The album Tom Waits called his all-time favourite in 1974
“The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.” – Tom Waits
As you get older in life, you can sometimes forget the mammoth impact culture can have on you. Sure, you can become infatuated with a book, encounter a new favourite record, or start an obsession with a series, but you don’t anticipate that it will have a formative impact on a soul that is already set in its ways as opposed to the malleable days of yore when the right art at the right time really could change your life… just as it did for Tom Waits.
When the wise old Waits was still just a wise old teenager, he encountered something that would set him off on an adventure and make him who he is today. In fact, Jack Kerouac’s classic On The Road set a whole generation off on a similar path, as the Bob Dylan quote etched onto the inside sleeve of the modern Penguin edition testifies, “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.”
While the book was originally published in 1957, it wouldn’t enter Waits’ life until a decade later, when he was 18. At the time, he described himself as a wayward “amateur juvenile delinquent” and a “rebel against the rebels”. He had been searching for something – ‘something’ in the most nebulous sense – ever since his father mysteriously walked out on the family without warning about eight years earlier.
On The Road encouraged Waits to expand the scope of that search. “I’d read Kerouac when I was a teenager. That was profound,” he told Harp Magazine in 2006. “I immediately wanted to get on the road and start hitchhiking. And I did. I went all over – I went to Arizona, Oklahoma, Texas – just to get out there and see what it feels like.”
In a very literal sense, it had changed the course of his life. But he also saw the philosophical rewiring that Kerouac’s wavering ways and quest to quench the beauty in things initiated. “Everybody wants to try and jump off something that’s higher than he can handle,” Waits continued, “just to see if he’ll float quietly to the ground or break up on the rocks.”
“Everybody wants to see what the world’s made of and wants to see what they’re made of,” Waits poetically put it. On numerous occasions, the ‘Martha’ singer has spoken about how the seminal text remained with him.
“’It spoke to me,” he told Telegraph Magazine in 1999. It wasn’t just the way in which it illuminated the possibility of a larger life. “I couldn’t believe that somebody’d be making words that felt like music, that didn’t have any music in it, but had music all over it,” Waits said of its gripping prose.
He wanted to make music that followed a similar sense of lilting liberation from form. But Kerouac already had. Two years on from the release of On The Road, the writer teamed up with the jazz pianist and chat show host Steve Allen to record an LP called Poetry for the Beat Generation. It set Kerouac’s poetic musings to wavering melodies, as they perhaps always should have been.
Expressing its importance not just as a beloved disc but also a permanent influence on his outlook, Waits explained in the self-written press release for his album The Heart of Saturday Night back in 1974, “I drive a 1965 Thunderbird that needs a valve job and at least 4 quarts of Penzoil a week and gets 4 miles to the gallon on a long distance, the trunk is busted. And I have 3 warrants on traffic violations in the Los Angeles Metropolitan area alone.”
Comically adding. “I am a pedestrian piano player with poor technique but a good sense of melody. I write in coffee shops, bars, and parking lots. My favorite album is Kerouac-Allen on Hanover Records.” That record is otherwise known as Poetry for the Beat Generation, and it seems Waits was a keen ear amid the generation in question.
In time, it proved as instrumental as his piano technique and traffic violations when it came to formulating a sound and style to call home. In turn, Waits’ own Heart of Saturday Night would change my life, like it changes every other young person who encounters it. We often forget that fact a little further down the line when we become the world-weary protagonists who parade around Waits’ wondrous songs rather than the kids first struck by its humanity.
