What do you think?
Rate this book
Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles
A gritty, smoke-filled, and boozy account of musician Tom Waits’s formative decade in Los Angeles.
Song Noir examines the formative first decade of Tom Waits’s career, when he lived, wrote, and recorded nine albums in Los Angeles: from his soft, folk-inflected debut, Closing Time in 1973, to the abrasive, surreal Swordfishtrombones in 1983. Starting his songwriting career in the seventies, Waits absorbed Los Angeles’s wealth of cultural influences. Combining the spoken idioms of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski with jazz-blues rhythms, he explored the city’s literary and film noir traditions to create hallucinatory dreamscapes. Waits mined a rich seam of the city’s low-life locations and characters, letting the place feed his dark imagination. Mixing the domestic with the mythic, Waits turned quotidian, autobiographical details into something more disturbing and emblematic, a vision of Los Angeles as the warped, narcotic heart of his nocturnal explorations.
Song Noir examines the formative first decade of Tom Waits’s career, when he lived, wrote, and recorded nine albums in Los Angeles: from his soft, folk-inflected debut, Closing Time in 1973, to the abrasive, surreal Swordfishtrombones in 1983. Starting his songwriting career in the seventies, Waits absorbed Los Angeles’s wealth of cultural influences. Combining the spoken idioms of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski with jazz-blues rhythms, he explored the city’s literary and film noir traditions to create hallucinatory dreamscapes. Waits mined a rich seam of the city’s low-life locations and characters, letting the place feed his dark imagination. Mixing the domestic with the mythic, Waits turned quotidian, autobiographical details into something more disturbing and emblematic, a vision of Los Angeles as the warped, narcotic heart of his nocturnal explorations.
- GenresMusicNonfictionBiography
240 pages, Paperback
First published September 7, 2022
15 people are currently reading
99 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
October 8, 2025
I really enjoyed this. I’m a Waits fan, but not fanatic, and it’s written for people like me. Some of these biographies can be overwritten, as if it’s difficult to leave anything out, but this isn’t. Without the appendices it comes in at about 170 pages.
Here’s a few of the best bits..
..Waits mentions that the great singer Leadbelly 'died the day before I was born. I like to think I passed him in the hall and he banged into me and knocked me over.’
‘I was born at a very young age in the back seat of a yellow cab in the Murphy Hospital parking lot in Whittier, California. It's not easy for a young boy growing up in Whittier. I had to make decisions very early. First thing I did was pay, like a buck eighty-five on the meter. The only job I could land was as a labor organizer on the maternity ward for a while. I got laid off, a little disenchanted with labor.’
Copying his hero (Kerouac), the teenage Waits and a friend, tried to hitchhike out of California to see how far they could go in three days, on a weekend: They ended up stranded in a freezing Arizona small town one New Year's Eve. Broke and hungry, they found themselves ushered into the warmth of a Pentecostal church:
‘They were singing, and they had a tambourine, an electric guitar and a drummer. They were talking in tongues and then they kept gesturing to me and Sam; 'These are our wayfaring strangers here! So, we felt kind of important. And they took up a collection, gave us some money and bought us a hotel room and a meal.’
‘My Dad spent a lot of time in the bars, so I was drawn to places like that - the dark places - my Dad drank in the afternoon... the fact that I hooked into [Bukowski] was because he seemed to be a writer of the common people and street people, looking into the dark corners where no-one seems to want to go - certainly not write about. It seemed like he was the writer for the dispossessed and the people who didn't have a voice.’
..Waits was less interested in Kerouac's religiosity than his melancholy cityscapes, full of the marginal or displaced, and the teeming social life he evoked: 'impressions of America, the roar of the crowd in a bar after work, working for the railroad; living in cheap hotels; jazz'??
To an aspiring songwriter, someone so obsessed with lyrics that he'd pinned Dylan's words onto his bedroom walls, Kerouac showed how vocabulary could be like an instrument; good writing was cool and auditory.
‘Do not follow him
Just take what clues he left and with them, go and build A strange home of your own.’ Waits’s tribute following Captain Beefheart’s death.
Here’s a few of the best bits..
..Waits mentions that the great singer Leadbelly 'died the day before I was born. I like to think I passed him in the hall and he banged into me and knocked me over.’
‘I was born at a very young age in the back seat of a yellow cab in the Murphy Hospital parking lot in Whittier, California. It's not easy for a young boy growing up in Whittier. I had to make decisions very early. First thing I did was pay, like a buck eighty-five on the meter. The only job I could land was as a labor organizer on the maternity ward for a while. I got laid off, a little disenchanted with labor.’
Copying his hero (Kerouac), the teenage Waits and a friend, tried to hitchhike out of California to see how far they could go in three days, on a weekend: They ended up stranded in a freezing Arizona small town one New Year's Eve. Broke and hungry, they found themselves ushered into the warmth of a Pentecostal church:
‘They were singing, and they had a tambourine, an electric guitar and a drummer. They were talking in tongues and then they kept gesturing to me and Sam; 'These are our wayfaring strangers here! So, we felt kind of important. And they took up a collection, gave us some money and bought us a hotel room and a meal.’
‘My Dad spent a lot of time in the bars, so I was drawn to places like that - the dark places - my Dad drank in the afternoon... the fact that I hooked into [Bukowski] was because he seemed to be a writer of the common people and street people, looking into the dark corners where no-one seems to want to go - certainly not write about. It seemed like he was the writer for the dispossessed and the people who didn't have a voice.’
..Waits was less interested in Kerouac's religiosity than his melancholy cityscapes, full of the marginal or displaced, and the teeming social life he evoked: 'impressions of America, the roar of the crowd in a bar after work, working for the railroad; living in cheap hotels; jazz'??
To an aspiring songwriter, someone so obsessed with lyrics that he'd pinned Dylan's words onto his bedroom walls, Kerouac showed how vocabulary could be like an instrument; good writing was cool and auditory.
‘Do not follow him
Just take what clues he left and with them, go and build A strange home of your own.’ Waits’s tribute following Captain Beefheart’s death.
March 3, 2023
SONG NOIR recounts the early years of Tom Waits and how L.A. shaped his path into music and personas. For a book about music, it namechecks a stunning range of literary folks — including Charles Bukowski, Joan Didion, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor, Nelson Algren, and Clifford Odets — plus inky-newsprint figures like the photographer Weegee. That signals that Alex Harvey is tuned in to the storytelling in Waits' work as well as the evolution of his sound, with influences from mariachi to Harry Partch.
In laying out Waits’ story, Harvey, a filmmaker, maps the journey in a compelling way.
Read my full review in Washington Independent Review of Books: https://bit.ly/SongNoir
In laying out Waits’ story, Harvey, a filmmaker, maps the journey in a compelling way.
Read my full review in Washington Independent Review of Books: https://bit.ly/SongNoir
March 29, 2023
Essential reading
I've been following Tom Waits since I first saw him as an opening act at Denver's Ebbet's Field in the late '70s. Nothing to date has even come close to this exceptionally candid overview of his pre-Rain Dogs years. Best yet, nearly all of the significant insider info comes in the form of quotes from Waits' himself. I've read probably all of the books about him but none have been nearly as informative as this one. Gave me a new appreciation for the early releases we've all listened to a zillion times.
I've been following Tom Waits since I first saw him as an opening act at Denver's Ebbet's Field in the late '70s. Nothing to date has even come close to this exceptionally candid overview of his pre-Rain Dogs years. Best yet, nearly all of the significant insider info comes in the form of quotes from Waits' himself. I've read probably all of the books about him but none have been nearly as informative as this one. Gave me a new appreciation for the early releases we've all listened to a zillion times.
October 28, 2023
Not a straight biography and the better for it. Some good insights that could have used a better fact checker (Neal Cassady was the model for Dean Moriarty and not Sal Paradise in “On The Road”) and editor to catch some of the repetitious language.
November 28, 2022
As a longtime Tom Waits fan, I was resigned to the treatment of the musicians early, LA-based, jazzy work like I treat a strong IPA- with awareness but a forced appreciation. Definitely an area of his discography where I would end up finding a few individual songs "not bad" while completely not getting the majority of the album.
However, Harvey's book that focuses on these early Waits years and how they were formed by LA and the crime noir movie genre prominent at the time has made me reconsider these albums. Its not just collection of previous interviews and book excerpts, nor a rehashed review of these albums. What Harvey provides is something much more thoughtful and interesting.
However, Harvey's book that focuses on these early Waits years and how they were formed by LA and the crime noir movie genre prominent at the time has made me reconsider these albums. Its not just collection of previous interviews and book excerpts, nor a rehashed review of these albums. What Harvey provides is something much more thoughtful and interesting.
January 29, 2023
I’ve been a Tom Waits fan for decades. This book chronicles his time in Los Angeles, where he started his career and where he wrote his first nine albums.
The book chronicles how he created the persona of the barfly with a beatnik sensibility and how he outgrew it and realized he could draw from that world without being trapped in it- and how he evolved into the musician who created “Swordfishtrombone,” where he wrote from the point of view of various different people and incorporated homemade and found instruments into his music.
I suspect author Alex Harvey decided to write about the first phase of Waits’ career in part because there are more reference materials available. Other writers have found Waits forbid his sidemen from cooperating with interviewers.
The book chronicles how he created the persona of the barfly with a beatnik sensibility and how he outgrew it and realized he could draw from that world without being trapped in it- and how he evolved into the musician who created “Swordfishtrombone,” where he wrote from the point of view of various different people and incorporated homemade and found instruments into his music.
I suspect author Alex Harvey decided to write about the first phase of Waits’ career in part because there are more reference materials available. Other writers have found Waits forbid his sidemen from cooperating with interviewers.
April 26, 2024
Some character from Waits’ early tunes (take your pick from salesmen in Purina-checkerboard slacks, or Jitterbug boys) must have ok’d this humdrum filler as a practical joke: “Hello, sucker, we like your money…”
Reads like a senior thesis cribbed from Wikipedia and various articles; no real analysis and only superficial allusions to the influences of LA in Waits’ Wild(er) Years.
Some embarrassing typos (including reference to someone carrying a “bleeper” should somone want to page them) and missteps (referring to ‘Big in Japan’ as a track off Rain Dogs) that make this less appealing than a rectal thermometer (if you know you know).
Reads like a senior thesis cribbed from Wikipedia and various articles; no real analysis and only superficial allusions to the influences of LA in Waits’ Wild(er) Years.
Some embarrassing typos (including reference to someone carrying a “bleeper” should somone want to page them) and missteps (referring to ‘Big in Japan’ as a track off Rain Dogs) that make this less appealing than a rectal thermometer (if you know you know).
December 2, 2025
I never was much of a fan of Tom Waits, but I do love music. But what I really like is LA. It seems like Waits is very much a King of LA, in the 70s at least. Very satisfying book with dozens of fabulous quotes capturing an amazing time for both music and the city.
Not an easy book to find, had to search the good old university press system.
Highly recommend.
Not an easy book to find, had to search the good old university press system.
Highly recommend.
December 22, 2022
Mostly reads like the liner notes of a boxset you have to put together yourself. Picks up a little at around 3/4s in when his wife enters the picture and they start discussing Swordfish Trombone.
February 23, 2023
Well written & nicely detailed. You probably have to be a fan to want to read it in the first place but it’s well worth the effort
February 27, 2023
This is a beautifully and compelling written account and does a remarkable job of bringing 1970s LA vividly to life.
December 25, 2023
A nice examination of the early days of this prolific artist. A bit "book report-y" at times, but still a worthwhile book to have and refer to as you enjoy the artists' works.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews