A list of Tom Waits’ favourite rock and roll songs: “The roughest diamond in the mine”
As a genre born from a convergence of jazz, blues, gospel, boogie-woogie, country, and folk, rock and roll spread its brackets rather wide. Despite such a broad and ill-defined banner, Tom Waits has somehow managed to spread his wings even wider as one of the most versatile singer-songwriters in the history of recorded music. From the folk balladry of ‘I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You’ to the avant blues masterpiece ’16 Shells From a Thirty-Ought-Six’, the only constant in Waits’ catalogue is top-flight lyricism.
Though his musical dexterity is more than worthy of note, Waits’ lyrical mastery has had him compared to eminent songwriters like Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, who both also share his gravelly, timeless vocal approach. Like Dylan, who Waits covered profusely during his rise to prominence in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Waits became enamoured with music in the 1950s thanks to the rock ‘n’ roll rhythms of Elvis Presley, Little Richard and their seminal peers.
Even during his childhood, Waits was exposed to plenty of jazz and soul music, which played into his penchant for emotional delivery and complex instrumentation. When he heard Dylan’s folk musings of the early 1960s, the final piece of the puzzle seemed to slot into place. “For a songwriter, Dylan is as essential as a hammer and nails and a saw are to a carpenter,” Waits once said adoringly of his lyrical luminary.
Speaking to Fresh Air in 2002, Waits discussed his eclectic taste in music. Though he always found crumbs of comfort among his contemporaries, such as Dylan, The Rolling Stones and Elvis Costello, his favourite music usually stemmed from traditional jazz and folk realms. “I didn’t really identify with the music of my own generation,” Waits revealed. “But I was very curious about the music of others.”
Waits’ music is an interesting blend of genres and periods. While he has frequently worked at the vanguard, composing unprecedented avant-garde blends, he tends to favour traditional instrumentation; you wouldn’t hear him jamming along to Kraftwerk or Aphex Twin, for instance. “Songs really are like a form of time travel because they really have moved forward in a bubble,” he added on another occasion, discussing the timeless nature of his catalogue.
“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.”
Among the jazz, folk and soul records on Waits’ shelf is an abundance of rock ‘n’ roll music, mostly hailing from the genre’s emergence period in the 1950s and the classic rock period of the 1960s and ’70s. For Waits, rock music should be primal and energetic. Hence, while he appreciates the intricacies of jazz, the thrown-together nature of 1960s garage rock music by the ikes of The Kingsmen and ? and the Mysterians resonated beautifully. The Mick Jagger-adjacent vocal style of these two bands also undoubtedly ticked a few boxes.
In 2005, Waits discussed 20 of his all-time favourite albums in a feature with The Guardian. He picked out The Rolling Stones’ 1972 masterpiece Exile on Main St as a particular highlight from his favourite English rock group. 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,” he said, picking out a favourite from the album.
Another of Waits’ favourites from this period is Captain Beefheart’s ‘China Pig’, a classic song from Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. “The roughest diamond in the mine, his musical inventions are made of bone and mud,” Waits said of the parent album, Trout Mask Replica. “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.”
Below, we have collated a list of some of Tom Waits’ all-time favourite rock songs. The list spans from formative classics by The King to a few classics from later in the century by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and his close friend and collaborator Elvis Costello. The list also outlines Waits’ boundaries, from the heaviness of The Who through the oddities of Captain Beefheart to the soft rock of Buffalo Springfield.
