Why "Rain Dogs" is Peak Tom Waits

I examine one of Tom Waits' most revered texts for its 40th anniversary.

This album review takes stock of one of Tom Waits’ most revered texts, 40 years after its initial release.

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Genre: Singer/Songwriter, Experimental

Label: Island

Release Date: September 30, 1985

Vibe: 🌕

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👉 Click the GIF to stream the album on your favorite platform

If you’ve ever lived in a big city, you know they never really sleep. Some get quieter than others after everyone has commuted home from work, eaten dinner, turned on Netflix, and totally checked out, but none go totally dark or silent. You’ll always have those who operate best in the late-night or early-morning hours, where every movement or interaction is completed in the shadows between different worlds, be those the dimly-lit windows of all-night watering holes or the neon-drenched doorways into other, potentially less scrupulous environments. Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs, which turned 40 earlier this year, studies what happens in those circles, focusing on the unique brand of wandering loneliness most night owls will intuitively understand. It asks why certain people are pushed to society’s margins and, more importantly, what happens to them when they can’t (or won’t) function anywhere else. You’d be hard-pressed to find an album more human than this one.

If you’re unfamiliar with Tom Waits’ body of work, I’m torn as to whether this record is a good starting point. It’s not as soothing, albeit in a gritty way, as his debut, 1973’s Closing Time, not as surreal as 1975’s Nighthawks at the Diner, not as gleefully obtuse as 1983’s Swordfishtrombones, and not as cohesive (or as nightmarish) as his later work on LPs like 1992’s Bone Machine or 2002’s Blood Money. To go through Waits’ discography is to listen to a performer bend his style and push the envelope like no other singer/songwriter, yet never deviate from his peculiar brand of macabre charm. All that said, what I will say about Rain Dogs is that it catches Waits at his most cinematic and, to a degree, sonically creative. It purposely defies genre categorization (you could barely call this a “rock” album in a traditional sense), but that’s a good thing in my books. The more you box yourself in with a traditionalist mindset, the less you’re likely to connect with his work.

Waits recorded this album in two months at the end of 1984. He was meticulous in his preparation, recording ambient sounds in New York streets to get the city's atmosphere just right. From there, he incorporated unconventional styles and instruments, using even more unorthodox means that eschewed slick studio techniques. As Waits explained:

“If I want a sound, I usually feel better if I’ve chased it and killed it, skinned it and cooked it. Most things you can get with a button nowadays. So if I was trying for a certain drum sound, my engineer would say, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, why are we wasting our time? Let’s just hit this little cup with a stick here, sample something (take a drum sound from another record) and make it bigger in the mix, don’t worry about it.’ I’d say, ‘No, I would rather go in the bathroom and hit the door with a piece of two-by-four very hard.’”

That defiantly organic creative process extended to how he instructed his supporting cast. Guitarist Marc Ribot, who made his first of five studio collaborations with Waits on Rain Dogs, described the recording sessions, which took place at RCA on Sixth Avenue, as free-flowing, give-and-take affairs.

“As producer apart from himself as writer and singer and guitar player he brings in his ideas, but he’s very open to sounds that suddenly and accidentally occur in the studio. I remember one verbal instruction being, ‘Play it like a midget’s bar mitzvah […] He had this ratty old hollow body, and he would spell out the grooves. It wasn’t a mechanical kind of recording at all. He has a very individual guitar style he sort of slaps the strings with his thumb ... He let me do what I heard, there was a lot of freedom. If it wasn’t going in a direction he liked, he’d make suggestions. But there’s damn few ideas I’ve had which haven’t happened on the first or second take.”

I don’t think the distorted landscape Waits built, one replete with shadowy alleys, grimy bars, and sidewalks stained by rain and exhaust. A more hipster, less corporatized version of Blade Runner’s futuristic hellscape. By prioritizing textures and the shapes of words, as well as how they drift off the tongue, the sounds that fill every crack and crevice of Rain Dogs become these enthralling mnemonic snapshots, conveying beauty and scarring in equal measure. The tone shifts wildly and unpredictably, veering from comic to tragic, all while keeping rhythm at its core. Drummer Stephen Hodges avoids cymbals throughout, choosing instead to lean on toms, marimbas, and objects that may have been the nearest hittable surface within reach. You hear wood. You hear skin. You hear metal. It’s alternative rock at its most aurally physical.

Album opener “Singapore” kicks the door with this crooked, carnivalesque gait. An accordion sighs, bells flicker, and Robit’s guitar squeals down what feels like these narrow hallways. Victorian slang, Biblical references, and other odd lyrical aphorisms tumble out of Waits (“In the land of the blind/The one-eyed man is king”), his voice dripping with danger and delight. It’s a song high on visuals and camp, though the latter is taken up several notches higher on “Clap Hands,” a wolfish nursery rhyme where marimbas glide effortlessly under sludgy guitar and vocals. It plays like the first couple of hours of an after-hours party, as does “Jockey Full of Bourbon,” not so much walking a thin line between relatable and feral, but strutting along it with reckless abandon, drink in hand and lit cigarette dangling from its mouth.

Eventually, Waits transports us to that early-morning hour, right before closing, when everything slows down to a near-crawl. The coffee is cold, the bar crowd is thinning out, and silence descends upon the city as the sun readies its daily rise. “Time” is one such song, full of urban poetry that ranks among some of the best of his career. He gets philosophical and so incredibly real at the same time, it’s heartbreaking:

And their memory’s like a train
And you can see them getting smaller as they pull away
And the things you can’t remember
Tell the things you can’t forget

The poppiest of all these tracks is probably its best-known, “Downtown Train.” It chugs along with the steely confidence of a same-period Dire Straits track, every note dripping with desire and longing. But, because it’s Waits and his ace band, all playing in the same room and sharing the same energy, it doesn’t lose any of his signature grit and grime. Without those rough edges, I doubt the song would have maintained the staying power it has enjoyed for the past four decades. Instead, the music business critirati would’ve marched down the dark, lonely streets Waits describes with such vivid detail, torches and pitchforks in hand, decrying how the once-legendary indie voice had “sold out” for the short-term benefits of rock radio. Thankfully, not a scenario he or we, as a culture, had to deal with.

If a record like Swordfishtrombones” showcased how weird Waits could get while still being listenable, Rain Dogs channels those instincts in a more accessible, but no less tangled or risky direction. The production treats ambient noise as an instrument and echoes like a character all its own. You hear scrapes and clatters, the hiss of breath, and the messiness that makes Waits’ music sound so alive and urgent in the first place. If you canvas all the 1985 anniversary records I’ve covered this year, you’ll find a lot of the MTV aesthetic: polished, shiny surfaces, gated drums, and videos that played like ads for a certain brand of coolness that you’d never associate with his persona. Rain Dogs is the antithesis of that branding, a record that goes out to party in worn boots and an overcoat that reeks of rain and regret. In Waits’ storytelling, you meet all sorts of vital characters you’d never see on MTV—the kind of drunks, strays, and small-time crooks that primarily fly under pop culture’s radar. Crucially, underneath all the quiet despair that simmers under every word, ragged hope emerges. The album treats oddity as a way of surviving, refusing to judge the lives it documents. Instead, Waits leads with empathy, a lesson that artists like PJ Harvey and Elliott Smith would take to heart in the years after.

In changing the notion of what rock, avant-garde, and Americana could do together, Waits comforts those who live with discomfort every day. That still counts for something, maybe more than it ever has when you listen anew.

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Are you a Tom Waits fan? Which of his songs or albums is your favorite? Sound off in the comments.