Track Listing

1. New Coat of Paint
2. San Diego Serenade
3. Semi Suite
4. Shiver Me Timbers
5. Diamonds on My Windshield
6. (Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night
7. Fumblin' With the Blues
8. Please Call Me, Baby
9. Depot, Depot
10. Drunk on the Moon
11. Ghosts of Saturday Night (After Hours at Napoleone's Pizza House)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8240 in Music
• Released on: 1989-07-24
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds

From Amazon.co.uk
The Eagles might have covered his song "Ol' 55" but Tom Waits was cut from a different cloth than California's other singer-songwriters--he suggested a scruffy beat poet who'd walked out of a forgotten scene of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Waits's beatnik schtick could get old and he developed into a much more musically adventurous songwriter in later years, but his second album contains some of his best early work, including the sweet romantic blues of "New Coat of Paint" ("You wear a dress baby, I'll wear a tie"), and his best hipster recitation, "Diamonds on My Windshield". Two songs are enduring classics: the doleful, dirge-like "San Diego Serenade" ("Never saw the morning till I stayed up all night") and the touchingly sweet "(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night" ("Stoppin' on the red, goin' on the green, 'cause tonight'll be like nothin' that you've ever seen"). --John Milward

Album Description
Japanese only SHM pressing. The SHM-CD [Super High Material CD] format features enhanced audio quality through the use of a special polycarbonate plastic. Using a process developed by JVC and Universal Music Japan discovered through the joint companies' research into LCD display manufacturing SHM-CDs feature improved transparency on the data side of the disc allowing for more accurate reading of CD data by the CD player laser head. SHM-CD format CDs are fully compatible with standard CD players.

Customer Reviews

Second album, released 1974
On Waits' second album his poetic lyrics are wrapped in a variety of jazzy, bluesy and folk styles with a hint of the orchestral on two tracks. Diamonds On My Windshield and The Ghosts of Saturday Night are spoken recitals, a form he would later explore over entire albums.

The most outstanding tracks, lyrically and melodically, are the tender San Diego Serenade with its elegant strings, the soulful and melancholy Shiver Me Timbers and the title track which in sentiment and imagery brings to mind his much later composition Jersey Girl.

The jazzy numbers include New Coat Of Paint and Semi Suite; Fumblin' With The Blues represents that genre whilst Drunk On The Moon is somewhere in-between. Of the other ballads, Please Call Me, Baby is an orchestrated outing whilst Depot Depot has the most arresting saxophone solos.

The Heart Of Saturday Night provides a satisfying cross-section of all the different styles Tom Waits would develop in his illustrious career, including on masterpieces like Rain Dogs, Heartattack and Vine and Mule Variations.

For fans, I recommend the book Innocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader which documents his life and music up to 2004 and is perhaps better than a formal biography as it provides various perspectives from many different writers.

A MASTERPIECE!!!
This album is his best for me. Two songs are enough to say it a masterpiece "San Diego Serenade" and "drunk on the moon"

Legendary !
This is some of the saddest music I've ever heard. Tom's second disc still holds up magnificantly. Back in his early years he was the bourbon/blues piano playing sad sack who could put into words what few others could. Yeah, we all know how he's changed his style over the years, but for me, this lounge lizard's first few disc's are what I consider some of the best music ever written. A timeless classic!