Zappagram 136: The Ballad of Tom Waits—Seventy-Five Years of Poetic Genius

In this issue: Tom Waits turns 75, Courtney Love calls PJ Harvey "rude," Steve Albini Way, a Patti Smith tribute concert, Billboard fucked up, and much more...

To call Tom Waits a cult figure is to undersell him.

His following isn’t casually devoted, it’s fanatical, and rightly so. Fans don’t merely listen to Waits—they evangelize him. They scrawl his lyrics in notebooks, tattoo his weathered visage on their skin, and trade bootlegs of his performances like sacred relics. To love Tom Waits is to embrace the weird and the eccentric, to revel in the beauty of the wounded. His is the voice of the outsider, the weirdo, the underdog who knows the joke’s on all of us, but he still tells it and gets the laughs anyway.

Waits is a force of poetic contradictions—a crooner of the misfits with a barstool for a pulpit and a junkyard orchestra as a backing band. He’s spent half a century seducing the faithful with music that sounds like it drunk-stumbled out of a dive in search of salvation or damnation and either one would do.

Tom Waits turns seventy-five this week.

Born December 7, 1949, in Pomona, California, Waits was inspired by Bob Dylan and the poe…