Tom Waits for No One (Rain Dogs Review)

Matty Swivels
7 min readSep 17, 2024

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I first heard Tom Waits when I was in high school. My buddy turned me onto him.

Photo by Jack Finnigan on Unsplash

I was a CD guy. I love CDs. They’re reminiscent of vinyl. You get a physical product with art work and liner notes. They’re something to hold onto, care for, collect.

My buddy loaned me his copy of Used Songs. I immediately fell in love with three tracks: “Step Right Up,” “Muriel,” and his version of “Whistelin’ Past the Graveyard.”

I have always loved jazz music. I still do. “Sing Sing Sing” is one of the best songs of all time. If I could pick a song for the 20th Century, it might be that one.

Tom Waits was jazzy. For a highly critical 17-year-old, Tom Waits was the guy I was looking for.

The first Waits CD I bought was The Heart of Saturday Night. It’s his sophomore album and I still think it’s one of his best.

I wanted more. I needed more. I bought more.

My next purchase was Rain Dogs. I think it cost me around $20. I was jubilant. I ran out to my car, popped that sucker in my player, and immediately said to myself, “What the hell is this?”

It was nothing like what I was expecting. Frankly, I thought it was awful.

It starts out with a song called “Singapore.” I thought it was bad. “Okay,” I thought, “maybe things get better on the next song.”

The next track is “Clap Hands.” Nope, not better.

“Cemetery Polka”? Are you fuckin kidding me? It felt like I was listening to a methed-out dishwasher bang a trashcan in the gutter:

Uncle Verlin, Uncle Verlin
Independent as a hog on ice
He’s a big shot down there at the slaughterhouse
Plays accordion for Mr. Rice

The words are better than a short story. But the music sounds like a carnival of fucknuggets.

My relationship with music has changed dramatically in my adult life — so much so that, upon reuniting with my old friend after a good 8 years, he was surprised. I now go extended periods without listening to anything. I used to write music reviews; I was always plugged in and jamming out to something. But that’s not the case anymore. I want a good chunk of time just enjoying the silence.

But back then, music was almost everything.

I lived in songs. I made my own songs. I related everything to songs. I came up with my own soundtracks to the books I read.

From my collection I could put together song narratives to the book narratives I was reading, and I did it out of habit. It let me explore different angles of a novel. And the novel helped me explore different angles of songs and albums. And I journaled about these syncopations, feeling like I was connected to flowing romanticism that had no name, could not be contained, but would visit people in their late-night melodramas.

One of my favorite albums of all time is East 1999 Eternal by Bone-Thugz-N-Harmony. I fell in love with rap because of that album. It’s melodic, harmonic, creepy, gangster, and heartfelt. And it’s a story. It’s thematic. It is cool as shit. I used to put that album on and enter a completely different world.

That’s what I looked for in music: new worlds to enter.

But this Tom Waits character — this whacko visionary who hijacked a New Orleans parade and marched it through truck stops, diners, and whorehouses — left me dejected, confused, and disappointed.

When I popped Rain Dogs into my CD player for the first time, I hoped to climb into the world of a jazz lounge singer. Instead I was punched in the balls and told to dance in traffic.

So that’s what I did.

Being 17

Being 17 is like nothing else in the world.

It’s not like 16. It’s not like 18. It’s way different than 23. Being 17 — even when things are going right — is tumultuous and critical.

At 17, I lived many lives and changed many times. There was violence and parties and drugs and love. When I was 17 the world seemed to teeter on a great epoch — and we eventually crashed into a new era, all of us hurried droplets jumping waterfall rocks. That summer, I wanted to run away.

So I did.

Or, rather, I started to.

I got in the car and I started driving.

I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t bring any clothes. I didn’t have a chance in hell. I simply had a desire to get away.

I left almost everything at home. All my books, all my journals, and most of my music.

I’m a big fan of funk. Always have been. I had a funk compilation playing, but I was not in a funky mood. I don’t know what was wrong with me. So I swapped it out for Rain Dogs and I kept driving.

I believed in the greatness of Tom Waits. I knew the man made magical orchestrations. I longed for the romanticism of The Heart of Saturday Night but I’d listened to those songs too much by that point, so I gave Rain Dogs another chance.

I drove until the album ran out. And I kept driving, letting the album repeat.

“Downtown Train” started to give me hope. Upon my umpteenth re-listen, “Cemetery Polka” sounded like the relatives at all my friends’ open houses. “Hang Down Your Head” hit me in the gut. “Big Black Mariah” was groovy and sinister. “9th & Hennepin” felt like a scene from a couple nights ago:

All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes

“9th & Hennepin” is hands-down one of the best things I have ever heard. It was a shard out of my nightlife. (I like donuts.) It was a snippet into things to come.

Then there was “Time.” Time made my balls harden and get small. “Time” is the centerpiece of the whole album. “Time” hurts. “Time” is sad. “Time” is romantic and nostalgic and wise. It’s the piece I was looking for:

And you’re east of East St. Louis
And the wind is making speeches
And the rain sounds like a round of applause …

Rain Dogs (1985)

It wasn’t raining that afternoon, when I started to run away. But it rained later that evening.

I drove across the state. I drove for hours. I drove back to one of my old hometowns and I thought, “Hey, this wasn’t all a dream. Life really happened. It’s still here.”

It’s true there’s nothing left for him down her
And it’s time, time, time
It’s time, time, time
And it’s time, time, time that you love

And it’s time, time, time …

I drove around that place lost to myself on the inside. Hurt — yes. But the album was starting to make sense.

And instead of carrying on, I drove back to the town I lived in then. I kept Rain Dogs playing.

I was kinda sick of it before I got back. I needed silence or something else. But as I pulled back into town, I drove to a park. I reclined my seat and turned the album back on to finish off with “Anywhere I Lay My Head.”

My head is a-spinning round
My heart in my shoes, yeah
I went and set the Thames on fire,
Now I must come back down …

It’s a dirge. But it felt right.

It rained that night. A thunderstorm moved in. I’m glad I didn’t run away that day. I eventually did move across the country, but that was later.

From that day until the night I boarded a plane and headed to the Pacific Ocean, Rain Dogs made more and more sense. It was a proper soundtrack to the characters I met.

Like many artists I adore, I’m fascinated by the underworld. I studied it and wrote about it. That methed-up dishwasher I mentioned earlier? He’s a real guy. I worked with him in a kitchen.

He was maybe in his 30s and he looked ragged. His eyes had a goneness. I never liked talking to him but apparently he liked talking to me.

I saw him going over to this two-story brick house that was painted white. He walked from one end of town to the middle, where this house was. My buddy lived across the street.

We watched him go in and I never volunteered that I knew the guy. Apparently, in one of the upstairs apartments, was a group of three older prostitutes. I went over there one night. Like I said, I lived many lives when I was 17. (Calm down, we didn’t bang.)

We talked and smoked cigarettes and I learned about their lives. They were each clean freaks, constantly scrubbing this and that. We told stories and made jokes and stayed up late until finally they had to go to bed.

And then I set off into the night, still smoking cigarettes. I wasn’t looking for trouble, but I wasn’t looking away when I found it. That sliver of summer is best told with the soundtrack of Rain Dogs.

I rarely listen to that album these days. But I revisited a few songs while I wrote this review.

Life sounds different in the playback.

Swivels in, Swivels out.

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