Rain Dogs

Rain Dogs is the eighth album by American singer-songwriter Tom Waits, released in September 1985 on Island Records. A loose concept album about "the urban dispossessed" of New York City, Rain Dogs is generally considered the middle album of a trilogy that includes Swordfishtrombones and Franks Wild Years.

The album, which includes appearances by guitarists Keith Richards and Marc Ribot, is noted for its broad spectrum of musical styles and genres, described by Rolling Stone as merging "Kurt Weill, pre-rock integrity from old dirty blues, [and] the elegiac melancholy of New Orleans funeral brass, into a singularly idiosyncratic American style."

The album peaked at #29 on the UK charts and #188 on the US Billboard Top 200. In 1989, it was ranked #21 on the Rolling Stone list of the "100 greatest albums of the 1980s." In 2003, the album was ranked number 397 on the magazine's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".

Composition and recording

Waits wrote the majority of the album in a two-month stint in the fall of 1984 in a basement room at the corner of Washington and Horatio Streets in Manhattan. According to Waits, it was:

The Raindogs

The Raindogs were a band formed in Boston, United States around 1985 after several members had disbanded the rock band The Schemers. They combined Celtic and American music to form their own hybrid of rock and roll. Based in Boston, the band was made up of Mark Cutler, Emerson Torrey, members of recently disbanded New Orleans band Red Rockers Darren Hill and Jim Reilly (also of Ireland’s “Stiff Little Fingers"), and Johnny Cunningham, formerly of Silly Wizard. The Rhode Island based Schemers had previously won the Providence Rock Hunt and the Boston Rock Rumble band competitions, and their single, Remember was widely played on Providence, Rhode Island FM radio stations.

The Raindogs toured throughout the United States with Warren Zevon, Don Henley, and Bob Dylan and were noted for their incendiary live performances.

Discography

The group released two albums on Atco Records: