My son, who has a band in San Diego, has always been a fan of Tom Waits. One of his high school teachers had collaborated with Waits on some of his earlier albums and knew him well. My son's group recently drove down to Phoenix to hear a Waits concert and said the audience was "blown away."

Years earlier, around 1971, I had an employee in my store who was a college student at San Diego State. She and her dad were good friends of Sam Hinton's and I had been privileged to join in a little song fest with Sam and her dad, a West Virgina-born master carpenter and excellent guitarist. She was involved in the San Diego coffee house scene in the 1960's and saw a lot of Tom Waits in the days when he was living among the "street people" and working in a National City pizza parlor. She said he smelled "like a goat" back then, but was fascinated with the music he was creating. He is definitely one of a kind.