Tom Waits in 1974 was sort of the yin to Billy Joel's yang. Both were formed in roughly the same sort of East-coast, working class, boozy balladeer mold, and while Joel was the kid with a bright future, fighting his way off of Long Island, Waits, the self-styled prematurely old man, was a troubadour from the tough side of the tracks; any threadbare skid-row saloon or flophouse with an out of tune upright in the corner was good enough for him, and there he would stay. While it seemed, for a moment, that there might be as many similarities as differences between the two, their careers would diverge predictably enough, Joel going on to create ever-more radio friendly unit shifters, Waits patiently sculpting his voice with whiskey and cigarettes, content to plumb the dark corners of the America Joel had left behind for his not-ready-for-prime-time characters...
Saturday Night finds Waits at perhaps his most accessible, and would listen like a collection of old standards, but for the fact that Waits is the sort of fellow who writes the standards... "New Coat of Paint" opens the record with a decidedly sleazy optimism, while "San Diego Serenade" portrays the aftermath in all too familiar and ugly colors. From these two points of reference, Waits unfolds his tales onto the streets of his imagined America, in all of its seamy, smoky, neon-shrouded glory and ignominy... "Shiver Me Timbers" and "Please Call Me, Baby" relate parallel accounts of abandonment, while "Diamonds on my Windshield" attempts to wash those sins away in a stream-of-consciousness cross-country meander, a sort of ode to a forgotten, and perhaps un-earned, Beatnik legacy. From here, it's all pretty much a come-and-go-as-you-please complaint desk of hope and regret, from the carefree "Fumblin' with the Blues" to the lovely and gratifying "Drunk on the Moon," right up until the final moment, in which we find neither closure nor redemption, just a solitary sailor, reaching into the pocket of his peacoat and spending the facts of his life, like small change, on a stranger. Which is, of course, the best any of us can hope for. And Brenda and Eddy notwithstanding, it beats the hell out of any scene from any Italian restaurant... So it goes.
#337, Jethro Tull's Aqualung: These guys came along well before my time, and all I've ever really known about them are two things: First, that they were much maligned for introducing the flute into rock music (I'm pretty sure this had been done before, by The Mamas and the Papas, Hawkwind, Moody Blues, Canned Heat, et al), and second, that they knocked the first band I ever saw live, Metallica, out of the running for the first Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance Award at the Grammys in 1988 (which is, by any measure, fucking ridiculous). So... they're the old guys with the flute that beat my thrash-metal heroes at the Grammys. That's *all* I knew about Jethro Tull going into this. Luckily for them, I'm possessed of a generous nature. This is actually a pretty good record. I recognized the first six notes of the title track, of course, as anyone would (though I'd ascribed these six notes to Iron Butterfly or Deep Purple or some other band I'd never paid any attention to), but what followed that was a pleasant surprise. Released just a few months after I was conceived, Aqualung is, while not a concept album per se, an examination of the hypocrisy of religion, and finds the band expanding beyond the largely hard-blues sound they'd previously cultivated. Standouts for me are "Cross Eyed Mary," the astounding "Hymn 43" (said to have influenced Iron Maiden) and "Locomotive Breath."
#338, Big Brother and the Holding Company's Cheap Thrills: Great stuff from Big Brother and the Holding Company here. Much is made of Janis Joplin, and great as she was, she surely overshadowed any backing band she ever worked with, and it would seem fitting to give some overdue credit to Peter Albin, Sam Andrew, James Gurley and David Getz. Great job, guys! "Piece of my Heart" is probably my favorite track on this one.
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