The 500 - #339 - The Heart Of Saturday Night - Tom Waits

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

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Album: # 339

Album Title: The Heart Of Saturday Night

Artist: Tom Waits

Genre: Blues, Jazz, Folk

Recorded: Wally Heider Studios, Hollywood, California

Released: October, 1974

My age at release: 9

How familiar was I with it before this week: A little

Is it on the 2020 list? No

Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: (Looking for) The Heart Of Saturday

For the third and final time, we have a Tom Waits record on The 500. Previously, I wrote about 1985's Rain Dogs (#399) and Mule Variations (#416), which was released in 1999. The Heart Of Saturday, is the second studio album from Waits and my favourite of the three. The album cover depicts an exhausted Waits, smoking a cigarette outside a cocktail lounge while a blonde woman observes him a short distance away. The moody, night-life cover reflecting the melancholy of Waits' songs was inspired by the 1955 Frank Sinatra record, In The Wee Small Hours -- an album which is also on The 500, at #101.

Waits' music isn't for everyone. His gravelly voice is off-putting to some and others find his lyrics, which focus on the underbelly of society, depressing and sometimes morose. In the 80s and 90s, Waits became increasingly experimental. He dabbled with cacophonous, industrial sounds and bizarre, sometimes grotesque, arrangements on later releases. However, this record, The Heart Of Saturday Night, and his debut release, Closing Time, are more conventional and likely more appealing to most listeners.

If I were to introduce the uninitiated to Waits, I would play them side two from Saturday Night long before revealing Mule Variations, Rain Dogs or Bone Machine. Indeed, much about the tone of those records can be gleaned from the titles and album covers alone.

I discovered The Heart Of Saturday Night while working as a bartender in the late 90s. 

Garlics Restaurant - my home away from home for 12 years

One particularly busy night, this record was in the rotation. At that time I was less familiar with the songs on it, so I was taken by surprise when Rob, a waiter who is still my good friend, walked by and, with an impish smile, said plaintively:

"Colder than a whale-digger's ass."

Talk about your non-sequitur. I was flummoxed and, as Rob walked away to continue serving customers, my head swirled with questions. 

"What the hell is a whale-digger?" 
"Was whale-digging something out of Moby Dick?"

"Maybe they are sea-hardy fishermen who harpoon sperm whales in order to dig for the precious ambergris deep in their intestines?" 

"I suppose that would be cold work, right?"

"Why did Rob say he was cold?"

Some time later, I got a chance to ask Rob to clarify. "What did you mean with the whale-digger's ass?"

"Not whale...well-digger's ass", he clarified, "on the Tom Waits record."

"Colder than a well-digger's ass", I would learn, is a popular idiom in the southern United States. Waits' writes it into the fifth track on side one, Diamonds On My Windshield, a beatnik-style, spoken word, jazz performance that includes this verse:

"And a Wisconsin hiker with a cue-ball head

He's wishing he was home in a Wisconsin bed

But there's fifteen feet of snow in the East

Colder then a well-digger's ass

And it's colder than a well-digger's ass"

Diamonds On My Windshield is an unexpected departure from the other tracks on the record, which are perfect late-night, wine-sipping music. In fact, I was playing it in my classroom during a recess period this week. A few students stayed behind to play cards (aka: avoid the cold weather).  As the record played, one piped up and said:

"This is the kind of music you hear in a fancy restaurant."

He was spot on, and I highly recommend The Heart Of Saturday Night for your next dinner party, or any time when the wine is close at hand and you want to escape into Waits' melancholy and wistful world for an hour.

And I'm still not convinced that the job of "whale-digging" doesn't exist.

Cocktail Party Fact

In 1979, Tom Waits sat down for an interview with Australian TV host Don Lane. Many believe the strange interview, available here on YouTube, helped inspire Heath Ledger's performance at The Joker for The Dark Knight movie. Unfortunately, Ledger died in 2008, so it can't be confirmed. You be the judge.

The 500 - #399 - Rain Dogs - Tom Waits

 I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

Album # 399

Album Title: Rain Dogs
Artist: Tom Waits 
Genre: Experimental Eclectic Everything
Recorded: RCA Studios
Released: September, 1985
My age at release: 20
How familiar was I with it before this week: One song
Song I am putting on my Spotify Mix: Clap Hands

Rain Dogs Cover - Tom Waits (1985)

There was a small rush of dopamine that accompanied the keystrokes that placed "Album #399" into the header of this post. When this marathon journey began in January, 2019, there was certainly some trepidation on my part that this was a "fool's errand" that would fizzle-out. However, with 100 records in the rear view mirror, completion of this nine-year task seems far more likely.

Tom Waits (1985)

What a phenomenal record was waiting at #399. Tom Waits' Rain Dogs is the middle album in a trilogy of experimental music that began with Swordfishtrombone (1983) and would conclude with Franks Wild Years (1987). All three records are notable for Tom's embrace of a broad spectrum of musical styles and wide range of instrumentation, as well as the use of eclectic background sounds gathered through natural sources rather than studio trickery. Indeed, Waits prides himself on being a Luddite who eschews technological sleight of hand in the studio, wonderfully captured by this somewhat salty, but perfectly Waits-ian, quote:

"If I want a sound, I usually feel better if I've chased it and killed it, skinned it and cooked it. Most things you can get with a button nowadays. So, if I was trying for a certain drum sound, my engineer would say, 'Oh, for Christ's sake, why are we wasting our time? Let's just hit this little cup with a stick here and make it bigger in the mix.' I'd say, 'No, I would rather go in the bathroom and hit the door with a piece of two-by-four very hard.'"

Much of the record was composed in a squalid, basement apartment at the corner of Washington and Horatio Street in the West Village of Manhattan. 

Washington & Horatio Streets, NYC

It was, as one might expect of New York City in the mid-eighties, a rough area, frequented by a diverse group of wandering artists, addicts, sex workers, pimps, hoodlums and the homeless. It was from this landscape that Waits drew his inspiration for both the music and his extraordinary lyrics. These urban vagabonds also provided inspiration for the album's title. As Waits put it:

"I kept thinking about people who live outdoors. You know how after the rain you see all these dogs that seem lost, wandering around. The rain washes away all their scent, all their direction. So all the people on the album are knit together, by some corporeal way of sharing pain and discomfort."

However, I couldn't help but think how this applies to all of us. We are all wandering the face of the earth, knit together by invisible forces. Fortunately, for many of us, we have the solace and comfort of a home and the ties that bind us are often love and belonging. Perhaps Waits is just reminding us to eschew the hectic whirlwind of our world and embrace the eclectic background. Maybe that will grant us a little more sympathy for the rain dogs in our world.

The 500 - #416 - Mule Variations - Tom Waits

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

Album # 416

Album Title: Mule Variations
Artist: Tom Waits
Genre: Experimental Rock
Recorded: Prairie Sun Recording Studios, Cotati, California
Released: April, 1999
My age at release: 33
How familiar was I with it before this week: Very Little
Song I am putting on my Spotify Mix: House Where Nobody Lives

Mule Variations by Tom Waits 

In my blog post from March I discussed a 1978 record by Devo. In the post, I recalled my Sunday evenings in the late 70s and early 80s listening to the The Doctor Demento Radio Show. 

Here is what I said:

Dr Demento..."was appointment listening. It combined my two great loves: music and comedy. Each week, Dr. Demento (aka Barry Hansen) would spin an eclectic mix of novelty songs ranging from humorously peculiar to the hauntingly bizarre. It was where I first heard... 

• "Weird" Al Yankovic and his first parody hit "My Bologna" (which lampooned The Knack's My Sharona), 
• What's He Building in There? by Tom Waits
• Constantinople by The Four Lads,  
• and all the exquisite weirdness of Barnes & Barnes with songs like Fishheads or Something's in the Bag

As it turns out...the second example I gave was untrue. 

What's He Building in There? was released by Tom Waits on this album, Mule Variations, in 1999. I could not possibly have heard it in the time-frame I suggested. 

I'm not even close. I was off by nearly two decades.

Did I misremember this? 

I still don't think so and I say that with confidence, despite clear evidence to the contrary. I distinctly remember hearing that Tom Waits' song on the radio in the 80s. Furthermore, I can recall quoting lines from it with my high-school chum Paul.

Perhaps this is an example of False Memory -- a psychological phenomenon where an individual recalls something differently than the way in which it happened, or maybe I am the first to identify a new example of The Mandela Effect.

The Mandela Effect  is a psycho-social condition that transpires when a large group of people believe an event has occurred when there is abundant evidence it did not. It was named by Fiona Broome who, in 2010, shared her strong recollections of the death of Anti-Apartheid activist Nelson Mandela while he was imprisoned in the 1980s. Broome recalled news stories and even a speech delivered by his widow, Winnie. 

However, as you likely know, none of that is true. Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and became the President of South Africa. He did not die until 2013, when he was 95 years old.

Nelson Mandela (1997)

Even though Broome's recollection never occurred, her experience was not an isolated case. Her story gathered a following from many people who experienced the same false reality. As a result, the Mandela Effect was named. For some who are part of this collective, there is a belief that they once lived in a parallel reality (one in which Mandela died in prison). However, now, due to some unfelt schism in the time-space continuum, they exist in our reality. A reality in which Mandela became President and died at 95.

I am not part of that collective and, normally, I would dismiss it as delusional hooey. However, there is another weird example that I personally experienced.  I was convinced that the popular children's book series "The Berenstein Bears" was spelled that way, with an "e". The "truth" is that it was named after the creators, Jan and Mike Berenstain, with an "a". Thus, they are The Berenstain Bears. They always have been -- despite everything my memory was telling me.

A book cover for one of many in the Berenstain library

I am not alone. In 2015, this phenomenon was, as a Globe & Mail Article put it, "a feverish discussion." Many came forward with the same recollection. I talked to numerous friends and found people in both the Berenstein and the Berenstain camps. 

Which brings us back to where I started. I could not have possibly have heard the Tom Waits' song What's He Building in There? twenty years before he released it on this album, Mule Variations. 

The question is, am I experiencing a false memory or is this an example of the Mandela Effect? In an attempt to verify my Mandela Hypothesis, I contacted my high school pal Paul. Would he remember it as I had? 

Sadly, he did not. So, it seems it was a false memory.

I suppose it is fitting that a Waits' song would choose to fragment itself in my memory timeline. Waits has always been an enigma to me. He is a musician, songwriter, composer and actor best known for his gravelly voice and his poetic focus on the darkness and beauty found in the underbelly of society. On The 500 Podcast episode dedicated to this album, actor Chris Sullivan summed him up as follows:

"Tom Waits is a romantic idea...I mean, every actor wants to be a musician but I always wanted to be Tom Waits. I realize that would require a huge amount of self-destructive behaviour, but you can't just "dress-up" like Tom Waits. He is entirely singular". 

Waits has two more records on The 500 list, so I will share more about him in the future. For now, much like the frustrated speaker in the Waits' song that started this confusion, I'll look to my flawed and time-fragmented brain and wonder..."What's He Building in There?"