Tom Waits spent much of his life searching for a father figure, said Tim Adams in the London Observer. The singer-songwriter became fixated on male role models after his dad walked out when he was 10 years old. Waits would visit friends’ houses just to hang out with their dads. He’d ask these men grown-up questions such as, “So how long you been at Aetna, Bob?” At 12, he started carrying his grandfather’s walking stick and wearing a trilby. “There was a need for maturity and guidance from somewhere,” he says. “And I was going to have to provide it for myself—even if it meant putting on a hat and looking in the mirror and squinting a bit.”
As he found solace in music, he developed a new hero: Ray Charles. “I never got to know Ray. But I did shake his hand at an airport once, which was a profound moment for me. It wasn’t so profound for him, but it wasn’t meant to be.”
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