“It was a gas”: How a San Diego pizza shop led to Tom Waits’ breakout
“Leaving the town in a-keepin / Of the one who is sweeping / Up the ghost of Saturday night,” Tom Waits sang in 1974, and he was that ghost.
From when he was 14, to when his blossoming success started to feel safe enough, Waits was sweeping floors and slinging dough, feeding the late-night revellers, which makes perfect sense when you think about his early career.
Back then, he had the voice of a lounge crooner with a roughness around the edges, and rather than sipping whiskey in an old club back room, a track like ‘Martha’ sounds exactly like a man in a beat-up work uniform, singing from a rusty piano in the pub. He encapsulated the same grandeur of yearning, but there was always a trace of the working man involved, a normalcy to it.
So it’s perfect that the scene of these stories would be your average-joe restaurant job. With his love for cigarettes and booze, and his enamour with regular day-to-day tales, Waits starts to become the archetype of the chef working the line. He starts to take the shape of a musical Anthony Bourdain, fascinated with the way that a community works, but putting it into ballads, rather than fancy meals or TV documentaries.
Looking back at those early records, it’s the regular person on the street that takes centre stage, and nowhere is that more obvious than on ‘The Ghosts of Saturday Night (After Hours at Napoleone’s Pizza House)’, or on that song’s spiritual sister, ‘Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night’. The tracks both see Waits hold the same position, and specifically, that position is by the big windows of the restaurant he worked at on the main drinking strip in San Diego.
He mentions the joint by name in the title, and that’s how essential it is. Napoleone’s Pizza House was a crucial spot for Waits, not only because it was where he had worked since his teens, but because it gave him the scenes and stories that would later make him a success.
“I worked there for years, for Joe Sardo and Sal Crivello, and eh, it was a gas. Well, like every night about eh four o’clock in the morning, all the white vinyl-booted Go-Go dancers and all the sailors would come over about a quarter o’ four. And just about that time, Joe would go out in front just to check out the traffic on the street,” he recalled, painting a vignette as beautiful in an interview as he does in his songs about the spot.
To him, despite it just being your average mom-and-pop pizza place, Napoleone’s dripped with romance. The restaurant owner remembered Waits’ time there, although the artist was pretty quiet. “He was shy at first, but I think that was just because he was young,” Sal Crivello said. “He washed dishes, and then became a cook. He was an excellent worker. He made good pizzas.”
Every part of the job was formative, from the years spent there to the people he met, to the scenes he saw, and to the sounds that would float through the door. “I thought I was gonna be a cook,” Waits said, as for a good while, he genuinely believed this pizza shop was his lot in life, adding, “That’s about as far as I could see. But what also happened was that I was mystified by the jukebox, and the physics of how you get into the wire and come out of the jukebox. That’s where that came from. I’d listen to Ray Charles singing ‘Crying Time’ and ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You,’ and I’d think, that’s something.”
And with that, he was transformed, beginning to write down the things he saw and heard, as the pizza shop became his pool of inspiration, and drinking from it made him a star.
