A touch of early Tom Waits, and an apt follow-up to last week’s “Ace in the Hole,” with a similar blend of hipster slang and nostalgie de la boue. When I headed off to Europe at age 18, I had two or three Waits cuts on the handful of cassettes I brought with me. I wasn’t really equipped to learn them, since in those days I was easily confused by any song with more than a basic I-IV-V or circle of fifths chord pattern, but I have a keen memory of spending a late night in Paris working out the chords to “Drunk on the Moon” — not that I got them right, but it was a memorable attempt.

I lived in Paris off and on over several years, staying with a woman who had been a grad student of my mom’s — she let me sleep on a mattress in the living room of her small apartment on Rue du Père Corentin, near Porte d’Orléans,  and I did the cooking and read a bunch of her books, including medieval history, psychology, and other stuff I would not have read in another situation but am grateful to have explored. It was a relaxed, comfortable situation, and that apartment was a regular base as I moved between summers in northern Europe and winters in Spain, Italy, and North Africa.

I was indulging in romantic fantasies shared by a lot of rambling young folks in that period, inspired by legends of Woody Guthrie, Hemingway, and all sorts of other characters who lived hobo or boho lives and nourished themselves on whiskey and nostalgie de la boue. Waits was an obvious avatar, slouching drunkenly around the stage in a cloud of cigarette smoke, mumbling disjointed verses, or fingering slow jazz tunes on an upright piano, his lyrics limning the lives of small-time hustlers, hookers, diner waitresses, petty criminals, and other creatures of the urban night.

There was an off-hand, half-formed quality to a lot of his lyrics, as if he was improvising them as he went along, and I spent a few nights improvising my own songs into a cassette recorder, under his spell and fueled by a liberal infusion of alcohol. I remember one effort that began:

I know I’m drunk today, was drunk yesterday too,
I know it’s my own problem, got nothing to do with you.
It ain’t because you left me that I’m feeling this way,
Though I ain’t saying it wouldn’t have been different if you’d stayed…

I hadn’t yet been seriously involved with a woman, had no memories to fit that lyric, but hell, I was a rambling musician, drinking deeply and wandering the night-time streets of Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Budapest, Copenhagen… a romantic character in my own mind and playing the part convincingly for people who led more prosaic lives.

In keeping with the rest of this series, I’m playing this song as I remember it. I’m sure the chords aren’t exactly what Waits played, though they’re certainly closer than what I figured out in my teens, and the lyrics include some words and phrases I misheard and some that have evolved in my memory, as well as some I may have heard right, but wonder about, like the line I hear as “Come schemers and dancers, chary the light,” meaning, to me, seeking the comfort of darkness — the internet experts transcribe the last bit as “cherry delight,” which it surely isn’t, and prove they aren’t reliable by following with “I’ve hawked all my yesterdays,” which obviously should read “I’ve hocked all my yesterdays,” a perfect Waits phrase.

Anyway… I can still picture myself learning this late at night in that Paris apartment, a soft glow coming through the glass doors leading to the balcony, cross-legged on my mattress on the floor, my guitar in my lap, whispering along in an approximation of Waits’s midnight rasp so as not to bother my host, and pleasantly drunk on French wine and moonlight.