Rain Dogs: music for hip dorks, rich tramps, and other oxymoronic fools. I’m one of those fools, but it strangely took a recent relisten to remind myself of the love I have for an album that I used to regularly class as perfect, all things considered. This was a label shared with one other album; Weezer’s Blue Album, and there really isn’t much else that the two albums have in common, other than their delegation to the ‘W’ part of the pop/rock section in HMV. They’re both great albums, in my opinion, but more importantly, great albums that achieve everything they intend. Where the Blue Album is the zenith of loser-y, yet uplifting, white nerd rock, Rain Dogs is, well, let me tell you, tough guy…
Tom Waits’ magnum opus is cool, Bohemian, stupid and pimp. It enchants enough for you to consider it the new, quirky rule of masculine art, and messes with you enough to start using “pimp” as an adjective. Amid louche, dirtied-up blues and the darkest of dark cabaret lurks the perfection of Tom Waits’ notorious displaced outcast character; a freakish pile of boho rags known for his aching throat and uncanny wit. He cracks jokes about “making feet for children’s shoes”, does his Howlin Wolf impression, and eventually befriends Jim Jarmusch. Only those who have been close with Waits are aware how much of this character is a character, though many accounts confirm that no matter its beginnings, Waits himself developed into this character to some extent over time. He’s seen some shit, which Rain Dogs documents over its loose concept; the strictly taboo subject of the homeless, strange, derelict and destitute of New York, the kind of people Travis Bickle accidentally left off his longlist. Seldom have characters lived in such harmony with the musical themes that act as their entourage, contributing to the some of the best storytelling, and most outlandish joy ever recorded in a studio.
Rain Dogs is one of my all-time favourite albums. With nineteen tracks at a total of over fifty minutes, the album is as stacked as it is freakily cool. We all have our favourites of these tracks, and I’m going to go over my five. It’s probably necessary for me to stress that they are my five, so that nobody is left asking where Downtown Train is – it’s up Rod Stewart’s ass, that’s where it is. Great song, by the way, but honestly quite en vogue compared to the rest of the outsider, outcast-y stuff the album offers, which is likely why Rod Stewart got a hit out of it. Anyway, enough talk about Rod Stewart (seriously, let’s never talk about him again); let’s get to the list!
#5 – Clap Hands
If I were to take part in a campfire singalong, I’d take a verse to vent about Rod Stewart, and then maybe interpolate a bit of Clap Hands. The song takes the form of a campfire singalong, but the campfire has spread, circling and trapping those singing, “enjoying” the singing, keeping time or playing marimbas – holy heck, does Rain Dogs LOVE a marimba? The players are forced to reveal their most sinister selves, but at least they’re warm. Waits’ vocal itself is snakelike; a nasal hiss, discrete but in command. He sings gasoline fairy stories about travellers, going up to Harlem with pistols in their jeans, going to Baltimore only to be staked out by death. I love how he resolves his story with a nod to a nursery rhyme (“they all went to Heaven in a little rowboat”), and quite simply, I love how engaging he is in his role as storyteller; quite useful for a half-baked campfire analogy.
#4 – Tango Till They’re Sore
The boy has a wild mind on him, wilder than Frank’s Wild Years, and they were pretty wild. Tango Till They’re Sore contains many of Rain Dogs’ best, most haunting lyrics; mournful visions that take the lead in Tom Waits’ tango. These spooky skeleton visions emerge and extend from a story of a man falling from a window, his fall only broken by confetti in his hair, which Waits illustrates with the most spectacular self-pity – book him for your cabaret show now! His lyrics are seduced with a colour akin to confetti itself, even as they hint at the narrator’s own funeral; a demand to have his theme song played; an assertion that daisies will suffice if no other flowers are available. Fitting for a song with “sore” in the title, Waits puts a little extra achy mustard on his voice as he moans the chorus; a weep dressed as a growl that melodises as much as it traverses the pain he is effortlessly able to display.
#3 – Hang Down Your Head
He’ll swoon the pants off of ya! Imagine, you’re in need of an emotional pick-me-up and you’ve got this grizzly bear doing it for you. Displaying his softer side on Hang Down Your Head (whilst still equipping a ravenous vocal tone, nasty albeit stricken by romance), one may declare the song comparable to Downtown Train (I’m a hypocrite for its exclusion, right?); a fundamental, soft rock ballad that only engages with the rest of Rain Dogs due to the bestial voice Tom Waits approaches it with. Its melodies are, however, some of the album’s strongest, and it’s only right to stop being struck by Tom Waits’ weirdness for one moment and note that he was pretty damn good at writing a catchy song, whilst being sincere and sympathetic when refraining from ghoulishness. That tortured soul chorus (“HANG DOWN YOUR HEAAAAD FOR SORROW”); those simple i-v chords. The song is as as much a tearjerker as it is a pick-me-up, like a coffee date of outcasts.
#2 – Anywhere I Lay My Head
The stone gargoyle that decorates the cathedral has flown and become sentient. It’s singing a fairly dashing hymn that it just made up, called Anywhere I Lay My Head. It goes “MYYY HEAAADISURGH SPINNIN ROUUUUND”. Tom Waits’ voice frolics – in its own rough-and-tumble, face-kicking way – no matter what genre it fancies, but gospel is something he takes to better than anything else, which is pretty damn surprising when you consider that surely nobody wants him singing in their church. I can only put that down to ignorance on their part. When I open my church, I’m inviting Tom Waits and the New Orleans brass band that ends Anywhere I Lay My Head after he’s finished laying down the lord’s law. Come On Up to the House may have reached a few new audiences over the past ten years (translation: I’ve watched movies and television shows that it has been featured in), but Anywhere I Lay My Head is Tom Waits’ untampered gospel high; Amazing Grace for scoundrels.
#1 – Rain Dogs
There is no shortage of what could come to mind when you think Rain Dogs. Could be the hobo blues; could be a certain lyric. For me, it is a certain lyric, specifically “FOR I AM A RAIIIIIN DOGGGG TOO”, which punctuates the chorus of the title track, finalising a musical ascension like a madman at the top of a haunted staircase. And haunted it surely is; it even begins with a gothic accordion intro that may as well be a dilapidated pipe organ. But its most charming timbre is its guitar, which contains a tone that frequents the album; plonking and stabbing, like a jolly mugging, following each instance of the above quote with a sick “bwow bwow bwow bwow bwow bwow”, chromatic descension. It sounds like the guitar frets are wrapped in barbed wire, or at the least, some form of nettle, and forms a call-and-response – of sorts – with Tom Waits’ glorious vocals, which bark bark bark like no other take on the album. I guess that’s fitting, for he is a rain dog too.
