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

The Heart Of Saturday Night: Day 5

I don't quite know how to describe the change that my relationship to this album has undergone so far. I would say I've grabbed onto a few songs which are doing it for me (not, incidentally "Diamonds on My Windshield," though I'm still working on it), and grown increasingly tolerant of others, but it stops there. I was really hoping to find something good about "San Diego Serenade" but it still sounds like a bad Van Morrison tune to me. Which bums me out.

It's too early to say that this album is a step backwards from CT (I'll save that for day 7...), but it's hard to shake the feeling that the "bad" songs on THoSN are, actually, bad and not just hard to figure out.

That said, the title track has really grown on me, as has "The Ghosts of Saturday Night." The best way to put it, I suppose, is that the songs are solidifying their positions, on the "hit" and "shit" lists respectively. More than one or two "shit list" songs make a negative review for a TW album, and this one has quite a few. Ah well, c'est la vie. I'll be listening hard these next two days, trying to give every song it's due, and we'll see how it all shakes out.

-K

PS - TW is playing Satan himself in the upcoming Terry Gilliam picture The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, Heath Ledger's last, unfinished project. It looks typically ambitious and typically flawed for a Gilliam flick, almost certainly worth a look. I'm a little broke right now, but hopefully I'll be able to check it out and let you, oh few faithful readers, know what I thought. In the meantime, check out a very unusual and funny interview with the man himself from CBC (Canadian Radio), TW's segment starts around 21 minutes in. (Link from eyeballkid)

The Heart Of Saturday Night: Day 1

The Heart of Saturday Night (1974)

Initial Thoughts:

Within a few seconds THoSN sounds significantly more polished than CT. As mentioned in yesterday's post I'm familiar with "New Coat of Paint" the opener: It's a boozy, juke-joint style blues song about painting the town red. It has a pretty irresistible piano part and TW sounds good with a full band behind him here, nice drumming and good bass playing that know how to get out of the way of TW's piano line.

Any TW fan worth his salt knows he's capable of a good weepy ballad, but "San Diego Serenade" is maybe a bit much.

We hear a new TW voice for the first time on"Semi Suite," a deep croon, totally gravel free, unusual. "Semi Suite" is pretty clever, but so far the record is as remembered: practically a Dr. John cover album...

I was talking last night with Rachel (girlfriend) about the progression of TW's subject matter. He's still in the sad old man phase of his song writing. It's good, no doubt about it, but it isn't that interesting to anyone who isn't a sad old man. Later on, TW writes songs about hookers and hobos that are so good that it doesn't matter how little you have in common with the protagonists, you still feel for them.

"Diamonds on my Windshield" is a breath of fresh air. It asks something of the listener. It plays like a road-tripper's playground chant. This is one which will require a lot of repeat listens. Nothing else so far has really begged for that (though they'll all get it anyway). Title track is very nicely orchestrated, we're on an upswing now.

Still upswinging, "Fumblin' With the Blues" is nicely reminiscent of cinematic, dark old blues songs like "Dyin' Crapshooter's Blues" and "St. James Infirmary Blues." TW using his voice for good effect, the band is nice, great little flourishes when necessary, otherwise competent. "Please Call Me, Baby" is pretty forgettable at the moment, "Depot Depot" isn't bad, but muted trumpet solo aside it's still lacking a lot in the way of originality.

These shady character songs, they're still in the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold mold, that is, they're about the good side of all these shady characters. While that is a tried and true story, in the end, it's a lot less interesting that simply taking those characters for what they are: shady.

Well, the breakdown in the middle of "Drunk on the Moon" is why it's never a good idea to give up on a song (or an album) based on an initial distaste. That was unexpected, and now I'm intrigued. Well played, Tom.

So, in the end, this felt like a concept album in more than one way. Let's pretend (and I didn't listen hard enough this first go 'round to confirm) that all of the songs on this record took place on the same Saturday night. The last song would be a nice end-cap to that album, but, as is often the case with concept albums, too many of the songs suffered in the process making them fit the record. Rarely does one strain of inspiration really carry an entire album, and this feels (at least at the outset) like it was lacking inspiration for big chunks. I don't want to write it off, though, looking forward to a week of finding things that I didn't think were there.

Standout Tracks:

• "New Coat of Paint" - a lot of fun, well executed, really nice piano (which was surprisingly rare on this record...)
• "Fumblin' With the Blues" - see above
  
• "Diamonds on My Windshield" - more going on here than on the rest of the album combined, maybe
• "(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night" - nicely minimalist, a good song in it's own right.

See you throughout the week!

-K

The Heart Of Saturday Night: Preview

My hope for these short Wednesday Previews is that I can get all the information about my prior relationship to a record out in them, plus a little factual information about the record, so that I don't have to waste any time or space on that stuff throughout the week spent with said record.

The Heart of Saturday Night (1974) is TW's second studio album. I think it's the first TW record I had in it's entirety but I never really got past the first track so it is largely uncharted territory for this blogger.

That first track, "New Coat of Paint" has been a favorite of mine for several years, and is a great little minor blues jam to break out at a party (if you're the kind of guy who breaks out minor blues jams at parties...). Wikipedia tells me that this record was TW's highest ranked record on Rolling Stone's top 500 albums of all time, so if the suits at Rolling Stone Magazine are to be trusted this is the pinnacle of TW's career. On said list it sits two spots above Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell and a good twelve below Ms. Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill, so that's the range we're working with.

Arbitrary corporate-friendly lists aside, I don't have a lot of information to give you about this record. It was TW's first collaboration with producer Bones Howe, the two worked together for a long time, but eventually split around the time TW got married to Kathleen Brennan (but that's another story). Anyway, that's what we have to look forward to tomorrow and for the next week. Thanks for reading and tell your friends!

-K

Closing Time: Day 7

How embarrassing.

Here we are, day 7 already and I haven't posted since day 1. I swear, I started posts on days 2 and 3, the rest of the week? Well, I caught a cold. Let's not dwell on it, huh? I'll just start the wrap up and try to do better in the future.

Wrap up:

First of all, it was my unstated opinion early on that this is a front-loaded album. "Ol' 55," "Old Shoes," and "Rosie" were my standout tracks, which I still think are the best standalone songs on the record. But I think, after listening to it many many times this week, that the album becomes more of an album on side two. Side one, that is:

"Ol'55"
"I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You"
"Virginia Avenue"
"Old Shoes (& Picture Postcards)"
"Midnight Lullaby"
"Martha"

has a lot of great stand alone tracks, but only one ("Midnight Lullaby") that really makes sense only in the context of the album. I suppose Virginia avenue is close too, but the rest are just songs, really good songs mind you, that don't require the context of the album to be understood. Side two, on the other hand, looks like this:

"Rosie"
"Lonely"
"Ice Cream Man"
"Little Trip to Heaven"
"Grapefruit Moon"
"Closing Time"

"Rosie" and "Ice Cream Man" are the catchy songs on this side, but both really benefit from the songs on either side of them, particularly "Lonely," an incredibly sad, sparse song (if you can even call it a song) which has silences in very prominent places (the chorus mostly) and very little non-melodic fill. It's a song which takes a minimalist approach to melody and accompaniment, and an almost abstract approach to rhythm, sandwiched between a crooned, hyper-melodic love song and and a straight-up Bo Diddley beat blues-rocker.

In a lot of ways, I think an artist's first album tends to be a smattering of their abilities, partly because a new artist wants to show everything he can do, and partly because they don't want to be pigeon-holed as a certain type of singer. There exists, certainly, an element of that on this record, particularly on side one, but as the album progresses the listener can't help but pick up a definite befindlicheit (sorry, "mood" works too, it's just, you know, I was a philosophy major, I can't help it) being projected. The songs on the second half almost bleed into each other, such that by the time you hear the closing instrumental, you can't really remember if it's part of "Grapefruit Moon," or the intro to a next track and the the album is over. It's pretty incredible for a first record to achieve that kind of continuity, I think. At least, I'm impressed.

Closing Time is a typical first record in a lot of ways. You can see a bit of TW's brilliance poking through, but, being honest, it is not a great indicator of who TW will become and what kind of songs he will go on to write. It is enjoyable, well produced, and well written, but is missing the edge and the wit that will become TW's trademark down the road.

A Few Bonus Thoughts:

So at some point over the last week I was listening to GZA's Liquid Swords with my friend Will, and continued listening on my walk home. Did you know that Masta Killa's verse on "Duel of the Iron Mic" hardly rhymes at all? People familiar with Masta Killa won't be surprised by this, his preference for internal rhyme (or no rhyme) over end rhyme, as well his masterful use of the emphasis which is automatically added to his lines which do rhyme have been trademarks of his style throughout his career. But, walking home that night, I was struck by the fact that the lack of rhyming on his verse, if anything, made it stand out positively on a track, and indeed an entire album, chock-full of excellent verses. Why do songwriters feel so obligated to write in rhymes? This is the only legitimate criticism I have ever heard leveled against Bob Dylan's songwriting as a whole, that his focus on rhyming has lead to some pretty clumsy phrasings. TW is almost certainly on the hook for the same, particularly on this album. The songs where he escapes from the constraint of rhyming, "Lonely" in particular and "Virginia Avenue" to a lesser extent, are songs which stand out as the more conceptual, substance in favor of style, songwriting which define his career.

I really liked this record in a lot of ways, it has some great songs and some revelatory information hidden in it about TW's career, but, generally speaking, I'm glad this week is over and I'm pretty excited to be moving on from CT. For one thing, I have been listening to it for more than a week, because it was the only TW I listened to in the run up to the start of this blog, so it's been about three weeks of it, which, for any album, might be overdoing it. Otherwise, however, it's just a little earnest for my liking. The jazz club/lounge singer thing is just slathered on a little heavily on a few of the tracks, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't looking forward to something a little edgier. I might not find that next week, but I'm one week closer at least.

Closing Time: Day 1

So, the real problem with the idea behind this blog is that there are several albums which I am not listening to for the first time, or for even remotely the first time. Some Tom Waits albums have been staples of my listening habits for years, so that when I listen to and blog about those albums, I'm not really giving "first thoughts" and "initial standouts" but am, in fact, bringing a host of predispositions and long-time favorites to this space.

Whether that in itself is a problem, I suppose, is questionable, but I do fear that it might make the blog a little uneven, from week to week. I will not, for instance, say "holy shit this track just blew me away" at any point during a week in which I am working on a TW album that is familiar to me. I will almost certainly say that (or something similar) on a regular basis otherwise.

Can you see where this is going today? You guessed it, I have heard 1973's Closing Time before. My first proper introduction to TW's music, freshman year at college, came by way of a mix-tape which a friend gave me¹ which contained two songs from CT: "Ice Cream Man" and "I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love With You." I hadn't listened to the rest of the album at the time, but in the delayed run-up to this blog's launch, I found myself listening to that album over and over, wary of moving on into later TW's stuff, but afraid also of losing my momentum. Long story short, I have heard this record many times. Try not to dwell on it.

Closing Time (1973):

Initial thoughts:

For the first time in a while, I'm wishing I had better speakers. I mean, they're perfectly adequate, but I can tell I'm missing some of the low end, and even in a short time I'd forgotten how beautiful "Ol' 55" is. Turning it way up is out of the question due to the presence of Gabor, my downstairs neighbor. This is a young person's record. By which I mean it was obviously written by a young person, not that it's for young people. It is all about beaten down old men, but all the emotions are so acute and clean, with none of the muddiness that you hear in Dylan's later stuff (also about old men, but with so much moral ambiguity which isn't present on this record). It's an album full of recklessness. I think today a young person would be ridiculed or marginalized for writing something with so little cynicism. Or, at least, I think I might ridicule them.

TW has won at least one grammy in the Folk Music category (actual number of grammys might be worth looking into), and usually I tend to think that's unfair both to folk musicians and to TW. "Old Shoes (& Picture Postcards)" is evidence to the contrary. It's a folk song of the highest order, the kind of campfire sitting, universal but specific, I-IV-V thing that makes songs like "Oh Susana" and "Dinah Blow Your Horn" stick around for decades.

The early 70's was a heyday for saxophones in rock music, one which I am kind of glad has passed, but the sax on this record has a nice, mild buzz to it, just enough to not take over the song. The fact that it is limited to a couple songs certainly helps...holy shit, I can't believe how amazing the end of midnight lullaby is. I've even heard it before, commented on it to my girlfriend, it doesn't matter, god it's beautiful, the light squealing guitar behind "Papa's gonna buy you a mockingbird." ugh. just amazing.

My friend Phil taught me to play "Rosie" on the guitar the way he plays it. That was awesome of him, I love this song. I can hit every note in this song except the crucial one. I remember trying to play "Ice Cream Man" with my college roommates and one of them saying "that's just 'Hit the Road Jack.'" In retrospect, that's fucking awesome, right? Could you pick a more amazing progression to lift? It's so minimalist and bluesy and minor and sticking that incredibly precise, super-creepy-ice-cream-truck music on either end of a two minute double entendre, love it.

Even at this stage TW seems to have a multitude of voices at his command. Obviously he has yet to develop his monster bark, notably present in later works, but he still has a surprising range of voices which he seems comfortable singing in. I'm thinking here of "Grapefruit Moon," particularly, and the difference between it and "Ice Cream Man"/"Little Trip to Heaven" the songs which precede it immediately.


Standout Tracks:

I can see that this is going to be difficult, but I promise, scouts honor, that I will never just say "the whole album." That's bush league stuff.

• "Old Shoes (& Picture Postcards)" - Hands down my favorite track at the moment, just beautiful and simple and sweet and everything you want off of an album like this.
• "Ol' 55" - What a way to kick off an album. From the count off to the quiet-but-louder-each-time guitar walk-downs on the chorus. Just fantastic.
• "Rosie" - Fun to sing, fun to play, fun to listen to, just a winning song.
• "Closing Time" - A great end-cap to this record, it's easy to forget what an accomplished pianist TW was already at this point in his career, this is a beautiful song.

That all for now folks, more throughout the week or as things occur to me.

-K

1Sorry about the non-linked footnotes, I'm working on that. This friend, named Ben Terris, is a very talented young man in what I would call the larval phase of his journalistic career. Google him.