Interviewer - Who do you listen to?
Tom Waits- I listen to AM radio a lot cause I don’t have an FM, I listen to Ray Charles, got a lot of old Ray Charles records, let’s see - Diana Ross [laughs] - I like her a lot, got some old Billie Holliday records, I listen to her, and Mose Allison, I’m real fond of Mose Allison, Dale Evans, Miles Davis, a little bit of everything. I try to integrate different styles in my writing, it’s important to do that. With a piano it’s easier for me to write, I can find a lot more things that I could never find on guitar so it helps with writing on the piano. I played guitar before I played piano, I’m no technician, no big fancy fingers. Writing on an instrument is different than being a real master of an instrument. It’s more of a process of investigation than anything else so you may be lacking in technique but high on the investigation scale. Right now I’m looking forward to sometime this month to going into the studio and work on another album with Asylum - trying to keep the group together in order to do that. I guess writing is the most difficult thing and the one thing I’m trying to do the most of.
Interviewer - Did you always want to be a musician?
Tom Waits- Yeah, I guess so, I couldn’t think of anything else I really wanted to be, seems to be today nobody wants to be anything but, nobody wants to be a baseball player anymore or anything - everybody wants to be a rock n roll star. I was always real interested in music, it never really struck me to write until I guess about the late 60’s, about ‘68 or ‘69 I started writing, up until then I just listened to a lot of music, played in school orchestras, played trumpet in elementary school, junior high, high school, went through all that and hung around with some friends of mine that played classical piano and picked up a few little licks here and there, played guitar and stumbled on the Heritage - and actually the first real songwriter I really saw and really got enthused about was Jack Tempchin and that was in about 1968 at the Candy Company on El Cajon Boulevard, he was playing on the bill with Lightning Hopkins and he was real casual and everything, it was just something I wanted to try my hand at, so I tried my hand at it, I don’t know, I guess you get better as you go along, the more music you listen to and the more perceptive you become towards melody and lyric and all. The only place really to play in San Diego were folk clubs. I used to go to a lot of dances. I played in a band in junior high called The Systems.

-Folkscene 1973, with Howard and Roz Larman (KPFK-FM 90.7). Los Angeles/ USA. September 21, 1973 (based on Bob Webb’s records, also lists as “August 12, 1973”). Audio tape. Transcription from tape by Gary Tausch as sent to Rain Dogs Listserv Discussionlist, June 6, 2001