I woke up today at the mercy of two-dollar Hungarian wine, which, by the way, is all a decent bottle runs you, feeling hungry and hurt and just about awful.
So I filled a mug and put on Nighthawks at the Diner, inspired by the Hopper painting of same name and one of the best anytime, down tempo, soul-feeding jazz records I’ve ever heard.
The story behind Nighthawks is simple: Bones Howe, Waits’s record producer, and Herb Cohen, Waits’s manager, wanted a live record, one that could bring the jazz out in Waits more strongly, but he was still new. He was a great performer but, a real bona fide live record? So, they thought, something in between. They put together a crack jazz band of old pros (one of whom was Pete Christlieb, one of the best tenor sax players in the world, and another Bill Goodwin, who drummed for Phil Woods) and packed a room at the New York recording studio Record Plant for two nights straight with a sold out crowd. They put in a bar and some tables, wheeled in a console, hired a stripper as the opening act and got it all on tape.
As one might imagine, this record is more of a performance piece than a live record. Waits breaks up his set with seven rambling and arresting introductions, rife with the wordplay, bawdy, and blue-collar magic for which Waits is so famous. The songs play out, in his own words, like “inebriational travelogues,” combining poetry, scat, short fiction and memoir to form a sultry smoke of Waits’s own sub-conscious, tinted by the bright neon lights of the Los Angeles underworld.
You can hear the whiskey going down, the cigarettes fuming; the crowd is rowdy and the bass player “should be chained up somewhere”; Waits is at the center, making dark, wine-stained mornings brighter with jazz and beautiful simplicity.
