Don Lane Show, 1979: Blue Valentine season
Tom Waits on Australia’s Don Lane Show in 1979, in the wake of Blue Valentine, is charm wearing wreckage as costume. The gravel voice does half the work; the timing does the rest. He is still the nocturnal songwriter of the Asylum years, before Swordfishtrombones would break the piano-bar frame for good. Between dry jokes and 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.
