On YouTube, there exists a clip of Tom Waits performing live on an unnamed American TV show. Broadcast in December 1978, the segment sees the ageless troubadour hunched like a question mark over a grand piano from which he extracts the most poignant seasonal song I’ve ever heard. “Hey Charlie,” he sings, “I’m pregnant and living on 9th Street, right above a dirty bookstore on Euclid Avenue.” Thus begins A Christmas Card From A Hooker in Minneapolis.
I don’t pretend that this four-and-a-half-minute masterpiece is the most complete accompaniment to the festive period. Recorded in the summer of 1978 on acoustic and electric piano, its sombre terrain doesn’t compete with the vast range of emotions over which The Pogues so effortlessly somersaulted a decade later on Fairytale of New York. Neither is Tom Waits an obvious poster boy for seasonal fare. In terms of public recognition, it’s hard to imagine him replacing Noddy Holder as the man who shouts “it’s Christmas!” on an advert for an affordable British supermarket.
All the same, Christmas Card From A Hooker in Minneapolis – and beat that for a title – provides a vital public service. As the willing multitudes spend a month immersed in seasonal bathos, year after year the sad and the lonely are decanted to the periphery. But in the world created by Tom Waits, there’s always room at the inn for even the most desperate people. As one correspondent, writing in response to the clip mentioned above, puts it, “Merry Christmas to and from all the marginal folks. The damaged, the deluded, and those who cling to what joy they can. Hang in there.”
Waits’ narrator is certainly doing that. With its lyrics written as if it’s meant to be read by only one person – the mysterious Charlie, whoever he may be – this story of a working girl living a precarious life is uncommonly intimate. Throughout, discovering the details of her life feels like voyeurism. Sure, she may be pregnant, but her new fella is a trombone player who promises to raise the child as if it were his own. In the meantime, he takes her dancing every Saturday night. He’s a good guy. She wears a ring that belonged to his mother.
Doubtless, it's cold out. At the time of writing this piece, the weather in Minneapolis is 19 degrees below zero. With a locale that is nearer to Winnipeg and Saskatoon than the lights of Broadway or Hollywood, the narrator’s professional circumstances remind me of a line by Alex Turner, from Arctic Monkeys, another of popular music’s truly great lyricists. “She must be f—ing freezing, scantily clad beneath the clear night sky.” Elsewhere, though, there are signs of change for the better. “I stopped taking dope and I quit drinking whiskey,” she confides. It’s a start, I suppose.
Certainly, Charlie himself sounds like a bit of a boy. Whether or not the pair were ever an item is unclear, but the familiarity with which the song’s narrator lets slip that she thinks of him “every time I pass a filling station on account of all the grease you used to wear in your hair” suggests a kinship forged beneath neon. There is sadness at no longer being able to play a record by [Little] Anthony and the Imperials that may or may not have been a gift. “Someone stole my record player, now how do you like that?” she says in what for me is the song’s most devastating line.
In lesser hands, this kind of fare might be little more than a brittle pastiche of the kind of lowlife American archetypes itemised by the likes of Charles Bukowski and William S. Burroughs. But in just 277 words, Tom Waits fashions a fully-formed world in which childish longing is underwritten by brutal truths. The narrator’s dream of driving “a different car every day dependin’ on how I feel” is contingent on the fanciful notion of being reimbursed “all the money we used to spend on dope”. But what’s done is done. As the author Barney Hoskins writes in his book Lowside Of the Road, “This was no lush life. This was heroin and jail time. Under the surface sentimentality we [hear] the hard edge of self-destruction.”
Although not exactly self-destructive, Tom Waits’ own circumstances during this period were uncertain enough. Barely five years after being sized-up by his record label, Asylum, as the kind of goldmine that might rival the emerging Bruce Springsteen, his sixth album, Blue Valentine, on which Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis is housed, failed to chart anywhere in the world save for Australia (at number 42). Not that he seemed greatly moved by good fortune, mind. After the Eagles recorded a version of his early-day ballad Ol’ ’55 on their double-platinum On The Border LP, the singer remarked that the group’s “albums are good for keeping the dust off your turntable and that’s about all”.
But he was aware of shifting sands. Billeted as a permanent resident at the Tropicana Motel, in Los Angeles, by 1978 Waits was on nodding terms with visiting musicians such as the Ramones, Blondie and Elvis Costello & The Attractions. Never mind that he was still in his 20s, his suspicion that the barfly-at-the-piano act with which he had made his name was in danger of becoming a dated pastiche was surely correct. As such, Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis can be enjoyed as a song played in a style its author would soon enough leave well alone for at least a decade.
But the notion that this is the kind of torch song that might be easily replicated by any one of a thousand piano bar stumblebums with a working knowledge of the beat poets is for the birds. Tom Waits was a poet long before strangers learned his name. No hack has the skill required to rhyme “neon buzzin’” with “second cousin”, as he did on (Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night, let alone the emotional acuity to create characters that leap from the speakers as if in search of a better life. That his allegiance, then as now, is with the underdog only adds to the magic.
In fact, so real does the story on Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis seem that it comes as a shock to learn that the narrator herself is a liar. There is no trombone player with a ring that belonged to his mother. There are no Saturday nights on the dance-floor. There isn’t even a thoroughfare in Minneapolis called Euclid Avenue, because I checked. Instead, come the song’s final verse, we learn that her words have been written in prison. “If you want to know the truth of it,” she needs to “borrow money to pay this lawyer,” after which she’ll be “eligible for parole come Valentine’s day”.
I don’t know if this final line is a come-on, or the faintest promise of a happy ending. I have no idea if Charlie ever received the card, or even if he’s still alive to read it. But I do know that this is the song for anyone whose life, for whatever reason, is made worse by the festive period. As Tom Waits himself once put it, “I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things”. And the message in the card from a lady of the night in Minneapolis couldn’t be clearer. Merry Christmas, the war is never over.
Is Tom Waits’s Christmas Card From a Hooker in Minneapolis the most poignant seasonal song ever?
The beautiful but melancholy 1978 masterpiece brings a welcome message to anyone clinging on to joy at Christmas: hang in there