Watch Tom Waits Perform “Ol’ 55” On VH1 Storytellers

If you don’t remember Storytellers was VH1’s sort-of answer to MTVs Unplugged, whereupon they invited various artists on their stage not to play acoustic instruments but to talk about the songs (the stories if you will) they had written over the years and then perform them. It was a really cool show, actually, and it was always neat to hear people talk about their songs.

Tom Waits performed on the show in 1999 and it is epic. Waits is a great songwriter, of course, and a great storyteller (and bullshitter). His Storytellers is full of all three in ample doses. It isn’t available anywhere commercially. I posted the show a while back (but it is currently unavailable on my blog, I’ll get it back up eventually) but you can listen to the whole thing over on the Archive. It is well worth your time.

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