Tom Waits performs "Frank's Wild Years" on Letterman, 1983

Wow. Lately I've been revisiting Tom Waits' 1980s albums Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs, which forever changed my sense of what songwriting and instrumentation could be. I discovered Waits in an unlikely place: on David Letterman. And thanks to YouTube, today I quickly found the precise episode from 1983 that left me speechless and making a beeline for the record store to pick up Swordfishtrombones. Here it is: