Gravel, timing and an Australian night
Tom Waits on Australia’s Don Lane Show in 1979, in the wake of Blue Valentine, is charm disguised as wreckage. The gravel voice does half the work; the timing does the rest. He is still the nocturnal songwriter of the Asylum years, before the island of Swordfishtrombones would break the piano-bar frame for good. Between the dry jokes and the cult-following small talk, you hear a man protecting his weather: funny, unwilling to become neat, and already writing from a room the television set cannot quite enter.
