While the roaring poet sees his eighties trilogy reissued, focus on the brilliant “Rain Dogs”, composed in the heart of Manhattan in 1985, largely nourished by the street and its damned souls.
Tom Waits in 1985, during the recording of “Rain Dogs”. Photo Brian Graham
Published on October 1, 2023 at 12:00 p.m.
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Tom Waits’ compass has rarely taken him to New York, but it is there that he recorded, in the mid-80s, the album which is not far from being his ultimate masterpiece. After his golden years at the Tropicana, the legendary Los Angeles motel where he lived on love and whiskey with Rickie Lee Jones, and after meeting his wife, Kathleen Brennan, on the set of Heart stroke, by Francis Ford Coppola, the Californian singer settled in lower Manhattan between an armory and a police recruitment office. The city is then a strange mess, torn between the orgies of high finance and the hollow avenues where the homeless take up residence in the packaging of household appliances. The street is electric and the hobo poet feels at home there: “ We learn things that are of no use elsewhere, he then said. Watch out for your change, watch out for cars, watch your back… If we behaved like that in other latitudes, we’d be arrested straight away. »
Tom Waits never misses an opportunity to mingle with the tramps who sleep downstairs from his house. He understands that they are called “Rain Dogs” (Rain Dogs), and this is what he calls his new album. To make things more poetic, he also puts forward a legend picked up off the ground: “In lower Manhattan, he explains, It happens that dogs get trapped by the storm. The rain drowns their tracks and they can no longer return home. »
New York inspires him all the more since he inaugurated two years previously, with Swordfishtrombones, a new form of composition, in which he takes pleasure in incorporating the sounds of an overheating city. “I record the sounds of construction sites and those of machines, he tells journalist Barney Hoskyns. And I go over them again in the evening, because I end up missing them when everything gets quiet. » After parting ways with his historic producer, Bones Howe, Tom Waits didn’t see himself putting on his cabaret stalwart castoff again: “People had come to think that I was just a quirk invented by a time machine. » Of the Swordfishtrombones, he moved away from the piano and the influence of jazz to write crazy arrangements which are reminiscent of those of Kurt Weill and The Threepenny Opera. His poetry suffers the same electroshock, the counter stories become more and more abstract: “My memory resembles a pawnshop, an aquarium or a cupboard, he explains to guide the curious. Sometimes our memories become as distorted as in a palace of mirrors and that’s where I am today. »
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Swordfishtrombones opened Pandora’s box, critical success gives wings to the crooner, and with Rain Dogs he finds the ideal balance. The orchestrations and sound collages are breathtaking, the spirit of Kurt Weill still lurks, but the melodies come straight from the simplest and most gaunt blues, that of the countryside and bayous of a ghostly South. His voice wanders wonderfully in a grand guignol setting, sometimes theatrical, sometimes visceral, always dangerously chipped. “As if Tom Waits had listened to the Pogues while reading Lewis Carroll and HG Wells”, wrote a critic of the time.
On verses of persistent despair, he burns his throat in the style of Captain Beefheart or Howlin’ Wolf, borrows the voodoo tunes of Dr John and gathers around him a cast the likes of which he will rarely experience. On guitar follow one another Keith Richards (sharp as never before on Big Black Mariah), Robert Quine, Lou Reed’s accomplice, and Marc Ribot, grand master of vaporous lyricism. The reception was triumphant, the singer even made a header in the charts, where no one had ever seen him, and the song Downtown Train almost instantly became a classic, later covered by Rod Stewart (and quite poignantly by Everything But The Girl on their album Acoustic). Universal glory and local glory. THE New York Times dedicate Rain Dogs 1985 album and magazine Rolling Stone, who moved from San Francisco to Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, writes that Rain Dogs East “the most beautiful portrait of the tragic kingdom of the street”.
Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs et Frank’s Wild Years are reissued on vinyl by Island/Universal; will follow in October Bone Machine et The Black Rider.
2023-10-01 10:00:09
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