FEATURE:
Tango Till They’re Sore
Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs at Forty
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RELEASED on 30th September, 1985…
IN THIS PHOTO: Tom Waits in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Bob Gruen
Rain Dogs was the ninth studio album from Tom Waits. Many consider it to be his very best. A concept album around "the urban dispossessed" of New York City, Rain Dogs is seen as a trilogy of albums including Swordfishtrombones and Franks Wild Years. With new influences and sounds coming into Waits’s work, Rain Dogs was this step in a new direction. Although not a massive commercial successful, Rain Dogs is often ranked as one of the best albums ever. I will get to some reviews of Tom Waits’s 1985 release. However, I want to start off with something from Wikipedia regarding the reception of this masterpiece:
“Comparing the album with its predecessor Swordfishtrombones, NME journalist Biba Kopf wrote that Rain Dogs saw Waits continuing "his continental drift through the crannies and corners of America's varied cultures", and concluded that "the lasting achievement of Rain Dogs is that Waits has had to sacrifice none of his poetry in pursuit of new musical languages to meet its demands." At the end of 1985, the magazine ranked Rain Dogs (jointly with the Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy) as the year's best album. In The Village Voice, Robert Christgau gave Rain Dogs a "B+" grade and said that Waits had "worked out a unique and identifiable lounge-lizard sound that suits his status as the poet of America's non-nine-to-fivers." Anthony DeCurtis penned a mixed assessment for Rolling Stone, finding that "Rain Dogs insists on nosing its way around the barrooms and back alleys Waits has so often visited before."
Retrospectively, Rain Dogs has been noted as one of the most important albums in Waits' career, continuing the new path which he forged from Swordfishtrombones onwards. In a 2002 reappraisal, Rolling Stone critic Arion Berger gave the album five out of five stars, calling it "bony and menacingly beautiful." Berger noted that "it's quirky near-pop, the all-pro instrumentation pushing Waits' not-so-melodic but surprisingly flexible vocals out front, where his own peculiar freak flag, his big heart and his romantic optimism gloriously fly”.
I will move on by sourcing quite a lot of this Pitchfork review of Rain Dogs from this April. It is illuminating when it comes to the background and lead-up to the album. They describe Rain Dogs as “a romantic and carnivalesque masterpiece imbued with the avant-garde sound of New York”. That seems pretty apt:
“The defining image of Tom Waits’ early career is a photograph taken by Mitchell Rose for Rolling Stone at the Tropicana Motel in West Hollywood in 1977. The singer-songwriter had been renting a room there for a few years by that point, but the photo looks like he’d moved in an hour ago. Beer bottles litter the coffee table in front of him; a guitar case rests atop an oversized cardboard box. Waits leans forward, hands folded, looking skeptical, maybe a little put-out, but certainly not embarrassed by the shabby condition of his domicile. He’s sitting in a folding lawn chair that hasn’t seen a ray of sunshine since the Nixon administration.
The next year, Waits put out his sixth LP on the Asylum label, Blue Valentine. The imprint, started by David Geffen and Elliot Roberts in 1971, was a showcase for the Southern California talent that was defining the post-Woodstock singer-songwriter landscape. Judee Sill’s debut album was its inaugural release, Jackson Browne’s with his first record a few months later, and by the time Joni Mitchell issued For the Roses on Asylum in the fall of 1972, Asylum sat near the center of a scene that was becoming a movement.
Waits knew some of these people from shared bills and the scene revolving around the Los Angeles club the Troubadour, where he’d been discovered by manager Herb Cohen. But he didn’t quite fit in. The prevailing mode of the early singer-songwriters was personal expression—you were supposed to draw from your life for your material, dotting your lyrics with references to friends and lovers and changing the details just enough to maintain plausible deniability. Waits wasn’t interested in this kind of sharing. Instead, he turned the whole idea on its head and based his life on his songs.
Like so many in his cohort, his early encounters with Bob Dylan blew his mind. Where many of his peers came up playing in garage bands, learning how to play Beatles tunes and “Louie Louie,” he fashioned himself as a solo songwriter from the beginning, and Dylan was his North Star. In the 2009 biography Lowside of the Road, writer Barney Hoskyns describes Waits’ earliest performances at a local folk society’s hootenannies as little more than impersonations, where “he was so in thrall to the staple Dylan persona that he wore a harmonica around his neck without ever putting his lips to it.” But where others copped the style and tried to write lyrics that could be considered poetry, Waits channeled the elder artist’s drive for reinvention. By the time he was making a name for himself at San Diego folk hoots, his middle-class suburban upbringing in Whittier, California, suddenly became irrelevant: Music was a good way to become someone else.
Waits got a record deal and, inspired by the Beats and associated countercultural figures like Charles Bukowski, he wrote about down-and-out characters and ragged street life, delivering his songs in the guise of a shabbily dressed nightclub hipster. “The Tropicana became a kind of stage,” Hoskyns observed, “a backdrop to Waits’ twenty-four-hours-a-day performance.” As the ’70s wound down, the songwriter worried that he’d painted himself into a corner. His work had certainly evolved between 1973’s Closing Time and Blue Valentine growing bluesier and rougher as his smoked-scorched voice deepened. But he felt stuck and worried that he was repeating himself.
His search for a new sound was set aside when Francis Ford Coppola tapped him to write and perform songs for One From the Heart. The film’s music would be central to the film’s story and Coppola had fallen in love with the boozy after-hours milieu the songwriter rendered so well, so Waits sat at the piano and got to work, clocking in at the filmmaker’s office like a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith. While composing, he reconnected with Kathleen Brennan, a script supervisor he’d bumped into a couple of times, and they fell for each other hard. Within a week, they were engaged, and from that point forward, his creative output would be split into “Before Kathleen” and “After Kathleen.” Her greatest contribution may have been the way she bolstered his confidence. If Waits feared letting go of the persona that had defined his recording career, Brennan convinced him that something better was within his grasp. She also expanded his musical palette, schooling him on the work of avant-garde artists that would be important in his next phase—Captain Beefheart, Harry Partch, Gavin Bryars.
While continuing work on the soundtrack, Waits knocked out one last album for Asylum with his longtime producer Bones Howe: Heartattack and Vine hit stores in fall 1980. It’s a strong record on which he pushed his voice further and added thick and mean guitar. But it wasn’t a radical departure from what came before. The chrysalis-like transformation would have to wait until the next record: With his contract up and a new family to support, Waits fired Cohen, split with Howe, signed with Island, and released 1983’s Swordfishtrombones.
Producing himself for the first time, Waits raided the musical junk shop and returned with wheezing accordion, fragile glass harmonica, thwacking talking drums, bubbling marimba, and too many miscellaneous percussion instruments to list. His previous work was informed by theater and cinema, but the songs on Swordfishtrombones were uncannily visual, the colors and textures of the sound framing his newly sharp narratives. Characters included a sailor on shore leave, a fugitive on the run from the law, and a homicidal office-furniture salesman who sets fire to the family home. If earlier songs sometimes felt like a slurring drunk telling you a story in a bar; now, they felt vivid and alive. Swordfishtrombones was recorded in California with local players; it would take a move east to New York City just after the record’s release to complete his metamorphosis.
Waits found a creative community almost instantly. In recent years, the city’s experimental downtown music scene had gone overground, and Waits felt a kinship with some of its players. He befriended saxophonist and composer John Lurie, whose band the Lounge Lizards had, in its early days, deconstructed jazz, celebrating the genre while undercutting it with amateurism in a way that fit with Waits’ own playful reverence. Through Lurie, he met jazz guitarist Marc Ribot. Hal Willner, who was the musical director of Saturday Night Live, gave Waits an education on the carnivalesque music of Kurt Weill and invited him to contribute to Lost in the Stars, a tribute to the German composer.
Waits summoned drummer Stephen Hodges and bassist Larry Taylor from California, both of whom had worked on Swordfishtrombones, and Hodges was astonished by how quickly and thoroughly a cabal had formed around the songwriter. “He seemed like the frigging Pope of New York,” he told Hoskyns. “He was taking care of business. He was all over the place.” The degree to which Waits was feeling his oats can be measured by the fact that he asked Keith Richards to play on his record, and the living legend agreed—after years of telling guitarists he was looking for a Stonesy feel, Waits had the self-assurance to ask the man himself.
And he knew how to get what he wanted in the studio. “He really has a good ear, not just for this note or that note, but for understanding how the sound is framing the lyric,” Ribot said in a later interview. “What decade is it, what continent is it on, what kind of room is it in?” Rain Dogs has much in common with Swordfishtrombones—antiquated instruments, metal-on-metal percussion, stomping cabaret numbers alternating with wispy instrumentals. But it has a grungier and more scuffed-up aesthetic that puts guitar, both by Waits himself and Ribot, out front. The latter’s style takes in Cuban syncopation, Southwestern twang, free-jazz skronk, and bluesy rock, but above all it forces you to confront the elemental materials of his instrument, with its electrified hum, heavy wood, and vibrating steel. To hear Ribot play is to understand that a guitar is a machine.
Rain Dogs is more of a band record than its predecessor—it sounds like people playing together in a room, and you notice their interplay at least as much as the arrangements. And everything revolves around the drums. After signing to Island, Waits became one of a few artists in the period—see Peter Gabriel and Robert Fripp of King Crimson—who experimented with a drum setup with few or no cymbals. Even if indirectly, some of this tendency came from the rapidly expanding interest in “world music” in the U.S. and UK in the 1980s, which made work from percussion-heavy traditions more accessible. And some can be traced to earlier strands of experimental rock, specifically the stand-up bashing of Maureen Tucker and the angular rhythms of Captain Beefheart.
For an artist with roots in jazz and rock, deemphasizing cymbals changes the recording’s character. The hi-hat and ride reinforce perception of the rhythm’s grid, allowing the ear to hear the precise meter more clearly, serving as an aural version of dot-and-dash notation on paper. A kit where cymbals are used sparingly can sound heavier, looser, and more rhythmically free—the drums on Rain Dogs roll, tumble, and lurch rather than simply marking time. “Tom always wanted orchestra accuracy with back-alley blues—it had to be loose, and had to be accurate,” said Hodges in a podcast interview. Amplifying the low-end was his use of a 32-inch bass drum better suited for a marching band, the rumble and quake of its diaphragm lending darkness and drama”.
I will come to some reviews to round things off. This classic interview from 1985 finds Tom Waits sharing a cab ride with Chris Roberts to discuss Rain Dogs. I have selected a section from the interview that was especially interesting. There are some wonderful 1985 interviews with Tom Waits that I would urge people to seek out:
“You constantly draw on the potent and jarring imagery of ‘handicaps’ – deaf, dumb, blind, lame – bandages – and the photo on the cover of Rain Dogs isn’t exactly a Dagwood and Blondie cartoon…
"Ah yeah, it does kinda have that Diane Arbus feel to it. His name is Andrews Peterson – it’s a drunk sailor being held by a mad prostitute, I guess. She’s cackling and he’s sombre. It did capture my mood for a moment. It’s just like – uh – isolated. Maybe this comes from living in New York a little bit – you kinda have to invent an invisible elevator for yourself just to live in: A guy goes to the bathroom on the tyre of a car, then a $70,000 car pulls up alongside an’ a woman with $350 stockings pokes her foot out into a puddle of blood and sputum, an’ the rain comes down, an’ a plane falls off the sky… it just gets a little… you start to just kinda focus on what you have to do an’ where you have to go. I always gravitate towards abnormal behaviour when I’m out on the street, so I have to be careful, cos it’s everywhere! I might never get to where I’m going!"
So does Rain Dogs (swimming, as it is, alongside your current thespian activities) signal a new era for Tom Waits?
"I hope so – just in terms of discovery and ideas. I’m trynna get away from that jazz thing. I live where the Nigerian overlaps Louisiana now. I’m trynna listen more to the noise in my head. My writing process has changed. Like when it’s rainin’ – again! – you have to make sure you have enough things to catch it in. I’m realisin’ the possibilities in arranging, exploring."
While Rain Dogs features some unearthly meddlings with the bizarre, there’s also a clutch of more conformist AOR songs like ‘Downtown Train’, ‘Hang Down Your Head’ and ‘Blind Love’. Which is not to detract from the poignant poetry of ‘9th And Hennepin’, ‘Gunstreet Girl’, the resigned ‘Tango Till They’re Sore’ and the shimmering ‘Time’. There are 19 titles in all.
"I never owned my songs, and now I do. It’s like – I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more. So now I send my songs out there, tell them to stick together an’ look out for their brothers. Aw… I usually just try to design something that has purity of purpose. Some are just sketches, some are more developed."
So what’s Keith Richards like?
"A wild animal. A real gentleman."
As a family man, are you thinking more in terms of career these days?
"You can’t, without driving yourself crazy. You can’t perceive it correctly. You just have to stay interested, keep a sense of humour, stay civilised and curious, an’ y’know, enjoy life’s rich pageant. Some are more afraid of success than of failure. It’s hard to get on the radio, an’ without that you can’t affect things an’ ‘catch the young’. It’s all business y’know? I don’t know – maybe I have been a cult for too long, but you do what you do. So many come along as a big sensation an’ then tomorrow nobody gives a shit about them – keep it movin’ pal! I stay a little… outside the glass.
"I think I’d like to take a crack at a wider audience, but with that comes responsibility. If you’re too big you get self conscious, if you’re too obscure you feel nervous. So it’s hard. The main thing is songs. You take off your hat an’ the birds fly out of your head – some homing pigeons, some crows, some never get off the ground, some never even hatch. I don’t wanna sound too sentimental, cos I’m really not. Make some money here, fine…"
Another of your favourite words seems to be ‘demented’….
"Aw… I’m not as demented as I’d like to be. We all have to prescribe to certain conventions and it’s difficult to dismantle this world and rebuild it the way you’d like. Some are completely unselfconscious and gone; I admire that. When I’m an old guy I’ll sit on the porch with a shotgun, and a skirt, and an umbrella, an’ if you hit your baseball in my yard you’ll never see it again."
The Times once described you as ‘the greatest living beat poet’, and you’re still alive. Is there a place for poetry in today’s civilised world or is it an outmoded medium?
"Everybody’s in a hurry. They even rush you in the barber’s. You have to get the most expensive coffin, not just a pine box, so it must be better on the other side. I’m gonna stick around though; you gotta police your area, you have to be in charge.
"I don’t know – all that stuff is vicariously important to me. See, Ginsberg is still alive, Burroughs, Robert Frank… it’s like a party. The ’50s was Chuck Berry, the Korean War, McCarthy… I love the idea of Kerouac. I love the sound of his name, the way it throws a rock through the window and lets you out."
Is cool important to Tom Waits?
"Well, I lose it all the time, so…"
I cannot vouch for this.
Music remains his first love. "I guess it’s where I feel most comfortable." The developing involvement with film and theatre doesn’t occupy as large a part of his daily thoughts as some gratuitous written attempts to justify Tom Waits as an ‘artist’ may have led you to believe. His roles to date have been small if successful – "I study acting a little. I’m trynna learn" – and he says of Coppola: "It’s hard to break new ground when people are watching your every move”.
Let’s go back to 2011. That is when Drowned In Sound published this article about Rain Dogs. It coincided with Rain Dogs Revisited coming to London’s Barbican Hall on 13th July, 2011. This is an album that I have heard a few times but wanted to know more about ahead of its fortieth anniversary:
“Rain Dogs sprawls majestically. The title refers to domestic dogs losing their natural scent tracks back home after a heavy rainstorm: an appropriate moniker for an album which continually casts its eye on downtrodden New York characters cast adrift from normality by events beyond their control, huddling together for an unlikely and unsteady camaraderie. It perfectly encapsulates the point where Waits’ penchant for beautiful, cinematic and poetic ballads confronts the sonic invention and envelope-pushing that he garnered from being introduced to Captain Beefheart, Kurt Weill and other diverse musical manuscripts by his new wife Kathleen Brennan. The influence of the latter is vital in understanding Waits’ development and confidence in relocating his sound into previously uncharted territory: "My wife's been great” Waits admitted to Playboy Magazine in 1988. “I've learned a lot from her. She's Irish Catholic. She's got the whole dark forest living inside of her. She pushes me into areas I would not go, and I'd say that a lot of the things I'm trying to do now, she's encouraged" The influence of Brennan in catalysing the dramatic reactions occurring in his mid-to-late 1980s records resulted in the opposing edges of his music becoming deeply and wonderfully embedded within each other on the album, glowing white-hot with friction.
Take the first half of the album that I described before. You rattle - pinball style, from one inn and doorway of a darkened alley of rogues and miscreants before suddenly, the window of heartbreak opens into the stunning emotional left-right of ‘Hang Down Your Head’ and ‘Time’. Waits is well known for being obtuse and ramshackle. What many don’t realise is that he’s arguably the finest writer of ballads in the last 30 years. He understands tenderness and he understands how to use it effectively without treading onto mawkish ground. A perfect example is the magnificent ‘Downtown Train’, a song which, on that first album listen years ago, I looked ahead and already knew from the Rod Stewart cover version. What did I expect? I expected gruff, angular and prickly. What did I get? A masterclass in how to do a shining melodic anthem while all the time comprehensively eschewing cliché: the art of how to write a so-called “big song”. This is Waits all over. He’ll work you hard, but he’ll reward you in spades afterwards. And for every moment that horrified people look over at you and mouth “What the bloody hell is THAT?” there’ll be another song that you could play to your grandmother and have her nod in sage approval. But with Waits being Waits, there’s always something positioned just that little bit off centre to hold the interest of the curious and the demanding. Listen to the growls and marauding brass strutting their way around ‘Tango ‘till They’re Sore’. Sway to the taut, clipped funk of ‘Walking Spanish’. And admire the Chinese Tangram puzzle intricacy of ‘Diamonds and Gold’, slotting together obtuse pieces with consummate ease. These are the hallmarks of a composer and musician at the pinnacle of their art: experimenting wildly while remaining coherent and gleefully expressive.
The pivotal addition to the roving group of musicians behind the album’s tapestry of sound was guitarist Marc Ribot, whose razor-wire treble lines act as the perfect foil to Waits animalistic mumbles, scats and growls and provides apt musical reflections on the song narrative. A perfect example is the angry, kaleidoscope guitar solo on ‘Jockey Full of Bourbon’, like a drunkard attempting to aim a gun
through the hazy fury of inebriation. Also featured on the album is Rolling Stones lead guitarist Keith Richards, adding his characteristic Telecaster bite to ‘Big Black Mariah’ and ‘Union Square’ (according to Richards, Waits informed him of the style he wanted him to play by wordlessly gyrating in front of him). The forceful, poly- rhythms of Michael Blair and Stephen Hodges add a jarring, unsettling tone to the proceedings with thick, sensual percussion running scared from skeletal marimba. Yet much of the real atmosphere is laid down by the dark, sweeping curtains of New Orleans brass that flit about in the wind of the record. Waits had experimented musically for many years, but it was on this trio of records that he fully began exploring the way that a record’s sound and feel could be tailored to perfectly fit the subject matter. Lyrically, the album contains some of his most vivid images, ranging from the rambunctious rag-tag characters permeating the gloom of ‘Singapore’ and ‘Cemetery Polka’, through to his chiselled-in-dirt poetry depicting scattered human wreckage found in the titular track, and so profoundly expressed, as Larry Taylor’s upright bass dances around in the background, within the spoken words of ‘9th and Hennepin’:
“And all the rooms they smell like diesel
And you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept here
And I'm lost in the window, and I hide in the stairway
And I hang in the curtain, and I sleep in your hat
And no one brings anything small into a bar around here
They all started out with bad directions
And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear
One for every year he's away, she said
Such a crumbling beauty. Ah,
There's nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars won't fix”
Within the album (as in so many of his records), one of Waits greatest skills is the ability to draw you pictures with his words, gradually sketching in the details without ever resorting to pretension and cliché. Some of the lyrics from ‘Time’ are some of the most striking and evocative lyrics of his entire career, including this incandescently beautiful image taken from the final verse:
“Well, things are pretty lousy for a calendar girl
The boys just dive right off the cars and splash into the streets
And when she's on a roll she pulls a razor from her boot
And a thousand pigeons fall around her feet”
By the end of the record, through the pistol smoke, whiskey and tears, you feel that Waits emerges triumphant. The glorious cacophony of accordion, striding gleefully into a marching Dixie jazz band parade on ‘Anywhere I Lay My Head’ could be seen as either a celebratory party, or an upbeat funeral procession. Either way, Waits seems to have found a realisation waiting for him on the other side:
“Well I see that the world is upside-down
Seems that my pockets were filled up with gold
And now the clouds, well they've covered over
And the wind is blowing cold
Well I don't need anybody, because I learned, I learned to be alone
Well I said anywhere, anywhere, anywhere I lay my head, boys
Well I’m gonna call my home”
Rain Dogs, within all its ramshackle yet perfectly aligned mayhem, is arguably the album where Waits’ penchant for ironically juxtaposing the grim and the gorgeous of society is presented in its most vivid colour and shape. As I was soon to discover following that memorable day, having stepped off the coach at Newcastle into a new and beautiful world of music, Waits has never made a bad record, and there are some that would challenge Rain Dogs for the title of his finest album (Mule Variations is equally as good, if not better in terms of overall quality). But in terms of creating a musical landscape where the freaks, the criminals and the crazy share ground with the heartbroken and sensitive under a sky of brilliant invention, it is a record like no other. He’s an artist where it isn’t simply a case of putting a record on and letting it spin ambiguously in the background. He’s someone who metaphorically strong-arms you into attention. But it’s worth every second of introspection. And in my eyes, Rain Dogs is the door into the oddly-lit attic of his mind that is most perfectly shaped for you to slip inside. And if you can stay strong amongst the weird shapes and sounds for just a little while, you’ll probably never feel the need to step out again”.
I will end with two reviews for Rain Dogs. There is this universal acclaim and love for one of the defining albums of the 1980s. Definitely among Tom Waits’s very best. His genius and unique songwriting brilliance in full display! If you have not heard the album then make sure that you do so. This is what AllMusic noted about Rain Dogs in their review:
“With its jarring rhythms and unusual instrumentation -- marimba, accordion, various percussion -- as well as its frequently surreal lyrics, Rain Dogs is very much a follow-up to Swordfishtrombones, which is to say that it sounds for the most part like The Threepenny Opera being sung by Howlin' Wolf. The chief musical difference is the introduction of guitarist Marc Ribot, who adds his noisy leads to the general cacophony. But Rain Dogs is sprawling where its predecessor had been focused: Tom Waits' lyrics here sometimes are imaginative to the point of obscurity, seemingly chosen to fit the rhythms rather than for sense. In the course of 19 tracks and 54 minutes, Waits sometimes goes back to the more conventional music of his earlier records, which seems like a retreat, though such tracks as the catchy "Hang Down Your Head," "Time," and especially "Downtown Train" (frequently covered and finally turned into a Top Ten hit by Rod Stewart five years later) provide some relief as well as variety. Rain Dogs can't surprise as Swordfishtrombones had, and in his attempt to continue in the direction suggested by that album, Waits occasionally borders on the chaotic (which may only be to say that, like most of his records, this one is uneven). But much of the music matches the earlier album, and there is so much of it that that is enough to qualify Rain Dogs as one of Waits' better albums”.
I am going to finish with Far Out Magazine and their take on Rain Dogs. Every feature and review provides different angles and personal takes on a remarkable work from one of music’s most beloved artists. I wonder if and when Tom Waits will follow 2011’s Bad As Me:
“He seems to be a reporter that has also lost all subjectivity. He has slunk well into the weird underworld which he set out to chronicle but – like an undercover investigator who takes up junk to bust a drug gang but fails to kick the habit and becomes aligned with mob life – Waits is now firmly holed up in the streets of the seedy city for good. His reams of unfurling scribbles have never found a more fitting album that Rain Dogs.
Even the album’s backstory seems to confirm this. Waits wrote the record in the belly of the beast in a basement room on Horatio Street in New York City, a place he lovingly describes as “kind of a rough area, Lower Manhattan between Canal and 14th Street, just about a block from the river … It was a good place for me to work. Very quiet, except for the water coming through the pipes every now and then. Sort of like being in a vault.”
He wanted to capture that rumbling city above on the record, so he set about making field recordings—capturing the mechanical hum of the urban dispossessed. This roars forth with the opener ‘Singapore’, an industrial track in the true sense of the word that uses horns and marimbas to transfigure the clang of banging pipes into music. This rumble exists down by the docks, where everyone is “mad as hatters”. They have seen the great scenes of the world from the “sewers of Paris” to the ports of “Singapore” on a boat captained by a “one-armed dwarf” with a penchant for throwing dice down the wharf.
But Waits doesn’t stay there long on his staggering journey. In no time, he’s barking about a poor cursed family on ‘Cemetery Polka’ and then suddenly, nine tracks into his cavalcade, he takes pause with ‘Time’ and finds a quiet spot to get reflective. It’s a beautiful moment amid the mania that highlights the humanity behind all the madness that goes before it and the continued meshuga yet to come. In part, that typifies some of the brilliance of this record: Waits isn’t just journeying through the gutter and transcribing it into music, he takes his time to get to the heart of it.
In this regard, the album seems similar to the Velvet Underground’s bruised banana debut that came before it. While much jazzier and musicologically meandering, it tells much the same beat-inspired tale of cities. In fact, these comments that David Bowie used to describe early Lou Reed are very fitting for Rain Dogs: “[He uses] cacophony as background noise and to create an ambience.” Alongside that both songwriters take inspiration from things “like Hubert Selby Jr, The Last Exit from Brooklyn and also John Rechy’s book City of the Night,” and are boldly unafraid to take pop traditions down a more literary route.
Much like the Velvet Underground, when approached from the frothing surface, Waits’ record seems like the depths of cultural degeneracy. Upon first listen, there is something perturbing about the opening onslaught of ‘Singapore’, ‘Clap Hands’ and ‘Cemetery Polka’ with more conventional jazzy folk being pushed down the tracklisting. These headier numbers kick up the perverse dirt of some dingy dive bar, suddenly whisking the sticky taverna into unwelcome life. While the dissonance of the down-tuned instruments creates the same vibe as the feeling you get when you visit a pub for the first time that you feel you don’t belong in.
After a while, as the album sprawls out, it becomes clear that indeed there are certain bars unfit for every person. The seafarers reside in the realm of sea-shanties down by the quay, while the arty rejects do their best Humphrey Bogart impression in the sepia bars where ‘Time’ rings out, the young hopefuls look for brighter horizons like drunken Bruce Springsteen’s on ‘Downtown Train’, and the friskier fellows sling back Havana cocktails in the sweaty ‘Jockey Full Of Bourbon’. Every cobbled stone is touched upon in Rain Dogs and it results in a masterful album that plays more like a book than a usual twelve-inch, and what a read it proves to be!
But that literary feat is lifted to loftier heights through the perfect energy of the music. You don’t have to pore over the wondrous lyrics to work out Waits’ world, like all the best page-nine tales, you can get a sense of them in a glossed-over leaf through. And that triumph comes down to his unique approach in the studio. As he said of Keith Richards’ involvement on the record: “He’s very spontaneous, he moves like some kind of animal. I was trying to explain ‘Big Black Mariah’ and finally I started to move in a certain way, and he said, ‘Oh, why didn’t you do that to begin with? Now I know what you’re talking about.’ It’s like animal instinct.” That’s what makes Rain Dogs so relatable and joyous—not because we know the streets he sings of, but because the smells and auras also seem to waft up from the whirling record on its hour-long merry-go-round”.
On 30th September, Tom Waits’s remarkable Rain Dogs turns forty. I know there will be celebration, retrospection and dissection nearer the date. Whether you are a Tom Waits fan or not, this is an album that I think everyone should hear. Hard to ignore or not love. So fascinating, I wonder whether a short film or piece has been shot based on this album. Released in 1985, this hugely important and brilliant work is one of the greatest albums…
OF the decade.
