I first heard Tom Waits thanks to a grad student who stayed in my folks’ house on Cape Cod circa 1975-76 and left his records behind. They were mostly jazz, in my memory, though my sister remembers the Commodores and Wild Cherry,  and included Waits’s Small Change, which made sense, since it was essentially a jazz album, with Shelly Manne on drums and Lew Tabackin on sax.

I’d never heard of Waits, and was entranced by everything about him — the voice, the songs, the instrumentation, and the romantic embrace of urban low-life. I was 17 or 18, fresh off my first period with Dave Van Ronk and about to head out into the world as a rambling hobo guitar player; my original inspiration was Woody Guthrie, but I was playing more blues and classic jazz/pop songs, so Waits was just the right added spice.

Around the same time, I caught Waits on Fernwood Tonight, Martin Mull’s fake small-town TV talk show, and was further entranced… and when I made some cassettes to take with me on my rambling, I included a couple of Waits tracks — this one and “Drunk on the Moon,” and maybe “The Heart of Saturday Night” as well.

As I wrote in my post about “Drunk on the Moon,” I probably got some of the chords wrong and don’t necessarily remember all the lyrics right — I at least tried to learn that one, but just kind of absorbed this one. Which said, it has stuck with me for almost fifty years.

Several decades later, when I wrote How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll, I was trying to think of a well-known musical figure who might be willing to read and blurb it, and managed to get an email for Waits’s office, and they said he was interested, so I sent an advance copy… and, to my astonishment, a couple of weeks later I got a phone call from Waits. He wanted a better sense of who I was and what the book was about, and over the next few weeks I got several more calls — mostly it was about the book, but one was because his son was doing a school report on blues and wanted a copy of my Robert Johnson book… and finally he called me with a potential blurb, and I had the chutzpah to ask if he could rephrase part of it, and he did… and that’s the end of that story. I checked in with his office again when I wrote The Dozens, because I thought it might interest him, but got no response. Which is fine; I’m pleased with the little contact I had, grateful for his blurb, and even more grateful for all the music.

Incidentally, I loved the early albums, but nothing prepared me for Rain Dogs, which I am listening to as I write this, and consider his masterpiece. He’s done a lot of fine work since then as well. He’s a hell of a songwriter and musician, and one of the good guys.

Oh yeah, and… I once had a crush on a waitress in an after-hours restaurant in Davis Square called Kay and Chips, where I used to get steak tips and eggs at two in the morning after driving back from a monthly gig at the Press Room in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She was dark and beautiful, and I never had the nerve to strike up a conversation, though I probably flirted a little while giving my order. I don’t recall whether I ever thought about this song while eating those late-night breakfasts, but it would have made sense, and when I sing the song now I think of her.

Addendum: I just found a story from the Somerville Times, which reminds me that by the time I was going there, the restaurant was called Dolly’s at Kay and Chips. I don’t think my waitress was Dolly; maybe no one was. They opened at 11pm and closed sometime in the early morning, and it was a nice scene.