any biography. When Barney Hoskyns was researching his unauthorized 2009 biography, Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits, Waits and his wife asked people not to talk to him. Hoskyns believed that it was Brennan who was responsible for the "wall of inaccessibility" surrounding Waits. Stage persona Waits has been determined to keep a distance between his public persona and his personal life. According to Hoskyns, Waits hides behind his persona, noting that "Tom Waits is as much of a character created for his fans as it is a real man". In Hoskyns's view, Waits's self-image is in part "a self-protective device, a screen to deflect attention". A few music journalists have gone so far as to suggest that Waits is a "poseur". Hoskyns regarded Waits's "persona of the skid-row boho/hobo, a young man out of time and place" as an "ongoing experiment in performance art". He added that Waits has adopted a "self-appointed role as the bard of the streets". Mick Brown, a music journalist from Sounds who interviewed Waits in the mid-1970s, noted that "he had immersed himself in this character to the point where it wasn't an act and had become an identity". Louie Lista, a friend of Waits's during the 1970s, stated that the singer's general attitude was that of "I'm an outsider, but I'll revel in being an outsider". In a similar manner to contemporaries like Bob Dylan and Neil Young, Waits is known for cutting contact with figures he worked with in his past. Another friend from that period, Troubadour-manager Robert Marchese, related that Waits cultivated "the whole mystique of this really funky dude and all that Charles Bukowski crap" to give "his impression of how funky poor folk really are", whereas in reality Waits was "basically a middle-class, San Diego mom-and-pop-schoolteacher kid". Humphries thought that there was a "conservative element" to Waits's persona, stating that behind his public image, "Waits has always been more of a white-picket-fence kind of guy than you might imagine." Jarmusch described Waits as "a very contradictory character", stating that he is "potentially violent if he thinks someone is screwing with him, but he's gentle and kind too". Herbert Hardesty, who worked with Waits on Blue Valentine, called him "a very pleasant human being, a very nice person". Humphries referred to him as "an essentially reticent man ... reflective and surprisingly shy". He has a sense of