TOM WAITS’ Revival: Rain Dogs

By: Miles Silverstein

Tom Waits was dying. By the late 1970’s, the enigmatic troubadour had fallen into the boozy repose of a rotting beatnik, the weary afterbirth of the genius who gave us Closing Time, Small Change, and Blue Valentine. A madness had settled in, and Waits was delaminating. The emerging beast was strangling the leftovers, a cannibal’s own feast. And in a moment of divine intervention, new life is breathed upon him: Kathleen Brennan resurrects him. Waits’s marriage is known to have been an inflection point in the life of the raconteur, rejuvenating him in the image of a man truer to himself than he had ever been before. The reinvention of the broken Waits is nothing short of miraculous, a high-wire daredevil act of genuine madness that led to the conception of Rain Dogs.

Before he met his wife, Waits drew inspiration from the metropolitan underworlds of Kerouac, the rust belt lyricism of Dylan, and the trash bin alleys of Bukowski; post-Brennan Waits embraces the avant-garde. The emerging brutalist soundscape of Captain Beefheart, Burroughs, and Zappa gave Waits the confidence to take his first swing at producing his new sound: the 1983 cult classic Swordfishtrombones. The charm of the record lies in its naked approach to a world of inhuman oddity (see “Shore Leave”—what the hell is a Singapore sling?). The album is underproduced, filled with big-room sound, open space, sunburnt valleys, and a tonal wilderness of screams and chairs pushed along a concrete floor all tied together with genius arrangement. Swordfishtrombones is the birthplace of Waits’ unique eeriness, and the genesis of the showmanship that would define him.

‘Singapore’ sets the stage for Rain Dogs with an out of breath brass orchestra highlighted by trilling xylophones tucked beneath Waits’s gravelly whisper. Rain Dogs sees a radical departure from Swordfishtrombones in its new fullness. Where Swordfishtrombones was intentionally spare, Rain Dogs is conceptual and complete. Rain Dogs realizes this aesthetic through off-kilter accordion choruses, undead guitar riffs, and nomadic tribes of auxiliary percussion. An album for the “urban dispossessed,” Rain Dogs reeks of dirty tricks, whorehouse humor, and parodic wit. Ghastly poetry lines this record, driving a sharp point into the cortex of the listener. Waits is wagging an “I told you so” finger, urging beasts to wake up… 

‘Cemetery Polka’ samples vignettes of rundown neighborhood characters, an impressionistic menagerie that would feel at home dripping from the brush of Egon Schiele. ‘9th & Hennepin’ stinks of a rogue midnight sleaze venturing forth into the ragged underbelly of a fractured urbanism. ‘Midtown’ cuts Ornette Coleman with the midnight abrasion of a recreated cityscape field recording. The true hallmark of this masterpiece, however, is its ability to comfortably house comely serenity in its entr’actes and lulls. Songs like ‘Time’ or the spectacular closer ‘Anywhere I Lay My Head’ invoke a reticent, tragic love that finds itself incongruous with the broken-down lives of the album’s many characters. They present oases of true beauty within dirt and grime that must be experienced to be believed.

Rain Dogs is a disjointed experience, an hour runtime that drifts through your head in 20 minutes. You’re planted in the midst of an eclectic collection of stories, examining thriving moments of the wasted and the wicked, the over-served and under-appreciated, the forgotten and the lost—and yet there is beauty. There is something to be said for the artist capable of distilling love out of life’s disgruntled undergrowth, the tunnel through which the dark reaches the light. Rain Dogs is a record unlike any other, and no amount of words written over the last forty years is capable of trapping its enthralling allure. It is unique. It is disgusting. But above all else, Rain Dogs is transcendental.