Reverb

Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles

Alex Harvey

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781789146646
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

A gritty, smoke-filled, and boozy account of musician Tom Waits's formative decade in Los Angeles.
 
Song Noir examines the formative first decade of Tom Waits's career, when he lived, wrote, and recorded nine albums in Los Angeles: from his soft, folk-inflected debut, Closing Time in 1973, to the abrasive, surreal S wordfishtrombones in 1983. Starting his songwriting career in the seventies, Waits absorbed Los Angeles's wealth of cultural influences. Combining the spoken idioms of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski with jazz-blues rhythms, he explored the city's literary and film noir traditions to create hallucinatory dreamscapes. Waits mined a rich seam of the city's low-life locations and characters, letting the place feed his dark imagination. Mixing the domestic with the mythic, Waits turned quotidian, autobiographical details into something more disturbing and emblematic, a vision of Los Angeles as the warped, narcotic heart of his nocturnal explorations.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Crawling down Cahuenga
• 1 Riding with Lady Luck
• 2 Neon Buzzin’
• 3 Everything’s Broken
• 4 I’m Never Going Home
• 5 In the Neighborhood
• Conclusion: A Strange Home of Your Own
• Chronology
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Select Discography
• Acknowledgements
• Photo Acknowledgements
• Index