Evidence of the well-documented weakness of Lowside of the Road can be found on the five pages of its second appendix: emails from Tom Waits' friends confirming that they would not assist Barney Hoskyns in writing this biography. To Hoskyns' credit, he demonstrates that an unauthorized biography need not be a hatchet job. But while some readers quibble with the conclusions Hoskyns draws in the absence of evidence, I sometimes question the direction in which he chooses to take his analysis. Just what is biography meant to do?
In his discussion of the first thirty years of Waits' life, Hoskyns is on firm ground. There are many people with whom to talk, and many of those people choose to do so here. Hoskyns speaks in great detail about Waits' folk roots in San Diego in the late 1960s and his move to L.A. What is but touched upon, however, is Waits' early family life. It is as if, out of respect for the musician's privacy, the biographer steers clear of anything beyond Frank Waits' drinking and the breakdown of his marriage to Alma Waits. Where this book is most vivid is in describing Tom Waits' early struggles in the music business, the difficulty in finding the musicians and the producer who could help him put on vinyl what he heard in his head. The image of the hobo under the streetlamp was first forged behind the piano in ridiculous gigs opening for Frank Zappa. Waits' own struggles with alcohol, his bohemian motel life in Los Angeles, and his personal life round out a sketch of his years on Asylum Records.
With his marriage to Kathleen Brennan and his switch to Island Records, Tom Waits traded the hobo for the carnival barker. With Waits, Brennan, and their three kids living an intensely private life, Hoskyns is unable to make the same connection, from 1980, between Waits the person and Waits the musician. And, yet, beginning with Swordfishtrombones (1983), Waits' music changed dramatically. As many critics have carped, the last half of Lowside of the Road reads as a series of album reviews; Hoskyns is remarkably skilled at describing the music, but thirty years passes pretty quickly with little more than a series of records to mark the time. I would have preferred that the second half of the book more contextualize Waits' achievement in the changing landscape of popular music. For example, how does someone who works with a broad canvas, song cycles on a large scale, fit in a world in which downloading has reinforced a shift back to a earlier, singles-based sensibility? To his credit, Hoskyns restrains any resentment he might feel about Waits' apparent attitude towards his research, showing spleen only perhaps in his criticism of Waits' latest albums. Similarly, he filters out any peevishness that might be felt from those Waits friends excluded from the current tightly-knit circle, those friends who would, then, speak to the author at great length about being discarded by a genius.
Still, I found this a very valuable book, for reasons that Hoskyns probably does not realize. I am a huge Waits fan, but -- ten years younger than the author -- I got interested in him with the release of Big Time (1988). Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs (1985) make perfect sense when you begin in the late 1980s. I enjoyed here learning more about Waits in the 1970s, running out and buying Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) in order to compare his live sensibilities with that of Glitter and Doom, my favorite record of last year. There is no huge transition for me to explain: the hobo is the carnival barker, and neither is Tom Waits at home in northern California. That is not to say that I would not like to know more about the influences behind the wonderful collaborations between Brennan and Waits, but I am happy to supplement the music with at least this much context.
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