"Blue Skies"
'The Early Years, Vol. 2', 1971 & single, 1974
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I’d assumed Tom’s officially-unreleased song “Blue Skies” was a cover. Partly because “Blue Skies” shares its title with a much more famous Irving Berlin song, and partly because it sounds like a standard.
That latter bit means A) It’s really good, but also B) There’s nothing particularly Waits-ian about it. If you told someone that this was an old song that hundreds of different artists had covered over the years, they’d probably believe you. Tom wrote what could have been a new classic…then left it off his album. That’s a very Dylan move.
Tom did try, though. Several times. There are two very different “Blue Skies” recordings circulating. The first, which was eventually released on the unauthorized compilation The Early Years, Vol. 2, is an acoustic guitar demo Tom recorded in 1971. He only has one actual verse — it’s mostly just the chorus repeated a few times — but it doesn’t matter. It could have fit right in on Closing Time. It would have been one of the best songs on the album. But it didn’t make the cut.
He tried again for his second album, 1974’s The Heart of Saturday Night. He apparently plays piano on this one, though it’s hard to tell. This is a far cry from the stripped-down 1971 take. Not only is there now a full band playing on it, but strings and backing singers were added later, apparently against Tom’s wishes.
I get his objections, but personally I like it. The heavy production sounds shlocky, but it’s kind of a shlocky song. In a good way. To me, it’s a bit like the people (certain Beatles included) who object to Phil Spector messing with Let It Be. Again, I get it, but I think “The Long and Winding Road” works better with big, syrupy strings. It’s just that sort of song.
Despite what was clearly a lot of work done on it, “Blue Skies” was again left to the side. Well, almost to the side. As Bones Howe remembered to Waits biographer Barney Hoskyns, “‘Blue Skies’ was very much like a Ray Charles song. But then it just didn’t sound like it fit the album at all, so we released it as a single instead.”
So I guess it’s not entirely unreleased, though as far as I can tell the single, backed with “New Coat of Paint,” didn’t do much of anything. “Blue Skies” hasn’t been officially released again since. But if you like that early Closing Time sound, it’s a stealth classic.