Tom Waits's earliest years as a performer were the mid- to late sixties — not as a folkie, but as a rock musician. He kept rhythm on a Saint George electric guitar for a band called The Systems, though that didn't last very long.

Later, in Southern California, Waits participated in Hoot Nights at places like the YMCA, the Bonita Inn, the Back Door, and the Manhattan Club ("hooting" is folk/country parlance for the stage being opened up for performers to play impromptu). At Mission Beach, California, as scores of long-legged, tanned teenaged girls and bands of roaming hippies burned bonfires on the sand, Waits fell into his own circle, intent on finding his way as a performing and earning musician. He never got caught up in Beatlemania in his early teenaged years, nor did he hike to Haight-Ashbury to be among the flower children. Working as a bouncer and doorman at the Heritage on Mission Boulevard, Waits waited his turn to step up to the stage. Having a girlfriend working as a waitress didn't hurt either, for she often put in a good word for him with Heritage management. More important, Waits's small-time job gave him a fringe benefit: he got to listen, and by listening he absorbed a slew of musical styles and inflections that he would continue to draw from for the length of his music career.

By November 1970, the humble doorman and probably the world's politest bouncer was advertised in the San Diego Tribune: "Singers Marko and David plus Tom Waits at 8:30 and 10:30P.M., Friday and Saturday." According to Bob Webb, who owned the Heritage, "Thomas Waits," as he signed his name, warmed the stage for the folk/pop duet Michael Claire, featuring Michael Milner and Claire Hart.

In 1971 Waits tried his luck in Los Angeles at the renowned Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard, where scores of musicians tried to sell themselves. If Waits was lucky, he was able to sing four songs on Monday nights once a month. Slipping under the radar, for nobody knew his name or his face, Waits sometimes got away with doing it twice. This continued through 1972 — until Waits caught the attention of David Geffen one night at the Troubador.

According to Jay S. Jacobs's 2000 biography of Waits, Wild Years,

Geffen wasn't planning on staying long when he dropped by the Troubadour that night in 1972, but he quickly changed his mind. Commanding the stage was a guy who looked more like a vagabond than a rock musician. But Geffen had barely taken his seat before Waits's seductive aura had encompassed him. "He was singing a song called 'Grapefruit Moon' when I heard him," Geffen recalled recently. "I thought it was a terrific song, so I listened to the set." He watched, he listened, and the wheels started turning. Here was an artist who could make some intriguing records. "After [the show], I said that I was interested in him. He said, 'Well, I'll have my manager, Herb Cohen, call you."' Geffen left the Troubadour thinking that since Cohen had his own record company, this would be "the end of it." But, to his surprise, Cohen did finally call: "He was interested in making a deal with me for Tom. ... Herb had said that he didn't really think that it was right for him to make the record. My making the record would help him with the publishing. So I made a deal for [Tom]. And he made a great first record."

Tom Waits's band for his first Closing Time tour, which ran from April to June 1973, consisted of Waits on acoustic guitar, piano, and vocals, Webb on stand-up bass, Rich Phelps on trumpet, and John "Funky Fingers" Forsha on guitar. The tour occasioned Waits to explore his diverse interests, absorbing the immensity of the country with the avidity of his hero, Jack Kerouac. The first stop was Washington, DC's Cellar Door, playing for six nights as the warm-up band for Tom Rush. They went north to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and played another five dates at Passim Coffeeshop in Harvard Square. While there, Waits and Webb took a side trip to Lowell, Massachusetts, in an effort to locate the unmarked grave of Kerouac, who had died less than four years before. At Max's Kansas City in Manhattan, the band opened for Charlie Rich, with other dates in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and Atlanta (warming up for Buffalo Bob Smith). By the time they reached the West Coast, Waits headlined for the first time in Redlands, California, playing for a general audience that had offered a one-dollar donation to attend (Arthur Lee Harper and the Buffalo Nickel Jug Band warmed up for Waits).

Waits's enthusiasm bled from a desire to reach beyond his San Diego confines, where he had been working side jobs as he pursued his musical inclinations. He explained to Music World's Jeff Walker in 1973: "San Diego musicians stay there and hope something is going to happen, but it never does. Nothing happens down there. You play in a rock band in high school and when you get out you end up playing in some swank club behind a girl singer or you stay in the rock band, play GI dances and get paid peanuts." Waits tried to up the ante by driving north to Los Angeles. "I came up as often as I could, but I didn't want to move here until something was happening. I just didn't want to wind up in a gas station." Barney Hoskyns interviewed Walker for his biography of Waits, Lowside of the Road (2009):

"He was so open." Walker recalls, "We talked about music and jazz and Beat poetry. He picked up a trumpet and played a little riff on that. We loved him." Waits, says Walker, was smarting from a tattoo he'd just had done in a downtown parlor. "Thursday afternoon, sober as a judge," he said of the heart and flowers design. "And yes, it hurts."

As Jeff and his photographer girlfriend Kim Gottlieb drove home to Laurel Canyon, they decided to make Waits the cover star of the June issue. "Because we were a free magazine, we didn't have to put somebody well known on the cover," says Gottlieb. "We could afford to take somebody that not too many people knew and put them on the cover." Adds Walker, "We went away and said to ourselves, 'This is going to be an important record and this guy's going to be an important artist.' You felt really privileged to be meeting him." Walker saw Waits' boho-beatnik act as a conscious assertion of identity. "It seemed to me this was all very deliberate, pushing the boundaries and genres that he had come out of," he says. "But he was fairly forthcoming. He wasn't holding back or mysterious."

In its forty-plus years of radio broadcasting, KPFK's FolkScene has been vital to the dwindling audiences of contemporary folk music. The show was well received by folk music fans and musicians, who...