Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen occupy positions in American music that are adjacent in their geography — both drew from the specific tradition of the American outsider, the person living at the margins of the prosperity that the country’s mythology promises, the man in the bar at last call or the woman in the factory town with no factory — and entirely different in their commercial reach.
Springsteen built the largest possible audience for that specific subject matter. Waits built the most devoted possible audience for the most uncompromising version of it.
Their relationship — documented in fragments across decades of interviews, in the specific way that the accounts of mutual admiration between two private men are always documented — began in the early 1970s when both were performing in the Los Angeles club circuit that was, in 1973 and 1974, producing some of the most significant new music in America.
Waits was at the Troubadour. Springsteen was developing the material that would become Born to Run. They inhabited the same small geography without being closely connected — different managers, different labels, different trajectories — but aware of each other in the specific way that musicians who are doing serious work in the same city at the same time are aware of each other.
The specific night that Springsteen has described most completely was a Waits performance at a small Los Angeles venue in the mid-1970s — the kind of venue that Waits performed in by preference and by commercial necessity, small enough that the distance between performer and audience was not a distance at all but a shared space in which something unusual was happening.
What Waits was doing on small stages in the mid-1970s was something that did not have a clear precedent — a fusion of the Beat poetry tradition, the jazz-inflected piano bar, the downtown Los Angeles geography of transients and losers and beautiful failures, delivered in a voice that sounded like gravel and whiskey and genuine feeling, accompanied by piano and occasionally a rhythm section that supported rather than constrained the specific quality of what he was doing.
It was not rock and roll. It was not jazz. It was not folk. It was something that the venue held and the record industry struggled to categorize and that musicians who heard it recognized immediately as serious.
Springsteen drove three hours to see him again the following night. He has said this in interviews not as a romantic gesture toward the mythology of musical devotion but as the simple practical response of someone who had heard something and needed to hear it again to understand it — the way you read a sentence twice when the first reading tells you it is more than a sentence.
He has said Waits taught him something about economy — about the specific power of saying less, of trusting the listener to fill the space that the song leaves empty.
Springsteen’s natural instinct is toward fullness, toward the accumulation of detail and the extended narrative, and Waits represented a counter-instinct that he found both alien and instructive. He has said the influence is not directly traceable in his recordings — it did not make him sound like Waits. It made him a different kind of listener to his own work.