Waits found a creative community almost instantly. In recent years, the city’s experimental downtown music scene had gone overground, and Waits felt a kinship with some of its players. He befriended saxophonist and composer John Lurie, whose band the Lounge Lizards had, in its early daysdeconstructed jazz, celebrating the genre while undercutting it with amateurism in a way that fit with Waits’ own playful reverence. Through Lurie, he met jazz guitarist Marc Ribot. Hal Willner, who was the musical director of Saturday Night Live, gave Waits an education on the carnivalesque music of Kurt Weill and invited him to contribute to Lost in the Stars, a tribute to the German composer.
Waits summoned drummer Stephen Hodges and bassist Larry Taylor from California, both of whom had worked on Swordfishtrombones, and Hodges was astonished by how quickly and thoroughly a cabal had formed around the songwriter. “He seemed like the frigging Pope of New York,” he told Hoskyns. “He was taking care of business. He was all over the place.” The degree to which Waits was feeling his oats can be measured by the fact that he asked Keith Richards to play on his record, and the living legend agreed—after years of telling guitarists he was looking for a Stonesy feel, Waits had the self-assurance to ask the man himself.
And he knew how to get what he wanted in the studio. “He really has a good ear, not just for this note or that note, but for understanding how the sound is framing the lyric,” Ribot said in a later interview. “What decade is it, what continent is it on, what kind of room is it in?” Rain Dogs has much in common with Swordfishtrombones—antiquated instruments, metal-on-metal percussion, stomping cabaret numbers alternating with wispy instrumentals. But it has a grungier and more scuffed-up aesthetic that puts guitar, both by Waits himself and Ribot, out front. The latter’s style takes in Cuban syncopation, Southwestern twang, free-jazz skronk, and bluesy rock, but above all it forces you to confront the elemental materials of his instrument, with its electrified hum, heavy wood, and vibrating steel. To hear Ribot play is to understand that a guitar is a machine.
Rain Dogs is more of a band record than its predecessor—it sounds like people playing together in a room, and you notice their interplay at least as much as the arrangements. And everything revolves around the drums. After signing to Island, Waits became one of a few artists in the period—see Peter Gabriel and Robert Fripp of King Crimson—who experimented with a drum setup with few or no cymbals. Even if indirectly, some of this tendency came from the rapidly expanding interest in “world music” in the U.S. and UK in the 1980s, which made work from percussion-heavy traditions more accessible. And some can be traced to earlier strands of experimental rock, specifically the stand-up bashing of Maureen Tucker and the angular rhythms of Captain Beefheart.
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