(Broadway)

www.broadwaybooks.com

BY FRED MILLS

Regardless of specialty, biographers of all stripes have had to contend with the fact that sometimes their objects of scrutiny simply don't care to be scrutinized. Nowhere is this truer than in the entertainment industry, where public figures envision a scandal-seeking Kitty Kelley or Albert Goldman lurking behind every interview request. That's the story behind the story of this exhaustive Tom Waits biography by British journalist Barney Hoskyns, a veteran rock critic and cofounder of RocksBackPages.com. In the course of his career (dating back to the punk era), Hoskyns interviewed Tom Waits on several occasions - each time, it's worth noting, under friendly circumstances. To Hoskyns' chagrin, when he decided to do the deeper digging required of a comprehensive biography, he learned that Waits and wife Kathleen Brennan were tacitly stymieing his efforts by letting it be known among friends and associates that if they cooperated with Hoskyns and his inquiries they'd soon find themselves banished from the Waits circle of trust.

Among those who tentatively agreed to talk to Hoskyns then withdrew their involvement after consulting the Waits camp were Keith Richards, longtime Waits guitarist Smokey Hormel, and Waits' old girlfriend, Rickie Lee Jones, whose 2008 email, reproduced in a fascinating appendix in this doorstop-sized/640-page book, went somewhat evasively, "Waits, hmm, what's to say. I am waiting for a book about ME. Let's see if his wife lets me say anything about us, or me... then we'll see." Luckily Hoskyns had plenty of extant source material to sift through - including, presumably, the two prior (and deeply flawed) Waits biographies, Patrick Humphries' Many Lives of Tom Waits and Jay Jacobs' Wild Years - plus interviews he conducted with people willing to talk on the record, notably Waits' producer Bones Howe, saxman Ralph Carney and numerous folks who'd populated the Sunset Strip when Waits was coming to national prominence as the booze-swilling, piano-playing beatnik bard at odds with the cocaine cowboy/singer-songwriter soft-rock SoCal scene of the mid seventies.

Because Waits lived his life - some would call it a "role" - largely in the public eye during that period, the early years are detailed considerably more in-depth than the later ones, after he met and married Brennan and eventually relocated from Hollywood up the coast to the rustic desolation of Petaluma County. Yet Waits' post-wild years (during which, significantly, he stopped drinking) are arguably the more compelling ones, with his musical output including the astonishing Bone Machine (1992) and Mule Variations (1999), an aesthetic transformation that had commenced back in '83 with the hipster-approved (and rightly so) Swordfishtrombones. Cockblocking from Waits and Brennan notwithstanding, Hoskyns is still able to capture each step of Waits' artistic evolution with journalistic sensitivity and gravitas - for example, he helps guide the reader through Waits' often inscrutable immersion in theater (e.g. his and Brennan's collaborations with avant-garde playwright/director Robert Wilson) - and readily conveys what's special (or not) about each album without getting too distracted by the type of critic-speak dissections that frequently cause music bios to bog down.

In the end, Lowside of the Road is that best of biographical breed, a celebration that manages to remain clear-eyed about the subject without ever descending to muckraking (or ascending to hagiography). It has its funny moments, too. In Hoskyns' coda, the author finds himself outside an Edinburgh venue following a Waits concert, asking himself why he's waiting with a brace of Waits fans for a glimpse of the man himself. Alas, they learn too late that he beat them all to the tour bus. "Before I can quite register what's happened," writes Hoskins, "the doors suck shut and the bus pulls away into the damp Edinburgh night." Inside every veteran journalist, it seems, beats the heart of the eternal fan. Don't worry, Tom. We don't bite.