„Rain Dogs“

(Island, 1985)

Chosing the so-called „best record by“ Tom Waits opens up the same problem as with Bob Dylan (see “New Morning”) and reduces the final choice to “personal favourite” (leaving out the question if there is a ranking possible in art anyway…). Because Tom Waits, just like Nick Cave or Bob Dylan, never made a mediocre record. They are all good, some are different and some might be called less or more important, surprising, challenging or whatever, but finally the result of having to opt for one album can only be reduced to a private history with that record. Most often the chosen record will be the one that really opened up the world or vision of an artist. Or it might be some musical minute detail that gives the final choice or maybe even some completely arbitrary reason. So after a short description of what Rain Dogs is about, I’ll give you some of the collected personal occurrences that I base my choice on. Turn it as you will, that is the only proper way to do such a thing.

Chronologically “Rain Dogs” falls into the middle of what has become known as the Weil/Brecht-trilogy of his work, starting with his radical re-invention on “Swordfishtrombones” (1983) and ending with the concept-album “Frank’s Wild Years” (1987), and cumulating in the live-album/movie-roundup “Big Time” (1988), that rehashes the best parts of the trilogy. This part of his work also marks the step from Asylum-records to Island-records, his break-up with Rickie Lee Jones and following marriage to Kathleen Brennan, working with Coppola, splitting up with his long term manager Herb Cohen and not last of all moving from LA to NY. After “Big Time” there was a stint of silence about Waits for quite some time until his last return with “Bone Machine” in 1992 (which made it runners-up on here), after which he turned into several direction at once (movie, theatre, music, scores) and started to ride away in all of them to become the singular, unique artistic gravity field he is today.

Listened to in order, this phase wasn’t as compact and solid as it might seem in hindsight. The other albums mentioned all seemed to follow a certain path or idea (“Swordfishtrombones” is a walk through the US-american suburban everyday nightmare, “Frank’s Wild Years” is a concept album about making it big as a musician / entertainer and “Big Time” of course is a live album accompanying a movie with a frame plot) but “Rain Dogs” seems like a pretty lose collection of stories and feelings, or rather of images and emotions that evaporate from damp nightly city streets and fume into roadside cafes, pensioneer’s hotels, small time criminals’ bars, drunkards’ bars, freaks’ hang outs, and ever so on. If you think about “Down by Law” – where two songs off of “Rain Dogs” (“Jockey Full of Bourbon” and “Tango Till they’re sore”) were used as soundtracks during the beginning and the end, accompanying the great jazz-score of John Lurie[1] – you have hit the outskirts of that place. Add a little “Freaks”, a little “Deerhunter” and a little something from any Hollywood love-movie[2] you can think of and you get a better picture. These 19 songs will take you to all kinds of bad dreams, dilemmas, love affairs, drunken stupor, gang fights, funerals and strange people who’ll introduce you to their weird folks.

“Rain Dogs” stands out musically and lyrically, but which Tom Waits record doesn’t? Interestingly though, you’ll have to get through three strange songs to get to the first one that’ll strike you on first listen. There is the weird ethno-stomper “Singapore” with its all new, bluesy use of marimbas and congas, then there is “Clap Hands”, the only song I know that is able to screech in a dark manner, and then there is the crazy carnival-song “Cemetry Polka”. All three of them are great, actually, it’ll only take most people some time to get to them. (And I have listened to this albums about onehundredthousand times.) Moreover, “Clap Hands” has the first proper guitar solo by Marc Ribot on the record. And maybe it is Ribot’s mark all over the record that makes it so special musically. I have tried playing along with my guitar to a lot of these songs, but I would never have been able to imagine anything like the lines Ribot is playing on here. And inspite of their awkward settings and tonal lines they still make a lot of sense and fit perfectly. The other famous guest guitarist on “Rain Dogs” is easier to figure out: Keith Richards himself.

No way am I gonna go through all these songs now one by one. You can see from the outset that there is a lot of variety, but there is more to come. From great ballads (“Time”, “Hang Down Your Head” and the oh so beautiful “Blind Love”), to blues-monsters (“Big Black Mariah”, “Gun Street Girl”), spoken atmospheric noise tracks (“9^th and Hennepin”), jazzy boasters (“Walking Spanish”), some instrumentals and the grandezza orchestrated “Anywhere I lay my head” with the Uptown Horns doing their best first as an melancholic instrumental AA-choir and next as the brassband from the insane asylum. Somewhere between the jazz attitude of Thelonious Monk, the no holds barred testosterone machine of Little Richard, the drunken rock-monster of The Rolling Stones circa Exile on Mainstreets, the Rat Pack’s best appearances and an avant-garde take of ethno music from all around the world – a lot to take into one record actually, but there has to be a reason “Rain Dogs” is so good.

It should be mentioned that this was a time when the whole music industry went glam, hairstyles and costumes shot into all new directions, heavy rock bands suddenly wore make up and Hip Hop showed up in its primal stages. Everything became slick and big, Yuppies appeared on Wall Street and home computers started their rampage through living rooms around the western world. At such a time, Tom Waits went back to the roots, recorded as lo-fi as possible and wore an image that was both outdated and outside, like a primordial reptile caught in a drugged stupor.

When I first hit on “Rain Dogs” – or was it the other way around – I was quite young still. I only knew Tom Waits from some tapes I bought cheaply at some store (“Closing Time” and “Heart of Saturday Night”). I don’t know why I bought them. Because I liked music I guess and somehow they appealed to me in the cheapo-bin there.[3] Then we were at a big shopping centre and I saw this record in there and I bought it, for no apparent reason again. Back home I put it on and, boom, my young mind was gone and wasted forever. In the following years I collected the back catalogue of Tom Waits mainly in second hand stores, unearthing marvels such as “Tom Traubert’s Blues” or “Heartattack and Vine” and I also bought every new Waits album the same month it was released.

There were some friends that shared the interest with me, as well as reading Bukowski and getting drunk at weekend nights – you can see what parts of the Tom Waits image we were attracted to back then. But even if getting drunk on weekends is a common thing to do for teenagers from the urban outskirts, I insist that there is a difference between doing it while listening to techno music or heavy metal, or chosing the more stylish side path of Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski. Even if Cointreu isn’t ever as style-safe as Whiskey, but what the heck, we had a great time. Well, finally we were all drunk and puked behind the bushes (the lucky ones) just as anyone else.

Other times we set off to further away places, scrambling six of us into one car to drive 90 minutes to some place were a festivity would be to take place. On one such rides a friend of mine had a tape by Bad Religion and since “No Control” isn’t that long a record, he taped some Tom Waits to the end of it. Imagine the mix alone! But when the brass band hits the power at the end of “Anywhere I lay my head” another friend of ours, who wasn’t initiated to Tom Waits and who I guess never cared about music at all if any, broke into incontrollable hysterical laughter. Obviously the contrast between the broken down first part and the whacky happy second part was that did it to him. So we played the whole song to him at least a half a dozen times. One more memory: when I started to learn to play the guitar I took the lyricsheet of this record and played random chords – of the four or five I was able to play – to them, making up my first “self written” songs that way.[4]

According to some definition “Rain Dogs” are lost animals that can’t find their way home because the rain has washed away their scent so they’ll have to stray for the rest of their existence with the hope of finding a new home some time. A great metaphor for the kind of outsiders and bowery bums Waits is describing – some of them live in all of us.

P.S.: On the cover, contrary to popular belief, that isn’t Tom Waits. They are regulars of the no longer existing Café Lehmnitz near the legendary Reeperbahn in Hamburg’s red light district. One more thing: there are several bands calling themselves Raindogs and in Japan there is a rock’n’roll/biker gang with the name.