Rocktrospectiva: The Dazzling And Carnivalesque "Rain Dogs" Turns 40

Released on 30 September 1985 "Rain Dogs" was the ninth studio album by US singer-songwriter Tom Waits, a conceptual album about "the urban dispossessed" of New York City, Rain Dogs is generally considered the middle album of a trilogy that includes Swordfishtrombones and Franks Wild Years, the album spawned three singles "Jockey Full Of  Bourbon", "Hang Down Your Head" and the iconical "Downtown Train" the aided the album to peak No. 29 in the UK and No. 199 in the USA, years later in 1989/1990, Rod Stewart covered the song and made it and international hit.  

 

The album, which features guitarists Keith Richards and Marc Ribot, is noted for its broad spectrum of musical styles and genres, described by Arion Berger as merging "outsider influences – socialist decadence by way of Kurt Weill, pre-rock integrity from old dirty blues, the elegiac melancholy of New Orleans funeral brass – into a singularly idiosyncratic American style.

 

Waits wrote the majority of the album in a two-month stint in the fall of 1984 in a basement room at the corner of Washington and Horatio Streets in Manhattan. According to Waits, it was, "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."

 

In preparation for the album, Waits recorded street sounds and other ambient noises on a cassette recorder to get the sound of the city that would be the album's subject matter. A wide range of instruments was employed to achieve the album's sound, including marimba, accordion, double bass, trombone, and banjo, indeed the album is notable for its organic sound, and the natural means by which it was achieved. 

 

Waits, discussing his mistrust of then fashionable studio techniques, said, "If I want a sound, I usually feel better if I've chased it and killed it, skinned it and cooked it. 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 (take a drum sound from another record) 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.'"

 

Rain Dogs was the first time that Waits worked with guitarist Marc Ribot, who was impressed by Waits' unusual studio presence. Ribot said, "Rain Dogs was my first major label type recording, and I thought everybody made records the way Tom makes records. ... I've learned since that it's a very original and individual way of producing. As producer apart from himself as writer and singer and guitar player he brings in his ideas, but he's very open to sounds that suddenly and accidentally occur in the studio. I remember one verbal instruction being, 'Play it like a midget's bar mitzvah.'" Ribot also recalls how the band would not rehearse the songs before going to record; rather, Waits would play them the songs on an acoustic guitar in the studio. "He had this ratty old hollow body, and he would spell out the grooves. It wasn't a mechanical kind of recording at all. He has a very individual guitar style he sort of slaps the strings with his thumb ... He let me do what I heard, there was a lot of freedom. If it wasn't going in a direction he liked, he'd make suggestions. But there's damn few ideas I've had which haven't happened on the first or second take."

 

It also marks Waits' first recording with Keith Richards, who played on "Big Black Mariah", "Union Square" and "Blind Love". Waits said, "There was something in there that I thought he would understand. I picked out a couple of songs that I thought he would understand and he did. He's got a great voice and he's just a great spirit in the studio. 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." According to Barney Hoskyns, the album's general theme of "the urban dispossessed" was inspired in part by Martin Bell's 1984 documentary Streetwise, to which Waits had contributed music.

 

Though it has been remarked that the man on the cover bears a striking resemblance to Waits, the photograph is actually one of a series taken by the Swedish photographer Anders Petersen at Café Lehmitz (a café near the Hamburg red-light boulevard Reeperbahn) in the late 1960s. The man and woman depicted on the cover are called Rose and Lilly. 

 

The album has been regarded as one of the most important albums in Waits' career, continuing the new path which he forged Swordfishtrombones onwards, hailead as a romantic and carnivalesque masterpiece imbued with the avant-garde sound of New York, and whose lyrics might be the best in Waits career, also because every track seemed to be like a short-themed movie full of mystery and darkness. 

 

Rain Dogs Track List: 

 

1. Singapore

2. Clap Hands

3. Cemetery Polka 

4. Jockey Full Of Bourbon

5. Tango Till They're Sore

6. Big Black Mariah 

7. Dimaonds And Gold

8. Hang Down Your Head 

9. Time