"Tom Waits for No One"

I consider myself a serious fan of Tom Waits. His eccentric and eclectic take on jazz, blues, rock, mixed with his beatific vaudevillian theatricality has endeared him to me since I first discovered Rain Dogs at the tender, and impressionable, age of sixteen. When I first started broadening my teenage musical horizons, Tom Waits was among the first select group of artists to really grab my ears and give them something that they'd never heard before, wild, even a bit frightening. Other artists that fall into this category included The Pixies, Naked City, Boredoms, and The Locust. Pretty all over the place, really. Anyways, the point I'm trying to arrive at is that when I first started becoming exposed to these new and exciting musicians I wanted to know everything about them. And thanks to such sources as the All Music Guide, message boards, and informative user reviews on Amazon, I absorbed every piece of information I possibly could. These were the pre-Wikipedia days, and Google wasn't yet what it is today, and so finding a definitive list of a particular non-mainstream artist's accomplishments was, well, almost impossible. 

Keeping all this in mind, I still considered myself a know-it-all when it came to Tom Waits. So, imagine my surprise when I learned, totally by accident, that he had once starred in an animated music video! How did this slip by me?  It even won an Academy award for the animation techniques it employed. For a longtime fan like me, this was a serious discovery!

"Tom Waits For No One" was first filmed live at the La Brea stage in 1978, then later rotoscoped, an animation technique first developed by American animator Ralph Bakshi, and finally brought to life with hand-drawn animation. This is a lost classic; among the first animated music videos to debut, "Tom Waits For No One" perfectly managing to capture the beatific cool of Tom Waits in his jazzier, lovelorn, pre-Swordfishtrombones period. 

Enjoy.