Free Wild Years by Jay S. Jacobs Page B

making up for slights like these. Over the years,
The Heart of Saturday Night
has gained in stature. Many now consider it a masterpiece. It is still selling, but Reddy, Sedaka, and Donaldson have long since faded into relative obscurity. Mike Melvoin sensed that
The Heart of Saturday Night
had staying power. “I knew I was working with a genius. I knew that this was of serious, real value. It wasn’t of ephemeralvalue.” Admittedly, Melvoin has worked with artists he considered “wonderful talents” who generated some interest but ultimately failed to take off. There’s no calling it. Still, Melvoin insists, “Tom’s work is intrinsically timeless.”
    While
The Heart of Saturday Night
demonstrated how much Waits had grown as a musician in the studio setting, his live act needed an overhaul. The problem was that despite his growing reputation, few people in the music business knew which niche he belonged in. Was he rock? Was he jazz? As a result Waits was booked into a series of tours as the opening act for artists he couldn’t possibly mesh with. Live performance became an ordeal for him — he was booed off the stage by fans of acts he had no business sharing a bill with. In the early seventies he toured with a diverse assortment of entertainers, including comedians Redd Foxx, Martin Mull, and Richard Pryor; Bette Midler in her “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” phase; country-rock outfit Poco; and fifties guitarist Link Wray.
    Waits also opened for the likes of country-and-blues singer Charlie “The Silver Fox” Rich (whom Tom acknowledged was one damn good singer), former Byrds leader Roger McGuinn, and the doo-wop funk collective The Persuasions. Then there was adult-contemporary singer/songwriter Melissa Manchester, funk pianist (and one of several unofficial Beatles) Billy Preston, and blues belter Big Mama Thornton.
    â€œIt was the old case of the one-size-fits-all industry push on a new songwriter,” Waits complained to David McGee of
Rolling Stone
. “Throw you out there and see what you can do. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.” 6 One of the few pairings that actually made some sense was Tom Waits and Bonnie Raitt. Waits had sung backing vocals for the song “Sweet and Shiny Eyes” on Raitt’s
Home Plate
album, along with a collection of other still-unproven Elektra/Asylum artists — including Jackson Browne —and he and the young singer/blues guitarist shared a certain affinity. Touring with Tom, Raitt told
Newsweek,
was an enriching experience: he kept her band in touch with life on the street; he was like a portal to a world they didn’t usually get to visit. 7
    Waits often complains to interviewers that he was even obliged to be the warm-up act for fifties’ T.V.-puppet-show maestro “Buffalo” Bob Smith and his wooden better half, Howdy Doody. Chances are that this is just part of the comic hard-knocks mythology that Waits enjoys building for himself — there is no real evidence that Tom Waits ever did meet Howdy Doody. But Waits continues to spin it out, maintaining that he still breaks into a cold sweat when he remembers plying his trade at 10:00 a.m.for a studio full of polyester-clad suburban hausfraus and their bored Brady Bunch kids. “I wanted to kill my agent. And no jury would have convicted me. Bob and I didn’t get along. He called me Tommy. And I distinctly remember candy coming out of my piano as I played.” 8
    But all of this was just fun and games. Waits’s real trial by fire came when he was recruited to open for the stars of Herb Cohen’s stable — brilliant, anarchistic joke-rocker Frank Zappa and his cohorts, The Mothers of Invention. Waits’s Tin Pan Alley piano ballads about whiskey, love, and loss didn’t do it, to put it mildly, for audiences all pumped up to hear “Broken Hearts Are for Assholes,” “Weasels Ripped My