TOM WAITS Rain Dogs (Island)

by Edouard Dauphin

“I’ve got nothing to say and I’m saying it.”—Allen Ginsberg

Ever since he first slouched onto the pop music scene, back in the early ’70s, Tom Waits has evoked memories of beat generation heroes, Kerouac’s “madmen bums and angels,” who explored and even celebrated the dark recesses of postwar America. That Waits has found an audience not necessarily versed in beat icons like Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, and that he has withstood charges that he is little more than a one-man beatnik revival attest to Waits’s peculiar sensitivity and uncaringly selfdestructive instinct for survival.

Rain Dogs compares well only sporadically with vintage Waits albums and it’s doubtful whether the producing hand—no matter how shaky—of Bones Howe has ever been more sorely missed. Caroming through no fewer than 19 songs (Who does he think he is, Elvis Costello?), Waits doesn’t so much cajole and even im-