“Step Right Up” by Tom Waits

Tom Waits plays a huckster on "Step Right Up", from his 1976 album Small Change: a snake-oil pitchman urging the crowd to come closer and buy a miracle product he never names, one that supposedly handles everything from yard work to pizza delivery to tracking down lost slippers. He delivers it like a carnival barker working the midway, and he wrote it as a jab at goods that promise more than they can do.

Waits wrote it alone, and Bones Howe produced and engineered, with Jim Hughart on double bass and Shelly Manne on drums behind him. The song has long been praised for its sheer personality, and a 2018 Pitchfork review credited Waits with turning "dark slogans into black magic". Onstage he would work a cash register for percussion.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.