The Louche Life
Tom Waits
Sightings of Tom Waits were a curiously shared experience, a talking point among night owls like me in early 1970s LA. We might see him shuffling through West Hollywood, east of Beverly Hills and south of the Sunset Strip. But from a drive-by glimpse in the tenebrous light before dawn, he looked like some hapless dude in a slept-in suit, navigating the sidewalk to oblivion within a wedge of corridors that converged at Melrose and Doheny.
Using parking meters as walking sticks
With my eyelids propped open at half mast
He was probably traipsing home from wherever he’d spent the night informing his latest stanza, ready to crash until two in the afternoon like any self-disrespecting songwriter. Or he may have been headed to Duke’s, a greasy spoon tucked into the side of the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard, where he was holed up for a good long time and became its most legendary denizen.
The Tropicana itself was a legendary hole. For musicians, the vibe was Laurel Canyon with maid service and a pool. For New Yorkers, think Chelsea Hotel with parking spaces. There were palm trees, but rats lived in them. Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax owned the place. It was inhabited by a motley menagerie of nocturnal transients, rock-n-rollers on a rite of passage through Purgatory, waiting for a record deal…
