Big in Japan, this is a revised and updated biography of America’s greatest living musician. This work includes the most comprehensive Waits discography available in print and a new chapter detailing the legendary artist’s exploits in the 21st century. Legend, Bum, Genius, Con Man, Devoted husband and father, Storyteller, Inspiration, Drunk, Visionary, and The Last Living Beat - Tom Waits is all of these things. He’s old enough to be your dad and cool enough to be your hero. And he is responsible for some of the greatest, most varied and original music to come out of the United States since Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. Waits’ life and career are indivisible. The beauty and strangeness of his music is the fulfilment and loss of his life. Like Johnny Cash, he’s a singer with the rare gift of making the words on his records sound as though he has lived through each and every one of them. And like Beefheart, he inhabits a genre all of his own. A lifeline between the mission of the Beats and the self-destructive honesty of rock ‘n’ roll, Tom Waits has become the voice not only of several generations, but of an entire dispossessed people - a nation of Ginsbergs and Keseys whose birthright has been swallowed by corporate takeovers, jungles of white-collar office cubicles and vacuous pop. Jacobs retraces the long road that Waits has travelled and explores the music that made him a legend, reconstructing the towering myth that he has created for himself along the way. With sections on Waits’ filmography (he has been acclaimed for his appearances in several notable movies, including Domino ; Coffee and Cigarettes ; Short Cuts ; Rumble Fish ; and The Outsiders ), an exhaustive discography and an additional chapter updating his career in the 21st century, Wild Years is the ultimate companion to the work of the last underground hero.
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