The Heart Of Saturday Night, released 50 years ago, lit a path for TOM WAITS’ next decade of music-making. Beat poetry and noir jazz entwined and his roots in rough-andtumble San Diego showed through in his first truly Waitsian oeuvre. “All the elements were there,” discovers SYLVIE SIMMONS, “ready to be drawn out.”
Scott Smith (courtesy Chris Murray/Govinda Gallery)
LOS ANGELES, 1974
IN A TINY BUNGALOW AT THE BACK OF AN OLD house in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, Tom Waits is perched on a corner of a cluttered couch, cigarette in mouth, writing. The room is strewn with newspapers, magazines, full ashtrays, empty bottles, books, stacks of jazz LPs and, everywhere you look, notepads and paper scribbled with poems, potential song titles and overheard conversations. At Asylum Records’ directive, Waits is writing a bio/press release for his second album, The Heart Of Saturday Night.
“Born December 7, 1949, in Pomona, California,” he writes. “I drink heavily on occasion and shoot a decent game of pool. I like smog, traffic, kinky people, noisy neighbours and crowded bars.” His idea of “a good time”, he adds, “is a Tuesday evening at the Manhattan Club in Tijuana” – that is, the 1920s lounge bar across the US/Mexico border from San Diego, the city the Waits family moved to when Tom was around 10. From his late teens on, Waits had sung and played guitar at just about every small venue San Diego had to offer. Folk clubs mostly, like Folk Arts, then the Heritage, where for a while he worked as doorman.
Which was all well and good, but Waits wanted more. Every Monday at the crack of dawn he’d take an early Greyhound bus to LA to try for a spot at the Troubadour’s weekly hoot nights for new artists. This involved standing in a long line of musicians outside the club all day, waiting for an audition or rejection, followed by the 130-mile bus ride home.
Waits’ West Coast travels, the interplay of San Diego and Los Angeles, would be encoded in the grooves of The Heart Of Saturday Night – his first essentially Waitsian album. Getting there wouldn’t be straightforward, but he was starting in the right place. The Troubadour teemed with promoters, music journalists, record companies and managers, including Herb Cohen, a music biz impresario with a roster including Lenny Bruce, Tim Buckley, Linda Ronstadt, Lord Buckley and Frank Zappa, with whom he’d launched the Straight/Bizarre record label. It was at a hoot in 1971 that Cohen heard Waits, started managing him and gave him a publishing contract.
He wa
