Tom Waits-Rain Dogs

 Tom Waits-Rain Dogs

When I was 14, I used to watch Fernwood 2Night, (and later, America 2Night). It was a fake talk show from the world of soap opera Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, that had a combination of real guests and guests from ‘Fernwood,’ the mythical town that the talk show was based. Martin Mull was the host, with legendary Fred Willard as his side kick, playing alter egos Barth Gimble and Jerry Hubbard.

Since I was only 14, most of the jokes flew over my head, but the ones I got were pretty funny. Tom Waits was a guest on the original Fernwood 2Night, and I couldn’t tell if he was for real. He sang The Piano has been drinking, not me, and it seemed like kind of a put on, and then his interaction with Mull and Willard was some sort of drunken ramble concerning a broken tour bus and borrowing 20 bucks. It was hysterically funny for a kid who was just leaving Dr. Demento behind and finding his way toward punk rock. I saw Waits as more of an actor, first, since he was a favorite of Francis Ford Coppola and showed up in several Coppola films-I remember him most from Cotton Club.

I picked up Rain Dogs sometime in the late 80s, and there was so much happening on the record that I was immediately attracted to it. I knew about Tom Waits, but really didn’t have any other exposure to his music until buying this album. The opener, Singapore, with it’s odd percussion and unusual word play (“making feet for children’s shoes,” “Wipe him down with gasoline/’til his arms are hard and mean”) pulled me in immediately, and set a tone for the album. It seemed to describe those seedy international port areas that may or may not exist in real life.
 

The other songs were equally dense, and faded one into the next. I could recognize Mark Ribot’s  stinging guitar lines (Keith Richards, G.E. Smith, Robert Quinne and Chris Spedding are in there too), but there wasn’t a rhythm guitar as such in the music. In fact, beyond the percussion and double bass, I’m not sure what instruments were carrying the songs, so it’s appeal was unusual to me and my usual guitar based musical taste. Most songs were difficult to sing along to as well, not because Waits is a great vocalist-distinctive but not great, but the song structures were unusual.
 

Jockey Full of Bourbon, with it’s “Two-dollar pistol but the gun won’t shoot,” seems like a scary place with a dangerous narrator, but the singer for Hang down your head for sorrow, hang down your head for me, may well be the same person looking at what he’s done. Time is a sad song, but I don’t quite understand what’s happening. I’ve always been attracted to the line, “Well she said she’d stick around until the bandages came off.”

Another gruff voiced singer, Rod Stewart, had a hit with Downtown Train, proving that Tom Waits songs can clean up nicely.

My favorite song on the album is the closer, Anywhere I Lay My Head, with what seems like a New Orleans marching band on the fade out. “Anywhere, anywhere I lay my head boys/ Well, I’m gonna call my home.”

I’ve bought several Waits albums over the years, and the Asylum records seem more conventional. It feels like Waits really became ‘Tom Waits’ when he moved to Island, with songs from those five albums feeling like they fit together well, as evidenced by the Beautiful Maladies compilation. His new work is also good (Tom Jones does a great cover of Bad as Me), and Diamond in Your Mind with the Kronos Quartet from Healing the Divide is excellent if you can find it.

Rain Dogs was recently remastered, and is playing in the background as I write this. The bass is very present, (which could be a function of the cheap speakers I have), and the individual percussion instruments seem to stand out more. The sound wasn't bad before, but this does sound a bit cleaner.