The song Tom Waits wrote in tribute to Jack Kerouac
On the inside sleeve of of Jack Kerouac‘s seminal novel On The Road, Bob Dylan offers up the following appraisal: “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.” Indeed, it changed society. At a time when literatures prominent position as the pinnacle of art was waning, Kerouac decided that sitting behind a desk in judgement of the world wasn’t enough anymore, and set out to catch culture on the wing, to encapsulate the intersect of life and art with a visceral mix of realism and expressionism.
Very few albums in history have found such a beautiful knack of waxing lyrical about the everyday as Tom Waits’ sophomore classic The Heart of Saturday Night from 1974. Amid a recession, with the mechanical grind of the working week ramping up, Waits paints a picture, like the Edward Hopper of song, of downtrodden folks trying to find their weekly patch of reverie to jazzy tones and the streetlights’ glow.
Had he wanted to make the link to Kerouac even clearer, he could’ve called his record On The Streets, but instead he captured the times as they were, and simply explained during the first performance of the title track for this record, which was broadcast live on KFPK, that ‘(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night’ was written in honour of Kerouac.
Waits’ self-written press release for the album explains how he bled into his own musical prose. “The blur drizzle down the plate glass and a neon swizzle stick stirs up the night air, as a cue ball maverick of a moon rolls across an obsidian sky and the busses groaning and wheezing at the corner of restless blvd. and midnight road, across the trucks from easy street and window shoppers beat the cement stroll and I sit scowling over this week’s special Norm’s pancakes and eggs c69 trying to stretchout in the bowels of this metropolitan area,” Waits writes.
“I’ve tasted Saturday nights in Detroit, St. Louis, Tuscaloosa, New Orleans, Atlanta, N.Y.C., Boston, Memphis. I’ve done more traveling in the past year than I ever did in my life so far, in terms of my level of popularity, on the night spot circuit, I remain in relative obscurity and now upon the release of a second album, which I believe a comprehensive study of a number of aspects of this search for the center of Saturday night, which Jack Kerouac relentlessly chased from one end of this country to the other, and I’ve attempted to scoop up a few diamonds of this magic that I see,” he continues.
So, that sets the Kerouacian tone when it comes to adding a luscious poetry to the notion of an artist with his collar turned to the cold and damp, purveying the natural prose of the street. And then he pairs this to the beat of his songsmith heroes: “Musically pulling influence from Mose Allison, Thelonious Monk, Randy Newman, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Ray Charles, Stephen Foster, Frank Sinatra…”
In many ways, this makes ‘(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night’ one of his most definitive tracks. All summed up, with the utterly gorgeous lyric: “Magic of the melancholy tear in your eye.”
