Consumer Guide Album

Tom Waits: Closing Time [Asylum, 1973]
Waits has been around--one of the two songs that make this album is about driving home at dawn in a '55 Chevy, the other about contacting a girlfriend of forty years before. With his jazz-schooled piano and drawling delivery, he resembles Randy Newman more than such fellow inmates as Jackson Browne and David Blue--Newman feigns feelings for the purpose of mocking them, while Waits exploits an honest sentimentality which he undercuts just enough to be credible. He doesn't carry a tune as well as Newman, though, which gets to be an annoyance on side two. B+