Tom Waits: Rain Dogs

Rain Dogs is considered Tom Waits' most critically acclaimed album and follows the new musical path Waits had embarked on with Swordfishtrombones. Rain Dogs, which along with Swordfishtrombones and Frank's Wild Years forms the middle of a de facto trilogy, is the first of Waits' albums to be written in New York, in a basement in lower Manhattan. Rain Dogs is a 53-minute, 19-track monster, a kind of mutant musical "Canterbury Tales" of the late 20th century with a changing band. It's late 20th century with a changing band. There are banjos and marimbas, bow saws, parade drums and howling horns (and Keith Richards and Marc Ribot) on this rollicking, raucous work - and Waits using his voice in ever crazier and wilder ways. The songs are stories, sagas, laments, breakdowns, character studies, comedies and cabaret numbers. There's the aching "Hang Down Your Head" and the moving anthem "Downtown Train," covered by Patti Smith and Rod Stewart. Waits coined the term "rain dog," a reference to dogs that get lost when the scents are washed away by storms. The lost dogs on the album include: rowdy, roving merchant marines ("Singapore"), an accordion player in a slaughterhouse ("Cemetery Polka"), a "jockey full of bourbon" (also the song title), an abandoned, reclusive woman ("Time"), a "gun street girl," the old drunks and hustlers of Union Square, and even Waits himself: Aboard a shipwreck train / Give my umbrella to the Rain Dogs / For I am a Rain Dog, too. . . Originally released in 1985 on Island Records, the album was remastered for the first time ever from the original ½" flat master tape and personally supervised by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan. It was mastered by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering under the direction of Waits' longtime engineer Karl Derfler. The album's packaging was also restored. "Rain Dogs" is the ninth studio album by Tom Waits, recorded during his summer in New York in 1985. Keith Richard can be heard on guitar on three tracks. The album was included in the list of the 500 greatest albums of all time by Rolling Stones Magazine.