A wide ranging set from the troubadour/found sound musician. To RtBE, this is album Waits' crowning achievement.
The album manages to combine his weirdness and pop sensibility wonderfully. His whole career seemed to go back and forth balancing those touchpoints with varying degrees of success, but it is hard to deny anything on Rain Dogs.
While Waits is very associated with California and especially L.A. in his early period, Rain Dogs is very of NYC. It is where Tom wrote and recorded it, and his inspiration feels like it shifted block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood; it remains great walking around town headphone music.
Waits recorded with a host of extremely talented musicians (Marc Ribot, Tony Garnier, Keith Richards) playing a huge range of sounds (ballads, rockers, jazz) as Waits really captured the range, scope and sound he always toyed with in fantastic fashion. The whole album is full of highlights and all songs should be listened to.
Two quotes from Waits seem to sum up his feelings on this record better than anything else.
First:
"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.'"
Second:
"There was something in there that I (Keith Richards) 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."
Songs from "Jockey Full of Bourbon", "Hang Down Your Head", "Time", "Union Square", and "Downtown Train" are all masterful, in fact opener "Singapore" is probably RtBE's least favorite song on the album and it is still pretty good. This really is a fully great album top to bottom.
On another note, it wasn't until 2022 that RtBE learned that Tom Waits is NOT on the cover of this album. Having listened to it, bought it on various mediums over multiple decades, we always thought Waits was the topless man on the cover, why wouldn't he be? Turns out it is a picture taken by Anders Petersen at Café Lehmitz (a café near the Hamburg red-light boulevard Reeperbahn) in the late 1960s of a 1980's Waits doppelganger.
Even if it isn't him, Waits is all over this record, his best. On it's 40th anniversary, play it loud, below are a few songs to get you started:
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