The Louche Life
Tom Waits
Sightings of Tom Waits were a talking point among night owls like me in early 1970s L.A. We’d compare notes if we saw him shuffling through West Hollywood, invariably alone, east of Beverly Hills and south of the Sunset Strip. But from a drive-by glimpse in the tenebrous light before dawn, if you didn’t already know who he was, he just looked like another 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 but with maid service and a pool. For New Yorkers, think Chelsea Hotel but 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…
