I really became a character in my own story. This is the high watermark of Waits’s self-mythologizing Los Angeles legend, the time he deliberately set about living the life his songs described.
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The song showcases one of Waits’s fondest early personas, that of the buttonholing boozer, bending your ear with ever more outlandish stories, and has the extended subtitle “Sharing a curbstone with Chuck E.Weiss, Robert Marchese, Paul Brody and the Mug and Artie.” also received a Waits tribute in the track “Jitterbug Boy” (from Small Change, 1976). Made famous by Waits’s one-time girlfriend Rickie Lee Jones’s serenade, Chuck E. Weiss, a good time guy originally from Denver who loved his drugs and tall tales. Waits’s main sidekick and conspirator was Chuck E.
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Waits had formed a small bohemian circle, which moved from the Tropicana to sober up over coffee at Duke’s and spent their nights at the Troubadour. Barney Hoskyns, in his excellent biography, Lowside of The Road, quotes a friend of Waits’s, who opened the fridge in search of a beer, and found only “a claw hammer, a small jar of artichoke hearts, an old parking ticket and a can of roof cement.” It even sounds like a line from one of Waits’s spoken-word poems of the time. The ungovernable state of his room became part of the legend. There, half-buried under his stash of records, girlie mags and empties, Waits exhibited a semi-public enactment of his stage persona, a version of the Beat musician in tune with the poetry of the streets. This pleasingly named, deeply unsanitary West Hollywood motel featured as the main location for Paul Morrissey’s film Andy Warhol’s Heat (1972) and was already renowned for its cool sleaze by the time Waits checked into his two-room apartment in 1976. One expects to find a dead man floating in the pool one morning.” “On the patio are rusty metal tables, deck chairs, palms and banana trees: a rundown Raymond Chandler set from the 1950’s. “There is a kidney shaped swimming pool in the courtyard,” William Burroughs wrote in Rolling Stone in 1980. Waits’s famed residency at the Tropicana Motor Hotel managed to combine both these impulses. 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.
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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.