Fifty Year Friday: September 2026
Welcome back to Fifty Year Friday! It is my great pleasure to announce that once again our first entry is by the esteemed and respected Leo The Deacon. I have added a couple of my own entries afterwards, but if you have limited time, please focus the Small Change reflections. I think it is the most brilliant Fifty Year Friday entry yet. Enjoy!
Tom Waits: Small Change
Has it been a year already? It’s getting so that tempus doesn’t just fugit, it kicks on the afterburners. You mind your own business, take each day as it comes, and the next thing you know, the Curator of this sublimely ridiculous blog is emailing you: “Leo, you gnarly old fossil! Have you finished the Waits review?” I am tempted to respond by ripping off Waits himself—“the computer has been drinking, not me…” Still, I won’t yield to temptation—at least not that temptation—because we have reached the fifty-year anniversary of the release of Waits’ 1976 masterpiece, Small Change. (And because the Curator is very patient with his enfant terrible collaborator.) Waits’ previous album, Nighthawks at the Diner, is my sentimental favorite, and the one that most thoroughly reveals the performative persona that Waits inhabited as a singer-songwriter in the 1970s. But with Small Change, Waits hits his artistic stride. The broad consensus of critics and Waits fans alike is that Small Change is his best album of the 1970s. I may like Nighthawks, with all its imperfections, the way one likes his girlfriend’s freckles or swoons over Eva Mendes’ “beauty spot,” but I can’t play the contrarian on this question: Small Change indeed shows off Waits’ artistry better than any other of his albums from that decade.
Unlike Nighthawks, Small Change jettisons the conceit of presenting a “live” performance, with the full Waits shtick, in favor of a more conventional anthology of discrete songs. Moreover, on Nighthawks, even when singing about lost loves or drunken weekends, Waits may be bittersweet, but never really tragic. Small Change is a darker set of songs. To be sure, the humor is still there, often deployed in the service of satire, and his tendency toward the melancholic and sentimental shapes a number of pieces. But several songs—most notably the title track “Small Change,” but also “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart,” and “Tom Traubert’s Blues”—are darker than anything on his three previous records. The humor has an edge as well: more than just a laugh, it conveys some sharp observations on American commercialism, seedy burlesque joints, and alcoholism. By the mid-seventies, Waits had become a heavy drinker. In part, this was due to the lifestyle of a touring musician, and in part because, to gain inspiration, he actually would immerse himself in the demimonde of tawdry motels, sleazy strip joints, and down-and-outer lounges. Looking back at that time, the now-teetotal Waits told a biographer, “You know, I was really starting to believe that there was something amusing and wonderfully American about a drunk. I ended up telling myself to cut that shit out.” The darker side of the shabby lush life was beginning to color his lyrics even then.
Almost all of the songs on Small Change are jazz-inflected, but there is a greater variety to the music than on Nighthawks. We might group the songs on this album into three bins: several songs feature just Waits on piano or on piano accompanied by just one other instrument—a bass, drums, or a saxophone (“Jitterbug Boy,” “The Piano Has Been Drinking,” Bad Liver and a Broken Heart,” “Pasties and a G-String,” “Small Change,” and “I Can’t Wait to Get Off Work”). Two songs, “Step Right Up” and “The One That Got Away,” feature a full jazz quartet of piano, bass, drums, and saxophone. Waits plays the piano, but as on Nighthawks, he has gathered some solid jazz musicians to back him up: Shelley Manne on drums, Jim Hughart returns on bass, and Lew Tabackin wields the sax. In the third and final bin are the fullest arrangements, featuring both the jazz quartet and orchestral string arrangements—a device Waits had employed on some songs on his first two albums, but not on Nighthawks. Here we find “Tom Traubert’s Blues,” “I wish I was in New Orleans,” and the nostalgic “Invitation to the Blues.” Truth be told, I am not a big fan of string arrangements with my jazz—it works best, perhaps, on torch songs sung by sultry chanteuses, but more often just sounds cloying and confectionary, like the thick icing on a sheet cake. Waits pulls it off with a voice full of asphalt and gravel, but it works best with “Invitation to the Blues,” a noirish ballad so retro that one might call it anachronistic. In it, Waits sings about a guy “who feels just like Cagney” taking a shot at romance with a waitress who “looks like Rita Hayworth,” despite the long odds of success. Sure, the song has strings in the background but, having in my twenties dissipated countless wee morning hours in coffee shops and diners while contemplating some bored waitress who barely recognized my existence, I can’t help but like the song; I’m a sucker for doomed, maudlin romance.
The gem of the album is also the darkest, the title track “Small Change.” Here Waits is not so much singing as performing a spoken-word recitation of poetry, punctuated by Tabackin’s mournful saxophone. With some of the most lapidary lyrics on this or any other of his albums, Waits recounts the murder of a small-time crook late at night on a city street and describes the bystanders’ shared indifference to the snuffing out of a human life: the ambulance drivers are just waiting for their shifts to end, the cops are cracking jokes, and a teenage factotum employed by one of the late-night businesses has been directed to hose the blood off the sidewalk. As various passersby filch the dead man’s ring, hat, and watch fob, hookers ply their trade, “their mouths cut just like/Razor blades, and their eyes are like stilettos.”
Worth singling out, too, is the brilliant “Step Right Up,” Waits’ playfully cynical indictment of American commercialism. The music is all jazz quartet, no strings, and Waits half speaks, half scats the rhythmic song which consists almost entirely of crass advertising phrases—particularly the kind one might see on TV, late at night, in the 1970s—one critic dubbed the song “proto-rap.” Much of it consists of banal slogans: “Act now!” “bargains galore,” “everything must go,” into which he gradually weaves ever more outlandish claims: “It gives you an erection, it wins the election.” Waits also works in a few genuine advertising tag lines from those distant times, such as Zenith’s “the quality goes in before the name goes on,” and Tegrin shampoo’s infamous sympathy for “the heartbreak of psoriasis.” The song is funny, for sure—but it also makes a pointed statement about Americans’ moth-to-the-candle attraction to shills and the prospect of accumulating ever greater quantities of “stuff.” We could have used a revival of the song during the last presidential election.
For me, however, the glory of “Step Right Up” is that it conjures up memories of one of the best concerts I ever attended. Right after the release of Small Change, Waits went on tour to promote it; gone were Shelley Manne, Jim Hughart, and Lew Tabackin, replaced for the tour with less famous jazz sidemen, a trio Waits christened “The Nocturnal Emissions.” No less a musical aficionado than this blog’s very Curator—in those days as bearded and hirsute as a Muppet—joined me in my puke yellow Ford Courier in December 1976 for the 90-mile drive up US 101 to see Waits open for the French jazz fusion violinist Jean-Luc Ponty at the Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara. What twisted mind conjured up such a musical pairing I cannot say, but it was genius. The genteel old Arlington Theater had been constructed earlier in the century to resemble a Spanish mission, and the ceiling was painted a midnight blue with tiny points of starlight, to mimic sitting in a Spanish colonial courtyard under the stars. The Curator and I took our seats, the house lights were turned off, and in the blackness Waits and the Nocturnal Emissions took their places. Like some inebriated interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis, Waits flamboyantly ignited a match, piercing the void, lit his cigarette in a sweeping motion, and growled the opening bars of “Step Right Up.” I have been told hat Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring provoked a riot at its Paris debut, and if the Santa Barbara crowd had not been so terminally laid back, Waits’ opening for Ponty might have produced a similar outcome. As it was, Waits’ performance was met with bemusement and impatience by a mellow audience expecting the trademark electronic arpeggios of the Gallic superstar. The Curator and I—albeit fans of Ponty—were simply delighted. After the concert, we stopped at the Sambo’s coffee shop there in Santa Barbara—and in walked Ponty! But—that is a tale for another time. Let’s keep the focus on Waits.
As good as Small Change is, it represents the apogee, the limit, of Waits’ skid-row bard approach to his art. Already one senses Waits is searching for ways to expand his idiosyncratic music by including darker material, edgier satire, and so on. This would become more noticeable in his immediately subsequent albums, as he pushed the envelope but never quite escaped it, performing a duet with Bette Midler on Foreign Affairs, and singing a cover of “Somewhere,” from West Side Story on 1978’s Blue Valentine. It wouldn’t be until 1983’s Swordfish Trombones that he broke from his 1970s persona, for better or worse. In a sense, then, Waits’ achievement in Small Change carries the same bittersweet taste of so many of his songs: it represents a peak moment of success, but like all pinnacles, it could only lead one down until a new mountain top could be attempted. Small Change was a summit that Waits would not equal again for many years.
—Leo the Deacon
Steve Hillage: L
Released in September 1976, this is a wonderful album. L is an intentional throwback to late sixties psychedelic rock. The first track is a cover of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” and given the original historic status, its reasonable to push back and ask, “Is this really necessary?”, particularly on a prog rock album? Well, given the introductory use of shenai (an Indian oboe-like instrument) and Hillage’s amazing guitar work, this may not be necessary, but it is irresistible and fully sets the mood for the album. Todd Rundgren is the producer, and we hear that with the sped-up, tape-manipulated coda and the ethereal, cosmic intro to the second track, “Hurdy Gurdy Glissando,” begins as an apparently free-form improvisation, thoughtful and reflective, with no elements of self-indulgence, but transitions into an early Pink Floyd art song, followed by more instrumental work, highlighted with Roger Powell’s keyboard work. Powell was a protegee of the famous Bob Moog (creator of the Moog synthesizer, of course) as well as the keyboardist on the preceding Todd Rundgren’s Utopia albums.
The rest of the album continues with a general prog-rock-enhanced sixties psychedelia sound with vocal material simple and accessible, but much like Pink Floyd’s early work, never puerile or simplistic. The first track on the second side, “Om Nama Shivaya,” is particularly notable for its blend of Indian, Asian, and Western elements, and, as you would expect, Hillage’s guitar work. “Lunar Musick Suite” is next and is the highlight of the album: powerful, relentless, and hearkening back to both Gong and Rundgren’s Utopial work. The album is bookended with a fine rendition of George Harrison’s “It’s All Too Much.”
Hillage is one of the most underrated guitarists in rock. I snuck in somehow, moving with the flow of the crowd, to see him at a sold-out performance in London at the Marquee Club, but the bouncer figured out that I didn’t have a ticket and escorted me out. At that point, I bought a ticket from a late arrival and came back into the club, enjoying about two-thirds of the set until the same bouncer, a thick-forearmed brute who was about twice my weight, snuck up behind me and leveled both of his fists at the back of my neck, collapsing me to the floor, partially unconscious. My next stop was a nearby hospital for an X-ray, and though nothing was broken, I suspect this is the primary cause of on-and-off arthritic symptoms in my neck over the last thirty-five years. The neck hurts just typing this up. But I never regret a moment of risk or insanity that I engaged in my youth. Do I wish the music of today was equally adventurous as that of the 1970s — of course, but I accept the music of today as it is, even the tunes that cycle through the same tired I-V-vi-VI or vi-IV-I-V (or the most common three-chord modal progressions), just as I accept I am no longer as adventurous and often have a fairly predictable daily routine when not traveling. But just as new music continues to develop and move forward, so do old relics like me, one way or another.
Stevie Wonder: Songs in the Key
Steve Wonder released the two LP Songs in the Key of Life in late September of 1976, by far his best-selling, most ambitious, and most critically acclaimed album of his prolific career. Some may think it’s a bit of a stretch, but Stevie Wonder’s willingness to take unusual harmonic paths reminds me of Schubert’s innovative and independent approach.
Wonder embraces jazz influences and the associated ninths, elevenths, and the occasional thirteenth chord, but uses them in his own distinctive ways, using dominant ninth and suspended ninth chords to build the soulful warmth of tracks like “Isn’t She Lovely” and “As,” while relying on minor elevenths to anchor the more repetitive and hypnotic passages found on “Pastime Paradise” and “Ordinary Pain.” He also uses minor ninths, major ninths, and, for musical tension, thirteenth chords.
More remarkable, and the reason I associate him with Schubert, is his creative exploration of unusual chord progressions. I don’t have the musical ear, and you may not have the interest, for me to detail the exact progressions, but the combination of these explorations and the way Wonder uses ninths and elevenths creates a clearly identifiable personal sound, a sound that is fully present on this album.
Wonder is not a great lyricist, and I suspect that’s mostly because he writes the music first, sometimes starting with the melody, sometimes playing with chord progressions, but usually coming up with natural, authentic music, to which he then fits placeholder lyrics, tightening them up, or entirely replacing them for the final product. The music is the attraction here, and the lyrics sometimes add to the overall quality, and never seem to get in the way. In a sentence, the music is the overall attraction here.
Hopefully you have heard this album, maybe many times, and there is no need for me to break this down track by track. If, due to your age, or by some chance of the arc of your life, you haven’t heard this yet, please give it a spin (or a stream), even if you’re a prog-head, jazz or classical music snob like me.
Woodstock: Aug 16-18
