Accompanied by Marcus Shelby on bass, Tom Waits paid tribute to iconic Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti on Saturday in San Franisco by interpreting a poem (“Fortune / has its cookies to go out…”) from his 1958 collection A Coney Island of the Mind.
It’s hard to see Waits and Shelby in the footage above, but the audio is nice enough to hear Ferlinghetti’s verses morphed seamlessly into a Tom Waits piano ballad. Waits’ opening remarks/jokes are worth checking out, as well, in which he quips that the Ferlinghetti-founded City Lights book store is like “Times Square for animals.”