01	Goin' Down Slow						02:48
	02	Poncho's Lament						04:17
	03	I'm Your Late Night Evening Prostitute						03:16
	04	Had Me A Girl						05:32
	05	Ice Cream Man						03:11
	06	Rockin' Chair						03:15
	07	Virginia Ave.						02:41
	08	Midnight Lulabye						03:37
	09	When You Ain't Got Nobody						03:23
	10	Little Trip To Heaven						03:02
	11	Frank's Song						01:56
	12	Look's Like I'm Up Shit Creek Again						03:03
	13	So Long I'll See Ya						03:31

Tom Waits is amazing.
Some of his older lyrics are corny but the depth of perception
more than makes up for it!

The Early Years
Recorded July - December 1971

Tom Waits (writer, vocals, piano, guitar)
Robert Duffey (producer)


THE EARLY YEARS VOL. 1

Year Of Release: 1991
Record rating = 7
Overall rating = 10

You sure can see why the Eagles liked to cover this guy in the beginning.
Best song: MIDNIGHT LULLABYE

Track listing: 1) Goin' Down Slow; 2) Poncho's Lament; 3) I'm Your Late Night Evening Prostitute; 4) Had Me A Girl; 5) Ice Cream Man; 6) Rockin' Chair; 7) Virginia Ave.; 8) Midnight Lullabye; 9) When You Ain't Got Nobody; 10) Little Trip To Heaven; 11) Frank's Song; 12) Looks Like I'm Up Shit Creek Again; 13) So Long I'll See Ya.

Columbia decided to release these early early outtakes twenty years after they'd been released... A whole pile of hot sweaty nifty shitty outtakes. Oh did I say 'shitty'? This ought to start a debate about whether there was a need for this release or there wasn't any... or an even larger debate about whether there is a need for 'dubious' archive releases at all. But for now, let us just adhere to the principle that every archive release has its use and any kind of tape made public is better than any kind of tape left private. Something like that.
And since we were speaking of Tom Waits after all, where does he come in in all of this? Well, he just happened to throw together a couple dozen tracks during a prolific recording session in 1971, but for some reason the tapes went unedited and unissued and most of the songs were demos anyway and most of them were released later, particularly on Closing Time and Heart Of Saturday Night. This, then, is the earliest Waits recording known to that particular kind of mortal man who's not known as a 'close Tom Waits associate'. Bootlegs excluded, of course. What kind of low-life scum would be buying a bootleg anyway? Bootlegs are for fruitcakes and sissies. Stick to good old Russian pirate releases.
The primordial question is: did Tom Waits suck? Did he? Was he really any good that early in his career? Well... he certainly didn't suck, that's pretty obvious. But were I to say he was mature and completely 'arrived' by 1971, I would be utterin' a preposterous lie for which I'd have no choice but to spend the rest of my life locked in a prison cell with Ricky Martin. (Ooh, I can imagine the consequences...). No, Tom was still young. Young and often splutterin' out silly naive gibberish like 'Had Me A Girl', where he imitates one of his idol's (guess which one) 'love for lists' by having all the lyrics run 'well I had me a girl from [insert random location], she [insert random activity on anybody's part], and my doctor says I'll be okay, but I'm feelin' blue'. It's not really funny and definitely not meaningful either, seems almost like he's really improvising, especially since on one of the lines he just breaks off devoid of inspiration... then again, if it is improvisation, it's pretty cool for an improvisation.
Of course, there are numerous early mini-gems on here, but not quite up to the general standards of Closing Time - the melodies are not quite up to par, and the underproduction is just a whiff, well, er, underproduced. Know how dang hard it is to strike an excellent balance between all those things when you're a singer-songwriter? Expressive vocals, meaningful lyrics, tasteful guitar/piano playing, neat little orchestrated touches, song sequencing... man, I sure couldn't do that. And that ain't done on Early Years either.
Which doesn't really mean it sucks or anything. The early versions of well-known classics are all decent - 'Ice Cream Man', 'Virginia Ave.' and 'Midnight Lullabye' are almost as good as two years later (although 'Midnight Lullabye', as awesome a song as it is, still isn't pulled off anywhere near as effective as the stately epic 'and dream, dream...' coda on Closing Time). And sorry if I gave you the idea that 'Had Me A Girl' is really typical of the album - it's not. Most of the time, it's the same slow moody humorless life observations, just underdeveloped. But it's still a must for fans. Songs like 'Poncho's Lament', 'Rockin' Chair' and 'Looks Like I'm Up Shit Creek Again', great or not, derivative or not (Dylan influences rule supreme on the album), are warm and inviting, and this early version of 'Little Trip To Heaven' gotta rank among the gentlest love ballads Tom ever wrote (yeah, I know that song also made it to Closing Time, but for some strange reason I don't find myself in the mood to be investigating right now I just prefer this early version. Gimme some space for unpredictability!). In other words, if you're looking for genius, you got it pal, genius is all over this record. If you're looking for masterfully crafted songs, maybe you should just skip forward to the original officially released stuff.
It's funny to note, though, how damn gentle Tom's voice sounds everywhere on this record. Whoever admires the fast rate of the evolution of Tom's personality from the late Seventies to the early Eighties should pay some attention to the fact that Tom's evolution from the early to mid-Seventies was even faster in a certain way - Early Years, for all their historical and personal worth, present us with a young ambitious but not really outstanding singer-songwriter who's just another face in the huge singer-songwriting crowd. From here, Tom could have easily gone on to unsophisticated Eaglish soft-rock or something like that. This stuff doesn't take a whole lot of effort to appreciate - especially if you've been prepared for 'non-beautiful' singing voices by the likes of Bob Dylan. Yet the evolution went in the right way, and even if Mr Waits would go on singing his brand of 'schlock' for a whole decade from now on, subsequent albums would find him rising above this schlock and regarding it with just enough irony and humour instead of really falling for it lock stock and barrel. So kudos to Mr Waits' evolution, and let's get on with it! There's still the second volume waiting for us, to see if it's better or worse.