I’m not sure why, but this time of year, favorite songs stick in my head for days. I luxuriate in great melodies, and marvel at lyrics which are poetry on the wing, especially with improbable, imaginative rhymes.
Today, I announce the winner of the 3rd Annual (except when I skip it) Songwriter-Rhymer Extraordinaire in the only category: Songs I Like. Previously, I selected Bob Dylan for his (probably imaginary) time in Mozambique spent “dancing cheek to cheek;” and John Prine who compared life to a food cornucopia in “Life is a blessin,’ a delicatessen.”
This year it’s the mercurial Tom Waits, who looked and dressed like an elderly bum on the corner even as a young man, while spouting rhymes and street patter at a rapid rate. In the 1970s, he figuratively set TVs on fire during a network talk show by cracking a beer, explaining with a line attributed to WC Fields, Dorothy Parker, and Waits himself: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”
Some saw his stage persona as manufactured: he often performed beneath a single, oversized street lamp, a scally cap pulled low over his eyes, with a voice like gravel tossed in a blender after chain-smoking Lucky Strikes. But to me, his world was just as alive and authentic as those of other performers.
It was touched by melancholy and nostalgia 50 years ago, so now it’s nostalgia 5.0. He celebrated big Detroit comfort cars and 1950s pickups, women with beehives and men with pompadours, long-haul truckers and Saturday night players, gathering in diners, pool halls, and what middle-class college students now romantically call “dive bars,” although the reality for many there is usually more hard-edged. Monday morning can be bleak even after a magical Saturday night.
Fittingly, “The Heart of Saturday Night” opens in a vehicle: “you gassed her up, behind the wheel, with your arm around your sweet one in your Oldsmobile, barreling down the boulevard, looking for the heart of Saturday night.” Arriving in a presumably crowded bar, the winning rhyme reflects “the crack of the pool balls, neon buzzin,’ telephone’s ringin’, it’s your second cousin.” It’s a rhyme snatched from the ozone, even as I ask, “Who even has a second cousin? Does the character want to pick up the phone?” But the fact the second-cousin knows the number where the hopeful Saturday night unfolds lends it a comforting edge.
Eventually, Waits finds the characters “stumbling” down the boulevard, rather than “cruising” or “barreling” down it, and the song ends with a return to the opening lyrics. The atmosphere, the actions, and the details no longer ring bells for me. They’re too far down memory lane, in a place I can fondly recall the images without their immediacy, with one crucial exception.
It’s a song about searching: for the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end, the single rose in a field of weeds, a silver lining in a sky of angry clouds. The locations and specifics of searching may change many times in our lives, but the feeling is the same. It’s our job, our pleasure, our joy to keep searching for that vaguely imagined place or moment while accepting an ultimate reality: even when we’re resolute and full of purpose in pursuing a goal, we’re really just stumbling ahead, imagining we’re in control of things which can veer off course or reverse themselves in the blink of an eye.
As this tempestuous, heartbreaking political year marches on, I feel a bit like Tom Waits’ protagonists, “stumbling” towards an imagined outcome just as vague as “the heart of Saturday night,” but just as appealing, too. Politically, I imagine we’re searching for the heart of America, fueled by visions of our imperfect but majestic democracy and Constitution.
I believe we can find it and, irrationally, I believe it’s within our reach if we elect officials who want to improve our lives with positive actions and programs. I believe in the heart of America, good people who want to revisit the time when we were proudly “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
The characters in Waits’ song experience a delicious anticipation: “you got paid on Friday, your pockets are jingling, then you see the lights and you get all tingling.” We continue to survive, my family and friends are mostly alive and well, and the heart of America feels just as achingly close and agonizingly distant as the heart of Saturday night.
Allen Woods is a freelance writer, author of the Revolutionary-era historical fiction novel “The Sword and Scabbard,” and Greenfield resident. His column appears regularly on a Saturday. Comments are welcome here or at awoods2846@gmail.com.