“You could always find him at the Tropicana Motel. Hollywood, upstairs from Duke’s Coffee Shop. A room (actually, a suite) around a greasy pool; or a room (actually, a hole in the wall) overlooking the parking lot. Heads and tails. It summed up where he most felt at home, except for a dimly-lit bar on South Main St. in L.A. proper, down near the bus station. ‘Everybody was rushing off toward the farthest palm,’ Jack Kerouac wrote of Hollywood, ‘and beyond that was the desert and nothingness.’ Tom Waits went to the frayed and faded bar because he’d used up all his choices, rolled his dice, and whathell … He soaked himself in the after-hours milieu, a late-forties bohemian hep-cat whose jive-talking, finger-snappin’, be-bop voot-a-roonie rasp came from too many Old Golds and a lifetime’s share of busted love affairs. He was born in a moving taxi on Pearl Harbor Day, 1949, in Pomona, California. Twenty years later, he found himself as a doorman at the Heritage nightclub in L.A. In a sense, he never left that gig. Beginning with the appearance of his first album, Closing Time, in 1973, Tom would usher you into an underworld of clinking glasses and smokey conversation, peopled with Skid Row regulars and irregulars … Set up another round, bartender, and pour it like you don’t own it …” – liner notes, Anthology of Tom Waits (1985)

SIDE ONE
Ol’ 55
Diamonds on My Windshield
(Looking for) The Heart of Saturday Night
I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You
Martha
Tom Traubert’s Blues
The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)

SIDE TWO
I Never Talk to Strangers
Somewhere (from “West Side Story”)
Burma Shave
Jersey Girl
San Diego Serenade
A Sight for Sore Eyes