Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits

by Barney Hoskyns

As vital as this early immersion in black music was, it was offset by the influence of rock’s first great poet. Bob Dylan’s dense lyrics were a gateway for any aspiring singer-songwriter growing up in the early 1960s folk era, and Waits got the Dylan bug bad, plastering his bedroom walls with transcriptions of his songs. The complex chains of images in such masterpieces as Highway 61 Revisited’s epic “Desolation Row” would influence Waits for years to come. As seminal as seeing James Brown in Balboa Park was the Dylan show Waits saw two years later, on 4 December 1964. Held in the Peterson Gymnasium at San Diego State University, the concert set Waits reeling. “Here’s a guy like Dylan on stage with a stool and a glass of water, and he comes out and tells these great stories in his songs,” he recalled of the gig. “It helped unlock the mystery of performance.” Four years away from writing his first song, the fifteen-year-old Waits was