It was so cold today here that I ended up with Tom Waits in my head: “…colder than a welldigger’s ass…”
And I can’t remember now if Diamonds on my Windshield is on Heart of Saturday Night or if I first heard it on the hilarious/sad/underwhelming Beat Generation box set I bought myself (likely with my employee discount) all those years ago, after coveting it for months in the record store.
It had some real gems on it, Ginsberg reading America as the closer, touches from Burroughs, Lenny Bruce (beat??), Kerouac himself reading his own work, implanting his cadence on my memory of some of his favorite words, exposing how much he enjoyed them himself.
But also, for some reason, Tom Waits makes multiple appearances.
Whenever I spot these sorts of oddities, it’s my record store days and my understanding of film rights for music that make me wonder if the same label had the rights to a bunch of it and just flipped through their own catalog for filler.
Need something else tangentially about Route 66? Check Tom’s stuff. Probably something in there about a road.
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