Tom Waits's Whittier, California childhood

Tom Waits was born on December 7, 1949, at Morningside Hospital in Pomona, California, and grew up in Whittier — the Los Angeles County city in the San Gabriel Valley that is also the birthplace of Richard Nixon, a biographical coincidence Waits has never appeared to find useful. His father was a Spanish teacher; his parents divorced when he was young and he grew up with his mother, moving between Southern California addresses. Whittier in the 1950s and 1960s was a quiet, predominantly residential city — not Hollywood, not the beach, not the San Fernando Valley music scene, but the anonymous suburban Los Angeles that Waits would spend his career writing about from the inside.

His father's absence was formative in the specific way that absences are formative: Waits has described waiting in the car outside a bar his father had entered, listening to the music seeping through the door, and internalising the romanticism of what was on the other side of that door alongside the reality of being left in a parking lot. The jukebox bars, the all-night diners, the working-class neighbourhoods of his early writing are drawn from the Southern California geography of his youth — Whittier, Pomona, the San Gabriel Valley — even when they are inflected with the mythology of New Orleans or Chicago or wherever else his reading and listening had taken him.

Whittier has no particular marker for Waits, who left Southern California eventually for Northern California's Sonoma County, where he has lived with his wife Kathleen Brennan for decades. The Whittier years are present in his music the way formative geographies always are: not as subject matter exactly, but as the soil everything else grew in.