Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
half okay, half a waste of time, June 10, 2009
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.
|
|
|
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Must read for hard core fans!, June 28, 2009
We all know that Tom Waits didn't want to have anything to do with this book and went out of his to tell his friends to boycott this biographer. Still, Barney Hoskyns went ahead and wrote the best book that he could have written about a living legend who happens to be uncooperative. There are many things in this book that would only appeal to hard core fans such as song by song analysis of albums. Hoskyns is an excellent writer and I am left to wonder what this book could have been if Tom Waits had not asked his friends to not talk to Hoskyns. It is still the best book out there on the subject and who knows someday Tom Waits may soften his stance and talk to a biographer or at the very least let his friends talk. Waits reasons for not talking is obvious. There's a mystery attached to his persona and he wants to keep it that way. He walks a thin line of being real and putting on an act and he wants us to always guess what's real and what's a put on. I do think that's a minor detail. True Tom Waits fans don't care. They love the man and his music. Whether his wife is the second coming of Yoko Ono is irrelevant. That's their business. The album cover says Tom Waits and that's what I go by. Read this book.
|
|
|
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Serious Critical Work, July 15, 2009
Well, ooh... okay, here it is. It is not a gossip biography but a book on Tom Waits' work, as a song-writer, singer, musician, producer, on-and-off actor. It's a work full of paradox as Waits does not want a biography written, but if there is one written, this is at least the type of book he must accept, one that shows that he is sort of a meta-musician, a real master of songs and traditions. The writer is in a very difficult position because if he gets you to identify with Waits you will hate the writer. Actually, the book does give you some insight into Waits' life, as you learn that his father left the family when he was ten, Waits struggled with adapting to the communal freedom of the Sixties (he, in a way, did not participate), and that he finally found his role as both an intellectual (I mean thinking, and responsible) musician and very playful performer. With lots of "sweating" rockers around, many thought his show was fake, and Hoskyns makes several attempts to describe how difficult it was for Waits to demonstrate that his music was scenic, visual, related to more than songs, without making listeners think they would not have to listen. Waits has been fiercely protecting his private life, most of the time, and even more since he met Kathleen Brennan. Hoskyns, again, is in dire straits here as he thinks this is right, and he even gets the counter-point: how Waits, finally, does find his political voice fighting phonyness and being "private" in public - so close to Hollywood, sometimes getting a kick from it, but turning against the pornographic family show that has become the custom, pseudo-revealing your "intimate" life and thus killing your work. Because nobody needs your work if they think they know you. There are many non-readers, non-listeners, and they are being served. Waits is no part of that, and to some degree, Hoskyns is the loser here, because he is both a listener and a reader, and his book is not for the mainstream audience anyhow.
As for Waits' big turn away from Elektra, away from swing, into rhythmic music and bizarre arrangements, Hoskyns gives much credit to Kathleen Brennan, too much I think, regarding the fact that he knows very little about her. He pictures Kathleen as saving Tom's life (he finally gets sober which might be the reason we still have him around), getting control of his musical production, and having a family with kids who actually play with him - on stage! - as they are beyond age 15. Which can mean a lot, and one might not like that too much, but then, it obviously means that Tom Waits is a rock star with a family, I mean ONE FAMILY and not five of them. Still, I think that Hoskyns is too generous with accepting all those credits for Brennan, and the trick is that when the book closes he confesses that he likes Waits' earlier work better! So he's all caught up in that paradox of life and music, interpreting both. Brennan gets all the credit but without her Waits' music was better?
Still, it is a good book, with phantastic quotes, unlikely observations, actually going through the recordings of every single album, describing who did it and why, and which song came out and how they relate to others. This is what critics do. It is a bit of a pity that Waits kept musicians from talking to the writer, as Hoskyns is not distracting us but getting us closer to the sounds, the feel, the energy. It does become clear how Waits is singular.
Of course, you can never get all the details, and some of Waits' musical life takes place in Europe. What if you cannot read Danish or German? Just one example: "Kommienezuspadt" is for Hoskyns "a piece of cod-German gibberish that Waits invented" - actually, it is an almost accurate rendition of "Komme nie zu spät", meaning "Never be tardy". I would have liked to get more to know about the Kurt Weill thing, about Waits connection to European traditions, musique concrete; even Astor Piazolla's name does not turn up, the connection to modern tango being rather obvious. - Hoskyns, as many British writers, is so very good exactly writing about North America.
Of course, with a great critical work you have a thousand reasons to say that you're of a different opinion - that is what critical works are for. Does it get you much closer to the man Waits? Well, not that you'd want to know him personally after reading the book. Not me, at least. But you would want to know all of his work, understand every song, and enjoy the sighs and coughs in between. This is what this book is about. It also contains some very nice black-and-white photographs, some old, some taken of former locations and witnesses as they are now. I read it within two weeks, listening to Waits' music in between. I now hear better. (Ulf Erdmann Ziegler, writer, Germany)
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by Jay S. Jacobs
DVD ~ Tom Waits
~ Tom Waits
