Small Change: Preview

Small Change (1976) is TW's fourth studio album, and his third with Bones Howe as producer. This is a classic from the TW library, featuring "Tom Traubert's Blues" and "The Piano Has Been Drinking," two songs which I have loved for some time and which TW has continued to perform for much of his career.

Much like The Heart of Saturday Night however, this is an album which is largely unexplored territory for me. It's another one which people will count among their favorite TW records, but I can't say it's one of mine, largely because I haven't listened to it that much.

That's all for now, expect my initial thoughts later today.

-K

P.S. If the stripper in the album cover's breasts look familiar, they should. They belong to Cassandra Peterson, who's cleavage became world renowned as Elvira "Mistress of the Dark" a few years down the road.

Nighthawks at the Diner: Day 7

Wrap up:

NaTD is a good album, I want to say that up front because I have some critical things to say about it, and I don't want to lose sight of the fact that I actually think it's a good record. TW is pushing buttons and cracking jokes, waxing poetic and riffing on poets. He's meta-lounge-singing, which is pretty new, and very different from when he was just lounge singing on THoSN.

When the stand-up comic stuff lands it is very funny, but when it misses it is incredibly distracting. I don't think it has a lot to do with the best songs on the album, to be honest. I think it certainly adds some character, and the obvious motive (to expose the listener to TW's stage presence from the comfort of their home without a dip in sound quality and before the home video revolution) is a benevolent one, but whether it serves to supplement the songs themselves or distract from them remains an open question.

That question, I'll grant, may be a moot one. The album is packaged as it is packaged, react to it how you will, but you can't improve the album by eliminating the stage banter, the album is as it is. I agree in more ways than one. The album is as it is, that much is obvious, and further I don't believe the songs particularly gain by eliminating the "(Intro)" tracks, perhaps "Better Off Without a Wife" feels a little more compact, and a little less goofy minus the long, onanistic introduction, but by-and-large they feel a little naked and a little decontextualized without the "(Intro)"s.

So how about those songs? There's a pretty decent rage of material on offer here, with the clear high point being "Spare Parts I (a Nocturnal Emission)," whose silly parenthetical doesn't do justice to the really raw bluesiness of the piece, as well as the lyrics which best show a balance between self-aware humor and real intelligence. The cover of "Big Joe..." is almost certainly my least favorite song on the record, the speak-sing earnestness doesn't really appeal to me and there's not a lot else happening to distract (the less said about the lyrics on that one, the better).

"Eggs and Sausage..." came on my local NPR affiliate the other night while at work, which has instantly warmed me to it, but I liked it anyway (and it has the best of the "(Intro)" tracks on the the album). Otherwise you're looking at a lot of songs with very clever jokes tucked between less clever ones, and very insightful and biting observation mingled with observations which fail to inspire.

I wouldn't say I disagree with my friends who have said that this is a hilarious album, and I wouldn't double-take at those who say it's their favorite TW album, but I would say that, knowing where he's headed, we're still climbing upwards. That said, better than CT and THoSN without a doubt.

Preview of Small Change (1976) is upcoming.

-K

Nighthawks at the Diner: Day 6

Haven't been a good little poster lately, I'll freely admit. I don't have a ton of time to write at the moment so I'll be brief.

So far so good with this record, though I have a slight concern about the actual v. perceived quality of the songs: Is TW just such a charismatic performer that he masks songs which are of similar, if not exactly equal, quality to those on THoSN? My plan today is to listen to the album minus the "(Intro)" tracks, or little conversational interludes and try to focus on the songs themselves. This solution is imperfect at best, but, well, it's what I'm working with.

See you tonight/tomorrow

-K

Nighthawks at the Diner: Day 1

Coming in at a robust 73 minutes, Nighthawks at the Diner has taken a full afternoon to digest. It's a little bloated, there's a lot of banter, a lot of audience noise, a lot of actual songs, some very jazz songs with some very jazz solos, and some straight Tomwaitsiness. It takes some time, but that's what this thing's all about right?

Initial Thoughts:

The first time through this record was just incredibly cathartic. It was washing away the earnestness and cheesiness of THoSN and replacing it with wittiness, self-deprecation, just plain self-awareness. TW has discovered the humor inherent in the medium of the jazz/lounge singer. He's discovered the romanticism of mundane colors and characters, as well as the humor in that romanticism. It makes for some significantly more interesting lyrics and some hilarious storytelling.

There is a little bit of dated/specific 1970s L.A. humor that leaves the uninitiated out, though very little imagination is required to catch the drift. Most of the humor centers around self-deprecation in a variety of formats: deprecation of bachelors, jazz musicians, young people, losers, loners, L.A.-ers. Lead-ins like "It's stooory time againnn" keep you chuckling throughout, even when the subject matter isn't particularly funny. The serious moments, few and far between, are well executed and genuinely moving.

I suppose my only complaint at the moment is that I can't watch the performance as well as listen to it. It really does feel like a performance, which is a testament to TW and the band's professionalism, given the time and place of the recording, to put together four coherent sounding performances in a row. There are some questions, however, which a view of the show might have answered. I would really like to know (and I suppose a little detective work could inform me) who's playing piano on which songs. Obviously TW is on guitar (not piano) on guitar songs, but he's also clearly on piano on a few. Mysteries to solve throughout the week.

Standout Tracks:

• "Eggs and Sausage"
  
• "Better Off Without a Wife"
• "Putnam County"
  
• "Spare Parts I (a Nocturnal Emission)"
  

I'm done blogging for the night, we'll talk about those songs and more throughout the week. Hope everyone out there is well. See you around.

-K

Nighthawks at the Diner: Preview

Nighthawks at the Diner (1975) is TWs third studio album...sort of. NatD was recorded in Record Plant Studios but was recorded over two nights in front of four separate live audiences. Four shows over two nights, with a stripper as the warmup act for every show. If I had produced this album it would have been really difficult not to put that little voice-over clip from 90's sitcoms before the first track: "Tom Waits is recorded before a live studio audience."

Anyway, this is TWs second record with Bones Howe acting as producer. It seems, at least according to the good multitudes over at Wikipedia, that Bones himself had a more central role in picking the band and arranger for this record, which (hopefully) will account for an improvement over the sound of The Heart of Saturday Night.

I've never heard this one before at all, so it's all new to me, I'm told by acquaintances that it's a very funny record, with lots of good crowd banter. That's promising. We'll see, I guess. Nighthawks: Day 1 is upcoming.

The Heart Of Saturday Night: Day 7ish

Well we're a little bit behind schedule this week (about 24 hours) so today is going to be a frenzied blogging day. Hopefully I can throw together a decent preview of Nighthawks at the Diner before I have to start listening to it. Whatever. On with the wrap up!

Wrap Up:

I had a feeling that when I started wrapping up this record I was going to regret some of my negativity throughout the week. I don't know why, I guess I've some of my less favorite songs from THoSN stuck in my head over the last couple of days and I assumed that the album was growing on me.

Well it isn't. "San Diego Serenade" still sucks. 'Never saw the sunshine til you turned out your love-light, babe.' ugh. I maintain that there are a couple of very decent songs on here, and a little bit of decent instrumentation, but by and large it's just a very by the books "gritty" jazz record, with very little grit and a questionable interpretation of the word jazz. It certainly doesn't have what I would call "timeless grit."

"Timeless grit" would be Blind Willie Johnson: shit that was weird and scary and different when it came out, and 80 years later is still weird and scary and different. Maybe this record seemed gritty in the coke-fueled glitz that was 70s L.A. Maybe the only seedy underbelly TW was aware of at this point was the glamorized seedy underbelly of Raymond Chandler's L.A., so that when he made this record it felt like he was telling the interesting stories of the downtrodden. Well, that's possible, but as far as I can tell it hasn't aged well. And I have to mark this as a step backwards from Closing Time, which had its share of schmaltz, but, mercifully, much less than Saturday Night.

Two weeks in and I'm already a bitter, snarky blogger. It happens. Nighthawks at the Diner preview is upcoming.

-K

The Heart Of Saturday Night: Day 6

Transportation Blues:

"Semi Suite" - First of all, pretty hilarious title for what is in reality a very bitter love song about a truck driver. Not, ultimately, a great song, but little bits of cleverness sprinkled throughout.

...followed by...

"Shiver Me Timbers" - a melancholy little ditty about sailing away from everything you ever blah blah blah. The distribution of nautical metaphors, references and puns reminds me of Zap Brannigan's theory of pick-up lines "Say as many of them as you can, as fast as you can"

...followed by...

"Diamond's on My Windshield" - A song about driving at night. Not as good a song as I had hoped but a few really nice moments: "The 8s go east and the 5s go north; merging exits back and forth" particularly.

...skipping ahead a few...

"Depot Depot" - a boozy tune about hanging out at the bus depot and having no place to go. More about waking up drunk in a bus depot than anything else. "I can't claim title to a single memory..."

This album has 11 songs and a solid 4 of them are clunkers about travel. Ok, 3.5, I still kind of like DoMW, but man those are Toby Keith album numbers. I know there's a reason that country and blues and R&B singers love "Ramblin' Men." The crazy backwardness of people who opt for a life of discomfort, who don't want to be loved by the people who love them and would prefer to jump from house to house, town to town, pier to pier, that's interesting stuff. And the stories are classics from both sides, the weird inner monologue of the rambler, the sad yet understanding lament of the housewife/daughter/son left behind. But this kind of sloppy execution, these half stories with little to no insight, just seems lazy:

"Hey, I'm working on this album about the underbelly of California on a Saturday night, but I'm a couple songs short"

"Shit man, right a song about travelers"

"I got a truck driver song on there already"

"So? What about cab drivers? Bus riders? Sailors? Just crazy dudes who drive around all night in the rain? Throw a sax solo on there and you're all set."

That is almost certainly incredibly unfair to the creative effort that went into the creation of this album. It comes from a time when TW was being called a beat poet, those wacky grass smokers who gave us the most famous road trip narrative since the Odyssey. The travelogue was certainly part of the aesthetic TW was cultivating for himself. That being said these are some of the worst songs on the album, and it's an album which if you took the best songs (which, incidentally are also the songs which stick closest to the thematic center of the 'Saturday Night' thing) you get a pretty awesome conceptual EP:

1. "New Coat of Paint"
2. "(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night"
3. "Please Call Me Baby"
4. "Drunk on The Moon"
5. "The Ghosts of Saturday Night"

Or maybe just a 3 song suite:

1. "New Coat of Paint"
2. "(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night"
3. "The Ghosts of Saturday Night"

Just my two cents.

Tomorrow: Wrap-up and a preview of Nighthawks at the Diner

-K