Released October 1974
Recorded 1974
Wally Heider Studios,
(Hollywood, California)
Genre Folk, jazz, blues
Length 40:54
Label Asylum
Producer Bones Howe
The Heart of Saturday Night is, for all factual purposes, Tom Waits second album. This, and the informational pieces listed below the albums image above, are the only things anyone can really agree upon. Beyond these facts, the path of opinion will only lead you down the rabbit hole.
Saturday Night represents many many things in the world of Tom Waits. Its the first step toward a whiskey-soaked career, a move away from a James Taylor-clone; its the first glimmering sparks of the carnival jabberwocky that was a decade off. It a full on Jazz album, a well painted portrait of the happier side of the city life's scummy underbelly - a bastard love child of Coltrane and Sinatra. It also has the somewhat dubious honor of being his most well ranked album on one of America's most smoke-blowing rags: Rolling Stone.
Heart of Saturday Night starts off with "New Coat of Paint," a a rollicking, roiling pickup line that sounds like the 50's greasers at 30. People with little to lose, dressing up to paint the night red. They've given up on preconceived notions of how it ought to be, they threw caution to the wind and whiskey at their problems.
Its impossible to set a musical tone for an album as slippery as
Heart of Saturday Night, but it does set a narrative theme. And while its often I.D.ed as a Jazz album, there are some of those early-tracked Folk themes still lurking here, but its clear from one listen through that those Taylor-esque songs are on the way out as their Jazz counterparts are not only the memorable ones here, but heavyweight classics that sit atop the Waits canon. Even San Diego Serenade, which is supposedly the best of folky-filler tracks, may as well have been on Closing Time, and is ultimately forgettable.
"Diamonds on my Windshield" is barely sung, beat-jazz with some high-hat and a walking baseline about roving the interstate highways that, while still jazz certainly, is nothing like the Big-band inspired "Paint" or "Drunk on the Moon," and both are nothing like "Fumblin' with the Blues" (both monster songs).
And while the album can seem like a dichotomy, Waits manages to marry both styles while progressing his lyrics beyond drunken caricatures and mass produced lonely love songs on the albums title track (and even better on "Ghosts of Saturday Night"). Unfortunately, his musical prowess was well ahead of his literary powers and the Jazz arrangements on this album are cake-taking, show stoppers.
There are certainly filler tracks on this album, and if you thought his best work came out in a post-1985 world, this may not be for you, or at least not what you're expecting. But for anyone who likes music,
Saturday Night is a monster and if its not in your Top 5 Wait's albums I think you're lying to yourself, or to me. Either way, you're an idiot.
Must Hear:
1. Fumblin' with the Blues
2. New Coat of Paint
3. Drunk on the Moon
4. Diamonds on my Windshield
5. The Ghosts of Saturday Night