"Bad Liver and a Broken Heart"

'Small Change', 1976

Every Tom Waits Song is an email newsletter covering just that, in alphabetical order. Find more info here and sign up to get it sent straight to your inbox:

Honestly, it’s amazing that any article about Tom Waits in the late ‘70s didn’t boast the headline “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart.” That’s how perfectly Tom summarized his contemporary image in six words.

He knew it, too. The first song we hit from Small Change is explicitly self-referential. Here’s what he told Rolling Stone about it at the time:

"I put a lot into 'Bad Liver and a Broken Heart'. I tried to resolve a few things as far as this cocktail-lounge, maudlin, crying-in-your-beer image that I have. There ain't nothin' funny about a drunk. 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. On top of everything else, talking about boozing substantiates the rumours that people hear about you, and people hear that I'm a drunk. So I directed that song as much to the people that listen to me and think they know me as much as I directed it to myself."

That line about people hearing rumors that he’s a drunk got me wondering just how true that was. Was it as widespread a perception as he implies? I looked up magazine profiles of Tom around Small Change; looks like he did one round of press a few months before the album came out, and another round after. Here are the opening sentences to all of them:

• Newsweek, June 1976: “An inebriated good evening to you all.”

• New Times, June 1976: “Tom Waits is crushed. The eclectic singer/ musician is sitting in the stale-aired dressing room of the Unicorn Club in Ithaca, New York, and he can feel the whole damned room pressing in on him. He's tired and his mouth is dry, in spite of the Heineken brought to him by the nice waitress in the black tights. He's feeling spaced and dizzy, and he's coughing like a 70-year-old wino stevedore down for the last stroke.”

• Down Beat, June 1976: “He looks as if he might have stumbled on stage by accident, this refugee from some chump change cafe, decked out in tattered sportcoat and weatherbeaten tweed cap. His white shirt soiled by who knows how many gas-forming bowls of chili.”

• Country Rambler, December 1976: “The shoes are those pointy, black Monkey Ward jobs of garbage-can vintage. The dark, narrow-lapel suit looks like it was pressed by a park bench. The skinny, crippled tie is barely identifiable beneath the food stains. The white shirt looks like it was packed in a back pocket.”

• Houston Press, December 1976: “Perfect. Tom Waits, the nighthawk jive-spouting throwback to the Golden Age of the Hipster, was sitting alone and bleary-eyed in the motel coffee shop.”

• New Yorker, December 1976: “Tom Waits is a twenty-six-year-old composer and performer who looks like an urban scarecrow. He wears a ratty black cap pulled down over his left eye, a coat that is simultaneously too big and too small, paper thin pointy black shoes, and a couple of days' worth of beard. He appears to have slept in a barrel.”

• Rolling Stone, January 1977: "Smellin' like a brewery, lookin' like a tramp," the nighthawk digs deep for some small change.

Let me emphasize again: I’m not cherry picking these. Those are all of the opening lines of profiles around that time. When they don’t explicitly state that he’s a boozehound - and they often do - they heavily intimate it.

So he was right to think he had that reputation. But he had no one to blame but himself. For goodness sake, his first album was called Closing Time. And, despite protestations that “I ended up telling myself to cut that shit out” with “Bad Liver and a Broken Heart,” I don’t think this particular song would do much to dispel the image. In fact, “Bad Liver” is explicitly the opposite of cutting that shit out, ending on his pledge to “substantiate the rumors that you’ve heard.”

Plus it comes on an album with another song called "Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen)" and one called "The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) (An Evening with Pete King).”

Sidebar: Damn, Tom loved himself a parenthetical around this time huh? Look at the official tracklist for Small Change. There’s one on almost every song!

The parenthetical for “Bad Liver” - “(in Lowell)” - seems random at first, but obliquely refers to the hometown of Jack Kerouac, another well-known boozehound. In a TV performance in Belgium, Tom makes the connection a little more explicit, telling a Kerouac story before playing “Bad Liver”:

If Tom ever releases a Dylan-esque Bootleg Series, there are a couple interesting versions lurking somewhere in Island’s archives. He first recorded this song with a full band, before changing his mind the next day and delivering the solo-piano take you hear on Small Change. And then a few years later, he recorded a new version for the Sly Stallone movie Paradise Alley (discussed in the “Annie’s Back in Town” entry) that went unused. Unfortunately the full band outtake doesn’t seem to circulate. The Paradise Alley version does, though it’s fairly similar to the album take:

One last interesting discovery in those press clips. The headline of the New Times piece that came out in June 1976 was Play It Again Tom. That is, of course, a reference to the oft-(mis)quoted Casablanca line “Play it again Sam” (perhaps by way of a Woody Allen movie of that name that came out in 1972). Then, a month later, Tom goes into the studio to record Small Change. And what’s that little riff he plays at the beginning and end of “Bad Liver”? It’s a bit of “As Time Goes By” famously performed by Sam in, you guessed it, Casablanca.

Coming up next: Tom visits Mr. Snip-Snip-Snip