"Diamonds on My Windshield"

'The Heart of Saturday Night', 1974

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This song should be billed as Jim Hughart ft. Tom Waits. The bassist all but steals the show, mixed very prominently and playing very fast. His bass line doesn’t just walk; it practically sprints. In a radio interview promoting the album, Tom explained how that memorable bass line came about:

I didn't really know what to do with that piece cause it was written out just as some spontaneous verse that I had written on the back of an itinerary and I didn't know what the hell to do with it. So we went in the studio and I tried singing it, tried doing it a-capella - nothing worked. Jim Hughart was playing the upright bass with me for that session just started playing a modal bass line and I just started talking and Jim Gordon started playing a cool 12 bar shuffle on brushes and we just winged it in one take and we had it and I like the way it came out.

He wrote the lyrics under the influence of the Beats, first reading it at a poetry workshop at LA’s Beyond Baroque bookstore. He then published it as poem in a zine called The Sunset Palms Hotel, which explains how he had the lyrics long before the music. 

Cover illustration by Charles Bukowski!

That a cappella incarnation he mentions? You can hear it—not from the album sessions, or from that poetry workshop, but from a live show he performed just a week before Heart of Saturday Night came out. Even though he’d already recorded the album version, clearly he hadn’t totally given up on the vocal-only (well, vocals and finger-snapping) approach.

To add a dose of confusion, though, there’s a version on the unauthorized Early Years Vol. 2 compilation, recorded in 1971, before he even got to Closing Time much less Heart of Saturday Night. While it’s fairly different in many respects from the 1974 album take (hand percussion instead of drums, bursts of tinkly piano, much more of a vocal melody), the one thing that is not different is that there’s a prominent walking bass line. I’m not sure how that squares his one-take-in-the-studio story. It seems like it had that bass-forward arrangement for a few years, then if anything lost it (briefly) after he recorded it. Here’s that 1971 demo:

It would continue to evolve live. In 1976, he did a version that added percussion and sax (and sound effects), but had no bass line to speak of. Either that or the bass is mixed so low as to be inaudible. Then, in 1977, the bass was back and saxophone became even more prominent.

I’m on the record as a Heart of Saturday Night skeptic, but I find “Diamonds on My Windshield” charming. Partly because of how much Tom seems to enjoy saying “colder than a well-digger’s ass.” And partly because of Jim Hughart, whose bass line gives it a zippy propulsion that some of the other songs lack.