How in the heck can I summarize Tom Waits’ life and career? He’s been in show business for going on forty years now, and his trademark growl makes his music perfect for getting drunk to. Waits signed up with Asylum Records in 1972 and released an album nearly every year from ’72 until 1988. Between his 1988 album Big Time and the release of his 1992 album Bone Machine, Waits also scored the Jim Jarmusch film Night on Earth. It was in 1992 that he also landed a sizeable role in Bram Stoker’s Dracula as Renfield. Following his role in Dracula, Waits began to make more and more notable film appearences while at the same time releasing numerous awesome albums. He can be seen in such films as Mystery Men, Short Cuts, Wristcutters: A Love Story, Domino, and The Book of Eli. But his best movie performance to date has to be as the evil Mr. Nick in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. While I wasn’t a huge fan of that film, I’d watch it again in a second just for Waits! Waits continues to work in the film and music industries today, and his most recent album, Bad as Me (his seventeenth), was released on October 21, 2011, and peaked at #6 on the U.S. billboard, proving that Tom Waits still rocks, even after all these years. Waits turns 62 today. Now break out the rotgut and press play!