Tom Waits: A real artist juxtaposes innocence with sleaze, beauty with repulsiveness. A real artist doesn't stick around the same watering hole for too long.
"I don't keep good records," he says. "I don't have a vault where everything's organized, so sometimes I lose stuff. If I'm not careful, the stuff that never had a home winds up in a drawer in a pizza box with hair oil and playing cards. Then I find it again and I feel like I'm seeing it for the first time."
Some of the songs-he can't remember exactly which ones-came from a fan in Russia.
"I paid the guy some money and he sent me a bunch of tapes," Waits says. "I don't know how people get a hold of this stuff. You have an engineer who was there when you recorded this and that, and he makes a copy and sends it to a taxidermist, and then he sends it to his brother who's a motorcycle repair guy, and then I dunno, before long your stuff is all over the place."
Harp magazine, December 2006. Telephone interview by Mark Kemp
Tom at The Fair
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