by JTD7, Ardmore, PA

Sometimes when an artist speaks to you, you know it right away. That’s how it was for me the first time I heard Tom Waits. He appeared on Saturday Night Live on April 9, 1977, according to the NBC web site. I knew it was in the springtime while I was in college, because I saw it at the campus Catholic Student Center on Holy Saturday. There was a party after the Easter Vigil service, and at 11:30 all of us who played in the folk group piled into an office to watch SNL. None of us had yet heard of Tom Waits. He appeared without preamble, solo on the piano, and launched right into “Eggs and Sausages.” I was immediately captivated: by his piano playing, the sort of jazz piano I wished I could play; by his lyrics, which were elusive and down-to-earth at the same time; by the deep melancholy of his subject, delivered with so much gusto; by the contrast between the delicacy of his piano playing and the roughness of his gravelly voice.

But there was a freshman voice major in the folk group, and he immediately started to dissect Tom Waits’s performance: Oh, he’s doing everything wrong, he doesn’t know how to sing, he has no breath support, his voice placement is all wrong, he’s putting unnecessary strain on his vocal apparatus, he won’t have a voice left in two years . . . . . until I turned to him and shouted through clenched teeth: “SHUT UP! I HAVE TO HEAR THIS!”

We wound up with everyone else on the other side of the room, whispering, and me with my ear pressed to the TV speaker, trying to catch every note.