Tom Waits

Waits' cult following was well staffed by this 1977 release, although the nine-song offering is one of his relative low points of the decade. Bette Midler's dolly routine on the duet of "I Never Talk to Strangers" is proof that one-liners like "your life's a dime-store novel" are only convincing when sung by Waits himself. The rambling monologues in "Barber Shop" and "Jack and Neal" feel a bit more forced than some of his earlier beat rambles, and, although the barstool philosopher routine in "Burma-Shave" is nothing new, it's the record's best.

The admiring audience that Tom Waits built up with his early work now worries about him
in a way that does his derelict's persona proud: when is that old boy gonna straighten up?
Closing Time was a quiet classic in 1973, but with The Heart of Saturday Night, Small Change
and Nighthawks at the Diner, the singer songwriter's beaten raps, overflowing with pathos
and Americana, had turned self-indulgent. Foreign Affairs, fortunately, shows a... More >

I like the poetry-with-jazz for "Jack & Neal," the mumbled monologue "Barber Shop," the Anglophile "Foreign Affair," and a duet with Bette on "I Never Talk to Strangers." But I get off the trolley at "Potter's Field," a production number for a high-rolling nightstick who crossed "from the Bronx to the River Styx." With his genre sleaze and metaphorical melodrama, Waits is a downwardly mobile escapist who believes that Everyman is a wino and Everywoman an all-night waitress who turns tricks when things get rough. The problem isn't the subjects themselves, but that for all his self-conscious unpretentiousness he inflates them. Which I guess is all we can expect of a schoolteacher's son who's been searching for his own world since he was old enough to think. (Grade: B)