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a schoolboy — was probably best known for shaping the pop-soul sound of The Fifth Dimension. Geffen and Howe had worked together for years, ever since Geffen, highly impressed with The Association’s sound, had offered to manage that band for free. Geffen felt that Howe and Waits would be a good match, “because Bones had a background in jazz. I thought that he was a perfect mix of jazz and pop for Tom.”
    Howe recalls Geffen’s approach: “He said, ‘I want you to produce an artist that’s just strictly an album artist. The guy’s never going to have a hit single, so you just concentrate on making great albums with him.’” Waits was in the studio at the time working on demos for his new album, so Geffen urged Howe to listen to a few of them and see what he thought. If Howe liked what he heard, Geffen would set up a meeting with Tom.
    â€œHe sent me the demo tape, and I listened,” says Howe. “I heard all this Jack Kerouac in there. This is something I really know about. In my engineering days, when I was engineering mostly jazz records, sitting in a motel room in Miami, just going on into the tape recorder, I had put together an album of about four hours of Kerouac. I had gone through allthat material and put an album together for him. It was called
The Beat Generation
. . . I was really familiar with Kerouac’s work, so David set up the meeting with Tom.”
    Geffen had also filled Waits in on Howe, describing his larger projects — the work he’d done with The Association, The Turtles, and The Fifth Dimension — but Waits wasn’t very excited by Howe’s credentials. They sounded a lot like Jerry Yester’s, and the plan had been to attempt something new in the recording process. Still, Tom did agree to meet with Bones. “I started talking to him about Jack Kerouac,” Howe reminisces. “Then I told him I’d engineered all these jazz records. I guess David had told him the other things I’d done. But that was really the cement. The glue with Tom and me was jazz and Kerouac. He said, ‘Do you know that Kerouac once made a record with Steve Allen?’ I didn’t. And he said, ‘Well, I have a tape of it somewhere and I’ll get it.’”
    That particular album — which was called
Kerouac
/
Allen
— was one of Waits’s favorites. He’d slip it onto the turntable and hear Kerouac intoning tales of hard times and life on the road while the original
Tonight Show
host and piano player wove in a little unobtrusive jazz. Waits loved the way Kerouac’s stories were transformed by the music. As he spoke over the melody, Kerouac’s poetry and prose metamorphosed into song. Waits had started exploring this dynamic in his own work. He gave Bones a copy of
Kerouac
/
Allen
and was happy to see that the album had a similar effect on him. “It was one of those things,” remembers Howe. “We were trading tapes and talking about music. Do you know this saxophone player? It was just that kind of natural thing. We decided to do
The Heart of Saturday Night
together.”
    Interviewed by Barney Hoskyns of
Mojo
in 1999, Waits remarked that “In those days, nobody would even think of sending you into the studio without a producer. In their minds, they give you thirty grand, you might disappear to the Philippines and they never see you again. They’re not giving you thirty grand, they’re giving [it to] this guy who plays tennis and wears sweaters and lives in a big house. They’re giving him the money and he’s paying for everything. Just show up on time and stay out of jail.” 1 So the guy who wore sweaters and the guy who was managing to stay out of jail got down to it. Waits and Howe held late-night meetings at Duke’s Coffee Shop, where they would throw ideas onto the table and discuss the songs that Tom was writing. Then they would head over to Wally Heider