Rain Dogs

Tom Waits recorded this album at the historic RCA Studio on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, the same rooms where Elvis Presley had recorded "Hound Dog" and "Don't Be Cruel" thirty years earlier. The musicians set up in the middle of the enormous room and played like a garage band, the space giving everything a particular reverb that no smaller studio could have produced. Waits had no rehearsals with the band before the sessions began. Instead he would bring out a ratty hollow-body guitar, play each song for the musicians as a rough sketch, and let them find their own way into it.

The album's first collaboration with guitarist Marc Ribot transformed both of their careers. Ribot later described Waits's studio instructions as genuinely unusual, including the direction to "play it like a midget's bar mitzvah," and said he assumed everyone made records this way until he discovered later that they did not. Keith Richards appeared on three tracks, his instinctive approach to rhythm locking into Waits's carnival logic in a way that felt inevitable. Waits made sounds by banging a bathroom door with a two-by-four, refusing the synthesizers and drum machines that dominated pop production in 1985 in favor of marimbas, accordions, banjos, trombones, and whatever would produce the right noise.

The album is a series of vignettes about the urban dispossessed, the people who have fallen through the cracks of every city that has ever existed. They are vivid and specific and sung in a voice that sounds like it was produced by decades of weather. Rain Dogs is the album that established Tom Waits not just as an eccentric but as one of the great American songwriters, and it sounds unlike anything else that existed in 1985 or has existed since.