A Beat Goes On

...Their half-talking, half-singing duet here is a typical Waits bar number—a guy comes on to a girl with what seems a corny line, and finally breaks down her resistance with his sincerity...

...He has had no hit records...

...If forced to, I would compare him with Hoagy Car-michael—not the composer of "Stardust" but the lush who hunched over the keyboard in To Have and Have Not, wiggled his eyebrows at Lauren Bacall, and scatted his way through "Hong Kong Blues...

...He is also in danger of becoming a cult figure...

...And finally, Waits' voice must be something of a bother to young people...

...His eloquent growl then perfectly rounds out the image...

...On tours he usually plays clubs or small auditoriums, or performs thankless opening-act chores for superstars...

...In Nighthawks at the Diner, where an audience was brought into the studio so that Waits could have both a controlled recording situation and the immediate response of live listeners, the jazz feeling was exactly right...

...There is something of the Raymond Chandler milieu in all this, and the truth is that you can't listen to Waits for very long without drifting back to some other time you probably remember far better than he does...

...She and Waits have an association that dates back a few years, when he worked as the opening act on her first tour and she picked up his "Shiver Me Timbers," a nice ballad that went into her second album...

...That's the kind of image Waits projects...

...The total Waits' effect comes across best live...

...Consequently, he more or less depends on his recordings to keep him in business and he manages to sell steadily in the middle-range...

...a thwarted romantic whose hymns to love lost or never found have been wrung from bitter experience...

...The Eagles made a successful recording of his "OP 55," included in his first album, Closing Time (1972...

...On his first two albums, he was apparently attempting to reach some rough compromise with rock and his sound is noticeably lighter and sweeter...

...Indeed, the only prediction I'm willing to make about the unconventional Tom Waits is that he will keep getting better and better...

...Still in his 20s, he is a broken-down piano man who has drunk so much booze and smoked so many cigarettes that his voice has been reduced to a desperate terminal growl...

...On Music A BEAT GOES ON BY BRUCE COOK To say that Tom Waits is like nobody else working in popular music today would be to engage in the sort of feckless understatement that characterized a more genteel era of criticism...

...That applies to his backup instrumentalists and to the music he has been writing, which has subtlety—a quality that encourages careful listening rather than reckless boogieing...

...o ne of the good things about Waits is that he knows how dependent he is on his special audience, and thus far has not disappointed it: No performer around today has shown such steady growth from album to album...

...Jack and Neal" is evidence of a recurrent sub-theme running through Tom Waits' work—an homage to the personalities and writings of the Beat Generation...

...While his sense of the past has given him the most distinctive style of any current songwriter, it is probably the biggest reason why the mass audience has stayed away as well...

...Yet he is no Beach Boy: He sings not of sun and fun, but of freeways just before dawn, of late-night bars and all-night diners, of violent deaths and unhappy lives...

...1 am tempted, for example, to call him the best songwriter, the most peculiar singer and the squirreliest performer to come along in years...

...Even the best of them—like Jim Morrison of the Doors and Marty Balin of Jefferson Starship—would not have been counted as much above average by the pop standards of the '40s...

...The act goes over well in big-city clubs...

...He gives the appearance of a performer you would have sworn went out when the juke box came in: He slouches onstage, invariably wears a peaked newsboy's cap and a '50-style narrow-lapeled suit, sports a tiny goatee, and looks scroungy enough to be a bum who happened to wander in from the street...

...He has a singular ability to create musical fantasies of a period he came to know through his parents' collection of 78-rpm records...

...The son of a high school teacher, he was born in Pomona in 1949 and grew up in towns around Los Angeles and as far south as San Diego...

...He puts it on a bit, 1 think trying for a kind of Louis Armstrong sound, yet as was the case with Satchmo, Waits' hoarse and seemingly overtaxed instrument is remarkably flexible...

...unfortunately, there simply aren't enough of them left to keep Waits performing more than quarter-time...

...In other words, there are a respectable number of people out there who are vitally interested in Tom Waits and his music and are willing to buy whatever he issues on the strength of his name alone...

...an atavist whose gift recalls the rhythms of a bygone generation...

...Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac and company have clearly influenced him directly, for beginning with Nighthawks at the Diner each of his albums has carried original long-line poems that are very much in the Beat tradition...

...Until recently...

...What is perhaps most important in a musical age dominated by hype and imitation, he is an original...

...If one knew nothing about Waits except the words to his songs, one would be certain he was a native Southern Californian...

...Nevertheless, Waits is hardly as well known as he ought to be...

...Not that rock fans demand exquisite singing from their crooners...

...Most of the other material is good—particularly "Muriel," "Burma Shave," and "Foreign Affairs...

...The romance is made poignantly real with specific detail and an effective evocation of the California ethos...

...When he started to find his own style, however, he collapsed into a tone about as euphonious as a sustained cough...

...These are Waits' people as his chronological contemporaries are not, and perhaps never can be...

...Only when he collapses onto the piano bench and begins tapping the keys, though, does he fully enter the part he has cast himself in—that of the old-time barroom piano player...

...But Waits' voice is uniquely awful: He sounds old...

...Waits demands hyperbole...

...Some may be surprised to find Bette Midler turn up on another track, "I Never Talk to Strangers...

...Waits' main reputation among those who had heard of him was as a songwriter...

...Ol' 55" is echt Waits...

...Informal, relaxed, the entire session was reminiscent of an extended jam...

...His version of the number had gone nowhere, even though the album received respectful reviews and a good sendoff by the Asylum label...

...The jazz must make them nervous, too...

...He may not sing prettily, but he does hit the notes on the head...

...One of its benefits is Waits' first instrumental track, "Cinny's Waltz," a subtle and sweet little tune that is his deepest and most successful venture into jazz to date...

...Bad Liver and a Broken Heart" is dedicated to Jack Kerouac, and "Jack and Neal" describes in rollicking detail the yo-yoing across the country by Kerouac and his friend Neal Cassady that provided the basis for On the Road...

...Interestingly, Waits is surer and sharper with his hoarse rasp than Middler is with her sliding soprano...

...The lyrics capture that wistful moment when, after a long night of love, a man heads back home, "feelin' so holy...

...Playing piano himself, he holds his own with fast jazz company like Jack Sheldon (trumpet), Shelley Manne (drums) and Frank Vicary (tenor sac), who are also featured on the rest of the disc...

...His latest, Foreign Affairs (Asylum 7E-1117), continues the upward surge...

...The average age of the record-buying, concert-going, hit-making rock public hovers around the 20-year mark...

...Unlike many gravel-voiced singers (Johnny Cash, for example, says quite accurately that he only has "about five good notes"), he commands quite a range...

...Although Nighthawks at the Diner was his real artistic breakthrough, much of its sequel, Small Change, was as good, and in some ways better (the title track—a poem!—is superb...

...liver since the double-record Nighthawks at the Diner (1975)— overall his best album, in my opinion —Waits has been working more and more in a jazz context...

...Bette, alas, does not...

...I say "danger" because the more enthusiastic the critics get, and the more TOM WAITS passionately his fairly limited audience adores him, the less likely it is that he will record that breakthrough hit and reach the top echelons of pop success...

...That is not too surprising, in view of the course his career has taken...

...Listening to Tom Waits sing about Jack Kerouac in "A Bad Liver and a Broken Heart," and about all those totems of the '40s and '50s—the Brooklyn Dodgers, Marilyn Monroe, Rocky Marciano—in "Jitterbug Boy," the post-teenagers cannot help suspecting he isn't one of them...