Customer Reviews

Tom Waits (Kill Your Idols)

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this book was a major disappointment. i picked it up hoping to learn a little about tom waits motivations and approach to music making. instead i got a very dry and shallow biography seemingly written based almost singularly on tom waits' discography. there's nothing revealing in this book, just an album by album recollection. it's a decent reference if you want to know about all of waits' works, but then again you can find a lot more of this sort of information on the web. the padding in this biography is snippets gleemed from interviews.

very uninteresting read.

Don't but this little book! It has less information than most of the magizine articles that are the basis of the author's knowledge base. It is unclear if the author has ever meet,interviewed or seen Mr. Waits preform. Huge omissions and years of information are not present. Some facts like the fact Tom had a relationship with Ricky Lee Jones or the first 3 albums for Island are a "Trilogy" are mentioned numerous times in a attempt to pad this books 150 double spaced pages. It looks and reads like a bad high school term paper.

I recently completed reading the Tom Waits biography by Cath Carroll and rather enjoyed it. It is a small volume and quite slim at 136 pages including both a few black & white photographs and the index. It is divided into three parts. Part one: The Story, Part Two: The Music, and Part Three: The Legacy. I believe that one reviewer stated that he could get this information from liner notes. While this is only partially true I do agree that much of the information is readily available elsewhere. There is however some writer insight. Ironically, under part Two, one thing lacking was the personnel on each album.

This is a small book in every sense of the word but amazingly is well researched and packs in a lot of fact and fiction (mostly generated by Tom himself!)about the bard of low-down losers of everytown skidrows. This is not the definitive bio of the still the most underrated songwriter in America but it will do for now. I read it one sitting but I might go back to it again. Get your own copy it fits in your back pocket quite nicely.