Every Tom Waits Song is an email newsletter covering just that, in alphabetical order. Find more info here and sign up to get it sent straight to your inbox:
I forgot that “Eggs and Sausage” had a subtitle until I started writing this. Everyone just calls it “Eggs and Sausage.” That’s a perfect title, you don’t need anything else. But Tom was big on needlessly long parenthetical subtitles around this time—I’m looking at you, “Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)”—and sure enough, there’s one for “Eggs and Sausage.” Or, should I say, “Eggs and Sausage (In a Cadillac with Susan Michelson).”
I immediately wondered: Who is Susan Michelson? This proved a harder question to answer than anticipated. The usually definitive Tom Waits Library threw up its hands in a footnote, referring to her as “the mysterious Susan Michelson” and adding “Your guess is as good as mine…”
There is a veteran music-industry executive named Susan Michelson, who seemed like an obvious candidate, but she says in an email it isn’t her. (She also says this is not the first time she’s been asked!)
The first few Tom Waits biographies I paged through came up empty, but one finally delivered at least some of the goods. In Lowside of the Road, Barney Hoskyns reports that Susan Michelson was Tom’s girlfriend at the time. Tom’s friend Michael C. Ford, the poet, tells Hoskyns:
“Susan worked at Denny’s or some diner like that, out in the Valley somewhere. She was a really nice girl, and I don’t know how that dissipated. Tom might have been in her company for a couple of years. Remembering Susan the way she was, she would be one who would keep very much out of the picture.”
So there you have it! And she even worked at a diner, which gives her a clear reason to be associated with this, one of the great diner songs.
Hmm, I wonder if “Tom’s Diner” is really about Tom Waits.1 Or is the waitress in “Unknown Legend” also Susan Michelson?2
NATD was my entry-level Tom Waits and I’ve wondered who SM was. He has all these names in his songs so you don’t know who’s real or who’s a character. Excellent!
Love the footnotes! 😂