A list of Tom Waits’ favourite rock albums
In the 20th century, amid the swirling mass of popular music, several iconic voices surfaced gritty, poetic, and seemingly as old as time itself. Most prominently, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan fit this bill with unique vocals and unprecedented songwriting prowess in their respective fields.
Dylan’s passion for music began in 1950s rock and roll; meanwhile, the Canadian poet Cohen stumbled upon folk as a profitable conduit for his words. The fires in which Waits was forged are much more eclectic and diverse. However, the gravel-voiced maverick likes to transcend time in his tastes. “I didn’t really identify with the music of my own generation,” Tom Waits told Fresh Air in 2002. “But I was very curious about the music of others.”
“Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble,” he added on another occasion. “Everyone who’s connected with it, the studio’s gone, the musicians are gone, and the only thing that’s left is this recording, which was only about a three-minute period maybe 70 years ago.”
Waits’ eclectic taste in music is immediately reflected when examining his broad catalogue and associative style, a unique amalgam of jazz, folk, rock, cabaret and avant-garde innovation. The 1960s rock explosion and the concurrent singer-songwriter boom would later complement his childhood introduction to the likes of Frank Sinatra and Thelonious Monk.
In 2005, Waits discussed 20 of his all-time favourite albums in a feature with The Guardian. Today, we’re focussing on rock, siphoning off the selections that fall within the diverse genre. With a taste for contemporary avant-garde music by the likes of Frank Zappa, it comes with little surprise that Waits shed early light upon Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica.
“The roughest diamond in the mine, his musical inventions are made of bone and mud,” Waits said of the album. “Enter the strange matrix of his mind and lose yours. This is indispensable for the serious listener. An expedition into the centre of the earth, this is the high jump record that’ll never be beat, it’s a merlot reduction sauce. He takes da bait. Dante doing the buck and wing at a Skip James suku jump. Drink once and thirst no more.”
Later, Waits showed his love for blues rock with Exile on Main St, a discerning favourite from the Rolling Stones canon. Above all, he praised Mick Jagger’s iconic vocals: “‘I Just Want To See His Face’ – that song had a big impact on me, particularly learning how to sing in that high falsetto, the way Jagger does.”
“When he sings like a girl, I go crazy. I said, ‘I’ve got to learn how to do that.’ I couldn’t really do it until I stopped smoking,” he continued. “That’s when it started getting easier to do. [Waits’s own] ‘Shore Leave’ has that, ‘All Stripped Down’, ‘Temptation’. Nobody does it like Mick Jagger; nobody does it like Prince. But this is just a tree of life. This record is the watering hole. Keith Richards plays his ass off. This has the Checkerboard Lounge all over it.”
As a friend and keen admirer of Bob Dylan, Waits saved a space for the Nobel Prize-winner’s 1975 album The Basement Tapes. The consummate collection was recorded nearly a decade before during studio jams with The Band. “For a songwriter, Dylan is as essential as a hammer and nails and a saw are to a carpenter,” Waits beamed. “I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in – so the bootlegs I obtained in the sixties and seventies, where the noise and grit of the tapes became inseparable from the music, are essential to me.”
See the rest of Waits’ selections in the list below. If you like what you see, check out the playlist.
Tom Waits’ favourite rock albums:
- Trout Mask Replica – Captain Beefheart
- Exile On Main St.– The Rolling Stones
- The Basement Tapes – Bob Dylan
- I’m Your Man – Leonard Cohen
- The Specialty Sessions – Little Richard
- The Delivery Man – Elvis Costello
- Purple Onion – Les Claypool
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