On Music

...You were underwhelmed...

...Another one is Tom Waits, whose name probably will not mean anything to you...

...The trouble with those pieces was that just when they had you convinced, they would quote a few examples-John Lennon, perhaps, or Grace Slick...

...In fact, I had to call up his business manager in Los Angeles just to get the vital statistics...

...But at her best-and "Land" is the best on Horses-she is very interesting and original...

...he writes good songs, yet manages to give the impression that he is casually ad-libbing his way through the entire routine, making things up as he goes along...

...All in all, Nighthawks at the Diner is about as much fun as I've had with an album this year, and Tom Waits is the kind of exciting new talent who makes you look forward to the next LP...

...On Music POP POETS BY BRUCE COOK WHENEVER a pop music critic begins talking about poetry, most sensible people start getting nervous...

...Actually, the material on Horses is much better as poetry than as music...

...He is funny without being a comedian...

...And he is utterly without pretension-a singer-writer who is wholly comfortable in his skin...

...What she sings of, though, is masculinity from the outside-her fear and incomprehension of the violence of the Johnny in her song, a violence directed sometimes at her yet more often at himself...

...But all you really need to know about him can be found on his new two-record album, Nighthawks at the Diner (Asylum 7E-2008), his third release...

...While Smith's feminist put-on style has never appealed much to me personally, her work has real substance...

...Waits has no hype going for him, no press agent telephoning editors and writers, no big ads in the newspapers and magazines...

...If they don't take you back to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights nights, then you never wondered what it was like in San Francisco when it all happened...

...Smith may not have his voice, or his charismatic quality, but she does have something of his intensity, and the lyrics she has written for every song on the album sound like Morrison's turned inside out...

...Nothing...

...Patti Smith comes from the opposite direction...

...Land" is more a self-conscious and esoteric chant than a song...

...Where he figuratively beat his chest, crooning or bellowing a celebration of his dark and slightly sinister brand of machismo, she wails out the agony and vulnerability of the weiblichen Prinzip...

...Were these the unintelligible lyrics which accompanied the lively music you were hearing on the radio...

...They remember the '60s, and all those articles about the Poetry of Rock: Paul Simon as the laureate of the new generation, the Beatles as purveyors of mystical truths in arcane phrases that meant a great deal to members of the drug culture, Leonard Cohen as a hip Shelley...

...The other numbers are similar, straining at the limits of their simple forms, loaded with a burden of meaning and an emotional weight that the unadorned melodies can barely support...

...She must be a little leery about their real value, a little shy about their literary worth...

...She was fairly well established as a young New York poet, with two collections to her credit, before she ever got it into her head to try to become the latest rock-'n'-roll princess...

...Morrison, for example, always wanted desperately to be a poet, and to be accepted as one...

...Smith's singing voice, in addition to uncertain pitch, lacks professional quality (even at the level we are accustomed to from rock performers...

...Today, those rock exegeses seem only slightly less strange than the heads on Easter Island...

...Indeed, he would be most effective in a small club, up in iront of a jazz group, free-associating before an intimate audience of his contemporaries...

...The veteran producer Bones Howe has demonstrated his genius by creating exactly this sort of atmosphere under studio conditions...

...Well, excepting Cohen, Smith's credentials are stronger than those of the last decade's rock-as-poetry crew...

...mood, getting the message across in jazzy, minor chords...

...Eggs and Sausage," "Better Off Without a Wife" and "Warm Beer and Cold Women" are perfect vehicles for that 3:00 A.M...

...he sings in a groaning, gravelly, world-weary voice that is no competition for genuine vocalists...

...Nighthawks at the Diner features a jazz quartet-and a good one-that Waits interacts beautifully with...

...But significantly, they have been left off the album...

...Waits is as rowdy as he is original, a man with a spontaneous sense of humor and a crude albeit sparkling talent for verbal improvisation...

...The major cut on the album is the nine-and-a-half-minute "land.' It is pure Morrison, right down to the hypnotically repeated background riff played by Richard Sohl on piano, in the style of the Doors' Ray Manzarek...

...Seeing the words on the printed page diminished them considerably...

...I'm well aware, of course, that not everybody did wonder about that...

...In fact, listening to Patti Smith's first album, Horses (Arista 4066), I was constantly reminded of Morrison, one of the truly magnetic performers of the '60s...

...At bottom he is a poet, maybe more of one than Patti Smith or Jim Morrison or any of the performers from the '60s...

...Tom Waits is 27 years old...

...Along with these songs there are a couple of, well, poems-"Putnam County," "Spare Parts" and "Nighthawk Postcards...

...In any case, she sure is better than the Captain and Tennille.ATTI SMITH, however, is not my only reason for reopening the subject of pop lyrics as poetry...

...He is an atavist-reverting to the style of the Beat poets of the '50s, who read their rambling, long-line, verbal extravagances to the accompaniment of jazz in dark cellars and coffee houses...

...For at the moment the darling of New York's Reno Sweeney crowd is a plain, gaunt girl from New Jersey who has been writing and singing the sort of raw, unprocessed hyper-Freudian fantasies that, a decade ago, were associated with the late Jim Morrison of the Doors...

...He grew up in Southern California...

...He sings about disappointments and loneliness, yet still manages to draw a kind of beat humor from it all...

...You looked...

...Listening to the album, one enters a kind of time warp: It is Tom Waits, recorded live at, say, the hungry i in San Francisco in 1958...

...There might be an image or two, or a turn of phrase that would jump out at you, but generally they provoked a feeling of bewilderment that so many people-including an occasional English professor-could take them seriously...

...Nonetheless, I mean to reopen the subject here and now...

...he even cultivated the friendship of the San Francisco poet Michael McClure, and published a book of verse derivative of his...

...He's been in the business for three years, has played clubs around the country and done two major tours -with Frank Zappa and, very recently, with Bonnie Raitt...

...If the lyrics to the songs in Horses were set down on the liner of the album, they would stand up under close reading and compare favorably to her published pieces...

...There is also an audience, bibulous but not boozy, attentive and responsive...

...You read...

...Moreover, in some numbers-"Gloria," "Redondo Beach" and "Birdland"-she seems to be parodying obscure sources...

...He may be down and out, but he hasn't lost the ability to laugh at himself as he sits sprawled flat on his ass...

...Waits is reminiscent, too, of the club performers who followed the poets' lead-Lord Buckley, Ken Nordine, Lenny Bruce...

...Does this mean the pieces on Horses are poems...