Ol' '55

Waits wrote Ol' '55 as one of his early songs, and Jerry Yester produced it. It opened Closing Time in March 1973 on Asylum, was released as the lead single and became a minor hit. The title refers to his car, a 1955 Buick Roadmaster, which he described as the first real luxury automobile he had owned and about as slick as deer guts on a doorknob. Deusner of Pitchfork describes it as an ode to the car that carries him away from his girlfriend's bed early in the morning, and as the only song with any daylight on the album.

The Eagles covered it on On the Border in 1974, and it was the B-side of their single Best of My Love. Waits told an interviewer in 1975 that he found their version a little antiseptic. At the Eagles' millennium concert in 1999, Glenn Frey told the audience that Waits had not liked the version when it first came out and then got the royalties check.