From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin- Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night- The Songs of Tom Waits-Take Two

A link to a YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night.

If you, as I do, every once in a while, every once in a while when the norms of bourgeois push to get ahead and then what get you into some angst-ridden despair about where you went off that angel-driven dream of your youth and need some solice put the headphones on some Tom Waits platter (oops, CD, YouTube selection, etc.- “platter” refers to a, ah, record, vinyl, put on a record player, hell, look it up in Wikipedia, okay).

If the norms of don’t rock the boat, the norms of keep your head down because you don’t want to wind up like them (and fill in the blank of the “them”) drive you crazy and you need to listen to those ancient drum beats that spoke of the better angels of your nature when those angel dreams ruled your days. Turn up the volume on that Tom Waits selection.

If you need, just to sort things out, just to recapture that angel-edge, to hear about boozers (and about titantic booze-crazed struggles in barroom, on beaches, in the back seats of cars, lost in the mist of time) , losers (those who have lost their way not those who never had a way to be lost), dopesters (inhaling, in solidarity hotel rooms, down in dark alleys, out in nighttime canyons flame blaring off the walls, the seven seas of chemical dust and creating vision of long lost tribes trying, trying like hell, to get “connected,” connected in the campfire shadow night), hipsters (all dressed in black, mary mack dressed in black, speeding, speaking be-bop this and be-bop that to stay in fashion), fallen sisters (sisters of mercy, sisters who need mercy, sisters who were mercifully made fallen in some mad dash night), midnight sifters (lifting in no particular order hubcaps, tires, an occasional gem, some paintings or whatever may be left in some sneak back alley, it is the sifting that counts), grifters (hey, buddy watch this, now you see it, now you don’t, now you don’t see your long gone John dough), drifters (here today gone tomorrow with or without dough, to Winnemucca, Ogden, Fresno, Frisco town and the great big blue seas), the driftless (cramped into one room hovels, shelters, seedy rooming houses afraid to stay in-doors or to go outside), and small-time grafters (the ten-percent guys, failed insurance men, repo artists, bounty hunters, press agents, personal trainers, need I go on). You know where to look, right.

If you need to be refreshed on the subject of hoboes, bums, tramps (and remind me sometime to draw the distinction, the very real and acknowledged distinction between those three afore –mentioned classes of brethren), the fallen (fallen outside the gates of Eden, or, hell, inside too), those who want to fall (and let god figure out who made who fall, okay), Spanish Johnnies (slicked back black hair, tee shirt, shiv, cigarette butt hanging from a parted lip, belt buckle ready for action, leering, leering at that girl over there, maybe your girl but watch out for that shiv, the bastard), stale cigarette butts (from Spanish Johnnie and all the johnnies, Camels, Luckies, no filters, no way), whiskey-soaked barroom floors (and whiskey-soaked drunks to mop the damn place up, for drinks and donuts, maybe just for the drinks), loners (jesus, books could be written on that subject so let’s just pass by), the lonely (ditto loners), sad sacks (kindred, one hundred times kindred to the loners and the lonely), the sad (encompassing all of the above) and others at the margins of society then Tom Waits is your stop.

Tom Waits is an acquired taste, but one well worth acquiring as he storms heaven looking for busted black-hearted angels, for girls with Monroe hips, for the desperate out in forsaken woods who need to hold to something, and for all the misbegotten.

Tom Waits gives voice in song, a big task, to the characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). In short, these are the people who do not make revolutions, far from it, but they surely desperately could use one. If, additionally, you need a primordial voice and occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Finally, if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. And that, my friends, is definitely a political statement. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother, keep looking.