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I don’t get much from “Emotional Weather Report” on Nighthawks at the Diner. I’ve never been much for poetry recitals, even when the recital is accompanied by a beatnik jazz combo. The song (if that’s even the word) has a lot of clever lines, but the overall package leaves me, to quote one of them, “Colder than a ticket taker's smile at the Ivar Theatre on a Saturday night.”
But for a few years after, Tom kept performing the piece, refining it, and, to my ear, improving it. He added new intros, in place of the “Opening Intro” that leads into the song on Nighthawks, which added great new lines.
In this version, from Minneapolis 1975, most of the song is the intro. There’s five minutes of intro, which bears little resemblance to the Nighthawks version recorded only six months prior. At one point he calls this “an improvisational adventure,” which is about right. (He also calls it “an inebriational travelogue.”) He throws in word-delirious lines like:
Well, I've been busier than a set of jumper cables at a Puerto Rican wedding. I've been to Swingsville, Hipsville, Gonesville, Uptown, Downtown, Bloomington, Bloomington, Bloomington, Buffalo, Ruffalo, Duffalo, Muffalo, Davalo, Dingalo, Babalo, Digalo, Dagalo, Seattle, Riaddle, Eisenhower, Whosenhower, Deesenhower, gone again, coming back, back by with an overhead cabin class. You know, I've been busier than a one-armed bass player when you get right down to it, I guess.
He continues on and on dropping memorable phrases in this. “I'm talking about slicker and deer guts on a doorknob.” “I ordered me up something that was stronger than stud horse bits with a foam farted off.” “I was on the corner of Why-Did-You-Leave-Me-Baby and Why-Don’t-You-Please-Come-Home.” And on and on.
Notice another difference? No band! He’s just finger-snapping along to accompany himself. I find this one more much engaging than the Nighthawks version.
Ditto this next version from the following year in Chicago. There’s a band again, but they’ve got a little more bite, the drummer especially. There’s fun banter with the audience in a different extended intro. “I hear you’re all crocked,” he says. “What about you?” some guy yells. “Ehh…not a chance,” he slurs, sounding deliberately unconvincing.
After calling the crowd “misfits that force-feed automatic transvestites,” Tom introduces the song by saying, “It’s all about a little girl I met in Cincinnati. It’s hard to do, meet a girl in Cincinnati. There’s only one of ‘em, and she’s usually all booked up.”
The song itself continues to be “an improvisational adventure.” He pulls various lines from the Nighthawks version seemingly at random, riffing on them like a standup comic rather than following the script precisely. He also throws in a lot of new lyrics that fit the general vibe, like “It’s colder than a flat frog on a Philadelphia freeway in February.”
He also institutes a new way of ending the song he’ll expand on over the next year or so, repeating the line of “Late night and early morning, low clouds”—a single lyric near the beginning of the Nighthawks version—over and over again, before muttering, “It’s cold out there” to wrap things up.
We’ll finish with one more live version, the following year (1977 now) in Roslyn, New York. I love the way it opens:
Since you left me, baby
Since you walked out on me
Well, I'm getting along just fine without you
Just fine without ya
In fact things couldn't be better
‘Cause I got me the legs from a table
And I got me the arm from a chair
And I got me the neck from a bottle
From an old mule, I got me some hair
And I tied it all together
Now baby can you see?
He give me more love than you'll ever give to me
(This, I discovered when Googling around, is a riff on an old Louis Armstrong song)
This song evolved and expanded live better than any other we’ve covered so far, from something that never struck me as super memorable on the record to a true joy to hear him experiment with from show to show. It’s too bad he didn’t bring it back occasionally in later years to see what other new parts might have emerged.
At the end of the 3rd version (Chicago, 1976), Waits gives a shout-out to Frank Vicari on tenor saxophone. Here's some info on Vicari: https://www.saxontheweb.net/threads/frank-vicari-passes.47437/
Thank you for this!