Record Rebound: Tom Waits reissues his 1985 masterpiece ‘Rain Dogs’
Alongside Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits completes the North American triangle of essential gravel-voiced singer-songwriters. Grouping Waits with these two highly-praised artists seeks to illustrate the eternally seminal nature of his back catalogue and prevalence in the field of poetic songwriting and characterful delivery. Besides such parallels, Waits is a unique force of versatile creativity that transcends genres, media, borders and creeds.
Throughout his watertight and illustrious career, Waits has released a host of landmark albums, such as Closing Time and Swordfishtrombones, but 1985’s Rain Dogs stands salient as the pinnacle product, holistically representative of Waits’ creative scope while remaining delectably accessible. Rain Dogs is a great entry album to a towering oeuvre, but it also serves as a prevailing summary for seasoned fans.
A loose concept album concerning the “urban dispossessed”, Rain Dogs confidently stretches itself across 19 tracks in just under 53 minutes. The mathematicians among us will have already derived that this is an album of snappy, bitesize servings, with most songs failing to breach the three-minute mark.
Waits wrote most of these chapters while living in a basement room in Manhattan. In Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits, the songwriter described the premises 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.”
Although Waits was shut off from the bustle of Manhattan outside, save for a trickle in the walls, he was deeply inspired by the ambient sounds of the urban environment while creating Rain Dogs. Fortunately, he had spent some time tape-recording some ambient sounds across New York City in preparation for the album before writing in his “vault”.
Rain Dogs derives much of its appeal from stylistic variety and unique songcraft. Sweeping seamlessly between emotional piano ballads and guitar-driven rock, the album merges jazz and blues sensibilities with a constellation of intriguing sounds. While most others were toying with synthesisers, electric guitars and conventional drum kits, Waits made a point of employing marimbas, accordions, double basses, trombones and banjos to achieve musical depth befitting of the concept.
Like the city streets it embodies, Rain Dogs is adorned with unique and unexpected sounds. Wary of conventional production techniques, Waits ensured his work set itself apart from the crowd, even if this meant using objects that weren’t instruments as instruments.
“If I want a sound, I usually feel better if I’ve chased it and killed it, skinned it and cooked it,” he once told You magazine while discussing the album. “Most things you can get with a button nowadays. So if I was trying for a certain drum sound, my engineer would say, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, why are we wasting our time? Let’s just hit this little cup with a stick here, sample something and make it bigger in the mix; don’t worry about it.’ I’d say, ‘No, I would rather go in the bathroom and hit the door with a piece of two-by-four very hard.'” This admirable attitude permeates the record through songs melancholic, humorous and meditative and, besides Waits’ distinctive howl, gives a relatively eclectic set of tracks a sense of unity.
The album’s singles, ‘Jockey Full of Bourbon’, ‘Hang Down Your Head’ and ‘Downtown Train’, mark some of Waits’ most commercially viable material but remain texturally unique. Venturing into the heart of the album, even the transient instrumentals, like ‘Bride of Rain Dog’, which foreshadows Aphex Twin’s ‘Jynweythek’, add a vital colour to the palette.
Collaborating with a swathe of talented musicians, most notably the guitarists Keith Richards and Marc Ribot, Waits created one of the 1980s’ most unique and consummate albums in Rain Dogs. On Friday, September 22nd, Waits will honour the masterpiece with a deluxe reissue on vinyl alongside Swordfishtrombones and Franks Wild Years.
The albums are now available for pre-order here.
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