CD Odyssey Disc 618: Tom Waits

Wow that was a stressful day. I wrote a large cheque for a home improvement project, and then followed that up with a 1-0 overtime win by the Bruins over the Habs. I feel like I’ve aged three years in three hours.

On to the next album which is a good one, so good that I’m once again delving into five star territory, despite the fact that it has 19 tracks.

Disc 618 is…. Rain Dogs

Artist: Tom Waits

Year of Release: 1985

What’s up with the Cover? A woman and a man share a hug. The man needs a shirt. The woman needs a nicer shirt. This album needs a better cover.

How I Came To Know It:  For more detail on how I know Tom Waits see the review for “Closing Time” and “Frank’s Wild Years.”  Getting “Rain Dogs” was just digging through his discography after I was hooked.

How It Stacks Up:  This is classic Tom Waits, I put it second out of his nineteen albums, with only “Mule Variations” (reviewed back at Disc 455) topping it.

Rating:  5 stars

Chronologically wedged between the great albums “Swordfishtrombone” and “Frank’s Wild Years,” “Rain Dogs” captures what is best on both of them., and then some.

This is Tom Waits during his ‘crazy circus’ period, with inspired songwriting, featuring innovative percussion and frenetic syncopation, which makes you feel like you’re in a big top tent run by the devil himself. Ray Bradbury eat your heart out.

“Rain Dogs” takes old time song forms like the rhumba, tango and polka and reimagines them to serve the freakshow of characters the songs portray. There is a polka about trying to pry money out of a rich aunt and uncle before they die (“Cemetery Polka”), followed by people who hit the Cuban clubs to “Tango ‘Till They’re Sore.”

Over it all is Waits’ voice, which sounds like the second coming of Louis Armstrong crossed with Howling Wolf and then possessed by a homeless prophet.

On songs like “Singapore” and “Big Black Mariah” Waits rollicks along with a bouncy rhythm that is strange and wonderful, painting crazy pictures of excess that make you want to play along. You’ll be bouncing along merrily to “Walking Spanish” and then mid-way through realize it is a song about heading to your death sentence. Then you’ll forget yourself again and keep walking – the devil’s big top indeed.

In other places, he turns to spoken word magic, with the exceptional urban poetry of “9^th and Hennepin” which I think is the finest crossover of spoken word with music I’ve ever heard. To the sound of a piano tinkling in a minor key and the occasional whine of accordion or recorder, he paints a picture of a steaming, low-class end of town:

“Well it's 9th and Hennepin

And all the donuts have

Names that sound like prostitutes

And the moon's teeth marks are

On the sky like a tarp thrown over all this

And the broken umbrellas like

Dead birds and the steam

Comes out of the grill like

The whole goddamned town is ready to blow.”

Then when you think Waits can’t top himself, he takes the musical richness of songs like “Big Black Mariah” and the lyrical brilliance of “9^th and Hennepin” and delivers a series of ballads that are as touching and emotionally resonant as anything you’ll hear in his catalogue.

This album has at least three Waits classics that fit this category, “Time,” “Blind Love” and the oft-remade (but never equaled) original version of “Downtown Train.” These are songs about deep longing, with images that throw your mind back to the America of the twenties and thirties, but sound as current as if they were written yesterday.

They are timeless because tapping into the need for human connection, and how hard we lean out of our own comfort zones – sometimes to reach for it, and sometimes to flee from how it makes us feel. These are songs for anyone who’s stood out in the rain and got drenched because it was the only way they could get their exterior to match what they were going through on the inside. Like Tom Waits, we’re all rain dogs in that sense. From “Time”:

“When you’re east of East St. Louis

And the wind is making speeches

And the rain sounds like a round of applause

Napoleon is weeping in the Carnival saloon

His invisible fiancé is in the mirror

And the band is going home

It’s raining hammers, it’s raining nails…”

Through “Blind Love”

“Now you’re gone

And it’s hotels and whiskey and sad luck dames

And I don’t care if they miss me

And I never remember their names.”

Each love affair on “Rain Dogs” is flawed in some way, but that makes it more beautiful and fragile. As Waits reminds us, it must be blind love, because the only kind of love is stone blind love. If you’re busy looking around wondering what’s happening and why, you’re doing it wrong.

This album has a gratuitous 19 tracks – five more than my usual maximum. For this reason, when I started writing this review I planned to grade it down a star just to punish the hubris of it all. But it is only hubris if you over-reach yourself. When you write 19 songs this good then by all means put them on a single record – you’ve earned it.

Best tracks: all tracks.