Tom Waits – ‘Rain Dogs’
Tom Waits writes stories like a quirky reporter on the beat. But his stories aren’t anywhere near the front page or even the back for that matter, they sit amid the hallowed space of page nine… on a local newspaper that is about to go out of print. They’re the very human fables from the outskirts of life where, paradoxically, most of us live, but our tales evade the spotlight all the same. Rain Dogs sees Tom Waits weave these mini demimonde Dostoyevskyesque vignettes into an enthralling journey through the gutters of modern civility, gazing up at the stars and slurry therein.
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.
