release date: Sep. 9, 1980
format: vinyl (reissue) (AS 52 252) / cd (1989 reissue)
[album rate: 4,5 / 5] [4,28]
producer: Bones Howe
label: Asylum / Elektra - nationality: USA
Track highlights: 1. "Heartattack and Vine" (4 / 5) - 3. "Saving All My Love for You" - 4. "Downtown" (4 / 5) - 5. "Jersey Girl" (5 / 5) - 6. " 'Til the Money Runs Out" (4 / 5) - 7. "On the Nickel" (5 / 5) (live) - 8. "Mr. Siegal" - 9."Ruby's Arms"
7th studio album by Tom Waits following two years after Blue Valentine (1978) is his last studio release under his own name with Bones Howe as producer - a near-fast fixture since '74 and the producer of a total of six albums. The unusual two-year period between new albums may be seen in the light of the lifestyle he practices together with Rickie Lee Jones. Since her solo debut in early '79, the pair had been living a life on the music industry's infamous shadow side, and Waits had ended their relationship in the fall of '79, simultaneously questioning his continued musical career. He left his 'beloved' LA motel, The Tropicana, his home for the better part of a decade, and moved to the East Coast and New York to find a new focus in life and with the clear intention of starting a healthier life. The change was not the success he had hoped for, and four months after leaving LA 'forever' and with a handful of new experiences, he returned to the City of Angels but this time in his own apartment - away from The Troubadour and away from The Tropicana clientele. It was also during this period that he found his (lasting) love in Kathleen Brennan, whom he (already) married in Aug. 1980. Waits had been engaged to write the music for a Francis Ford Coppola musical film, "One From the Heart" (1982) and Brennan worked at Coppola's Zoetrope production company.
Heartattack and Vine is on my top-5 favourite list of Tom Waits albums and it's also one of the first Waits albums that I bought on vinyl back in 1988 / '89. Bruce Springsteen had led me to this album when he included the beautiful ballad "Jersey Girl" on his 1986 live box set, and I became curious to hear the original version.
The album shows in several ways a 'new' Tom Waits. All of his previous albums are stylistically linked in a singer / songwriter, blues, and vocal jazz framework, but this one is his first electrified album. The title track and the first track start with a raw bluesy rock and r&b guitar and feauture a Tom Waits who almost spits out his words accompanied by a completely different sound stemming from percussion and trombone - an r&b backbone. The style is still centered around his narratives, the stories of lost destinies, and there is still a lot of vocal jazz in the music but the compositions have become simpler, more direct, rawer, almost like a type of garage rock, and in that way functions as a transitional album to a more experimental side to his music. You may wonder what The Pogues would have sounded and looked like had this album not been released.
The album is Waits' second to be included in "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die".
Highly recommended.
[ allmusic.com, Mojo 3 / 5, Rolling Stone 4 / 5 stars ]
