Such a Crumbling Beauty: Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs Turns 40

“I just imagine Tom dancing with a bunch of other drunken vagabonds around a flaming garbage can.” — Genius commenter on “Rain Dogs”

The most important Tom Waits album of 1985 might actually be the Hal Willner-curated tribute record Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill, released within weeks of the acknowledged classic Rain Dogs, which turns 40 today. Waits wasn’t the first to combine back-alley blues with the villainous oompah of Weill’s minor-key polkas — the first Doors album has their famous version of Weill’s “Alabama Song” separated from Howlin’ Wolf’s “Back Door Man” only by “Light My Fire.” But the influence of Weill (and his libretto man Bertolt Brecht) on Waits’ sound alongside his beloved bluesmen and jazzbos and also Captain Beefheart cannot be understated, nor ignored.

One listen to Lost in the Stars is like peering behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain; all that steampunk vocal (and other) machinery revealed to be puffed-up ventriloquism concealing a ridiculously vast admiration for The Threepenny Opera by a guy who made it his life’s work to flesh out an entire underworld for Low-Dive Jenny, a lesser character in the plot who doubles as its most enduring and beloved. That’s the praxis from which Waits has always worked, but it was only in the 1980s with some key sea changes — hooking up with his forever wife Kathleen Brennan, who first introduced him to the about-to-retire Beefheart’s music — that finally wed his unmistakable voice to a definitive sound.

On Stars, he barks out a dastardly rendition of “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” indistinguishable from the same carnival-cabaret of his own post-1980 music that the layman would at least associate with the Token Disney Bad Guy Tune. It’s got the exact dissonant, industrial throb that’s shocking to hear from Sting doing “Mack the Knife,” too. But Sting’s on a lark, a vacation from his neverending commercial fortunes in Tom Waits’ upside-down and creaking wheelhouse.

That’s a place Waits has been happy to never leave, even if it means collecting rainwater from the ceiling or “banging on a chest of drawers with a 2×4” rather than endlessly tinkering with real drums. That last part is true, though anyone who’s read Waits’ interviews knows his fictions are at least as rich as his recorded art. Marc Ribot, whose avant-mambo guitar on tracks like “Jockey Full of Bourbon” and “Rain Dogs” is another big piece of the puzzle, recalled Waits at one point requesting he “play it like a midget’s Bar Mitzvah.” And you know what? That’s what it sounds like.

The beauty of Tom Waits’ bullshit is how fully realized it is, an Andy Kaufman act he’s happy to keep up in the press with Brennan as his Bob Zmuda, he’s just every bit what he says, dresses like, conjures up. On my favorite Rain Dogs track, “Cemetery Polka,” his unreliable narrators “must find out where the money is / Get it now before he loses his mind” while he rattles off a litany of impossibly detailed fantastical misfits in less than two minutes:

 

“Auntie Mame has gone insane

She lives in the doorway of an old hotel

And the radio is playing opera

All she ever says is ‘go to hell.’”

 

Of course, he’s claimed on multiple occasions that the tune is about his real family: “this is as if all your dead relatives came back from the grave and you owed them all money.” The creepy-Americana melting pot aesthetic combined with Waits’ junkyard arrangement sense keeps folding in new sounds, voices, and inflections. Individual pieces can be one-note sometimes but the larger fabric is quilted with drunken New Orleans jazz, slow-cooked blues that falls off the bone, the occasional brusque rocker like “Union Square,” and always a few tender ballads like the solemn “Hang Down Your Head” or the majestic “Downtown Train,” with hit potential realized by a major outsider as usual, in this case Rod Stewart gussing it up with Trevor Horn’s unrecognizable power-synth schmaltz.

 

VIDEO: Tom Waits “Downtown Train”

Swordfishtrombones, the first time Waits indulged in this precise perpetual stew a couple years earlier, was a little fresher and fuller, but Rain Dogs’ sustained effect is expansive (19 songs!), and impressive, like a crime novelist who’s finally found his groove and keeps turning out pulp on the clock. He was cracking his knuckles and grinding out remarkably consistent, extraordinarily quotable (consecutive lines: “a flamingo drinking from a cocktail glass / I’m on the lawn with someone else’s wife”) short stories set to various evocations of past music bleeding into each other.

To paraphrase Mitch Hedburg, he still does, but he used to, too. I’m partial to the extra Brecht-Weill title track (which at one point takes place “aboard a shipwrecked train”), “Diamonds & Gold” (“sleep by the side of the road”), and “Tango ‘Til They’re Sore,” (“I’ll tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past”), but favorites may change according to which lyric you happen to catch on any given day. Though the darkest ones tend towards the storybook, more Brothers Grimm than Bad Seeds, even if his Lost in the Stars contribution concludes that “mankind is kept alive by beastial acts,” which is more or less the Cave mantra.

Waits got more than just a sound from Brecht-Weill; your rhythmed wits must be sharp to thread the needle of a line like “they quick as winking chop them into beefsteak tartare” from “Cannon Song.” And Rain Dogs begat the more abrasive Bone Machine and Blood Money, the warmer Mule Variations, the comprehensively all-over-the-place 3xCD set Orphans and the furious Bad as Me, which was the last time he did anything, 14 years ago.

Rain Dogs isn’t necessarily better or worse than any of these, just another scrap-heap feast to scrounge for favorites. So clap hands.