This track perfectly traces the build-up to the hour of power, identifies the transient moment one has worked all week for and finished off with the “magic of the melancholy tear in your eye”. Over the course of 16 studio albums, Waits would chart the doomed romanticism of the maudlin drunk, as well as documenting his ever-changing relationship with the bottle himself, in varying states of inebriation (The Piano Has Been Drinking is a wonderful example).
(Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night is set from the woozy perspective of the wide-eyed fledgling drinker, a loving ode to Saturday nights on the lash. By the time he released The Heart of Saturday Night in 1974, he’d forged a clearer direction, as demonstrated by the cloth cap and loose tie worn with dilapidated swagger on the cover – a style contrary to the longhaired, bell-bottomed country rockers fashionable at the time. The strength of the San Diego troubadour’s songs was never in question, but as an artist lacking identity, he was considered two-a-penny among a myriad of folksy singer/songwriters competing for the public’s affections. There are some great songs, sure: the instrumental title track, and Martha, which could be a Neil Diamond tune performed by Willie Nelson, as well as Ol ’55 – covered by Asylum labelmates the Eagles – about whom Waits was publicly sniffy, biting the hand that fed him. What’s most remarkable about Tom Waits’s 1973 debut album, Closing Time, is just how unremarkable it is. 1 (Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night
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