Music Arcades: Tom Waits: Rain Dogs

There's almost some weird synchronicity going on here. I say "almost" because, as synchronicity goes, it's a little out of sync. But get this. (1) I saw Tom Waits perform live 18 days ago, at the Bridge School Benefit. My first time, and he was astonishingly good, making me want to revisit lots of his recordings. (2) There's a song on this album called Union Square, and three days before I first saw Tom I was staying in this hotel, just a few short blocks from Union Square in San Francisco. (3) There's another song called 9th & Hennepin which I assume to be a reference to this Minneapolis location (though there is also a 9th & Hennepin in Putnam, Illinois), and just before I went to San Francisco I was staying a few blocks from there on North 1st Street. Hmmmm. What do you make of that, then?

The stand-out song from the performance was The Day After Tomorrow, which I am ripping onto iTunes from Lucy's copy of Real Gone as I type. For, as we know, Lucy is the authority on Tom Waits in this house — and this is another of her favourite albums. She says it's just at the point where he made the transition from songs to weirdness (I don't think she remembers that she said that last time too.)

Lucy's favourite song on the album is Jockey Full of Bourbon. Mine is Time at the moment.

What was impressive about the performance was that I always imagined Tom Waits might be a bit pantomime when playing live. And he was. I dare say he rehearsed every bat-like pose and every angular swivel of his knees in the mirror until he'd got them exactly right. But the point is that he had them exactly right, and he used the pose to express the song. So he was able to take quite a narrow canvas and paint something universal with it.

MusicBrainz entry for this album