Tom Waits is an intriguing subject for a biography. Also a reluctant one, as Barney Hoskyns discovered to his cost when writing this book. Never mind getting an interview with Waits himself. Even the author's requests to speak to friends and colleagues of Waits were blanked by almost everyone who still had any contact with this remarkable but shadowy performer. The stonewalling, which was clearly orchestrated by Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan, reached such a pitch that Hoskyns eventually found himself questioning his own right to proceed with this book about the singer, songwriter and part-time actor whom he believes to be "as important an American artist as anyone the twentieth century had produced".
Hoskyns is not one of those writers who goes looking for a fight. Quite the reverse. He is a diligent, unobtrusive weaver of historical narrative and a confirmed footnote addict. The very first sentence in the book ends with one of those pesky asterisks directing you to the bottom of the page, and there are long stretches where the flow of the narrative is subject to interruption by a steady stream of explanations, interjections and afterthoughts.
But above all Hoskyns is a music fan, and like so many other professional taste-makers has found himself beguiled for many years by the Waits voodoo. As he points out, with the slightly peeved air of one of those who was a supporter from the beginning, Waits has now become "as much of a sacred cow on the world stage as Bob Dylan" - so much so that "you could count the negative reviews of [his] recent albums on two hands". But despite having been rudely debarred from the Waits/Brennan "circle of trust", Hoskyns sketches a portrait of the artist that is sympathetic to a fault.
That still doesn't stop Waits from walking through the pages of the book like an unexploded bomb. Journalists and photographers may love his music and rough-hewn, beat-poet style, but they have also learned to beware his short temper and sudden mood changes. When he lived for a while in New York one of the few features of the city that appealed to him was the social acceptability of public expressions of rage or, as he put it, "being able to confront people without feeling conspicuous". After Ralph Carney, who played saxophone in his band for 15 years, had the temerity to complain about being dropped from the line-up, he was telephoned by Waits who explained his decision in such forthright terms that Carney remembers only that "It was such a heavy call that I kind of blocked it out".
It is hardly surprising that Waits guards his privacy. But is he guarding something more? His former manager, Herb Cohen, always urged his acts to lie about their private lives. "Who cares what the truth is?" he would tell Waits. "Feed the writers stuff that'll make the records sell." To what extent Waits took this advice to heart is a question to which Hoskyns keeps returning throughout the course of his lengthy investigation and appreciation of Waits's life and work.
The son of two teachers, Waits spent an unremarkable childhood in the humdrum Los Angeles suburb of Whittier. His parents' divorce when he was 10 and his father Frank's developing alcoholism doubtless provided grist for the creative mill, but it was not an obvious preparation for a life on Skid Row, or some showbiz approximation thereof. Even so, if the boozed-up, bohemian barfly role that Waits invented for himself as a performer was an elaborate act, it was one which he maintained and immersed himself in long after he had left the stage. By the time of his fourth album, Small Change, released in 1976, Waits had taken up residence in a $9-a-night motel called the Tropicana in which he occupied a two-room apartment that was "ankle-deep in albums and ashtrays, books and beer cans". When Waits went on the road with Ry Cooder around this time, Cooder was astonished to note that, while the rest of the band stayed in decent hotels, Waits insisted on staying only in "flophouse hotels".
By the time he reached 30, the method approach had taken its toll and Waits was on the way to being an alcoholic himself. "Drinking and smoking and staying out all night long ... it wasn't good for me," he said. "I knew that I wanted to change but I didn't really know how to do it." Enter Kathleen Brennan, whose influence on the subsequent development of Waits's music and career could not have been more crucial. As well as becoming his wife and the mother of his three children, she took control of his business affairs, became his co-songwriter and co-producer and persuaded him to stop drinking. It is the absence of her voice from the narrative that is the greatest shortcoming of this book, although Hoskyns does his best to compensate with some inspired speculation. "Kathleen urged her husband to push his polarities - to widen the gap between beautiful and ugly, tender and abrasive, melodic and dissonant. Music, she said, should reflect the fact that life can be strange and grotesque."
With contributions from the main players thin on the ground, Hoskyns focuses considerable attention on the actual music, and some of the best passages in the book are his descriptions of the songs and, particularly, some of the ever-more outlandish sounds on the various albums. On the song "Shore Leave" the arrangement comprises "multiple Feldman marimbas; Franny Thumm's metal aunglongs; Aldcroft's trombone sounding like a rubbed balloon; Tackett's no-wave guitar (played with a car key) and a banjo that sounded like busted bedsprings; plus the chair being dragged - in tune - along the studio floor ... What we heard was not music as such, but what the character himself heard in this nightmare version of Hong Kong."
And of course the quotes from Waits himself, many of them from interviews with the author from years ago, are always well turned. "I would rather be a failure on my own terms than a success on someone else's," he declared soon after he had been dropped by his first record label in 1983. As it turns out, he has become and remains a worldwide success very much on his own terms.
The story ends with Hoskyns standing forlornly in the rain outside the stage door of the Edinburgh Playhouse hoping to catch a glimpse of Waits after one of his shows there last year. "Surely it's only a matter of time before I clap eyes on Waits himself - and even, for the first time, on Kathleen ..." he muses. But Waits, it transpires, has already left the building.
David Sinclair's Wannabe: The Spice Girls Revisited is published by Omnibus. To order Lowside of the Road for £18 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846.
