New Year’s Eve 1979 was the most important day in the life of Tom Waits, after a decade trying to make interesting and artistic music and make a living from it without having to feel ashamed. It wasn’t that simple.
They discovered him in Trobadourthe legendary joint around which all the folk-rock of Los Angeles revolved like a tornado, the Crosby, Stills, Nash & YoungEagles, Joni MitchellJackson Browne, James TaylorOld-fashioned bohemian, Tom Waits might only have seemed like a poor misfit in this environment, but he was a hard-working Stakhanovist who sat at the piano with a rigorous work ethic while a constellation of seriously out-of-date stars thread, ego addicts with flowers in their hair, shamed the hippies from San Francisco and earned (and spent) more in one night than he did in half a year.
Tom Waits made his debut in 1973 and recorded and performed non-stop for seven hectic years, also working hard to look like a nutcase with a criminal record for theft and public scandal. Actually, of all the legends he cultivated, probably the only true one was that he drank too much. Housed in the Motel Tropicana at nine dollars a night, he arrived at the end of the decade more dented than a cab Bombay: quarreled with his manager, fed up with his producer, evicted by his record company for his poor sales and without a partner, after breaking up with Rickie Lee Jonesthen addicted to heroin.
Thus he reached the last day of the decade, with just turned 30 years old.
«Our first date was on New Year’s Eve 1979 in New York. He had performed there and everyone was drinking wildly. She was dressed entirely in black. I did not want to commit myself because she had to leave the next morning », she recalled in 2004, when I interviewed her for a cover of Metropolis. “We both worked in the studios Zoetropefor Francis Ford Coppola. Shortly after, I returned to New York and, two months later, we got married, “he added.