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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
The Eagles might have covered his song "Ol' 55" but Tom Waits was cut from a different cloth than California's other singer-songwriters--he suggested a scruffy beat poet who'd walked out of a forgotten scene of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Waits's beatnik schtick could get old and he developed into a much more musically adventurous songwriter in later years, but his second album contains some of his best early work, including the sweet romantic blues of "New Coat of Paint" ("You wear a dress baby, I'll wear a tie"), and his best hipster recitation, "Diamonds on My Windshield". Two songs are enduring classics: the doleful, dirge-like "San Diego Serenade" ("Never saw the morning till I stayed up all night") and the touchingly sweet "(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night" ("Stoppin' on the red, goin' on the green, 'cause tonight'll be like nothin' that you've ever seen"). --John Milward
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unbelievably Good,
By
This review is from: The Heart Of Saturday Night (Audio CD)
This album is a real find. Absolutely fantastic. It's pretty much in a class and genre of its own - probably not revisited until Nick Cave's 'Boatman's Call' in the 90s. Lyrically it's kind of somewhere between Bob Dylan and Springsteen, filtered through the literary influences of Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski. Probably the best way to describe it is with some kind of scenario. Imagine you're out in New York late at night, drunk as you've ever been, and you stumble into an underground jazz cafe at 2am. Through the haze of cigarette smoke you can just about see this dishevelled guy sitting at a piano who is playing surprisingly intricate and moving music while singing in a rasping blues voice about love and loss in the back alleys of America. That pretty much sums it up.
'New Coat of Paint' sounds like Dylan covering a Nina Simone track. 'Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night' is a bit more mainstream - maybe Jackson Browne if he was ever feeling a bit suicidal. 'Please Call me Baby' is just beautiful. And my favourite, surprisingly, is 'Diamonds on my Windshield' which is more performance poetry than a song, but is so original it's difficult not to love it. "There's fifteen feet of snow in the East and it's colder than a well-digger's ass". When was the last time you heard a line THAT good on a cd? Without being too pretentious, let's be honest about life for a minute. Most of us aren't supermodels, most of us don't feel happy and fantastic all the time, most of us can't sing like angels. And yet we all find happiness and beauty in the world on a pretty regular basis. This album is the sound of someone who is probably even less of a supermodel than you or I, who is less happy and more screwed up than we are, who sings like a drunk who's just woken up in a dumpster, and yet he finds beauty and poignancy all around him. There's something pretty life affirming about that. I haven't listened to this album once without being moved like I've never been moved before. I know Waits went on to create some pretty innovative, and pretty out-there music after this. But this is as honest and heart-rending as it gets. If you want something to listen to over a glass of whisky or a bottle of wine late at night, seriously, you should look no further than this. It doesn't get any better.
23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Many lost Saturday Nights...,
This review is from: The Heart Of Saturday Night (Audio CD)
This album is sublime. The whole. The sum of it's parts. Every single note, line and chord. From the optimism of the drunken romantic 'New Coat of Paint', to the beautiful 'San Diego Serenade' with it's 'I never knew I loved you, til I cursed you in vain' - genius.If you are looking for that elusive, ahem, 'hip' romantic album this is the one. The first time I heard this album will stay with me for ever. But it manages to feel as good on the two hundredth listen. Buy it now, and let a little Waitsian poetry into your life. After all, 'fishing for a good time starts with throwing in your line'.
28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Me again,
By
This review is from: The Heart Of Saturday Night (Audio CD)
Late night, mid February 2003. While peering through the pages of Amazon, I have come across an old review of mine, written in a drunken haze, 3 years ago. I just thought I'd add a couple of thoughts, this time, somewhat more soberly. Since '99, when, i have to admit, I feared, though did not admit, that the old master may be losing his touch, things have changed. I listened to the excellent Mule Variations, but with the idea that it was the death knoll of a great artist- a parthian shot from the dark, before a timely disappearance to obscurity. And then came 2002. Blood Money and Alice are as wonderful as any of his creations, taking his depictions of the carnival to fresh depths of 'beatitude'(in Kerouac's sense of the word), painting, vividly evoking, in red and black, the seedy underbelly of a 'gone world'. They are tremendous albums, and have been rightly placed on many 'best of 2002' lists. If anyone gets the chance- go and see his collaboration with Robert Wilson- Woyzeck. It is a wonderful visual drug, an assault on the senses. And it gives Blood Money real vitality and resonance. Why have i written this on a review of one of his earliest albums? To demonstrate that, even after 3 years of regular listening, which is usually enough to kill someones love for an artist, he remains a true companion, who has indirectly introduced me to a fantastic world of beat- Bukowski, Algren, Kerouac, Fante, Bryars, Jarmusch, Jack Black, etc ps. It's a great album pps. Dont buy Cath Carolls book on him- it's the second worst read in the world, after The Celestine Prophecy
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