Tom Waits “Rain Dogs” 1985. Today, December 7th, is Tom Waits’ birthday (b. 1949) so in celebration I’m spinning his sprawling 8th studio LP, a concept album about the “urban dispossessed of New York,” hearing his voice all “soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.” Rolling Stone described Rain Dogs as merging “Kurt Weill, pre-rock integrity from old dirty blues, [and] the elegiac melancholy of New Orleans funeral brass, into a singularly idiosyncratic American style” and rated it among the top 100 greatest albums of the 1980′s, as did Pitchfork and Slant Magazine. Notably, Keith Richards plays guitar on three tracks: the bluesy “Big Black Mariah,” rockin’ rhythm and blues “Union Square” and the country-inspired weeper “Blind Love.” Also noteworthy: “Downtown Train,” one of the catchier songs on a highly unusual and experimental album, was later covered by Rod Stewart (as well as by Patty Smyth, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Bob Seger). Stewart’s version hit #3 on the US charts in 1989 and received the Grammy for Best Male Pop Vocal performance. Waits’ imagery throughout Rain Dogs is rock poetry at its finest. The lyrics to “9th & Hennepin” paint the urban dispossessed picture so brilliantly you can feel the chill, smell the stink and experience the bleak emotions on that street corner.

Well, it’s 9th and Hennepin
All the doughnuts have names that sound like prostitutes
And the moon’s teeth marks are on the sky
Like a tarp thrown all over this
And the broken umbrellas like dead birds
And the steam comes out of the grill like the whole goddamn town’s ready to blow
And the bricks are all scarred with jailhouse tattoos
And everyone is behaving like dogs
And the horses are coming down Violin Road and Dutch is dead on his feet
And all the rooms they smell like diesel
And you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept here
And I’m lost in the window, and I hide in the stairway
And I hang in the curtain, and I sleep in your hat
And no one brings anything small into a bar around here
They all started out with bad directions
And the girl behind the counter has a tattooed tear
One for every year he’s away, she said
Such a crumbling beauty
Ah, there’s nothing wrong with her that a hundred dollars won’t fix
She has that razor sadness that only gets worse
With the clang and the thunder of the Southern Pacific going by
And the clock ticks out like a dripping faucet
Till you’re full of rag water and bitters and blue ruin
And you spill out over the side to anyone who will listen
And I’ve seen it all
I’ve seen it all through the yellow windows of the evening train