Tom Waits on songs and songwriters | Far Out Magazine

Tom Waits picked his 20 favourite albums of all time

FAROUT Magazine 2023

 "For a songwriter, Dylan is as essential as a hammer and nails and a saw are to a carpenter. I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in – so the bootlegs I obtained in the sixties and seventies, where the noise and grit of the tapes became inseparable from the music, are essential to me.” 

Tom Waits

Tom Waits’ 20 favourite albums:

In the Wee Small Hours – Frank Sinatra

Solo Monk – Thelonious Monk

Trout Mask Replica – Captain Beefheart 

Exile On Main Street – The Rolling Stones

The Sinking of the Titanic – Gavin Bryers

The Basement Tapes – Bob Dylan

Lounge Lizards – Lounge Lizards

Rum Sodomy and the Lash – The Pogues

I’m Your Man – Leonard Cohen

The Specialty Sessions – Little Richard

Startime – James Brown

Bohemian-Moravian Bands – Texas-Czech

The Yellow Shark – Frank Zappa

Passion for Opera Aria

Rant in E Minor – Bill Hicks

Prison Songs: Murderous Home – Alan Lomax Collection

Cubanos Postizos – Marc Ribot

Houndog – Houndog

Purple Onion – Les Claypool

The Delivery Man – Elvis Costello

"Being inspired by Bob Dylan and The Beat Generation, Waits would later move to Los Angeles, where he signed his first recording contract with Asylum Records. The development of Waits’ sound would gradually move closer to rock, blues and experimental genres, so it was clear that he would cite Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart as an album that had a significant impact on his life.

“The roughest diamond in the mine, his musical inventions are made of bone and mud,” Waits said of Beefheart’s album. “Enter the strange matrix of his mind and lose yours. This is indispensable for the serious listener. An expedition into the centre of the earth, this is the high jump record that’ll never be beat, it’s a merlot reduction sauce. He takes da bait. Dante doing the buck and wing at a Skip James suku jump. Drink once and thirst no more.” 

Lee Thomas@LeeThomasFO

Tue 31 October 2023 15:56, UK 

I have eight of these amongst the collection down in the vaults (down past the dungeon and turn right by the Ha-ha) Despite my tutor at Art School being on his list I have to disagree with Lee here as "perfectly balanced” “neatly constructed”  a list as its possible to get? 

Nope it is ODD!

 Marc Ribot? Les Claypool? Lounge Lizards? ( I own this one but top twenty in anyone’s collection? I think not?! 

Despite the mention of Dylan being as indispensable as "a hammer and nails" - the Basement Tapes? Odd and perverse choice I thought . . . . .

How about you? Discuss . . . .aaaaaand GO!

Gavin Bryars - Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (feat. Tom Waits)

Bob Dylan - I Shall Be Free no.10 (destined for the scrap heap says Jack Whatley) | FAR OUT MAGAZINE

Now I awoke this morning with the refrain going through my head of 

“I set my monkey on a log and ordered him to do the dog, he wagged his tail and shook his head and turned and did the cat instead . . . he ’s a weird monkey, pretty funky!” 

and of course in the moments as I emerged from sleep I struggled to place precisely which Dylan song it actually was so googled it and of course found it from Another Side of Bob Dylan as ‘I Shall Be Free No.10’ and in googling found the article from Far Out Magazine that puts forward the thesis that there are Bob Dylan songs that should never have seen the light of day and indeed should be consigned to the dustbin heap of time! 

Such a humourless po-faced piece as this belongs of course with the book burners and fascists who would ban the written word in whatever form and censor for censorship’s sake! Now I grant you I too struggled when first I bought my [vinyl] 'Under a Red Sky’ album from the bargain bins discovering Wiggle Wiggle Wiggle which I quote quite often (sic!) and yet . . . . .somehow I would rather it existed than not! I certainly think the early humorous songs of our Bobby deserve better treatment and this peculiarly humourless article is so severely lacking in depth and study it is almost laughable (sic!)

 This song is in a strong tradition from the left wing of nonsense songs and silly ditties that goes back to vaudeville and an even stronger tradition of Jewish humour dare I say it!

Wherefore Pete Seeger’s execrable 'Little Boxes' with it’s sophomoric wit? Why Woody was known to sport a humorous ditty or two and it is a a strong tradition! Wash-y Wash Wash (Warshy Little Tootsy anyone? Riding in My Car? Presumably Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream doesn’t deserve the same derision? (sic?)

read an academic paper on Bob’s 115th dream here https://www.exhibit.xavier.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=library_prize

Bob Dylan - I Shall Be Free no.10

The Bob Dylan lyrics that deserve to be deleted from history: “I set my monkey on the log”

Jack Whatley@JackWhatley89

Thu 23 April 2026 15:06, UK

"It’s hard to talk about lyrics and the very art of poetic pop musings without dangling our fingers over Bob Dylan, one of the most accomplished lyricists of his day. But he also had a stinker or two. 

Trying to find the worst lyric of your everyday artist is usually something enjoyable to do. Despite our best intentions, as humans, we enjoy revelling in the worst parts of the creative spectrum just as much as we do celebrating the finest.

In fact, there’s a good argument – one found in the collection of algorithms located within our pockets – that diving into the unpleasant waters of our favourite artists can cleanse us as neatly as bathing in their more beautiful work. However, things get a little tricky when the artist in question is Bob Dylan.

At this point, it seems a little redundant to speak on the huge impact Dylan had on lyric writing as a whole. The troubadour was a convenient spark for the counter-cultural revolution who was able to carry the burning embers of poetry into the pop world and create a collection of folk songs that would soon transcend their homestead in the smoky coffeehouses of Greenwich Village, New York, to become worldwide hits that would inspire not just contemporaries like The Beatles, Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell but pretty much every artist you love today, too.

Few pop singers have been awarded a Nobel Prize for literature for their magnetic songs and 

Dylan’s position as perhaps the greatest lyricist of all time is guaranteed because of this. He has delivered over 600 songs in his time as one of the icons of the music world, and his hefty back catalogue also netted him $300million when he sold it to Columbia recently. But with every expanse of work like Dylan’s, there is undoubtedly a spectrum of quality to dive into.

That’s the strange paradox of someone like Dylan. The higher the pedestal, the more noticeable the cracks become. When an artist spends so much of their career redefining what lyrics can achieve, even the smallest misstep feels magnified. It’s not just about a bad line here or there, it’s about how those lines sit alongside some of the most revered writing in popular music, creating a contrast that’s almost impossible to ignore.

At the same time, those weaker moments offer a glimpse into the sheer volume and freedom of his output. Dylan was never the kind of writer to self-censor into silence, and that willingness to follow an idea wherever it led is part of what made him so vital in the first place. Not every experiment was going to land, but without that openness, the brilliance wouldn’t have existed either, leaving behind a catalogue that feels as human as it does legendary."

read on here . . .

“I got a million friends"

5 Easy Captain Beefheart Masterpieces - Far Out magazine

5 Easy Captain Beefheart Masterpieces - Far Out magazine

Callum MacHattie

Sat 20 December 2025 22:00, UK

This is really interesting and not what I expected an interesting choice . . . . he’s wrong obvs! but it is interesting!

I normally am rather critical of Far Out Magazine but . . read on

Floppy Boot Stomp - Voodoo Wagon | “Fantastically overlooked”: David Gilmour picks Pink Floyd’s most underrated song

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/pink-floyd-song-david.../

David Gilmour - Fat Old Sun

Jeff Beck on Volume!

 

 During his final years, Jeff Beck was on a mission to teach proper volume techniques. The legendary guitarist had his fill with massive ear-shattering volumes, which he used willingly and joyfully during his time with The Yardbirds and in his initial solo career. But as he aged, Beck became more interested in refining his technique and finding the perfect sound. It was then that he came to a revelation: you can still fill up a room without actually having to crank up amplifiers.

“By using the P.A. to act in the way it was designed – which is play at low level and use all the distortion and whatever else you need, but make sure you don’t come out louder than the side-fill monitors or the front wedges – you can blow the house down, and I’ve done it,” Beck told Guitar Player in 2010.

“I’ve done a whole tour with a Fender Twin when Stevie Ray Vaughan was going through about four billion watts with a rig that looked like an amp shop,” he added. “He asked me, ‘What the hell are you using? Are your amps under the stage?’ I said, ‘Nope, that’s it right there.’ [Laughs.] But we spent quite a lot of time dialing in the sound and getting rid of the squeaks and squeals. We’d raise the level and then tweak it a little bit, and then we’d raise it a little more. You can’t believe what you can get out of a little tenor 20-watt amp.”

“I played with this powerful band that had 18 pieces, and I thought I’d need a Marshall for it, but I didn’t; I needed a Pignose,” Beck observed. “Even though the trumpets and the horns were blasting away, the difference in character of the guitar with that concentrated trebly sound just cut right through.“

Don's Tunes

Tyler Golsen / Far Out 

Photographer Robert Knight

When Lou Reed picked out “the single most untalented” person in rock ‘n’ roll | FAR OUT MAGAZINE |

🔴 WHEN LOU REED PICKED OUT "THE SINGLE MOST UNTALENTED" PERSON IN ROCK & ROLL

MUSIC » FROM THE VAULT

Lou Reed once delivered a requiem for his dearly beloved lost pet and ended up calling it a fish-stinking purring sycophant that by rights should’ve taken all of its nine lives anyway… probably. The Velvet Underground man was about as cuddly as a cactus and as complimentary as a compilation of X-Factor first-round exits. 

However, like the seeming undignified absurdity of a colonic, there was method to his verbal flow of scathing scatological slander. 

One of music’s true iconoclasts, he found himself an industry outsider from the get-go after the magnificent, rule-book rewriting, Velvet Underground only peaked at 171 in the charts. This outsider status seemed to suit him all the same, so he set up shop as a pariah of mainstream society and sat on the outskirts of culture hurling abuse at those he felt were wandering behind the advancing avant-garde.

Thus, it was perhaps his most curious castigation when he took aim at a fellow freak from the demimonde and rendered him worse than shit in a storm of cutting abuse. When asked for his opinion on fellow artists in 1973, he hurled a hatchet at the head of Frank Zappa and opined: “He’s probably the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life.”

Not content with simply slandering him with such an outlandish criticism, Reed went on to add substance to his scathing slant: “He’s two-bit, pretentious, academic, and he can’t play his way out of anything. He can’t play rock ‘n’ roll because he’s a loser. And that’s why he dresses up funny. He’s not happy with himself and I think he’s right.”

Despite this, the pair were cut from a similar cloth. When the world zigged, Frank Zappa zagged. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to call his brand of contrarianism the same type of iconoclastic behaviour we have come to expect from many rock stars, simply because it always seemed more off the wall and leftfield than merely saying ‘I don’t like The Beatles’. This is perhaps the reason he was once Reed’s latest target.

In fact, both artists were so far ahead of their time in bracing subjects seemingly beyond the pale that they flopped until sensibilities caught up with them, resurrecting the New York band from the ash heap of history and catapulting Zappa as a guitar God who represented the ironic face of liberation. Thus, Zappa and Velvet Underground represented the proverbial immovable object and unstoppable force when it came to bitter bickering.

The acrimonious spat apparently began when The Velvet Underground were playing on Zappa’s west coast patch in Los Angeles in 1966 as part of Andy Warhol’s art collective, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The story goes that Zappa made a sarcastic comment about the artistic band and their creative coterie of Factory stars that filtered through in the underground music scene. This jibe was only exacerbated further because both acts were signed to MGM, and Zappa, as the main rival alternative act, was receiving way more promotion.

In response, Lou Reed announced long before his magazine column quotes above: “Frank Zappa is the most untalented musician I’ve ever heard.” Later adding, “He can’t play rock ‘n’ roll because he’s a loser.” To which VU guitarist Sterling Morrison added: “If you told Frank Zappa to eat shit in public, he’d do it if it sold records. I would do it if I liked to.”

As Zappa’s Mothers of Invention bandmate Jimmy Carl Black once said, “I don’t remember Zappa actually putting them down on stage, but he might have. He really disliked the band. For what reasons I really don’t know, except that they were junkies and Frank just couldn’t tolerate any kind of drugs. I know that I didn’t feel that way and neither did the rest of the Mothers. I thought that they were very good, especially Nico (whom I secretly fell in love with or was it lust?).”

Continuing: “I especially thought that Moe was a very good drummer because in those days I don’t recall there being any other female drummers on the scene. The thinking of the audiences was completely different than those from New York City. They were lukewarmly received.”

Eventually the hatchet once hurled would well and truly rest underground as Reed would go on to posthumously induct Frank Zappa into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, so it would seem that attitudes changed in the years that followed the bitter feud, but ex-Velvet Underground multi-instrumentalist, John Cale, was still a little less willing to give up the ghost. In 1994 Cale stated, “[Zappa] isn’t really interested in music… he’s using music for animation.”

As for Zappa, he also seemed to warm to Lou Reed and Co., playing tracks by the group in guest radio DJ sets and dubbing them as a truly “authentic” band. In the end, it would seem that his gripe was more related to the heroin chic scene that surrounded Andy Warhol than the band themselves. And Reed responded in kind, as only he knew how. In short, it was simply in their nature to butt heads, it’s just that this battle was a bit like Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Double when two opposing, yet identical forces went to war.

Tom Taylor

Songs in detail | THE BAND : THE WEIGHT by Aimee Ferrier / Far Out Magazine

Despite the popularity of The Band‘s signature song ‘The Weight’, it actually only charted at number 63 in the United States. Yet, these days, the track is recognised as one of the most iconic recordings of the 1960s, often celebrated as one of the best songs of the decade.

‘The Weight’ appeared on The Band’s 1968 debut album, Music from Big Pink, and uses a storytelling structure to depict the travels of a man through Nazareth, Pennsylvania. The song is rich with biblical language, with the first verse mirroring Mary and Joseph’s attempt to find a place to stay before the birth of Jesus.

As the track progresses, with both Levon Helm and Rock Danko alternating between lead vocals, the listener is introduced to a collection of unique characters, all inspired by people Robbie Robertson had met in real life. These bizarre figures give the song its unique charm, with Helm explaining the backstory in his autobiography, This Wheel’s On Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of The Band.

He wrote: “The song was full of our favourite characters. ‘Luke’ was Jimmy Ray Paulman. ‘Young Anna Lee’ was Anna Lee Williams from Turkey Scratch. ‘Crazy Chester’ was a guy we all knew from Fayetteville who came into town on Saturdays wearing a full set of cap guns on his hips and kinda walked around town to help keep the peace, if you follow me.”

Helm added: “We recorded the song maybe four times. We weren’t really sure it was going to be on the album, but people really liked it. Rick, Richard, and I would switch the verses around among us, and we all sang the chorus: Put the load right on me!”

The song is credited to Robertson, although Helm argues that the other members of The Band contributed a significant chunk of the lyrics. However, the song’s beginnings can be traced back to Robertson, who started writing it while jamming on his guitar. He noticed that the inside of his instrument contained a manufacturing label stating that it was made in Nazareth. From there, he began penning lyrics with the place in mind, drawing from various cinematic influences. 

While living at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, Robertson became acquainted with Gotham Book Mart, where he would read film scripts. “The bookshop was a dusty, funky place owned by Fanny Steloff that sold used and new books,” he explained in an interview. “After looking around, I found that the store also stocked movie scripts. I loved film, and had long wondered how plot elements in a film fit together. These scripts were like blueprints”.

Alongside Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Robertson was also enamoured by the work of Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel, best known for directing films such as Un Chien Andalou and Belle de Jour. “Luis Buñuel’s scripts for Nazarín and Viridiana, which examine the impossibility of sainthood, also captivated me,” he said. Thus, seeing the word ‘Nazareth’ inside his guitar “unlocked a lot of stuff in my head from Nazarin and those other film scripts”.

Robertson once explained in detail how Buñuel’s films connected with ‘The Weight’, stating: “People trying to be good in Viridiana and Nazarín, people trying to do their thing. In ‘The Weight’, it’s the same thing. People like Buñuel would make films that had these religious connotations to them, but it wasn’t necessarily a religious meaning. In Buñuel, there were these people trying to be good and it’s impossible to be good.”

He continued: “In ‘The Weight’ it was this very simple thing. Someone says, ‘Listen, would you do me this favour? When you get there will you say ‘hello’ to somebody or will you give somebody this or will you pick up one of these for me? Oh? You’re going to Nazareth, that’s where the Martin guitar factory is. Do me a favour when you’re there.’ This is what it’s all about. So the guy goes and one thing leads to another and it’s like ‘Holy shit, what’s this turned into? I’ve only come here to say ‘hello’ for somebody and I’ve got myself in this incredible predicament.’ It was very Buñuelish to me at the time.” 

- Aimee Ferrier / Far Out

Photo: Barrie Wentzell

STEPHEN KING Picks his favourite Songs of all time | FAR OUT MAGAZINE!

photo Shane Leonard

 Stephen King’s favourite songs:

• ‘Stiff Upper Lip’ – AC/DC
• ‘At the Hop’ – Danny and the Juniors
• ‘Pink Houses’ – John Cougar Mellencamp
• ‘The New Girl in School’ – Jan and Dean
• ‘Dance Little Sister’ – Rolling Stones
• ‘That’s the Way I Like It’ – KC & the Sunshine Band
• ‘Dirty Water’ – The Standells
• ‘Louie Louie’ – The Kingsmen
• ‘It Came Out of the Sky’ – Creedence Clearwater Revival
• ‘Secret Agent Man’ – Johnny Rivers
• ‘Anarchy In the UK’ – Sex Pistols
• ‘Needles and Pins’ – The Searchers
• ‘S.O.B.’ – Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats
• ‘My Sharona’ – The Knack
• ‘Worries’ – Langhorne Slim
• ‘Fast Girl’ – The Tractors
• ‘Beautiful Wreck’ – Shawn Mullins
• ‘Wild Weekend’ – The Rockin’ Rebels
• ‘Mrs. McKenzie’ – Janis Ian
• ‘Step It Up & Go’ – Alvin “Youngblood” Hart & Teenie Hodges
• ‘Shake’ – Sam Cooke
• ‘Stars on the Water’ – Rodney Crowell
• ‘Carlene’ – Phil Vassar
• ‘I Shot Your Dog’ – Fred Eaglesmith
• ‘Seeds’ – Bruce Springsteen
• ‘Ramrod’ – Bruce Springsteen
• ‘Galveston Flood’ – Tom Rush
• ‘1952 Vincent Black Lightning’ – Richard Thompson
• ‘Can Your Pussy Do The Dog’ – The Cramps
• ‘Bayou Tortous’ – James McMurtry
• ‘Baby Come Back To Me’ – The Manhattan Transfer
• ‘Diamond Shoes’ – Tift Merritt
• ‘Manifesto No. 1’ – Shooter Jennings
• ‘She Loves You’ – The Beatles
• ‘Desolation Row’ – Bob Dylan
• ‘Choctaw Bingo’ – James McMurtry
• ‘Middle of the Road’ – Pretenders
• ‘Barrier Reef’ – Old 97’s
• ‘Pon De Replay’ – Rihanna
• ‘When The Stars Go Blue’ – Ryan Adams

Truly extraordinary!

Did this list make you re-think what you thought of King? It kind of did me but it reaffirmed my sense of admiration too! Truly!

Raised a smile and scratch my head and some are yet beyond me (still!) . . . . . . .

From Far Out Magazine - check also his list of songs listed in his books here