Customer Reviews

Small Change: A Life of Tom Waits

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The author tries to match Waits with his metaphor magic and of course fails. This kind of punchy "clever" writing might work for a magazine but is very hard to read for an extended period time, as in a book. There are lots of weird mistakes (is the author English and missing some things?) and the font used is almost illegible. Still it's the only book I know of and somewhat helpful if you can find the facts among the fluff.

Mr. Humphries is a big fan of Tom Waits. Unfortunately, he's mainly a fond of the early Tom, and spends a great deal of this book trying to explain why Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and everything that followed don't live up to Small Change. Tom deserves to have a biography written about him that does justice to his mid-eighties and later work as a period of astonishing innovation and creativity, rather than seeming almost apologetic that he dared to stray from the bars and back alleys of his early work at all.

Fans of Waits are sure to be disappointed by this book which pretends to be a bio. It's actually mostly a collection of the author's own enthusiastic essays about Waits. Read a Dave Marsh bio of Springsteen to get an idea of the flavor. Direct quotes from Waits are mostly familiar, having already appeared in well known magazines. Save your money or buy a spare copy of a Waits CD instead.

Fans of Waits are sure to be disappointed by this book which pretends to be a bio. It's actually mostly a collection of the author's own enthusiastic essays about Waits. Read a Dave Marsh bio of Springsteen to get an idea of the flavor. Direct quotes from Waits are mostly familiar, having already appeared in well known magazines. Save your money or buy a spare copy of a Waits CD instead.

Tom Waits is one of the great iconoclasts of the late 20th Century. His lyrics are brilliantly subversive laid over a simple jazzy sound. I bought this book hoping to gain some insight into Waits the man but I found the book to be somewhat abbreviated and abridged. This is more like a pulpy, fanzine type of bio that doesn't really probe the depths of this complex musician. It will feature small morsels of info but for the most part, it does little to get down to the heart of the matter. It does have moments but it doesn't quench one's thirst for knowledge and understanding of Tom Waits.