CLASSIC ALBUM: Tom Waits – Rain Dogs
A Classic Album back on vinyl! This week sees the reissues of three crucial albums by Tom Waits. Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Frank’s Wild Years all return to vinyl and are remastered. The albums, beginning with Swordfishtrombones (1983) marked Waits’ turn away from the whiskey-soaked, roguish troubadour who found fame with excellent jazz and blues inflected singer-songwriter albums including Closing Time (1973) and Small Change (1976).
This stylistic and creative transformation began to take place on Swordfishtrombones, and arguably peaked with 1985’s Rain Dogs. Waits’ surrealistic vision of folk, jazz, blues merges with carnivalesque, outsider music interests on an album on which no longer is Waits’ merely portraying the tired balladeer who has seen the sorriest of times, on Rain Dogs he is fully living it, the character becomes real through the instinctual, idiosyncratic but thoughtful and spacious instrumentation, composition and image-heavy lyrical content of the tracks. Tracks that at once sound like rediscovered, lost folk or work songs found buried somewhere in the ghost towns of America, or transported by sailor’s from some distant isle. The whole album is best listened to as one whole piece, the tracks are vignettes, filmic interludes, different stops on an increasingly maddening journey. Amongst the album’s more out-there moments (of which there are many), certain respite can be found in the pretty ballads Time, and of course Downtown Train (the latter covered by Rod Stewart!).
While comparisons can be drawn to what Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band achieved on Trout Mask Replica a decade and half earlier, its unlikely anyone, certainly not on a label such as Island, was making music of this ilk, music this rickety, ragged and characterful in ’85. As time goes on, its apparent that Waits’ perhaps ultimately discovered just what and who he was musically on this trio of records, and has never looked back since – only further into the future with a catalogue of subsequent albums that are a continued, uncompromised development of what began here.
