Tom Waits, "Christmas Card From A Hooker in Minneapolis" (Track of the Week)

This last week has been a real roller coaster. My winter break began, and on Wednesday I got to see a bunch of my former students at an event at my school. On Thursday, I got to bum around New York City for the day. When I got home, I went into the basement and saw that our boiler was leaking and our heat was off. Turns out we need a new one! Merry fucking Christmas.

In a strange twist of events, this whole fiasco has me feeling more optimistic than I have in awhile. Yeah we are confronted with an annoying and expensive problem, but we are going to fix it. I was also able to find a way to travel with my family instead of being stuck here waiting to get the boiler fixed, so Christmas has been saved, too. In a fit of good feeling I wrote a Substack piece on establishing some good habits for engaging in politics in 2024. The fascists want us confused and hopeless, we need to put our shoulders to the wheel and ignore the bullshit. 

I have to get up at 3AM tomorrow for my flight so I am trying to relax myself by drinking a Manhattan and listening to Tom Waits music from the 70s. I don't think he really showed his true genius until the 80s, but in the polyester decade he cut one of the great sad Christmas songs, "Christmas Card From A Hooker in Minneapolis." It's resonating with me because it's about persevering through some shit times. After every crappy day comes sleep and then a new morning. Maybe that new day will be shit too, but perhaps it won't. 

The whole premise of the song is a dark joke. Christmas cards that come with a yearly round-up of life events usually come from middle-class families wanting to brag on Susie's grades and Bobby's position on the varsity squad. They don't come from sex workers living a hand to mouth existence on the margins of society. The narrator's life is hard. She talks about a record from the person she's writing to, but also that her record player had been stolen. She tried going back to live with her parents in Omaha but "everyone I used to know is either dead or in prison." Now's she's back in Minneapolis "and I think I'm going to stay." By the end she admits she's in jail and needs help. In the worst and most desperate straits, she's still thinking that things can turn around. After all, "I'll be eligible for parole come Valentine's Day." 

The holidays are a time of reflection, which can often make us rue the ways our lives didn't turn out the way we thought they would. But even in the worst circumstances, people still find ways to keep on living. My busted boiler is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. Tomorrow is another day. 

Tom Waits, "San Diego Serenade"

I'm currently planning my road trip out to Nebraska to see my family this summer. I am getting excited by all of the possibilities of travel open to us, but also by spending a few days in the slower, less hectic world under the big Great Plains sky. While driving my kids around the suburban streets of northern New Jersey (my current home) this evening, I had a semi-official bootleg of a 1974 Tom Waits radio program on the stereo, and was struck deep by "San Diego Serenade."

It's a song Waits wrote about his hometown after having moved to and fully embraced Los Angeles. Like a lot of people (including yours truly) who leave where they're from to make their way in the world, he had long looked down on his hometown. The song is about that feeling when your teen angst fades and you can see the place where you grew up with more sympathetic eyes. The line "I never saw my hometown/ Until I stayed away too long" pretty much sums it up. My hometown is not as comely as San Diego, but it too deserves a serenade from me.

Track of the Week: Tom Waits, "Christmas Card From a Hooker In Minneapolis"

Christmas cards are a tradition I don't engage in, but they make sense to me.  At the end of the year I too usually take stock of my life and think about all that has happened since my last go 'round the sun.  It's good to get letters from friends and family about what they've been up to themselves.  I look forward especially to my sister's Christmas card and letter each year, since it gives me a great sense of what's been going on in her life over a thousand miles away.

Of course, my private thoughts about my life over the past year would need a great deal of editing before they could be doled out for public consumption.  Some people's Christmas cards might also make for harrowing reading.  That's the darkly humorous conceit behind Tom Waits' "Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis." The narrator frankly discusses destitution, pregnancy, drug addiction, and hitting bottom.  This is not a letter full of brags about children on the honor roll or vacations in Spain, so much so that anyone who sends Christmas letter like that ought to receive a copy of this song in the mail in reply to remind them that others don't have it so easy.

"Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis" comes off of Blue Valentine, which is the last of Waits' 1970s jazz piano-based records.  It's never been among my favorite albums of his, mostly because he seemed to know that his original persona and musical style were getting played out.  (He previously brought it close to perfection on Small Change, and would soon switch gears in a bluesier direction on Heartattack and Vine.)  However, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, and this song beautifully combines the low-life stories, tender growl, and moody jazz accompaniment that defines Waits' best work in this period.

Classic Albums: Tom Waits, Heartattack and Vine

I came to Tom Waits late in life, but like Paul on the road to Damascus, the scales fell from my eyes and I preach Waits' gospel every chance I get.  A friend in college was a Waits disciple too, and always used to play his stuff for me without winning me over.  His music seemed willfully obtuse, his voice abrasive, and none of it really fit with other artists I liked.  My girlfriend in grad school tried to win my soul for the bard of the gutter, and I didn't crack until she loaned me a copy of Heartattack and Vine.

For some reason, it just clicked with me, which is funny considering that is not one of his more highly rated records.  Allmusic only gives it three stars out of five, the second lowest score for any of his albums, and much lower than those that come right after.  Robert Christgau's B grade review is chock full of faint praise.  Released in 1980, it is a transitional album marking Waits' shift from his jazzbo lounge singer persona of the 1970s to his avant garde wildman stage that began in earnest with 1983's revolutionary Swordfishtrombones.  Up until this  point Waits' jazz piano laid the foundation, afterward it would be unorthodox percussion.  On Heartattack and Vine, it's the blues.  I think people don't like this record for the same reason I didn't like Waits for so long: it doesn't fit pre-existing categories.  Maybe that's why it was the one to hook me, it had a quality I lacking in the other stuff I'd heard.

The bluesy nature of the proceedings is apparent when the title track kicks of the record in raucous fashion.  A cutting, drunkenly lumbering guitar staggers into the room, soon accompanied by one of Waits' signature growls.  He uses this to best effect on one of his all time best lines "There ain't no devil, just God when he's drunk."  When I heard this song, his sandpaper and Marlboros voice suddenly made sense to me the way that Howlin' Wolf's similarly unorthodox vocal stylings always had.  Waits' singing is really better suited to blues-based material, and here his voice finally gets the right platform.

Other songs on the record mine the depths of the blues, especially the caustic "Downtown" and perverted "Mr. Siegal."  However, it's a couple of weepy ballads that make this album so great.  The first is "Jersey Girl," a song that has a lot of meaning for me.  I was listening to Waits a lot around the time I met the Jersey girl who would later be my wife.  When Waits says "Nothing else matters in this whole wide world, when you're in love with a Jersey girl" my heart swells.  Beyond my own subjective biases, it really is a fetching ballad, and expresses, without being maudlin, the insane magic of falling in love.  When my wife and I slow-danced to this at our wedding it was probably the happiest I felt that day.

The other ballad is the monumental "On the Nickel," whose title refers to 5th Street in LA (hence "nickel.")  This is skid row, and Waits is singing a lullaby to the men who live there.  The accompanying strings are lush, like something off of a Disney soundtrack, his voice whisperingly tender at the start.  Halfway through it gets low and fearsomely gutteral, as if he is channeling the pain and broken hopes of the men for whom he sings.  By the end if you are not moved, you have no heart.

None of the other songs can match "Heartattack and Vine," "Jersey Girl," or "On the Nickel," but a record with three awe-inspiring songs counts as a classic in my book.  It might not fit the image Waits fans or critics have of him, which is all the more reason to admire it as one of the most confounding works of a charmingly confounding artist.

Track of the Week: Tom Waits, "Warm Beer And Cold Women"

[Editor's Note: I've enjoyed writing entries in my classic albums series, but as much as I want to revive the album as a musical delivery system, by doing so I have been neglecting the glory of singular songs. Ergo, I have a new series: Track of the Week.]

Tom Waits has spent the last thirty years distancing himself from his original personae and style, preferring sound experiments, jumpy rhythms, and distortion to his days as a drunken, piano-playing jazzbo raconteur.  And truth be told, I think the album that marked this transition to something more challenging (Swordfishtrombones) is my favorite in his catalog.

That said, there are some nights when I'm too fatigued to be avant-garde.  After a long day of educating teenagers and navigating the usual bullshit and politics, I need comfort in the form of a glass of bourbon and some soothing music.  There is no better aural balm for times like this than Waits' early work, and no song more fitting than "Warm Beer And Cold Women."  The title itself perfectly evokes the essence of everyday frustration, the feeling that it's just one damn hassle after another.  'Cuz once the bourbon glow leads you to bed, you still have to wake up the next day and face the same old shit all over again.  It's the little moments like this song that keep it from getting unbearable.

Classic Albums: Tom Waits, Nighthawks at the Diner

This week the fact that I am about to become a father, and that my life will soon never be the same again, hit me with the full force of reality.  I feel ready for it, since my rough and rowdy days are behind me, but last night, as I put the finishing touches on transforming my office into a nursery, I sipped from a glass of wine while listening to Tom Waits' Nighthawks at the Diner, just for old time's sake.

I may be settled down now with a wonderful wife and a secure job, but that's only been a rather recent development.  About this time six years ago I moved from Illinois, where I studied for my PhD, to western Michigan for a temporary "visiting" professor gig.  Soon after I moved I broke up with my longtime girlfriend, and while I eventually made some close and dear friends, the first few months up there were rough.  I spent a lot of time alone, and a lot more of that time alone than I should have hanging out in bars or drinking alone in my apartment.  About the same time I got into Tom Waits, and the album that set his hooks into me was Nighthawks at the Diner.


That might sound like an odd choice, but for all my avant-garde pretensions, I'd always had a hard time digesting the more challenging work he released after Heart Attack and Vine.  (Luckily, I got over it.)  On the other hand, I loved his sense of humor from the get-go, and Nighthawks might be one of the funniest non-comedy albums of all time.  (The intro where he talks about taking himself out on a date still gets me howling with laughter.)  Although it's meant to sound like a live album recorded at a club, Waits cut the record in the studio, which had been turned into an ersatz club, with some of his friends forming the audience.

As a lonely, romantic and bar-hopping young man looking for the "heart of saturday night," I saw a lot of myself in his boozehound-jazzbo persona of the 1970s.  During that period in the autumn of 2006 before I made my fateful January flight out to New Jersey to visit my now wife (we'd met the previous summer in a neutral location but hadn't yet become romantically involved), I lamented my single status and lack of a permanent job, and wondered whether I'd end up being a broken-down sad bohemian drunk like a character in a Tom Waits song.

Sometimes I felt like embracing that eventuality, especially when I listened to my favorite song on the album, "Better Off Without a Wife."  Before this song Waits spins a tale of taking himself out for a date at a "class joint" like Burrito King, and how much he gets along with himself as a partner.  (This monologue also contains one of the funniest bits about masturbation I've ever heard.)  He proudly declares his singlehood, bragging that he can "sleep until the crack of noon" and that he "don't have to ask permission if I want to go out fishin'."  Of course, there's a little melancholy beneath the song, as he's not sure if he really does prefer the single life after all, or whether he's just trying to convince himself of the fact.  After all, the first words are "all my friends are married," implying that his status makes him more than a little lonely.

In addition to spending lots of time in bars in those days, I also frequented the many diners I was lucky to have in my neighborhood.  It's only been in the last couple of years that I have been able to better manage my addiction to diner food, which I must say is especially hard to do here in New Jersey.  Like bars, these eating establishments were places where I could socialize with the strangers and staff, and feel a little less alone.  On this album, as the title would attest, Waits gives a hilarious monologue about eating at some less than savory diners where his veal cutlet jumped up on the counter and "tried to beat the shit out of my cup of coffee, but my cup of coffee wasn't strong enough to defend itself."  The following song, "Eggs and Sausage" beautifully describes the cheap pleasure of a late night diner meal. God knows I've have a few in my life.

During my months of loneliness I was, to quote the old song, looking for love in all the wrong places.  Who knew that great women don't hang around in dive bars to talk to drunken depressives?  No song better gets to the heart of that problem than the aptly named "Warm Beer and Cold Women."  Although  Waits later disowned his jazzy lounge style, I would hope that he's still proud of this song, which kept me company on many a long and lonely night.

In the end I never turned into a Tom Waits character, I was saved by the love of a wonderful woman and liberation from the vagaries of working in the academic field, which are enough to drive anyone to drink.  Even though I no longer gather dust at the corner bar and finish off my evenings with a chili dog at the local diner, I can still listen to these songs with the appreciation that they helped get me through some pretty tough times.  Hell, they're sweet sounding enough that I might just end up playing them while rocking some babies to sleep.