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Tom Waits “Rain Dogs”

sfilzen — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 20:48:24 +0000

Tom Waits “Rain Dogs” released 35 years ago today, September 30th, 1985. Waits’ ninth studio LP is considered one of his best and ranks in several best-of-the 80′s lists; it went to #29 in the UK and to #188 in the US. It’s creepy antebellum cemetery dark, bluesy, jazzy, all accented by Waits’ signature gravelly growl. Though written in Manhattan (it references NYC in tracks like “Midtown,” “Union Square” and “Downtown Train”), it feels musically like a midnight stroll through Anne Rice’s New Orleans. Honestly, I can only take so much of Tom Waits – I like him in small doses only – but Rain Dogs is so unusual that it makes a full listen of the album worth it. I like “Cemetery Polka” (I grew up in an area of Wisconsin that was full of both polkas and tiny little abandoned cemeteries), “Jockey Full of Bourbon” (I like bourbon; this track was released as a single but I don’t think it charted), “Hang Down Your Head” (also a single and probably the most straightforward, least creepy tune on the record), the title track “Rain Dogs,” “Gun Street Girl” (good story in this one), “Union Square” (Keith Richards plays guitar on this track, as well as on “Big Black Mariah” and “Blind Love”) and probably one of Waits’ most famous songs “Downtown Train” which he released as a single. His single didn’t chart but others who covered it did: Rod Stewart (#3 US, #10 UK in 1989/90), Patty Smyth (#95 US, 1987) and Bob Seger (#17 US Adult Contemporary, 2011).

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Tom Waits “Rain Dogs”

sfilzen — Wed, 07 Dec 2016 16:57:58 +0000

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

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The Replacements “I’ll Be You”

sfilzen — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 18:52:54 +0000

The Replacements “I’ll Be You” b/w “Date to Church” 1989. Today, October 6th, is Minnepolis-based alt-rockers Replacements’ bassist and co-founder Tommy Stinson’s 50th birthday (b. 1966). “I’ll Be You” appears on the band’s 7th studio album Don’t Tell a Soul and was their only single to chart, reaching #51 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and hitting #1 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart and Album Rock Tracks chart. It is the kind of watered-down power pop that I never have really cared for, far preferring edgier and harder rocking releases. Allmusic reviewer Stephen Thomas Erlewine agrees with me, writing this about Don’t Tell a Soul: [it is] a highly lacquered dilution of the ‘Mats that is as misguided a crossover attempt as can be imagined. Matt Wallace’s enormous, bottomless production – as fathomless and dull as a muddy lake – is merely a symptom of the illness that infected the Replacements during the making of Don’t Tell a Soul, an illness that left the bandmembers with little sense of themselves… What’s really missed here is any sense that this is the work of a band: this is a record that’s been assembled track to track, lacking any spark or spontaneity… the saddest thing about Don’t Tell a Soul: it’s a transparent sellout that failed to sell.

The b-side to the single, “Date to Church,” is a swinging little number, interesting because of the appearance of Tom Waits. Paul Westerberg in an interview for Magnet Real Music Alternative said about the song, “Tom Waits is on ‘Date To Church.’ He had a whole sermonette in there, but we had to edit it down because it was too much Tom Waits for his label’s taste. We spent an infamous night together in the studio (in 1988). The drunkest men in the world, me singing ‘Ol’ 55’ and him singing ‘If Only You Were Lonely.’ Pretty ragged.”

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