https://www.discogs.com/release/339487-Tom-Waits-Rain-Dogs
Around this time a discovered Tom Waits. A colleague introduced me to a lot of different music styles, mostly alternative rock. It took a while, but I was hooked pretty quickly. I still love the rough way of his songs, both poetic and out of the gutter.
I know very well it is just that: a style. But it never fails to impress me. I once described it as playing poker in a room full of crooks. Or what I can imagine that would be of course. Tom Waits is at the top of my list of artists I want to see, but somehow I always missed him.
Rain dogs is about what the wiki article calls the urban dispossessed: bums and vagrants. It can be considered the middle part of a trilogy: Swordfishtrombones, Rain dogs and Frank’s wild years. Two of the songs have Keith Rolling Stones Richards on guitar. Not that I can recognise it.
The picture on the cover of this album looks like Tom Waits himself, but isn’t. They are called Rose and Lilly, and the picture belongs to a series made by Swedish photographer Anders Petersen at Hamburgs Reeperbahn in de 1960s.