Shelter From The Storm

The first job I got working in the “music” business was at Wherehouse Records in Gardenia, California. I was living in Hawthorne just a few miles away. I think at that time Wherehouse was the biggest record store chain in California. I don’t know maybe Tower was bigger, but I don’t think so. Wherehouse certainly had more stores. The job I got was working at the warehouse for Wherehouse. They had a big central warehouse in Gardenia. All the LPs, cassettes and 8-Tracks were shipped in to the the warehouse and then sent out to the individual stores. Someone I ended up working in the “returns” room. It was a fairly large corner of the warehouse, closed off into its own “room” constructed from 2×4s and chicken wire. All the returns (defects, overstock and otherwise) would be shipped from the individual stores to the warehouse and end up in giant stacks of boxes in the returns room. My job was to sort through all the albums, group them together by label on shelves and then write up “return authorization” forms to ship them back to the labels. Many people don’t know that in the record business everything is 100% returnable to the label, for any reason whatsoever. Stores can buy anything they want, as much as they want, and if it doesn’t sell they just send it back to the label for credit. I don’t think most retail businesses work that way. I think in most retail situations if you buy something and can’t sell it you just keep marketing it down until it does sell. But not the record business. You just send it back. I actually really liked this job. It gave me an incredible education in music and record albums. I’d see so many things come through that room. Things I’d never seen before. Some pretty rare things too. Well, rare nowadays at least. I really learned a lot about labels, artists, albums, etc. working there.

I had a couple of friends who I met at Wherehouse who lived a few blocks over from me. I used to go over to their house fairly frequently and listen to and talk about music. Rolf and Jim. Jim was the old-timer. He didn’t work at the warehouse (where Rolf worked with me) but at one of the retail stores. He’d been working at Wherehouse for awhile. He was a bit older than me and I looked up to him. I was always interested in what he was listening to. I remember one night he came in from a show at the Troubador where he’d seen this band, I’d never heard of before, Little Feat. Man, he just raved about the show and the band. Now this was 1974, so Little Feat had been around a little while, but they hadn’t really broken through yet. I think their fourth album, Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, had just been released. I remember he also liked The Heart Of Saturday Night by Tom Waits. But what I remember most was that he considered it a “morning” album. He used to say he would only play it in the morning. Being young and impressionable I found that kind of cool. 

I first became aware of Tom Waits when I bought the Eagles’ debut album. One of my favorite songs on the album was their cover of Tom’s song “Ol’ 55.” There’s a great story that Don Henley tells about their version. He says Tom didn’t really like it, he didn’t like the way they did the song. But, says Henley, he liked it a lot more when the royalty checks started arriving. Tom’s original version of “Ol ‘55″ was on his debut album, Closing Time. An album I dearly love. For those most familiar with Tom’s later material Closing Time might be a real shock. It’s a very folkie, singer-songwriter affair filtered through a Jack Kerouac novel. What a bunch of great songs. His second album, The Heart Of Saturday Night, was released in 1974. It contained more of the great songwriting that graced his first album, but the production was definitely something new. Producer Bones Howe brought a much tougher, street wise sound to the songs. The jazz/beat influence is much stronger as well. It’s an early preview of the direction Waits would take his music in later years. “Please Call Me Baby,” “Drunk On The Moon” and “New Coat Of Paint” are among my songs on the album, but the standout track here is the title track, “(Looking For) The Heart Of Saturday Night.” It’s “companion” piece, “The Ghosts Of Saturday Night” is a real Kerouac/Ginsberg influenced track with Waits reciting poetry to a jazz background. I had just discovered John Stewart around this same time and I was quite surprised to hear him play “Shiver Me Timbers” during a concert at UCLA. I remember he praised Waits as a great new, young songwriter.

Funny thing about Tom Waits. I wasn’t able to stay with him as he and his music grew and changed. The first two albums are two of my all-time favorite albums. His next album was the live Nighthawks At The Diner, and I’m quite fond of that one as well. But then came Small Change, Foreign Affair, Blue Valentine and Heartattack And Vine. I bought all of these albums, but none of them really captured my ear the way the first two had. And then in the early 80s he really started to change. I read great reviews of albums like Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years. I bought them, but they never connected with me. Now I know full well that these years are considered by most Waits’ fans to be his prime years. Seems that I fell off the wagon exactly when the majority of fans were getting on. I haven’t bought or listened to a new Tom Waits album in a very long time. But I come back to those first two on a very regular basis and they still do it for me every time.

When I was younger I used to move around quite a bit. I left home for college when I was 16. Just before my 18th birthday I dropped out and took off for Europe. Between the time I left home and when I bought my first house in San Marcos, Texas about fifteen years later I lived in places like Los Angeles, CA, Key West, FL, Syracuse, NY, Austin, TX, Houston, TX, Lancaster, CA, Cupertino, CA, Eugene, OR and lots of places inbetween. Some for only a few weeks or months at a time. I hitchiked back and forth across the US at least five or six times during those years, usually from coast to coast. I once hitchhiked non-stop from New Haven, CT to Los Angeles in four and a half days with only $2.00 in my pocket (I still had 20¢ left when I got back home). I once figured out I had lived in over sixty different houses and/or apartments over a ten year period.

“Have you ever been lonely in the middle of the night
Even though the one you love got her arms around you so tight
And a far-off freight train makes a hollow sound
And the mockingbird singing a sweet sad song as your feet hit the ground

“I gotta move, that’s all I know
I gotta move, gotta hear the west wind blow
I gotta move, but I’m running out of somewhere to go
So I just move…”

When I heard those opening lines from “Gotta Move” on Tom Jans‘ The Eyes Of An Only Child album I was completely hooked. It’s still one of the saddest, sweetest songs I’ve ever heard. I’ve never come across a song that so eloquently captures the “sweet sorrow” contradiction of moving and traveling. I had heard Tom Jans before. I first became aware of him when I saw him open for Cat Stevens at the Greek Theatre (Los Angeles, CA) in November 1971 with his singing partner Mimi Farina (Joan Baez’s younger sister). Jans and Farina put out a wonderful album in 1971 titled Take Heart. Tom wrote the classic song “Loving Arms” that’s been covered by everyone from Elvis Presley to Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge to Petula Clark to Dobie Gray to Olivia Newton-John to the Dixie Chicks. He released a stellar self-titled solo album on A&M in 1974. The Eyes Of An Only Child appeared a year later. This collection of ten songs was the high point of his career and it remains a real treasure in my LP collection. Every song is a gem, but the real standouts are “Gotta Move” (co-written with Lowell George), “Once Before I Die,” “The Lonesome Way Back When” and the title track. “Out Of Hand” was a smash country hit for Gary Stewart in 1975. Lowell George is listed as the “Executive Producer” and musicians include Bill Payne and Sam Clayton (also from Little Feat), Jesse Ed Davis, Fred Tackett, David Lindley, Jeff Porcaro, Jim Keltner and Mike Utley. They just don’t get any better than that and the playing throughout this album is just faultless. Valerie Carter and Herb Pedersen are along for background vocals.

Jans made one more album for Columbia, Dark Blonde (released in 1976). While it contained some terrific songs, it didn’t quite measure up to its predecessor, though it was certainly close. After that he dropped out of site. A new album, Champion, was released in a very limited edition on a Japanese label in 1982. I’ve never been able to find a copy (and believe me I’ve tried). He was in a very serious motorcycle accident in 1983 and then died in 1984, it’s said from a drug overdose (but don’t they always say that when they don’t know how a musician dies?). I was really saddened when I heard of his death. He was such a great, unique songwriter. He had the ability to write such personal, emotional, passionate songs without ever being sentimental or sappy. Not too many songwriters can do that. Joni Mitchell is another that comes to mind.

“Wondered in my heart of hearts if I’d been here before
Trembled when the winter wind would blow against my door
Been so far at sea I could not find the shore
Got down on my knees and prayed I would see more
With these eyes of an only child”

Tom Waits wrote a song, “Whistle Down The Wind,” for Tom Jans and it’s included on his 1992 album Bone Machine. Unfortunately, none of Tom’s albums have ever been released on CD in the US. I, of course, have ripped all four of them from vinyl to CDR, but it sure would be nice to get these on real CDs. The Eyes Of An Only Child and Dark Blonde were released in Japan in 2007, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to shell out the $35+ for each one. Take Heart and Tom Jans have never been released on CD anywhere in the world that I know of. It’s a crying shame. All of these albums are well worth searching out on vinyl if you can find them. Tom Jans remains one of the great “lost” songwriters of a generation. Today very few seem to know of him, but those that are familiar with his work hold his songs and music very dear.

Other Listens on June 24th:
Midnight On The Water by David Bromberg
New Skin For The Old Ceremony by Leonard Cohen
Book Of Dreams by The Steve Miller Band
Beautiful Loser by Bob Seger
Garcia by Jerry Garcia
Heart Food by Judee Sill 
Matthew & Son by Cat Stevens