Tom Waits’ Gruff Legacy (Loren Kantor, 9/15/26, Splice Today)
Like a method actor, Waits immersed himself in booze and cigarettes and slouched like a lifelong alcoholic. He told author David McGee, “I was sick through that whole period. It started to wear on me, all the touring… living in hotels, eating bad food, drinking too much. There’s a lifestyle that’s there before you arrive and you’re introduced to it. It’s unavoidable.”
Waits’ newfound drinking buddies included author Charles Bukowski and fellow singer Chuck E. Weiss (inspiration for Rickie Lee Jones’ “Chuck E.’s in Love”). While acting in the film Paradise Alley (1978), Waits met screenwriter Kathleen Brennan. The two fell in love and married in 1980. Brennan encouraged Waits to ditch his poet lounge singer act and embrace a more experimental, avant-garde approach. The couple wrote songs together and left Los Angeles for Sonoma County where they had three children.
Brennan inspired Waits to join AA and he became sober in 1992. Waits’ famously said, “One is never completely certain when you drink and do drugs whether the spirits that are moving through you are the spirits from the bottle or your own. At a certain point, you become afraid of the answer. That’s one of the biggest things that keeps people from getting sober, they’re afraid to find out it was the liquor talking all along.”
Fortunately, the quality of Waits’ music improved with sobriety. His voice became raspier as well. When music critic Daniel Durchholz told Waits his voice sounded like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon and then taken outside and run over with a car, Waits responded, “flattery will get you nowhere with me.”