Tom Waits

The first triumvirate of Waits' records defined his early, most immediately accessible period, but none with more style than Heart of Saturday Night, where Waits' grifters, pool sharks and long-haul drivers steal smokes and fall for waitresses in the wee hours of capital "A" American nights. Backed with a band that sounds plucked from a flyover-state Holiday Inn, "New Coat of Paint" and "Diamonds on My Windshield" draw from the fast-and-loose poetics of the Beats, where downcast wanderers like "Semi Suite" and "(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night" are early masterpieces.

Tom Waits is an urban romantic poet whose lyrics echo the oral Beat poetry pioneered by
Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and Corso in the Fifties. Like the Beats, Waits has an ear for
the underlying rhythms of American speech and an impressive ability to catalog and
juxtapose provocative snatches of cityscape while creating a grandly sentimental vision.
Waits has the special ability to redeem cliches -- to make such phrases as "lones... More >

Last time he was an urban romantic with a good eye who you would have figured for a Ferlinghetti fan if you'd thought about it. This time he begins to sound like a Ferlinghetti imitator, and while nostalgia for past bohemias sure beats nostalgia for past wars, it's still a drain and a drag. I mean, there might be more coverable songs here if maudlin melodies didn't merge with neon imagery in the spindrift dirge of the honky-tonk nicotine night. Dig? (Grade: C+)