He is instantly identifiable, like a name brand. If you're my age (or in the general ballpark), he was the neo-Beat hipster you either loved or hated in or after college -- and there were, then as now, camps pro and con. Or, if you're of the next generation, you might recognize him from his roles (most written with him in mind) in the movies "Down By Law," "Bram Stoker's Dracula," "Ironweed," "Mystery Men," "Domino," "Coffee and Cigarettes," or "Wristcutters: A Love Story," or from his later experimental albums so beloved of college radio stations, where he is, apparently, still the standard of cool by which a music library is measured.

Not bad for a guy who's made a nearly four-decade career out of being the most unpredictable and uncommercial musician in the business.

Tom Waits was, it must be said, pretty hard to ignore right out of the gate. He was the wild-haired, cap-wearing hobo charismatic who told shaggy-dog stories (mumbled around a perpetually lit cigarette), walked with a slouch, dressed like a vagrant and sang maddeningly beautiful songs about truckers and hookers, gangsters and homeless children, soldiers, drifters and grifters, all couched in the anachronistic sounds of old-school blues, jazz and Broadway, a most improbable hybrid of Jack Kerouac, Howlin' Wolf and Johnny Mercer. At a time when popular music was languidly bidding us to take it easy, Waits was spinning long, booze-fueled street rhapsodies about gypsy hacks and insomniacs and how small change got rained on with his own .38, extending an invitation the the blues -- impossibly hip, cinematic and verbal, and about as in-line with the times as a Caddy with tailfins. Moreover, he wasn't being ironic; the character and the vision were of a piece, and stayed in place after hours.

Then there was that voice (insert any number of descriptions here; poet Simone Muench likens it to the sound of a thousand crows caught in his throat). You don't even want to think about the sheer quantity of Jack and nicotine it took to get that way. More frustratingly for some, if you tried to catch and pigeonhole him, all you got was a fistful of feathers for your trouble. Still, some had to have a go at it -- no performer with a persona that bizarre, or a musical style that out of step, that theatrical, was going to fly under the radar of public opinion. You either got him (a genius) or you didn't (crazy bastard), but he was, like Mt. Everest, there, and he wasn't going to go away, even if the first few years of his career opening for acts as wildly diverse and uncongenial as Frank Zappa and Buffalo Bob Smith moved him to observe, "I've been riding the crest of a slump lately."

Sure it was a put-on -- what artistic persona isn't? -- but that is the very definition of an artist's primary concern -- a point of view. And what if your influences were the Beat poets, George Gershwin, James Brown, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Stephen Foster, Jerome Kern, Kurt Weill? What if you were hyper-literate and your lyrics sounded more like Kerouac novels than odes to primo bud or luscious groupies? What if you saw yourself as that guy at the strip joint piano, knocking out tales of love gone really wrong in-between playing "Harlem Nocturne" changes behind a growling alto, and maybe Charles Bukowski was sitting at the end of the bar too?

It was as valid a vision and a place to start as any, particularly if you had a natural bent for it and could deliver the goods -- and could Waits ever do that in spades. His first several albums (the live-in-studio "Nighthawks at the Diner," "Heart of Saturday Night, "Blue Valentines," "Small Change," "Foreign Affairs," "Heartattack and Vine", the soundtrack of the Francis Ford Coppola film "One From the Heart") featured work by LA jazz legends Jack Sheldon, Shelley Manne, Earl Palmer, Pete Christlieb, Pete Jolly, Teddy Edwards, Jim Hughart, Mike Melvoin, Lew Tabackin, Bill Goodwin, George Duke, Frank Vicari, Chuck Findley and more -- a body of work that still stands as a sonic Valentine to the Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler, all missed connections and dangerous women, failed romances and hard-luck palookas, racetracks and clip joints, steam rising out of the city's every pothole. You can almost hear a siren wailing in every song. (Except . . . wait a minute . . . what about those stomping blues howlers, and those shiveringly tender ballads that tear your heart out? Oops. Mind the feathers.)

Many still have the image of a crazy hipster jazz balladeer in mind when they think of Waits. Who can blame them? It was powerfully effective -- and it could have relegated Waits to the "interesting oddball" jazz files had he pursued it. Instead, in 1980, he met and married a brainy woman with an intriguing record collection who became his artistic collaborator and inspired him to take yet another sharp left -- a series of sharp lefts, matter of fact, that has yet to stop. It is his wife Kathleen Brennan that Waits invariably credits with introducing him to the likes of Captain Beefheart, Stravinsky and John Cage and throwing the monkey wrench in his career track that, along with three children, also resulted in a dazzling trio of grotesquely beautiful experimental albums ("Swordfishtrombones," "Rain Dogs" and "Frank's Wild Years") that radically redefined the Waits "sound" -- not that it was so easy to define in the first place, as anyone who'd been paying attention could attest.

Waits cast his nets even wider in subsequent albums "Bone Machine," "The Black Rider," "Blood Money," "Alice," "Real Gone" and "Mule Variations" ("Bone Machine" and "Mule Variations" both won Grammys), culminating in 2006's grand three-disc omnium-gatherum "Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards." With each successive album, Waits has challenged himself to veer away from the comfort zones most musicians kill to establish for themselves, playing unfamiliar instruments, omitting his trademark piano altogether ("Real Gone") and experimenting with vocal effects (some recorded in his bathroom at home) and bizarre percussion, creating aural landscapes as alien and unsettling as his oral ones, wielding his voice like a blunt weapon. Folk, rock, jazz, Delta blues, gospel, rhumba, tango, German Expressionist theater, saloon songs, marches, lullabies, even hymns -- if Waits's music is defined by its indefinability, it is also organic, a naturally-occurring hybrid of experiences and ideas that are unmistakably American. Call him the Smithsonian Institute of American music if you like. Everything's there, waiting to be taken up and used, as sturdy and functional as a cherry '57 Chevy. It is a working man's music filtered through a singular sensibility, extolling the irrepressible spirit of American life.

If most Americans seldom consider how utterly bizarre and improbable we must seem to the rest of the world, Waits has clearly been thinking about it, and celebrating it with a mad tent-revivalist's passion, for decades. The Reverend is on the road again, friends. Let us rise and say Hallelujah!