(Credits: Far Out / Asylum Records / Alamy)
Tue 27 January 2026 21:00, UK
“Jimmy Stewart said he stopped making movies because he didn’t like the way he looked on screen anymore,” Tom Waits once said. “I’m more the guy who says I look like hell, but I’m going to see where it gets me.”
This was the mindset Waits had going into Bad As Me. It was strange in the sense that, as a kid, Waits had spent so much time wishing he was older, and now that he finally was, everything seemed a whole lot more complicated than that. But eventually, that became his entire persona; the gritty, outlaw type whose music blends all aspects of American culture into one.
Mostly, Waits had to grow up fast because, as he told The Guardian, that’s what you had to do when you were from “a broken home”. Much of that also infiltrated his music, especially on Bad As Me, during moments when he lingered on being the sort of outsider who barely had much guidance. Many of the songs, therefore, like ‘Kiss Me’, sought to bring together all those in Waits’ life who had given him the guidance he craved.
That song in particular came from admiring voices like Peggy Lee and Julie London, and from, in his own words, trying to “understand them and take them apart and see what they’re made of, and wonder if you can make one, too”. This is a major reason why Bad As Me became so immediately popular and entirely timeless, because there was a lot of navigating his own experiences through different singers or sources, some of which also featured on the record.
‘Satisfied’, for instance, featured The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards on guitar, and was written in response to The Stones’ generational anthem ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’. Lyrically, it’s not hard to figure out why. While The Stones’ masterpiece tackles youthful malaise and frustrations with thriving in a society and generation that puts you down, Waits’ response playfully rejects this idea, arguing that he, of all people, will find satisfaction.
As he sings in the song, “I said I will have satisfaction / I will be satisfied / Before I’m gone.” He also namechecks the pair in the line, “Now Mr Jagger and Mr Richards / I will scratch where I’ve been itching / Now Mr Jagger and Mr Richards / I will scratch where I’ve been itching.”
This is an especially interesting position to take when you consider that Waits was always in a perpetual state of disillusionment, his boozy outcast image the typical manifestation of someone whose default state has always been survival and taking the road less travelled because nobody else showed the way.
As such, ‘Satisfied’ comes as a satirical play on what satisfaction actually means, mirroring the earlier discomfort and discontentment found in The Stones’ original song rather than pulling away from it. And in that sense, it’s typical Waits, layering his songs with humour to poke fun at how he kept on pushing even in the face of turmoil. Or, as he said, “I look like hell, but I’m going to see where it gets me.”
In the studio, Waits and Richards’ dynamic also added to this tone, especially as they both enjoyed exercising a sense of unpredictability just to see where it goes, or as a method of pushing the other even further. “[We] did that in one afternoon down in Chinatown,” Richards told Spinner UK. “I love working with Tom. You never know what he’s going to hit you with. There is that element of ‘Come on, surprise me’ between the two of us.”
Related Topics