Tom Waits' Early Career - Part II

I might be the only one who thinks so, but Tom Waits' second album, The Heart Of Saturday Night, is quite an improvement over his first. Most commentators have hardly made any distinction between the two, but to me there are some very notable (and pleasing) differences. While The Heart Of Saturday Night is still a good deal away from Swordfishtrombones or even Heartattack and Vine, it's at least the first sign of a songwriter with a unique voice. It's not a great album, but it's a nice album, and unlike Closing Time, it's an album that I find myself listening to quite frequently.

There's no one major difference per se, but rather it's a number of little differences that all add up to a stronger package as a whole. First of all, the individual songs are stronger. Take each song on its own terms and you might not really notice, but if most songs on Closing Time were about a B-, on The Heart Of Saturday Night he's averaging about a B+. Better melodies, better arrangments. Another key to the album's success, I think, is that the songs are relatively diverse, and yet they're unified by a similar vibe and similar sense of place. As a result, the lesser songs still sound good in the context of the better songs. The melody of "Shiver Me Timbers" might not be that impressive on its own, but sandwiched between the mid-tempo sleaziness of "Semi Suite" and the spoken word rant "Diamonds On My Windshield," it's a welcoming lullaby. In other words, all the songs display a different facet of Tom Waits' personality, but unlike on Closing Time, there's finally a tangible sense of that personality. Like any good album, it's eleven different sides of the same recognizable coin.

The largest leap, then, is in the lyrics. For the first time we get hints of the humor and sleaze that would soon dominate his work, as well as the strong eye for detail that would make his best songs seem almost like short stories. He's definitely in the embryonic stage, don't get me wrong. But on The Heart Of Saturday Night he's finally writing songs that couldn't have been written by other people. The Eagles would never have covered "Diamonds On My Windshield," for example.

"New Coat Of Paint" kicks off the album with an intoxicatingly boozy swing. It's my favorite song on the album, and one of my favorite Tom Waits songs, period. It sounds like it's been around forever, as if Tom Waits' version is actually a cover version. He gets in some memorable (if cheesy) one-liners, like: "Love needs a transfusion, let's shoot it full of wine/Fishin' for a good time starts with throwin' in your line." The lyrics are hokey, but you get the impression that he knows they're hokey (an impression you didn't get on Closing Time).

Then he moves along to "San Diego Serenade," an awkward ballad with lyrics that seem to rival Alanis Morrisette's "Ironic" in the department of songs that barely seem to achieve their rigidly thematic goal:

I never saw the morning 'til I stayed up all night
I never saw the sunshine 'til you turned out the light
I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long
I never heard the melody, until I needed a song.

I never saw the white line, 'til I was leaving you behind
I never knew I needed you 'til I was caught up in a bind
I never spoke 'I love you' 'til I cursed you in vain,
I never felt my heartstrings until I nearly went insane.

I never saw the east coast 'til I move to the west
I never saw the moonlight until it shone off your breast
I never saw your heart 'til someone tried to steal,
tried to steal it away
I never saw your tears until they rolled down your face.

I guess the ostensible idea he's trying to express is that people don't really appreciate things until they experience their opposite, or, as Joni Mitchell put it, "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." But how do lines like "I never felt my heartstrings until I nearly went insane" and "I never saw the moonlight until it shone off your breast" fit into this message? I think he just gave up and tried to make it all rhyme. Post-Heartattack and Vine Tom Waits would have never written a song like this, but I don't mind it too much on this album, because at the very least it's interesting.

With "Diamonds On My Windshield" we get the first appearance of spoken-word Waits, in which he describes a trip up Highway 101 from San Diego to L.A. If it's not quite "Frank's Wild Years," at least it captures a strong sense of place. My favorite verse is this one:

Wisconsin hiker with a cue-ball head
Wishing he was home in a Wisconsin bed
But there's fifteen feet of snow in the East
And it's colder then a welldigger's ass

A welldigger's ass, huh? That's pretty cold. "Diamonds On My Windshield" then segues right into the title track, a pleasant late-night ballad that Waits plays on acoustic guitar. Again, it's not the most amazing song in the world, but it works because it conjures a specific mood and it's different from the songs that surround it. The lyrics display his burgeoning eye for detail:

Tell me is it the crack of the poolballs, neon buzzin?
Telephone's ringin', it's your second cousin
Is it the barmaid that's smilin' from the corner of her eye?
The magic of the melancholy tear in your eye?

Compare this to "Lonely" or "Ice Cream Man." Those earlier songs were trying to sound universal, but instead they just sounded generic. When I listen to "The Heart Of Saturday Night," on the other hand, it's like I can actually see Tom Waits bumming around in some dead end L.A. shithole.

The rest of the album keeps the vibe flowing admirably. If none of the songs are mind-blowingly awesome, none of the songs are quite filler either. This is the album that Closing Time wanted to be but (I thought) wasn't. You can put it on late at night when you're the only guy left in the bar, but it's not the kind of album that 20 other California singer-songwriters could have written if Tom Waits hadn't written it first.

Still, I wonder how good the album really is. What if Tom Waits had died in a freak boating accident circa Blue Valentine? Would I have ever given this album more than one listen? That's a question I just can't answer. It's possible that part of my affection for the album is that a small percentage of me is rooting for early Tom Waits not to suck completely. But whatever; a good album is a good album.