Wild Years (8 page)

One of the first agreements that Tom and Bones struck was that this album was going to be a lo-fi product — a gritty assortment of expressions bearing no trace of studio polish. Even the artwork for
The Heart of Saturday Night
would have that low-life after-hours feel — a drawing of a tired and slightly dazed-looking Waits being sized up by a blonde hooker as he steps out of a neon-lit cocktail lounge at closing time.

Howe needed an arranger for Tom's new compositions, someone who could instinctively relate to what he and Waits were trying to achieve. He approached Michael Melvoin, legendary studio musician whose job list reads like a who's who of twentieth-century popular music (Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, Barbra Streisand, Peggy Lee, The Beach Boys, Michael Jackson, Harry Nilsson, The Partridge Family, Bing Crosby, Quincy Jones, John Williams, Burt Bacharach, Dean Martin, Herb Alpert, Bette Midler, Cher — and there are many more).
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Melvoin was so widely respected in the music business that he was voted president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the organization that presents the Grammy Awards, and he was the first practising musician to land this position. (Melvoin's children have made their own mark on the industry: Wendy was a member of Prince's band, The Revolution, and then formed her own group, Wendy and Lisa, with fellow revolutionary Lisa Coleman; Jonathan was a member of Smashing Pumpkins in 1998 when he died, tragically, of an overdose.)

Howe and Melvoin had worked together before — with The Fifth Dimension and several other acts — and despite the fact that Melvoin hadn't yet heard of Tom Waits, Howe felt that he had the sensitivity and the expertise to help them shape
The Heart of Saturday Night
. When Howe gave him a preliminary taste of Waits's material, Melvoin says, “I knew that I was dealing with an extraordinary, different kind of talent. There were a couple of things about it. First of all, the lyrics . . . I would describe them as top-rank American poetry. I thought then, and I still believe, that I was dealing with a world-class poet. My degree from school was in English literature, so I felt that I was in the presence of one of the great Beat poets.” As a student Melvoin had played jazz behind Beat poet and essayist Kenneth Rexroth. Tom's work was “a counterpoint to that experience. I was amazed by the richness of it. The musical settings that he was using reminded me of certain roots jazz experiences that I thought were very, very appropriate for that.”

Melvoin never had a moment's hesitation about taking on the
Heart of Saturday Night
project. “It seemed like a very good fit for my background. It amazed me how well [Tom and I] got on, immediately. I thought I understood what he was doing right away, and I felt great affection for him personally and professionally. My enthusiasm was full-blown right away.”

The Heart of Saturday Night
signals its difference in its opening notes. Waits plays a bawdy barrelhouse New Orleans piano intro to “New Coat of Paint” that would do Dr. John, his future friend and legendary Big Easy ivory-tickler, proud. Over a strutting, preening peacock of a tune floats Waits's voice (by now even raspier). The singer is planning a memorable night of drunken carousing with his sweetheart because their relationship is turning stale. Maybe a little wine, dancing, romancing somewhere in this sleepy old town can save them. This initiates the album's unofficial theme. The songs of
The Heart of Saturday Night
form a loose chronology of a descent into loneliness: the singer and his lover set out together on an evening ripe with promise; they slide deeper and deeper into the night world; they wind up drunk, forlorn, alone together in an all-night restaurant.

The next cut, “San Diego Serenade,” is a love song to Waits's home-town, and it wouldn't have been out of place on
Closing Time
. “Depot, Depot” evokes late nights at the Greyhound Bus Terminal in downtown Los Angeles, an ideal spot, so Waits has claimed, to take your date — but be sure to bring along a bunch of quarters to insert into the T.V. chairs.
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“Shiver Me Timbers” is a sincere tribute to sailors. “Diamonds on My Windshield” was scribbled on the back of a tour itinerary in a single spontaneous burst, and it recalls Tom's days of shuffling between San Diego and Los Angeles, stopping regularly for a cup of coffee, a bathroom break, or a car repair. Pulling out this scrap of paper in the studio, Tom began to wrestle with his jotted lyrics, but “Diamonds” just wouldn't click. Finally, the session musicians caught a vibe that Tom liked. The bassist, Jim Hughart, hit on a cool bass line, and the drummer, who that day was Jim Gordon, pulled out the brushes and delivered a hot shuffle beat. Gordon, a brilliant studio musician, was once a member of Eric Clapton's supergroup, Derek and the Dominoes; he cowrote the rock anthem “Layla” with Clapton. Years later, in a fit of dementia, he killed his mother, and he was forced to spend his later years in a mental hospital. But that day at Wally Heider Recording the atmosphere was unclouded by specters of tragedy. Waits, Hughart, and Gordon nailed “Diamonds on My Windshield” on the first take.

The album's title track is yet another celebration of the freedom to drive, to step into your car with a six-pack and a dream and go see what the sprawling Los Angeles night can offer. The cut's opening car-horn effects were created by setting up a tape recorder during rush hour on Hollywood's Cahuenga Boulevard. From twenty minutes of tape the best traffic sounds were extracted. It may not have been the most sophisticated recording technique, but, in its inspired simplicity, it worked. The edited street noises import an immediacy to the track, an authenticity, as Waits's lyrics communicate doubt and desperation and chronicle the attempt to turn it all around by combing your hair and washing your face and becoming a better person.

The album winds down as the sun comes up. Waits's disheartened revelers face a new day. “The Ghosts of Saturday Night (After Hours at Napoleone's Pizza House)” is a clear-eyed and moving look at the deflated patrons of Waits's former workplace couched in lyrics reminiscent of Charles Bukowski's poetry — an American Gothic of tormented but unbowed contenders. Sal Crivello recognized the song for what it was: Waits's tribute to Napoleone's and those who pass through it. “I enjoyed it and I thanked him for it.”

All told,
The Heart of Saturday Night
was an enormous step forward in artistic terms.
Closing Time
had been an impressive debut, but this was an album for the ages. Shortly after
The Heart of Saturday Night
had been recorded, Waits said that he expected the album to be a smash.
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He was proud of what he and his team had accomplished, and this made him confident. Experience would eventually make him more wary, less prone to making such glowing predictions.

In a just world,
The Heart of Saturday Night
would have been a smash. The fact that it wasn't could indicate that it was too far ahead of its time. Or too far behind. In hindsight it seems unrealistic to have expected such a creation to take flight in an era when middle-of-the-road pop stars like Helen Reddy, Neil Sedaka, and Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods dominated the charts. “I'm on the wrong end of the wheelbarrow every time,” Waits wryly remarked to David Fricke of
Rolling Stone
.
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Time, however, has a way of making up for slights like these. Over the years,
The Heart of Saturday Night
has gained in stature. Many now consider it a masterpiece. It is still selling, but Reddy, Sedaka, and Donaldson have long since faded into relative obscurity. Mike Melvoin sensed that
The Heart of Saturday Night
had staying power. “I knew I was working with a genius. I knew that this was of serious, real value. It wasn't of ephemeral
value.” Admittedly, Melvoin has worked with artists he considered “wonderful talents” who generated some interest but ultimately failed to take off. There's no calling it. Still, Melvoin insists, “Tom's work is intrinsically timeless.”

While
The Heart of Saturday Night
demonstrated how much Waits had grown as a musician in the studio setting, his live act needed an overhaul. The problem was that despite his growing reputation, few people in the music business knew which niche he belonged in. Was he rock? Was he jazz? As a result Waits was booked into a series of tours as the opening act for artists he couldn't possibly mesh with. Live performance became an ordeal for him — he was booed off the stage by fans of acts he had no business sharing a bill with. In the early seventies he toured with a diverse assortment of entertainers, including comedians Redd Foxx, Martin Mull, and Richard Pryor; Bette Midler in her “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” phase; country-rock outfit Poco; and fifties guitarist Link Wray.

Waits also opened for the likes of country-and-blues singer Charlie “The Silver Fox” Rich (whom Tom acknowledged was one damn good singer), former Byrds leader Roger McGuinn, and the doo-wop funk collective The Persuasions. Then there was adult-contemporary singer/songwriter Melissa Manchester, funk pianist (and one of several unofficial Beatles) Billy Preston, and blues belter Big Mama Thornton.

“It was the old case of the one-size-fits-all industry push on a new songwriter,” Waits complained to David McGee of
Rolling Stone
. “Throw you out there and see what you can do. I didn't know what the hell I was doing.”
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One of the few pairings that actually made some sense was Tom Waits and Bonnie Raitt. Waits had sung backing vocals for the song “Sweet and Shiny Eyes” on Raitt's
Home Plate
album, along with a collection of other still-unproven Elektra/Asylum artists — including Jackson Browne —and he and the young singer/blues guitarist shared a certain affinity. Touring with Tom, Raitt told
Newsweek,
was an enriching experience: he kept her band in touch with life on the street; he was like a portal to a world they didn't usually get to visit.
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Waits often complains to interviewers that he was even obliged to be the warm-up act for fifties' T.V.-puppet-show maestro “Buffalo” Bob Smith and his wooden better half, Howdy Doody. Chances are that this is just part of the comic hard-knocks mythology that Waits enjoys building for himself — there is no real evidence that Tom Waits ever did meet Howdy Doody. But Waits continues to spin it out, maintaining that he still breaks into a cold sweat when he remembers plying his trade at 10:00 a.m.
for a studio full of polyester-clad suburban hausfraus and their bored Brady Bunch kids. “I wanted to kill my agent. And no jury would have convicted me. Bob and I didn't get along. He called me Tommy. And I distinctly remember candy coming out of my piano as I played.”
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But all of this was just fun and games. Waits's real trial by fire came when he was recruited to open for the stars of Herb Cohen's stable — brilliant, anarchistic joke-rocker Frank Zappa and his cohorts, The Mothers of Invention. Waits's Tin Pan Alley piano ballads about whiskey, love, and loss didn't do it, to put it mildly, for audiences all pumped up to hear “Broken Hearts Are for Assholes,” “Weasels Ripped My Flesh,” and “Don't Eat the Yellow Snow.” Zappa heads lit into the young Waits with wolflike ferocity. “Zappa — that was my first experience of rodeos and hockey arenas,” Waits told David Fricke. “The constant foot stomping and hand clapping: ‘We! Want! Frank!' It was like
Frankenstein,
with the torches, the whole thing.”
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Many years later the memory still preyed on Waits. In 1999 he said to Barney Hoskyns, “I was always rather intimidated by Frank. There was so much mythology around him, and he had such confidence . . . When I toured with him, it was not well thought out. It was like your dad saying, ‘Why don't you go to the shooting range with your brother Earl?' I was like, I don't really want to. I might get hurt. And I did get hurt. I went out and subjected myself to all this really intimidating criticism from an audience that was not my own. Frank was funny. He'd just say: ‘How were they out there?' He was using me to take the temperature, sticking me up the butt of the cow and pulling me out. Kind of funny in retrospect. I fit in, in the sense that I was eccentric. Went out every night, got my forty minutes. I still have nightmares about it. Frank shows up in my dreams, asking me how the crowd was. I have dreams where the piano is catching fire and the audience is coming at me with torches and dragging me away and beating me with sticks . . . so I think it was a good experience.”
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Bones Howe thinks that dealing with Zappa actually did help Waits as a touring artist. “I saw him open for The Mothers a few times, and he would get heckled. I know it was uncomfortable for him, but it was a good baptism. He learned to banter with the audience. There were always a few people in the audience that he would hook . . . and he'd end up talking with them. He would develop a rapport with the people in his audience who really liked him. Little by little, he built his following that way. But he was always much better at a small venue.”

One person Tom had impressed in the small-venue setting would
eventually play a key role in exposing him to a national audience. Don Roy King caught Waits's show in 1973 at a Manhattan club called Reno McSweeney's. King was there to see the headliner — “a lovely, thin-voiced flight attendant turned cabaret singer” whose name King has long since forgotten. Waits, King thought, had “a great hook . . . He started his set in character, sort of a half-buzzed derelict with the voice of a bulldozer, slurring his way through a metaphor-rich stream of semiconsciousness. I couldn't wait for him to drop the act, to see what he was really like, to hear how he really sounded. Well, song after song went by. Each one rich and gutsy. Each with its own syncopated stutter-step of urban images and dark-side tales. Some were brash. Some were tender. All were captivating. The moods swung and flipped and flayed. But Tom never changed. He played the role straight through. He never looked at us. Never smoothed out the gravel. Never put out his cigarette. He did balance it on his stool once when he sat down to play the piano. The whole set was that derelict. A gutsy, shrewd act.”
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