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[He’s got a voice sounding] “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.”
~Daniel Durchholz

“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”
― Tom Waits

“We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness.
We are monkeys with money and guns.”
― Tom Waits

Neil Young inducts Tom Waits into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame:

Clap Hands:

From Wikipedia:

Birth name	Thomas Alan Waits
Born	December 7, 1949 (age 63) Pomona, California,United States
Genres	Rock, experimental
Occupations	Singer-songwriter, musician, actor, composer
Instruments	Vocals, piano, guitar
Years active	1972–present
Labels	Asylum Records, Island Records, ANTI-
Website	Official website

Thomas Alan “Tom” Waits (born December 7, 1949) is an American singer-songwriter, composer, and actor. Waits has a distinctive voice, described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding “like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.” With this trademark growl, his incorporation of pre-rock music styles such as blues, jazz, and vaudeville, and experimental tendencies verging on industrial music, Waits has built up a distinctive musical persona. He has worked as a composer for movies and musical plays and has acted in supporting roles in films including Paradise Alley and Bram Stoker’s Dracula; he also starred in the 1986 film Down by Law. He was nominated for an Academy Award for his soundtrack work on One from the Heart.

16 shells from a thirty-ought-six – live 85:

Lyrically, Waits’ songs frequently present atmospheric portrayals of grotesque, often seedy characters and places—although he has also shown a penchant for more conventional ballads. He has a cult following and has influenced subsequent songwriters despite having little radio or music video support. His songs are best-known through cover versions by more commercial artists: “Jersey Girl”, performed by Bruce Springsteen, “Ol’ ’55”, performed by the Eagles, and “Downtown Train”, performed by Rod Stewart. Although Waits’ albums have met with mixed commercial success in his native United States, they have occasionally achieved gold album sales status in other countries. He has been nominated for a number of major music awards and has won Grammy Awards for two albums, Bone Machine and Mule Variations. In 2011, Waits was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Waits lives in Sonoma County, California with his wife, Kathleen Brennan, and three children.

Alice – Live from Amsterdam 2004:

Album of the day:

Swordfishtrombones (1983)

……. The music can be primitive, moving to odd time signatures, while Waits alternately howls and wheezes in his gravelly bass voice. He seems to have moved on from Hoagy Carmichael and Louis Armstrong to Kurt Weill and Howlin’ Wolf (as impersonated by Captain Beefheart). Waits seems to have had trouble interesting a record label in the album, which was cut 13 months before it was released, but when it appeared, rock critics predictably raved: after all, it sounded weird and it didn’t have a chance of selling. Actually, it did make the bottom of the best-seller charts, like most of Waits’ albums, and now that he was with a label based in Europe, even charted there. Artistically, Swordfishtrombones marked an evolution of which Waits had not seemed capable (though there were hints of this sound on his last two Asylum albums), and in career terms it reinvented him.
~William Ruhlmann (allmusic.com)

Other December 07:

• Gregory LeNoir “Gregg” Allman (born December 8, 1947 in Nashville, Tennessee) is an American rock and blues singer,keyboardist, guitarist and songwriter, and a founding member of The Allman Brothers Band. He was inducted with the band into theRock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in 2006. His distinctive voice placed him in 70th place in the Rolling Stone list of the “100 Greatest Singers of All Time”.
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• Thomas Clark Cogbill, (b. April 8, 1932 – December 7, 1982) and known as Tommy Cogbill was an American bassist, guitarist andrecord producer.Tommy Cogbill was born in Johnson Grove, Tennessee. He was a highly sought-after session and studio musician who appeared on many now-classic recordings of the 1960s and 1970s, especially those recorded in Nashville, Memphis and Muscle Shoals. He has been credited as an influence by bass guitarists, including Jaco Pastorius. In the later 1960s and early 1970s, Cogbill worked extensively at Memphis’s American Sound Studio as a producer and as part of the studio’s house rhythm section, known as The Memphis Boys.
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• Harry Forster Chapin (December 7, 1942 – July 16, 1981) was an American singer-songwriter best known for his folk rock songs including “Taxi”, “W*O*L*D”, and the No. 1 hit “Cat’s in the Cradle”. Chapin was also a dedicated humanitarian who fought to endworld hunger; he was a key player in the creation of the Presidential Commission on World Hunger in 1977. In 1987, Chapin was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his humanitarian work.