Tom Waits is the most iconic of the cult musicians of our time. He always did not go against or even across the current - it was as if no current existed for him. In the 1970s, during the heyday of glam rock and stadium pathos, he embodied the romance of the urban bottom: to jazz accompaniment he sang beatnik ballads about unrequited love and the heart of a Saturday night in the wilds of the metropolis, about tramps and strippers, about a dwarf from Hong Kong and Puerto Rican woman on a wooden leg; and his favorite poet was Charles Bukowski. In the 1980s, when post-punk, on the one hand, and soulless plastic pop, on the other, ruled the roost, he turned to radical art-house cabaret, invented his own musical instruments, and collaborated with outstanding avant-garde artists of the New York scene. By the 1990s, he became the undisputed standard of creative integrity, and each of his new albums is still perceived as a revelation. His cinematic career developed no less successfully than his musical one: Waits wrote soundtracks for a number of films, he himself acted in films with Francis Ford Coppola, Jim Jarmusch, Robert Altman, etc. This book, equipped with rich illustrative material, contains interviews with Waits over the past thirty years, almost from the very day he first appeared on stage at the Los Angeles club Troubadour.