A keen, sensitive and sympathetic chronicler of the adrift and downtrodden, Mr. Waits creates three-dimensional characters who, even in their confusion and despair, are capable of insight and startling points of view.

He repeatedly toured the United States, Europe and Japan, and found greater critical and commercial success with Small Change (1976), Blue Valentine (1978) and Heartattack and Vine (1980).

With Brennan's encouragement and frequent collaboration, he pursued a more eclectic and experimental sound influenced by Harry Partch and Captain Beefheart, as heard on the loose trilogy Swordfishtrombones (1983), Rain Dogs (1985) and Franks Wild Years (1987).

[9] His father, Jesse Frank Waits, was a Texas native of Scots-Irish descent, and his mother, Alma Fern (née Johnson), hailed from Oregon and had Norwegian ancestry.

[26] Waits worked at Napoleone's pizza restaurant in National City, California, and both there and at a local diner developed an interest in the lives of the patrons, writing down phrases and snippets of dialogue he overheard.

[34] As his reputation grew, he played at other San Diego venues, supporting acts like Tim Buckley, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and his friend Jack Tempchin.

In early 1972, after quitting his job at Napoleone's to concentrate on his songwriting career, Waits moved to an apartment in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, a poor neighborhood known for its Hispanic and bohemian communities.

[42] Biographer Barney Hoskyns noted that Closing Time was "broadly in step with the singer-songwriter school of the early 1970s";[43] Waits had wanted to create a piano-led jazz album although Yester had pushed its sound in a more folk-oriented direction.

"[55] Recording sessions for The Heart of Saturday Night took place at Wally Heider's Studio 3 on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood in April and May,[56] with Waits conceptualizing the album as a sequence of songs about U.S.

[70] On his return to Los Angeles, he joined his friend Chuck E. Weiss, moving into the Tropicana motel in West Hollywood, which had an established reputation in rock music circles.

[75] Per Bowman, Small Change "made it clear that Waits had evolved into a master storyteller, reflecting the influence of crime-noir writers such as Dashiell Hammett and John D. MacDonald.

[103] Waits was dissatisfied with Elektra-Asylum, who he felt had lost interest in him as an artist in favor of their more commercially successful acts like the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Carly Simon and Queen.

[104] Jones's musical career was taking off; after an appearance on Saturday Night Live, "Chuck E.'s In Love" reached number 4 in the singles chart, straining her relationship with Waits.

[112] Waits was excited, but conflicted, by the prospect; Coppola wanted him to create music akin to his early work, a genre that he was trying to leave behind, and thus he characterized the project as an artistic "step backwards".

Waits's grumble of a voice now bounces off a peculiar assortment of horns and percussion and organ and keyboards, as if he'd led a Salvation Army band into a broken-down Hong Kong disco.

[160] In 1983, Waits appeared in three more Coppola films: as Benny, a philosopher running a billboard store in Rumble Fish; as Buck Merrill in The Outsiders; and as the maître'd in The Cotton Club.

[174] Arion Berger wrote that "With Rain Dogs, he dropped his bedraggled lounge-piano act and fused outsider influences – socialist decadence by way of Kurt Weill, pre-rock integrity from old dirty blues, the elegiac melancholy of New Orleans funeral brass – into a singularly idiosyncratic American style ...

[259] That year, he appeared in Kinka Usher's comic book spoof Mystery Men as Dr A. Heller, an eccentric inventor living in an abandoned amusement park.

[285] In 2006, he issued Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, a 54-song three-disc box set of rarities, unreleased tracks and new compositions; Waits described its contents as "songs that fell behind the stove while making dinner."

The first disc, Brawlers, consists of raucous rock and blues-based numbers; the second, Bawlers, of melancholic country songs and ballads; the third, Bastards, of stories, spoken word pieces and other works not so easily categorized.

In anticipation of the book release, Waits and ANTI- printed limited edition chapbooks of the poems to raise money for Redwood Empire Food Bank, a homeless referral and family support service in Sonoma County, California.

An outsider artist before the term was in common use, Waits has been enamored, at various points in his career, with the cool of 1940s and 1950s jazz; the 1950s and 1960s word-jazz and poetry of such Beat and Beat-influenced writers as Jack Kerouac, Lord Buckley, and Charles Bukowski; the primal rock & roll crunch of the Rolling Stones; the German cabaret stylings of Kurt Weill; the postwar, alternate world of invented instruments and rugged individualism of avant-garde composer Harry Partch; the proto-metal blues of 1950s and 1960s Howlin' Wolf and their extension into the world of Captain Beefheart's late-1960s avant-rock; the archaic formalism of 19th-century parlor ballads; Dylan's early- and mid-sixties transformation of the possibilities of language in the worlds of both folk and rock; the elegance of pre-war Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Hoagy Carmichael; the sophistication of postwar Frank Sinatra; and, more recently, the bone-crushing grooves of 1980s and 1990s funk and hip-hop.

"[329] Humphries cited him, alongside Newman, Kris Kristofferson and John Prine, as a number of U.S. singers who followed Dylan in breaking away from conventional styles of popular music and singing with their "distinctive" voices.

On Swordfishtrombones, his orchestration included talking drums, bagpipes, banjo, bass marimba and glass harmonica; on Rain Dogs, accordion and harmonium; on Franks Wild Years, glockenspiel, Mellotron, Farfisa and Optigan; on Bone Machine and Mule Variations, the Chamberlin; on The Black Rider, the singing saw; on Alice, the Stroh violin; on Blood Money, a 57-whistle pneumatic calliope and an Indonesian seedpod.

Things that aren't normally considered instruments: dragging a chair across the floor or hitting the side of a locker real hard with a two-by-four, a freedom bell, a brake drum with a major imperfection, a police bullhorn.

"[334] By Blue Valentine, violent death had become a recurrent lyrical theme in his work; he wrote the song "Sweet Little Bullet" from that album, for instance, about a 15-year-old girl who committed suicide by jumping from a high window along the Hollywood Bowl.

"[395][396] He notes that by the end of the twentieth century, "Waits was an iconic alternative figure, not just to the fans who'd grown up with him but to subsequent generations of music geeks",[397] coming to be "universally acknowledged as an elder statesman of 'alternative' rock.

Rain Dogs added extra textures and refinements, laying its (marked) cards on the table with its opening track, "Singapore", a novel contained within two and a half minutes of controlled musical mayhem.

[423][424] The Wire used "Way Down in the Hole" as its opening theme; each season featured a different rendition, including the Blind Boys of Alabama, Waits, the Neville Brothers, DoMaJe and Steve Earle.

The season four rendition was arranged and recorded for the show and is performed by five Baltimore teenagers: Ivan Ashford, Markel Steele, Cameron Brown, Tariq Al-Sabir and Avery Bargasse.