The Cover Uncovered: Anders Peterson, the photographer who inspired Tom Waits’ ‘Rain Dogs’
What is a rain dog? Well, Tom Waits himself offered up the following explanation to Spin: “You know dogs in the rain lose their way back home,” he said. “They even seem to look up at you and ask if you can help them get back home. ‘Cause after it rains every place they peed on has been washed out. It’s like Mission Impossible. They go to sleep thinking the world is one way and they wake up and somebody moved the furniture.”
There are people in the world who look like that, too, hopeless souls who “sleep in doorways” having lost their scent of home. This perfectly describes the coterie of characters who parade around Rain Dogs. In order to capture these poor street urchins, Waits shacked up in a vault beneath the streets of lower Manhattan. 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 getting to the heart of it.
There was one bar in Germany where all this unfurled in a few concentrated square metres. It was in Hamburg, on the outskirts of the Reeperbahn red-light district, and it was called Café Lehmitz. This is where the Swedish photographer Anders Petersen stationed himself for over three years, absorbing himself in the patrons’ shenanigans that they simply called their lives in the late 1960s. One picture he snapped was of a woman called Lilly and a man called Rose in a drunken embrace adorning Waits’ album cover (no, that’s no, the songsmith himself).
The patrons he snapped were – much like Waits’ album – sailors, sex workers, staggering accountants, and impromptu striptease dancers. They were the urban, and sometimes not so urban, dispossessed, gathered in one place and united through cheap liquor. Speaking about his fascination with these folks, Petersen remarked, “The people at the Café Lehmitz had a presence and a sincerity that I myself lacked. It was okay to be desperate, to be tender, to sit all alone or share the company of others. There was a great warmth and tolerance in this destitute setting.”
Little is known about Lilly and Rose, and that only adds to the lure. Lilly was the café’s darling, a bubbly girl who was perhaps the most attractive person to dare to darken its feted doorway, so she was the object of endless swoons. Meanwhile, Rose was a mysterious man named after the flower because of the tattoo on his chest. He would arrive at the Lehmitz smartly dressed as he worked as a waiter down the road. What became of them is poetically unknown, as is the way with the wayward protagonists stagger in and out of Rain Dogs, a true masterpiece.
