Young Master Waits


Tom Waits - Asylum Records - 1973

Los Angeles. August 12, 1973. A 23-year old veteran of the US Coast Guard chats in studio with the husband-and-wife hosts of KPFK‘s FolkScene radio show. He’s been playing out every Monday night at the Troubadour since 1971. His debut album sits fresh on record store shelves, but few will find it. Most folks outside of L.A. won’t even know his name until another year passes. That’s when his Asylum Records label-mates, The Eagles, record a cover of “Ol’ 55.”

About halfway through the chat, Howard Larman asks Tom Waits a simple enough question: Did you always want to be a musician?

Waits answers, “Yeah, I guess so, I couldn’t think of anything else I really wanted to be, seems to be today nobody wants to be anything but, nobody wants to be a baseball player anymore or anything – everybody wants to be a rock & roll star.”

The host keeps asking Waits to play this one song off Closing Time. His favorite, apparently. Eventually, Tom leaves the piano, picks up his guitar, and politely relents …

Tom Waits – “I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You (Live on KPFK, 1973)”
[audio:waits_hopethati_kpfk.mp3]

The original, studio version of “I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You” appears on Closing Time. If you don’t have this album, you should. Without question, it is one of his the best ever.

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