Log #139 - Gentle Nighthawks

This week I take in an early and oft overlooked album from Tom Waits - his 1975 outing Nighthawks At The Diner - an atmospheric whole greater than the sum of its insignificant parts. Eccentric English prog rockers Gentle Giant are given short shrift with their most famous album Octopus. 

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The Alan Parsons Project Tales Of Mystery And Imagination
Tom Waits Nighthawks At The Diner
Fennesz Endless Summer

Tord Gustavsen Trio The Other Side

Emilie Simon Vegetal

Gentle Giant Octopus

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Oh, what can I say? It’s a shame to write off a whole band’s career in a short paragraph but I’m afraid it’s gonna happen here. 

I was made aware of Gentle Giant through some positive reviews on a Facebook forum I follow. I was also aware that one or two of their album covers were Roger Dean designs - most famously the Octopus one below which is the subject of this brief review - the album, their 4th, indeed entitled Octopus.

The music is incredibly busy, taking in elements of Genesis, Traffic, ELP, Atomic Rooster (lots of piano) and Yes. It's a real prog rock soup with all sorts of vegetables thrown in but they aren't liquidised very well and, despite the obvious instrumental chops of the band, it's all a bit of an unpalatable stew.

In fact the group's stated mission statement was to:

Expand the frontiers of contemporary popular music at the risk of becoming very unpopular.

Perhaps this is why, in their decade of existence (1970-80), they never achieved the fame, fortune and admiration bestowed on many of their contemporaries.

I'm not a massive Tom Waits aficionado but feel that (like a lot of artists) he had a 70s phase, and an everything afterwards phase (not that I'm aware of much that he has done since the 80s). When he started out he sang conventional ballads and love songs - some of the tracks on the early albums like The Heart Of Saturday Night are beautiful. Even the singing was tuneful.

Then something happened around the turn of that decade. Waits went industrial. His music became dominated by clanking rhythms and gravelly barking vocals. The main album I was aware of that demonstrated this new sound was Swordfishtrombones. Actually this makes perfect sense. Waits had changed labels, his initial label Asylum dropping him for "failing to move beyond cult status". Swordfishtrombones was released in 1983 - his first album for the new label Island and his 7th overall.

This album was doing the rounds when I was a Uni student. There was even a track on the jukebox at our main drinking hole, the Red Cow in Exeter. How many jukeboxes have Tom Waits on them? Not many but this was no ordinary jukebox, and the Red Cow was certainly no ordinary pub (sadly no longer there). The track was the drunken sing-a-long In The Neighbourhood and would be aired nightly.

As a fan of hard rock Tom Waits remained a bit of a mystery to me (I was much more acquainted with the AC/DC numbers on said jukebox). But eventually I got the album, and followed it closely with Frank's Wild Years, Raindogs, Small Change, The Heart Of Saturday Night, Foreign Affairs, Big Time, One From The Heart and my favourite, Blue Valentine, which I think perfectly bridged the two types of Tom Waits.

Note not much from the late 80s on. This is an oversight on my part yet to be rectified - as indicated by the ranking below (Waits' output is so consistent it is hard to find a consensus for such a list - maybe one for me to tackle in the future?).

https://www.ranker.com/list/best-tom-waits-albums-list/reference

Also interesting to note that Waits lags behind other celebrated singer-songwriters (Young, Dylan, Morrison etc) in my overall frequency rankings with just the 5 to date.

Tom Waits tops my bucket list of artists I want to see live.

To be fair the gravel vocals came first and were already in place before the industrial clanking which coincided more with the powerful barking delivery which has remained in place ever since those 80s albums. When Waits recorded Nighthawks At The Diner it was only his 3rd album and he was only 26 although his voice sounds like a weary old man of 62 who has seen it all.

The album is set up like a live recording made in a seedy jazz basement. Actually it was set up, literally. The recording was made in a LA studio in front of a small audience of select guests, friends and record executives. Backed by seasoned jazz session musicians Waits slurs his way through a series of down tempo cabaret numbers interspersed with spoken asides, banter and his trademark humour, playing the role of the barfly troubadour to the max.

As the album goes, and the songs within, it's certainly not his best work, and doesn't reach the heights of the similarly jazzily improvised Astral Weeks. But despite its contrived origin, it does have a tremendous smoke filled atmosphere you could cut with a knife, and reminds me why the tour shy Tom Waits tops my bucket list of artists I want to see live. There is very little chance of this happening unfortunately.

Edward Hopper's famous 1942 depiction