Song Noir : Tom Waits and the spirit of Los Angeles / Alex Harvey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Harvey, Alex, 1941-2020, author.

Series:

Reverb series.

Reverb Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rock music--History and criticism.

Rock music.

Rock musicians--Biography.

Rock musicians.

Waits, Tom, 1949-.

Waits, Tom.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (241 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

London, England : Reaktion Books, [2022]

Summary:

A gritty, smoke-filled, and boozy account of musician Tom Waits's formative decade in Los Angeles.Song Noir examines the formative first decade of Tom Waits's career, when he lived, wrote, and recorded nine albums in Los Angeles: from his soft, folk-inflected debut, Closing Time in 1973, to the abrasive, surreal Swordfishtrombones in 1983. Starting his songwriting career in the seventies, Waits absorbed Los Angeles's wealth of cultural influences. Combining the spoken idioms of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski with jazz-blues rhythms, he explored the city's literary and film noir traditions to create hallucinatory dreamscapes. Waits mined a rich seam of the city's low-life locations and characters, letting the place feed his dark imagination. Mixing the domestic with the mythic, Waits turned quotidian, autobiographical details into something more disturbing and emblematic, a vision of Los Angeles as the warped, narcotic heart of his nocturnal explorations.

Contents:

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Introduction: Crawling down Cahuenga

1. Riding with Lady Luck

2. Neon Buzzin'

3. Everything's Broken

4. I'm Never Going Home

5. In the Neighborhood

Conclusion: A Strange Home of Your Own

Chronology

References

Select Bibliography

Select Discography

Acknowledgements

Photo Acknowledgements

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Print version: Harvey, Alex Song Noir

ISBN:

9781789146646