I am quite an easy going kind of guy when it comes to music. You like what you like and – as long as it isn’t horrible racist , sexist, homophobic, Nazi shit – then I’m pretty happy to leave you be, and go about my day. However there are two subjects that I will fight you to the death over.

One: The Rolling Stones Exile On Main Street is the greatest double album ever committed to tape, and Two: Tom Waits has never released a bad record. So today, just to give me break from reviewing albums, we’ll I’ll be mixing my two loves together like a cheap whisky cocktail and taking a look at the legendary bromance between Keith Richards and Tom Waits, a friendship that spans nearly 40 years.  

It all began when Tom Waits was recording his masterpiece, Rain Dogs, and his label asked him who he’d like to work with, to which Waits replied;

“I said, ‘What about Keith Richards?’ I was just joking, but somebody went ahead and called him. And then he said, ‘Yeah.’ And I said, ‘Now we’re really in trouble.’”

Tom Waits has never seemed to me like someone who would be starstruck, but, as he explained, meeting Keith Richards for the first time was quite daunting;  

“I was really nervous. He came with about 600 guitars in a semi-truck. And a butler. We were in these huge studios in New York, like The Poseidon Adventure. Huge, high ceilings in these rooms like football fields. They’d fill these things up with orchestras and we were in there with five guys. It felt a little weird. He killed me. I was really knocked out that he played on all those things.”  

Yet the two men clicked and worked incredibly well together, which was something that Tom Waits had never dabbled in before;

“We wrote songs together for a while and that was fun. I had never really written with anybody besides my wife, so it was unique and a little scary at first.”  

Something of this magnitude was not lost on Keith Richards himself, who explained on his YouTube channel;

“It was great to work with him. It was only found out later that he never writes with anybody else, he only writes with his wife, Kathleen. So, I realized that was an extra honor, to work with a guy who’s not a collaborator.” 

Keith Richards would appear on Big Black Mariah, Union Square, and Blind Love on Rain Dogs, but that wouldn’t be the last time the two would work together. In 1992 they would team up for That Feel from Bone Machine, and then on what is, seemingly, Tom Waits last-ever studio album, 2011s Bad As Me, Keith appeared on Chicago, Satisfied, Last Leaf, and Hell Broke Luce.

They also performed a sea chanty together, which has to be heard to be believed, Shenandoah, from the 2013 release, Son of Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs and Chanteys.

With a bromance like this, it’s best to leave the final words to those involved. Keith Richards said in his autobiography that Tom Waits is;

“…a one-off lovely guy and one of the most original writers.”

he had ever met.  

While Tom Waits had these simple words for his friend;

“There’s nobody in the world like him.”