![]() ![]() In The Heart of Saturday Night, for example, we see Waits fully embrace the half-rebel, half grumpy alcoholic persona he began developing with Closing Time. Waits’ attempt at self-mythologisation would culminate in the formation of an alter-ego that would evolve over the course of his next few albums, eventually melding his own personality to the extent that it became impossible to separate the man from the myth. Self-conscious decisions such as these helped Waits to create the aura of hard-won wisdom that continues to surround his work to this day. ![]() Indeed, in ‘Martha’, Waits deliberately speaks from the perspective of an embittered old man to soften what is essentially a song about the life-altering power of love. ![]() However, the seeds of optimism at the core of Closing Time reveal an artist disguising his youthful idealism with the cynicism of men twice his age. Waits consciously bought the atmosphere of these clubs to Closing Time, blending the sultry romance of his troubadour status with the stream-of-consciousness, and highly confessional lyrical style he’d plucked from the writings of Alan Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski. Like Jack Kerouac’s charismatic antihero, Dean Moriarity in On The Road, Waits was born on the backseat of a moving car, something I’m sure he came to regard as validation of his adopted Bohemian status when he decided to leave his comfortable Californian suburb to bum around the west coast performing in smoke-filled bars. I don’t believe in fate, but Waits was bound to fall in love with the bohemian world depicted in the novels and poetry of Beat writers. Let’s begin with Closing Time, an album that owes as much to youthful optimism as it does to Beat literature. ![]()
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