The 1967 song so beautiful that Tom Waits couldn’t handle it: “It killed me”
There is an undoubted kinship between Tom Waits’ music and the paintings of Edward Hopper.
Both men are the great, expressionist voyeurs of American life, lurking in the shadowy alleyways and purveying what poetry they can pry from the jungle of civility. Making the best pizzas in San Diego might not seem like a pivotal step on the way to this artistic position, but Waits was able to observe far more than the optimal conditions for dough during his days at Napoleone’s in National City, California.
In fact, it was dishing out dough that proved to be the formative artistic experience of his life. Waits took up the job when he was only 14 years old. He was certainly very young, but it kept him off the streets, which was all the more pressing since his strange Spanish-teaching father, “a tough one, always an outsider”, had left in the night when he was only ten.
Like father like son, Waits was also an outsider, but this moment drove him further afield. He was a self-professed “amateur juvenile delinquent” and a “rebel against the rebels”. But he found comfort at Napoleone’s. His shift companion was always the in-house jukebox that just so happened to be filled with Ray Charles records.
In an instant, Waits was captivated. He would sit and watch the world go by beyond the condensation-streaked windows with Charles howling away, and everything seemed to make a little more sense. However, he was also just a youngster and with the revolution of rock ‘n’ roll afoot, he was far from averse to a bit of The Beatles and the Stones.
So, in 1967, when Charles covered the former, Waits was awe-struck. “He did ‘Yesterday’ on electric piano and it just killed me,” he told Hear Music in 1999. Raw and guttural, Charles had collided worlds in the seamless manner that only he can.
Waits didn’t know what to do with himself the first time he encountered it. “To hear that voice, it was like he crossed over a bridge,” Waits continued, “Because he remained in R&B territory, yet there was something so timeless about his voice, and hearing him do a Beatles song was just indescribable.”
Waits wasn’t the only one awed by the track, either. It might be the most covered song ever written, but when ranking the greatest Beatles renditions out there, Paul McCartney gave Charles’ ‘Yesterday’ a special mention.
The song means a lot to McCartney, too. “I think ‘Yesterday’ – if it wasn’t so successful – might be my favourite,” he said when weighing up the entire Beatles discography. With its meandering flow and simple yet profound meaning, it is easy to see why Waits might see through its ubiquity and agree.
