Barney Hoskyns has written a rock biography—much like the subject himself—unlike any other. It is a unique take on one of rock’s great enigmas.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When a celebrity not only refuses to cooperate with a would-be biographer but persuades most of his inner circle not to grant interviews either, the writer's task is much more daunting. In trying to account for the 40-year career of eccentric singer/songwriter (and occasional film actor) Tom Waits, Hoskyns (Hotel California) puts his subject's reluctance front and center, openly speculating on the rumors that Waits's wife has engineered his withdrawal from his early associates. The armchair psychology extends to Waits's idiosyncratic public persona, but is buttressed with interviews with as many people as Hoskyns could get to talk, a few conversations he had with Waits for magazine pieces and excerpts from other articles over the years. For the most part, Waits's musical transformation from hip troubadour to far-out maverick is well contextualized, but when Hoskyns's resources are stretched thin in this overlong book, his pronouncements become less compelling. Readers may not particularly care what the biographer thinks of Waits's last album, for example, nor need a complete set list from a random concert. Despite these problems, however, Hoskyns deserves credit for trying to give Waits the critical scrutiny his work deserves. (Apr. 14)
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Review

Absolutely outstanding" --Danny Baker, BBC

"[This] book lights up and whirls like one of the greasy carnival rides in Mr. Wait's own sprawling oeuvre" --The New York Times

Hoskyn's superlative overview of one of America's major (though idiosyncratic) popular artists will likely stand as the best book on his life"--Library Journal (starred review)

"Hoskyns persevered in writing the first Waits biography, netting fascination firsthand stories, terrific photographs, and fanatically detailed information about studio sessions and concerts...the result is a respectful, entertaining, and revelatory portrait set within a vivid cultural context."--Booklist

"It's about time [Waits] received biographical homage from a rock writer of the stature of Hoskyns."--Stephen Poole, The Guardian

"Comprehensive and judicious. [Waits] could not have found a more respectful, sympathetic and knowledgeable biographer if he'd chosen him himself."--Mick Brown, The Word

"Thanks to his diligence.  His Californian connections and some magazine interviews he conducted long ago with Waits, Hoskyn's life comes across as convincingly lifelike."--Robert Sandall, The Sunday Times




From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Crown Archetype (May 19, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767927087
• ISBN-13: 978-0767927086
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.6 x 9.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #761,295 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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55 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars half okay, half a waste of time, June 10, 2009

By 

Cubert Ambrose (oregon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits (Hardcover)

A lot of music fans would really love a good biography on Tom Waits, and the author Barney Hoskyns lets this desire overrun the question of whether or not he has the information for a decent biography.

Now, let's get to the problem with this book; Waits has no desire to play along with an unauthorized biographhy, and has requested that his friends honor his wishes to not play along. Hoskyns never forgives Waits for this.

Now, personally, I can see Waits's issue here. Hoskyns however makes a pretty big fuss over Waits excluding friends from his inner circle who don't honor his wishes to keep his private life private. Now this may sound cold, but two things; one, however cold it may sound, Waits is a grownup, his friends are grownups; there's never any evidence or even suggestion that Waits has treated people in any sort of dishonest, criminal or abusive way. Two, personall, I'm a private person if somebody was writing an unauthorized biography (I am in no way claiming to have done anything worth making me famous, or that anyone would be interested in my private life this is conjecture) yes, I would ask that my friends not blabber about my private life, and if they did anyway, I would be quite hurt.

I would love to know some of the stuff Hoskyns wants to know about. I would love to read interviews from the sidemen to get an inside story about the recordings of some of my favorite music, but again, Waits and his friends are grownups; if Waits would prefer that much for stories of his behind the scenes times get spread around, that's his time.

On that note, Hoskyns also conjectures quite a bit about Wait's marriage to Kathleen Brennan, suggesting that she's holding a Yoko-Ono type influence on his life, alienating his friends and affecting his work. We're not talking bout The Beatles here though, where there's a band to disrupt. The albums are issued under one person's name. A Tom Waits album is whatever Tom Waits says it is. If he says that a Waits album is with Kathleen Brennan over the old guys, than that's a Tom Waits album.

The great fault with this book, and as the book goes on Hoskyns seems to be apologizing for it and trying to excuse himself for it is that he signed on to do a book without accepting that he was never going to have access to the information that he wanted. As the book goes on, Hoskyns resorts to stacking up snarky asides against Tom, writing reviews of the later records and recycling stories from David Letterman interviews. Hoskyns's personal offence at Tom's love of privacy even manifests itself in an appendix where the author includes e-mails from Waits acquaintances refusing interviews.

Even if you utterly disagree with my view that Waits is justified in asking his friends not to play along with this project, and you feel that the author is absolutely justified in his disenchantment with Waits, it's hard to deny that the author's lack of necessary information substantially wrecks the latter half of the book.

Hoskyns isn't a terrible writer though, and while I can't recommend buying this book, Tom Waits fanatics will find this worth checking out for some entertaining chapters on the earlier portion of Waits's career and the construction of the drunken jazzbo mythos still follows him around.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Life of Tom Waits?, November 23, 2009

By 

D. French - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits (Hardcover)

More like a fraction of his life. It's a good account of Waits's younger days, but soon turns from a biography into the author's interminable opinions of the music--song by song by song--since he couldn't find out much of anything about his subject's adult life. Which apparently made him resentful, because we get a lot of foolish innuendo about the sinister control the Waits's have over their friends, and the even more sinister control Kathleen has over Tom. SUCH a wanker.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I had high hopes, July 16, 2009

By 

default_test_string (Eugene, OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits (Hardcover)

Some good anecdotes contained within but it was rather annoying to have to read Barney's opinion on nearly every Waits song ever released. No offence intended to Mr. Hoskyns but I am not interested.

He doesn't seems to enjoy Tom's most recent work, says things like "was Tom Waits finally chasing his own musical tail?" in regards to Real Gone [long answer: No], and when he went out of the way to slam songs like "Make It Rain" & "Lucinda" I tossed it into the trash.