The way Tom Waits romanticized his artistic idols fundamentally altered his own art; he perceived, and was transmuted. His early influences – beats like Burroughs and Kerouac, oddballs like Lord Buckley and Little Richard – arguably shaped his third album, Nighthawks at the Diner (1975), more than any other. They almost speak through him in a stunning act of clarity, and yet it is entirely his own timbre. Now it has a 50th-anniversary vinyl reissue courtesy of Anti- Records, which arrives like a long-lost friend.
Nighthawks at the Diner is a bizarre combination of caricature (as if the slapstick spirits of past poets haunted Waits) and authenticity. With his gruff, smoky voice and liquor-lubricated lips, acting like a shaken cocktail of Bogart and Bukowski, it’s easy to think Waits is being ironic. It’s not a parody; it’s a persona, but one he was immersed in like a personality prison.
After two quiet albums as a singer-songwriter, Waits and his resident label, Asylum, made the odd decision to release a live album featuring all new songs. Label founder David Geffen also pushed Waits into a jazzier direction (years before becoming a billionaire). Rather than a regular concert, however, the whole thing would be staged to emulate the atmosphere of a small club or restaurant, or even a diner, where Waits would be the lounge lizard loser rambling into his piano. The result is a masterpiece of personality.
Tom Waits’ band for the album included Pete Christlieb on saxophone, Bill Goodwin on drums, Jim Hughart on bass, and bandleader Mike Melvoin on piano. They were all genuine jazz stars, having recorded with Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Vince Guaraldi, and many others. Melvoin and Hughart had played on Waits’ previous album, the much more straightforward and melancholic The Heart of Saturday Night (1973). There are audible arteries connecting that record to the beating beatnik heart of Nighthawks and its jazz-pop follow-up, Small Change (1976).
Nighthawks at the Diner was recorded at the Record Plant in Los Angeles on 30 and 31 July 1975, and was stitched together from four shows. A different audience attended each, and admission was by invitation only, though free tickets were handed out at Tom Waits’ old haunt, the Troubadour. As such, the crowd was likely filled with friendly ears conducive to his charms, from hip Elektra-Asylum employees to existing fans of the musician.
“It was a pretty good-sized room,” Jim Hughart told Bassics Magazine 25 years after making the album. “They set it up like a nightclub with big tables with checkerboard tablecloths and peanuts and pretzels and wine and beer.”
“Candles on the tables,” Melvoin told biographer Jay S. Jacobs in Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits, recalling the way the Record Plant was decorated for the recordings. “A room full of people. The show started with a stripper who was the classic old-tassel twirler. It was wonderful. The ambiance was great. The band was sensational. The interaction between the band and Tom was wonderful.” You can hear this innate connection between the musicians 50 years later; their patience, trust, and responsiveness are remarkable.
Waits had earlier met an old-fashioned burlesque dancer named Dwana, whom he thought would be great for the gig. “Waits had this bright idea,” Hughart recalled in the interview above. “There was a girl he knew who was a stripper, so he said, ‘I think I’ll bring her in.’ What could be more appropriate for the warm-up for a Waits show than a stripper? It was perfect.”
Producer Bones Howe, who worked with Waits on several albums after this, did an excellent job collating the tapes (from a 3M 16-track deck) into what became one seamless performance. It’s practically impossible to tell that different listeners were laughing on other days during the Record Plant recordings. Nighthawks at the Diner maintains the illusion of a cohesive whole throughout, similar to how movies such as Birdman and Rope present themselves as if filmed in one take while in fact concealing their edits.
It’s that elusive whole which one easily falls into with Nighthawks at the Diner, more so than any individual song – aside from the nearly 12-minute-long “Nighthawk Postcards (From Easy Street)”, itself a rambling, mesmerizing synecdoche for the larger album. Generally, the whole feels like more than the sum of its parts, and that’s because Nighthawks at the Diner is a pure performance. It’s a show that’s designed like an intimate concert experience, as if Waits is jamming just for you.
Tom Waits’ interstitial musings and wry jokes make up seven of the album’s 18 tracks, indicating a performer in complete control of a persona. The one-liners, the non sequiturs, the surprisingly sweet asides, the scatting, the self-deprecating stories, the observational humor and sadness – Waits’ wandering words paint a perfect personality portrait in Nighthawks at the Diner, with the musician’s performance as a funny, broken boozer almost transcending the music itself.
Four of the songs on Nighthawks from the Diner originated during the sessions for The Heart of Saturday Night, and you can certainly hear it (“Eggs and Sausage”, for instance, has more than a twinkling resemblance to “The Ghosts of Saturday Night”). “On a Foggy Night” was another orphan from those 1974 recordings, and Waits has described it as a soundtrack cut for an imaginary film noir only he could perceive. As Waits memorably told the hosts of Folkways on KPFK-FM 90.7, “The film came out about 1947 and I wrote it just a couple of weeks ago.”
The rest of the tracks feel like a natural bridge between the sincere singer-songwriter of Waits’ first albums and the weirder, growlier poet of his final Asylum records. In retrospect, it’s easy to draw a line through Waits’ recording career and track that musical evolution, with Nighthawks at the Diner as a transitional prelude to the iconoclastic, self-mythologizing trickster he would become in the 1980s. At the time and on ground level, though, these stages and phases looked less like connect-the-dots and more like haphazard pointillism.
It certainly wasn’t what Geffen expected, or even wanted. “[David] Geffen hated Nighthawks“, drummer Bill Goodwin told Barney Hoskyns, author of Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits. “He said it was too much of a jazz record. Bones told me Geffen’s exact words were, ‘This is a fucking jazz record!’”
The album was too jazzed-up and eccentric for many fans of Waits’ earlier singer-songwriter act. As Jay S. Jacobs wrote, “Nighthawks at the Diner became the first Tom Waits album to fail across the board. It sold poorly, the critics were uniformly unimpressed, and even Tom’s loyal fan base considered it to be a strange misstep.”
However, the infectious energy of Waits’ personality and performance style was hard to deny, even if one didn’t particularly love the songs themselves. Revered music critic Robert Christgau called Nighthawks at the Diner the “first live double in history where you skip the song to get to the next intro”. The sheer magnetism of Waits’ playful persona began to define his live shows. Thus, as a live album, Nighthawks at the Diner is more than music; it’s a testament to his personality, documenting his disposition.
“He exhibits the single ingredient most missing from the music of today’s new stars – personality”, critic John Landau wrote in Rolling Stone after seeing Waits perform live in December 1975. “Waits onstage is something to behold. He bobs, weaves, smokes, and snaps his fingers from the moment he enters until the moment he leaves”.
Landau added, “He has now advanced to a point where his entire set revolves around his command of the language”, something perfected by Nighthawks at the Diner (with a bit of help from Howe’s editing). Thanks to being such a performative anomaly onstage, Tom Waits was on the cool cusp of stardom by the end of 1975, and Nighthawks was the blank page between chapters.
Less than one year later, Waits would crack the Billboard 100 for the first time with his next album, Small Change. He was interviewed by Time, Newsweek, Vogue, and other outlets, and was being considered for film roles for the first time, with Hal Ashby nearly casting him as Woody Guthrie in his 1976 picture, Bound for Glory (a role that ultimately went to Keith Carradine). By 1977, Waits was performing on Saturday Night Live, but he made a point to play “Eggs and Sausage” from Nighthawks at the Diner.
However, having cooked up the perfect performance with his live album, Waits would soon be eager to leave Nighthawks behind. “I thought of Tom as a professional poet who was in character,” pianist Mike Melvoin told Barney Hoskyns, author of Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits. “He needed to be thought of as the character. It’s where you and your body and your personal experience are the artifact. The question was, ‘How far are you willing to go with this jacket? How tight are you prepared to wear it?’” In Nighthawks, Waits wears it really tight. He takes it all the way.
In Wild Years, Tom Waits told biographer Jay S. Jacobs, “I tried to resolve a few things as far as this cocktail-lounge, maudlin, crying-in-your-beer image that I have. There ain’t nothin’ funny about a drunk. You know, I was really starting to believe that there was something amusing and wonderfully American about a drunk. I ended up telling myself to cut that shit out.”
Eventually, Waits would leave Asylum Records after some darker albums and reinvent himself, expanding his acoustic range with bizarre instrumentation and somehow deepening his growl even further. After beginning a lifelong artistic and marital partnership with Kathleen Brennan, Waits launched into a series of experimental, downright apocalyptic jazz-rock albums for Island Records, starting with the 1983 masterpiece, Swordfishtrombones.
Listening to Nighthawks at the Diner 50 years later, with all of Waits’ subsequent years having already etched their influence into the world, it’s easy to forget that Tom Waits was only 25 when he made the album. There’s such confidence, such talent. It’s the sound of a pure performance, before slipping out of character was even a thought.