My Life in the Cutout Bins: Tom Waits/Nighthawks at the Diner

"I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs, catch an uptown A train . . ."

So begins William S. Burroughs' most famous work, Naked Lunch. The thing that all the Beat writers had in common was their casual use of poetry, developing words into phrases and sentences that would not only communicate what their prose described, but offer up some semblance of the feeling itself.

Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and the rest sought a truly defining American experience, not one going back to the settling and expansion of the country, but in the here and now. They prowled the alleys of the cities, supplicants to the cool universe, accepting what alms and inspiration came their way, generally ending up in the bars and jazz clubs "Lonely as America, a throatpierced sound in the night."

Of course, they weren't the first generation to feel the romance of the road, nor the last to find it a refuge. Tom Waits, a young songwriter from the San Diego folk music circuit who migrated to Los Angeles, was influenced by Dylan as well as by the Beats, specifically Jack Kerouac. Waits displayed a talent for writing gorgeously tender melodies and a deep interest in the darker elements of human life, the backwoods and the Bowery, the loss of moral compass on the open road, the terror inherent in utter freedom, violent death, and humor distilled from the cynicism of a seasoned carny. All delivered with a jazz vibe. Everything Waits was going to do was there, in nascent form, on his first two albums, but the focus became much clearer once producer Bones Howe and Waits began to work together.

The Heart of Saturday Night, the first record Waits and Howe made together featured musicians who gave an authentic edge to Waits' jazz pretensions, primarily because they were jazz players. Bassist Jim Hughart and saxophonist Pete Christlieb were familiar to the public by ear if not by name, as were arrangers Bob Alcivar and Mike Melvoin. Melvoin provided a further connection, along with Howe, to the Liberty label, where both had previously worked with The Fifth Dimension.

The one thing you couldn't get on either of Waits' first two records was a sense of what it was like to see and hear him perform his songs live. Because live, Waits was a whole other ballgame. He was involved in a project to see if slowly, over time, he could meld himself, his character, so that it was no longer a presentation of  a beatnik barfly philosopher who's been hurt a little too often, but the real thing. Waits had also come under the influence of another counterculture antihero poet, Charles Bukowski. He liked to talk, use words to humor, shame, cajole, con, and genuinely entertain his audience. The song's introduction became as important as the song itself in many ways.

He and Howe came up with the idea that, for Waits' third album, a small club would be set up in the studio and an audience would be invited. Waits would perform for them and it would be recorded, 'live' but in the studio. Some other records were recorded this way, usually jazz records such as Cannonball Adderley's 'Live at 'The Club,' produced by Capitol's David Axelrod. In a 2004 interview with Sound on Sound, Howes remembered the setup:

"We did it as a live recording, which was unusual for an artist so new. Herb Cohen and I both had a sense that we needed to bring out the jazz in Waits more clearly. Tom was a great performer on stage...I remembered that Barbra Streisand had made a record at the old Record Plant studios, when they were on 3rd Street near Cahuenga Boulevard. It's a mall now. There was a room there that she got an entire orchestra into. Back in those days they would just roll the consoles around to where they needed them. So Herb and I said let's see if we can put tables and chairs in there and get an audience in and record a show. I got Michael Melvoin on piano, and he was one of the greatest jazz arrangers ever; I had Jim Hughart on [upright] bass, Bill Goodwin on drums and Pete Christlieb on sax. It was a totally jazz rhythm section. Herb gave out tickets to all his friends, we set up a bar, put potato chips on the tables and we had a sell-out, two nights, two shows a night, July 30 and 31, 1975. I remember that the opening act was a stripper. Her name was Dewana and her husband was a taxi driver. So for her the band played bump-and-grind music - and there's no jazz player who has never played a strip joint, so they knew exactly what to do. But it put the room in exactly the right mood. Then Waits came out and sang 'Emotional Weather Report'. Then he turned around to face the band and read the classified section of the paper while they played."

The clue that Nighthawks is not a live album in the normal sense is that none of the songs are part of the artist's well known live repertoire, which is to say that they are all new songs. But the performance concept was perfect for when Waits would perform these songs in front of a live audience, as he does on a December 1975 performance taped for the PBS Soundstage series. Waits occupies the first half of the show, with the second half featuring Mose Allison. That program put Waits on my radar and put me on the search for his records, but I especially wanted the record with "Eggs and Sausage." That's one of the songs from Nighthawks that he performs on the show, but most of the tracks are other songs from his first two albums that also get new intros, sometimes melding from his familiar patter-filled riffs into the song itself with no fanfare (as, for example, on "Drunk on the Moon").

His version of "Eggs and Sausage" is performed on film as an intro to his set, with Waits sitting in the blue light of an actual diner and performing the song as a piece of beat poetry, uptempo, snapping fingers, riffing and bebopping, as Seinfeld would say. That was enough to get my thirteen year old self hyped on Waits, but I was happy to discover the slowed down, bluesy, late night jazz set version on Nighthawks.

Waits came around during a time when there was an odd nostalgia in the music business for sounds and styles of a previous time. Performers who come immediately to mind are Bette Midler and Leon Redbone, both of whom came from a night club background, as did Waits, and both of whom had a style (or styles) that went against the grain of the then current pop environment. Not surprisingly, Midler and Redbone both worked with Joel Dorn on their first recording projects. Dorn had an ear for sounds that sounded out of their time frame, in fact he continued to work with acts like The Frank and Joe Show well into his indie record label career.

Another interesting note: In 1966, Jerry Yester produced The Association album Renaissance before Bones Howe took over production for the group for the next couple of records. Yester also produced Tom Waits' debut album Closing Time, the only Waits album for the Asylum label not produced by Howe.

As a budding writer, musician, and performer, I was probably predestined to fall in love with a performer whose "entire set revolves around his command of the language" ("Positively 84th Street - Poet of the Crack of Dawn" by John Landau. (Rolling Stone magazine. December 18, 1975). But I didn't really follow Waits out of his beatster Asylum era, and Nighthawks at the Diner remains the only Waits album I've ever owned. I mean, I was all for the artist moving forward and all that, but his Weill infused stuff never grabbed me and the sentimentality thrown into his Harry Partch noise music period began to seem like so much unnecessary drama.

The thing about beatnik Tom was that it truly wasn't just some beat jive. Tom was influenced more directly by Kerouac than by the others and his writing has more in common with Kerouac's robust, physical style. It hinges on the poetry in the service of a melody that is memorable and seems as though it was always there--we remember it as though it was sung to us as an infant or as though it is part of our genetic landscape. In a March 2023 piece for Creem, Hether Fortune writes: "Waits’ musical aesthetic wasn’t always the didgeridoo-infused, floor-stomping, drill-bit freak show he’s come to be known for. At the beginning of his career, in the ’70s, he was basically a strange crooner."

Nighthawks at the Diner is a set piece, kind of like a Broadway show, and it isn't difficult to see Waits performing this onstage as though at an old timey club. His stage patter is like the improvisation of a jazz musician--he has a set of well worn riffs and runs that he's put away in his brain and can apply as needed to grease the wheels. These are to be used sparingly, as a mark of style so that they don't come to be seen by the audience as a crutch. The important things are the things he truly plays without thinking and the things he doesn't play--that's where the real creativity in improvisation comes from. Inspiration and the inhaling, the waiting for inspiration.

One of the cool things about being able to see Waits live at the time, or on the Soundstage broadcast is that you can see that he reuses some phrases and some poetic bits that are part of his patter, but they do change as he reacts in the moment to what is happening. It's a performance where Waits is being the character and he's hitting his mark, singing the lines, but what happens in between is open, even if it's based on a framework that doesn't really change. And even if Nighthawks at the Diner were a Broadway show, it's one that I'd pay to see more than once.

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