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Alex Harvey on Tom Waits’s wild LA years: During the first, formative decade of his career, when he was largely based in Los Angeles, Tom Waits mined a rich seam of the city’s lowlife locations and noir associations. Right from the outset, Waits liked to mix the domestic with the mythic, turning his own quotidian details into something far darker and more emblematic. Waits’s famed residency at the Tropicana Motor Hotel managed to combine both these impulses. “There is a kidney shaped swimming pool in the courtyard,” William Burroughs wrote in Rolling Stone in 1980. “On the patio are rusty metal tables, deck chairs, palms and banana trees: a rundown Raymond Chandler set from the 1950’s. One expects to find a dead man floating in the pool one morning.” Click here to read the whole thing.

Alex Harvey on Tom Waits’s wild LA years:

During the first, formative decade of his career, when he was largely based in Los Angeles, Tom Waits mined a rich seam of the city’s lowlife locations and noir associations. Right from the outset, Waits liked to mix the domestic with the mythic, turning his own quotidian details into something far darker and more emblematic. Waits’s famed residency at the Tropicana Motor Hotel managed to combine both these impulses. “There is a kidney shaped swimming pool in the courtyard,” William Burroughs wrote in Rolling Stone in 1980. “On the patio are rusty metal tables, deck chairs, palms and banana trees: a rundown Raymond Chandler set from the 1950’s. One expects to find a dead man floating in the pool one morning.”

Click here to read the whole thing.

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    Alex Harvey on Tom Waits’s wild LA years. Click here to read the whole article.
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