Bio me this
Chris Robinson
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Lowside Of The Road: A Life of Tom Waits by Barney Hoskyns (Broadway) 640 pp
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The Lit Pimp and the biography
While sitting on the toilet skimming through future ass-wipe material called Hello! Canada, I spot a quote from this Monte Carlo billionaire: "I often read books, preferably biographies, so I can learn from other people's mistakes." Now, I wasn't so smitten with the quote itself, but it did make me stop and ask myself a few questions. Why do I read biographies (let alone write them)? Is it a case of "what the heck made you so damn special and not me?" Maybe it's just a sense that there is something you might have in common with the subject?
Having just read biographies of The Carter Family (Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?), Warren Zevon (I'll Sleep When I'm Dead), Pete Townshend (Who Are You?) and Tom Waits (Low Side of the Road), I wonder what exactly is it that I'm trying to learn from these people about the world that I can't, say, learn from my friends or from experience?
The billionaire did have a point about mistakes, but maybe not in the way he intended. I guess I like reading about how troubled and dysfunctional these people could be largely because it gives me hope that if they can succeed, so can I.
Course, how come I never feel better about myself then?
Barney Hoskyns, author of the Tom Waits' biography Low Side of the Road, seems like a guy who gets it. Unable to get Waits' approval to do the biography and foiled time and again in his attempts to interview associates and friends of the reclusive musician, Hoskyns asks, "Why am I writing this
book?" (Appropriately, he has no answer.)Hoskyns, who also wrote a book about Prince, recalls being asked by his purpleness: "'What gives you the right to write a book of conjecture about my life?' I had to think about it. I guess I'm still thinking about it."
Does it matter? What is truth but someone else's guesswork?
According to Waits, "people don't care whether you're telling the truth or not, they just want to be told something they don't already know."
Waits tells one journalist, "Everything is explained now. We live in an age when you say casually to somebody, 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I'd just as soon continue wondering."
Does it help our understanding of the artist or just fuel us up for party chitchat? I can't help but wonder if it's the latter. What will I do with this information (as opposed to knowledge) of The Carter Family, Zevon, Townshend and Waits? Sure, maybe I'll hear one of their songs and remember a related anecdote, but outside of that the information will not add or subtract from my experience/knowledge of the work itself.
Stephen Hodges, a former drummer for Waits' band, seems to sum up the predicament best when he tells Hoskyns: "I mean, how the fuck do you explain Tom Waits?"
You can't explain Waits or any other person for that matter. All we can do is cobble together facts and impressions, approximations.
Hmm... I guess I did learn something after all.
