Tom Waits Rain Dogs

Widely considered the creative peak of a long and storied career, Tom Waits’ ninth album, 1985’s Rain Dogs, is a gutter symphony populated by colourful characters: a one-eyed ship captain; a blind boilerman; an accordion-playing slaughterhouse worker; a calendar girl with a razor in her boot; and, of course, the titular “rain dogs” who live in the streets and huddle in the doorways. “All the people on the album are knit together by some corporeal way of sharing pain and discomfort,” Waits said in 1985, and you can hear that shared commiseration all over Rain Dogs, which features everything from teary-eyed ballads (“Hang Down Your Head”, “Time”) to fractured nursery rhymes (“Clap Hands”) to New Orleans funeral brass (“Anywhere I Lay My Head”)—and so much more. The first album written and recorded after Waits moved to New York City, the ramshackle sound of Rain Dogs gets a lot of help from the city’s downtown jazz-scene players, including John Lurie, Robert Quine, Greg Cohen and Bobby Previte. They’re accompanied by a junkyard of sound—the result of Waits expanding his textures to include marimba, singing saw, accordion, banjo, and, most notably, the percussive guitar of Marc Ribot, whose rubbery twang would make appearances on Waits’ records for decades. The resulting album is raucous, exciting and full of sonic surprises. On “Singapore”, the drum sound was created by smacking a two-by-four on a chest of drawers. Meanwhile, the cacophonous blues stomp of “Big Black Mariah”, the barroom chug of “Union Square” and the gorgeous country ballad “Blind Love” all feature guitar from none other than Keith Richards. Rain Dogs also features Waits’ big swing at a pop song, in the form of the lovelorn ballad “Downtown Train”. The single wouldn’t be a hit for Waits—whose gravel-road rasp anchors the tune—but it would become a hit in 1989 for Rod Stewart. He’s just one of the many stars to take inspiration from the tracks on Rain Dogs, which have been covered by such artists as Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Los Lobos and Tori Amos. For an album that, on the surface, seems so unapproachable—an avant-garde collision of clattering percussion, dissonant polka, drunken horns, street-corner accordion and Waits’ sandpaper wail—Rain Dogs has proved to be incredibly durable.