(Chicago Review Press)

www.chicagoreviewpress.com

BY FRED MILLS

For a long time Tom Waits fans were ill-served by book publishers, with Patrick Humphries' slim 1989 bio, Small Change, pretty much their only option. But in the wake of Waits' post-Bone Machine early ‘90s renaissance the presses gradually roared to life, and since then we've seen a number of Waits-related tomes including those by Jay S. Jacobs (Wild Years) and Barney Hoskyns (the near-definitive Lowside of the Road) plus Humphries' own vastly expanded treatment, Many Lives of Tom Waits.

There was also a 2005 anthology of critical writings, Innocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader, featuring interviews, essays and reviews spanning Waits' career up to 2004. It's still in print, which is why the publication of Interviews and Encounters may seem curious. Not only is the essential structure similar to IWYD, with both books broken up into sections corresponding with Waits' early, middle and recent years, there are several duplications-among them, a 1974 Waits-penned press release for The Heart of Saturday Night, a classic early profile from '75 by Todd Everett and not one but two interviews (1999, 2004) by Magnet's Jonathan Valania (nice payday, eh Jon?).

Still, Waits is Waits, which is to say an endlessly entertaining musical personality whose ability to shadow-box with journalists never fails to provide great copy. Interviews and Encounters has plenty of unique material, of course, with editor Paul Maher Jr.'s selections both juicy and judicious including radio interviews, a transcription of a rare 1983 Island Records Swordfishtrombones promo LP featuring Waits' song-by-song commentary, and several free-wheeling Q&As originally published circa 2006's Orphans.


Maher also stitches together the sections of his book with connective narrative, filling in details not mentioned in the reprinted stories and thereby supplying a fuller context than the earlier volume attempted; a 10-page index is helpful, too. On balance, then, you could do far worse than to add this to your Waits bookshelf-let's have an expanded version circa 2021.