Tom Waits Broke Out of His Little World On “Downtown Train”

Rain Dogs is forty years old today. I won’t get into all of it, because there is simply too much to get into, but I am thinking most about what we encounter at the record’s 46-minute mark: a song called “Downtown Train.” An old friend taught me about Tom Waits a lifetime ago, as we watched a snowstorm dust the fire escape of a neighboring dorm building. I pined for the gothic of SoCal but every unanswered text pushed it further away. So he played me “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” and it was warm then, but the cast-iron heater we had to offset with a cracked window was warmer. “I wish I had all the money we used to spend on dope,” Waits sang into me. “I’d buy me a used car lot and I wouldn’t sell any of ‘em. I’d just drive a different car every day, dependin’ on how I feel.” He was twenty-eight then but sounded like a husky-voiced god. I had an uncle who talked the way Waits sang, his sentences damp with acid plashes and blisters of chain-smoke puberty. At some point I went out and bought my own copy of Blue Valentine and played it so much that the needle about punched a hole through the wax. Waits was like an alien to me; his stories were of a Los Angeles I was convinced existed beneath the one I’d been dreaming about.

I’m here now though, living in Los Angeles, and even those stories are gone. The Tropicana Motel Waits (and the Ramones) used to live at closed down in ‘87. The singer-songwriters are all gone. Old Herb Alpert’s got a UCLA building named after him now but he’s gone to Malibu. I hear the Troubadour’s still going but I don’t recognize most of the names on the calendar. The characters of Closing Time and The Heart of Saturday Night and Nighthawks at the Diner have all been, like those in Warren Zevon’s first record, sewn up and given different names or shipped out to new cities. He wanted to be Dylan when his friends wanted to be the Kingsmen. He read Bukowski and wrote about the type of people he imagined Chuck would have agreed were out-of-luck. Any given night fifty years ago and you’d have found Waits in the West Hollywood clubs, singing about beatniks living rough and fast. His voice got deeper by the minute, and his writing got more wasted and impassioned. He sang with sincerity in an emotionally bankrupt place.

But Waits eventually escaped Los Angeles, sometime after making Swordfishtrombones at Sunset Sound in ‘83, the first entry in his great “Junkyard Trilogy.” For two months in late ‘84, he wrote Rain Dogs in a basement room in Lower Manhattan, between Canal and 14th Street, a block from the Hudson River. Water used to fall out of the pipes above him; he likened his time there to “being in a vault.” Before reaching RCA 6th Avenue, he used a cassette recorder to capture the street-level pollution of New York’s ambience. In the studio, accompanied by a cabal of Michael Blair, Marc Ribot, Larry Taylor, Stephen Hodges, Bob Funk, Ralph Carney, and Keith Richards, Waits made his densest album yet, filling Rain Dogs with marimba, trombone, banjo, accordion, and the natural sounds stuck inside his tape player. If he and Blair couldn’t get the drums right, they’d beat on a chest of drawers in the bathroom with a two-by-four until, as Waits put it, “the sounds become your own.” While instructing Ribot’s guitar playing, Waits told him to “play it like a midget’s bar mitzvah,” whatever the hell that meant. Four years later, Option Magazine asked Ribot how he knew what Waits wanted in those sessions. He told them, “Listen to Rain Dogs and find out.”

It’s funny then, that I am drawn most to “Downtown Train,” arguably the straightest part of Rain Dogs. Ribot and Richards don’t play on it; Waits, Robert Quine, and G.E. Smith layered three guitar parts into each other instead, with Smith’s topline massaging the track’s hook with an oily mean-streak. Robby Kilgore’s organ purrs faintly in the scrim but you never forget it. It’s all very lush but in a “from the bottom of a radiator” kind of way. “Downtown Train” is both vivid (“Outside, another yellow moon has punched a hole in the nighttime”), cliché (“You leave me lonely”), and simply fabulous—and on an album packed with so much Beefheart-meets-Brecht splendor, no less. It’s not “Jersey Girl” or “On the Nickel,” but the song has alter-egos, famously dressed up by Rod Stewart for Top-40 radio in 1989. Bob Seger did his own interpretation around the same time, and Patty Smyth and Everything but the Girl were flicking away at the melody even earlier. But all of them pulled the song through new colors, out of the somber and into the sweet.