Celebrating 20: A double dose of Tom Waits

Twenty years ago, on May 4, 2002, Tom Waits released two albums, Alice and Blood Money. They were the 14th and 15th studio albums of Waits' career, dating back 29 years at that point, to March 1973.

It is quite unusual, of course, for a recording artist to release two LPs on the same day. But Waits wasn't the first. Guns and Roses did it, Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello had done this previously, for various reasons.

Waits' wild years: Tom finds musical adventure under every rock

There was a time quite awhile ago when I listened to Tom Waits' post-1970s albums constantly. For a few years in the mid-2000s, I commuted for work about 40 miles each way four times a week. And most of the time, one of those CDs was spinning at a volume a little higher than might have been healthy. The fairly current ones in heavy rotation at the time were Alice, Blood Money and Real Gone -- with Mule Variations and Bone Machine finding their way in every now and again.

But that was a long time ago. It had been several years since I listened to any of those albums straight through. So before I wrote this piece with the intention of ranking these albums, I decided to run through all of them consecutively -- both to refresh my memory and to analyze them with perspective. And I am truly shocked at how well every damn one of these things (except one) holds up. I found that ranking these albums was damn near impossible. We're talking about 10 albums, and it's no exaggeration to say that nine of these things are 4.5-star albums or better. There's not a hair's-width of difference between my favorite and the ones that land fifth, sixth and seventh. Wow, that was tough. And I'm still not happy to have to rate a couple or three of these things so low, but I don't have a clue what to drop down to slot them any higher.

Tom Waits: The only thing real is the music (the Asylum years)

With longtime friend and frequent collaborator Bette Midler

The Tom Waits story is a difficult one for anybody to tell. We don't know much at all about who the guy is as a person because he guards his privacy like it's gold.

In the half-century since Waits emerged from the fertile Southern California music scene with his unique style of jazzy folk, he has rarely done interviews with reporters, never with any biographer. He is well-known for pleading with friends and family to zip it up whenever a potential biographer comes calling. He's never, as far as I know, granted an interview with anyone as musician/actor/writer Tom Waits -- it's always been as offbeat, alternative-reality "Tom Waits." 

Tom Waits found his way home with Rain Dogs

Tom Waits got a lot of mileage out of his persona as down-on-his-luck boozy lounge lizard. It carried him for about a decade and through several pretty good albums a long time ago.

I found that stuff interesting for the most part. I was a fan of a couple of those early albums and was happily entertained at a 1982 show in a small concert hall in Houston when Waits was part of a three-piece cocktail-jazz band.