Tom Waits in Illustration

“There is a cliche about Tom Waits, or, as he described it to me, an ‘oversimplification.’ In his words, the received version is that he ‘growls about booze and gargles with nails and screws.’ In keeping with this perception, an affectionate illustration called ‘Visible Tom Waits’ by the artist Jim Lockey, was posted on Tumblr. Waits’s body, with fedora, is depicted in cross-section, like a scientific chart, with his brain tagged ‘Here be monsters,’ his throat filled with sandpaper and ‘gravel & spiders,’ and his lungs noted simply as the location of the furnace.” 

From “Gravel Pit” by Sasha Frere-Jones for the New Yorker, October 2011; Illustration by Jim Lockey 

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