No one speaks English, and everything’s broken and my Stacys are soaking wet…

—”Tom Traubert’s Blues”

When I was 21, I actually bought a pair of Stacy Adams wingtips because I idolized Tom Waits. If you’ve seen Stacys, you probably realize that a white kid from Michigan has no business wearing them. And you might be right. But Tom Waits claimed to wear them, and I thought Tom Waits was the coolest guy in the world; therefore, I was going to wear them too.

Besides, the issue of authenticity has always been complex in the world of Tom Waits. Was he really ever the hobo jazzbo he tried to be in the seventies? I don’t know. But I know that I spent most of my early twenties in dive bars and diners. I mean, I loved Frank Sinatra and had already read Kerouac and the Beats years before I had ever heard Waits. So now, I can’t seem to remember which came first: was I attracted to Waits because he was singing about stuff I thought was cool, or did I think stuff was cool because Waits was singing about it… Regardless, I certainly never would have bought a pair of Stacy Adams shoes had it not been for “Spare Parts I (A Nocturnal Emission)” and “Tom Traubert’s Blues.”

By the time that 1992’s Bone Machine came out, I was already obsessed. A few years later, I had burned myself out on Waits and moved on to other obsessions. I’d still buy the albums, of course, but I was no longer fanatical. My Stacys wore out, I got married, got a good job, the whole bit. I started to understand some of the reasons Waits himself had left that 70s persona in the Asylum, where it belonged. Charles Bukowski is fun to read, but he’s not much of a role model. And Neal Cassady was dead at 41.

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