On a July night in Los Angeles, a stripper named Dewana walked out in front of a small invited crowd while a band played a bump-and-grind tune. The room was not a club but a recording studio, and the man waiting behind the piano was Tom Waits, the gravel-voiced singer-songwriter. On October 21, 1975, the result of that staged evening appeared as Nighthawks at the Diner, his third studio album on Asylum Records.
Building a club inside the studio
Why record a live album inside a studio? Waits and his producer Bones Howe wanted to show the jazz side of his music more clearly. The known clubs of the time were in rough shape, so they built their own. At the old Record Plant on Third Street, where Barbra Streisand had once recorded with a full orchestra, they set up tables and chairs, invited an audience, and ran a bar with potato chips.
Waits announced the venue as Raphael's Silver Cloud Lounge, a place that existed only for two nights. The audience got tickets through Waits's manager Herb Cohen, who handed them to friends. Dewana, a former burlesque queen Waits knew from Hollywood's criminal circles, opened the show. Her husband drove a cab. After she left the stage, Waits began with 'Emotional Weather Report'.
A jazz quartet with nothing written down
The band behind him was a proper jazz quartet: Mike Melvoin at the piano, Jim Hughart on double bass, Bill Goodwin behind the drums, and Pete Christlieb on tenor sax. Hughart later said the musicians had to memorize everything because Waits had nothing written down. Rehearsals took four or five days in the studio. The actual recording, two days of two shows each, was the fastest session of Hughart's life.
The album unfolds at a leisurely pace, with spoken introductions scattered between songs. Waits reads newspaper ads while the band plays, improvises lines from Frank Sinatra's 'That's Life', and slips between beatnik comedy and late-night confession. The title comes from the first line of 'Eggs and Sausage (In a Cadillac with Susan Michelson)', and the cover, designed by Cal Schenkel, echoes Edward Hopper's 1942 painting Nighthawks.
Nighthawks at the Diner reached number 164 on the Billboard 200, which was Waits's highest chart position at that point. It was not a hit by any normal measure, but it did something more useful: it captured the appeal of early Waits better than his previous records. As Peter Watts wrote in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, the fake nightclub atmosphere may convey that appeal better than the two albums before it. The album's reputation has grown quietly over the decades. In 2010 it received a silver certification from the British Phonographic Industry, a sign that listeners were still discovering it long after its modest chart run. The record also carries a few collaborations that are easy to miss. "Spare Parts I (A Nocturnal Emission)" was written with Chuck E. Weiss, and "Big Joe and Phantom 309" came from Tommy Faile. The full album runs 73 minutes, a long night by any standard.
The record is a trick that works because everyone commits to it. The musicians swing, and Waits plays the part of a lounge poet who has seen too much. The jokes and the jazz are inseparable. What could have been a gimmick became a document of a performer learning exactly who he was. Critics noticed the theatrical side of the performance. AllMusic's Mark Deming wrote that Waits brought comedy and acting into the program, and in 2010 Rhapsody named the record its album of the day, with Nate Cavalieri praising the care Waits put into his stage persona.
What could have been a gimmick became a document of a performer learning exactly who he was.