From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin- Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night- The Songs of Tom Waits-Take Three
If you, as I do, every once in a while, every once in a while when the norms of bourgeois push to get ahead and then what, push you off your sainted wheels, and get you into some angst-ridden despair about where you went offthat angel-driven dream of your youth, not faded, tattered, and half- forgotten(but only half, only half, sisters and brothers, and need some solace, need to reach back to roots, reach back to the primeval forest maybe, put the headphones on some Tom Waits platter (oops, CD, YouTube selection, etc.- “platter” refers to a, ah, record, vinyl, put on a record player, hell, look it up in Wikipedia, okay).
If the norms of don’t rock the boat, the norms of keep your head down because you don’t want to wind up like them (and fill in the blank of the “them,” usually dark, speaking some unknown language maybe gibberish for all you know, moving furtively and stealthily against your good night) drive you crazy and you need to listen to those ancient drum beats, those primeval forest leave droppings maybe, that spoke of the better angels of your nature when those angel dreams, half-forgotten but only half remember, ruled your days. Turn up the volume another notch or two on that Tom Waits selection, maybe Jersey Girl or Brother, Can You Spare A Dime (can you?), Hold On, or Gunn Street Girl.
If you need to be refreshed on the subject of hoboes, bums, tramps (and remind me sometime to draw the distinction, the very real and acknowledged distinction between those three afore –mentioned classes of brethren out in the railroad jungles in some Los Angeles ravine, some Gallup trestle, some Hoboken broken down pier, the fallen (fallen outside the gates of Eden, or, hell, inside too), those who want to fall (and let god figure out who made who fall, okay), Spanish Johnnies (slicked back black hair, tee shirt, shiv, cigarette butt hanging from a parted lip, belt buckle ready for action, leering, leering at that girl over there, maybe your girl but watchout for that shiv, the bastard), stale cigarette butts (from Spanish Johnnie and all the johnnies, Camels, Luckies, no filters, no way), whiskey-soaked barroom floors (and whiskey-soaked drunks to mop the damn place up, for drinks and donuts, maybe just for the drinks), loners (jesus, books could be written on that subject so let’s just pass by), the lonely (ditto loners), sad sacks (kindred, one hundred times kindred to the loners and the lonely), the sad (encompassing all of the above) and others at the margins of society, the whole fellahin world, then Tom Waits is your stop.
Tom Waits gives voice in song, a big task, to the kind of characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). In short, the people who do not make revolutions, those revolutions we keep hearing and reading about, far from it, but those who surely, and desperately could use one. If, additionally, you need a primordial voice and occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Finally, if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother, keep looking.
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