Tom Waits’s contribution to the genre, “Downtown Train”, the 17th track on his album Rain Dogs (1985), was slow to establish itself as a covers magnet. The previous Swordfishtrombones (1983) was the first in this “junkyard trilogy” for Island Records (the third was 1989’s Franks Wild Years) in which Waits and his artistic partner and wife Kathleen Brennan created movie miniatures for the ears. The couple replaced the nightclub mood of Waits’s earlier albums with a daylit clatter of percussion, angular guitars and archaic keyboards.
Rain Dogs is like a concept album with extra hits. As well as some brutal, Brechtian ditties there are heart-wrenching ballads and sneaky grooves. The album may be about “the people who sleep in doorways”, as Waits has said, but the protagonist of “Downtown Train” has cleaned themself up enough to greet a lover or friend from Uptown: “I’m shining like a new dime.”
The verses are vivid and intense: “Outside another yellow moon/Has punched a hole in the night-time.” The chorus is less poetic, ending bathetically on a careworn cliché — “You leave me lonely.” Like many pop classics, “Downtown Train” is more about mood than specifics; its melodic story arc tugs at the heart. The arrangement is about as conventional as Waits gets, with thudding rhythm guitar by Robert Quine and memorable lead guitar lines in the intro and chorus by Hall & Oates sideman GE Smith.
One of the song’s earliest covers was by Mary Chapin Carpenter, on her 1987 album Hometown Girl. She plays it straight, with the conviction of a good singer who knows a good song. Another, underpowered version, by ex-Scandal frontwoman Patty Smyth, came out the same year.
Rod Stewart, a model train enthusiast with 900ft of track in an elaborate set-up, ensured the song’s longevity as a pop classic. Producer Trevor Horn gave it an expansive setting in 1989, with forthright piano, crepuscular synths, big drums and a wall-of-sound chorus that summarises every “big pop” track in the late-1980s jukebox.
A lesser singer might be cowed, or just wail against the wall of sound, but Stewart sails across the multitrack without breaking sweat. The singer’s great gift, as Tim Hardin once declared, is that “he just sings the tune”. However, in a 1995 Mojo magazine interview with Mick Brown, Stewart said he found extra tunes in Waits’s material: “I can find melodies that he’s got there that he doesn’t even know he’s got himself. Like ‘Downtown Train’ — I can hear the melodies that either he’s trying to sing or they’re in his head but he can’t get them, and I just go there.”
Legend (or at least Billboard magazine) has it that Stewart got the idea of recording the song from Bob Seger, obliging Seger to can his own version, recorded a month earlier. The American singer eventually put out a newly recorded “Downtown Train” in 2011 with his Silver Bullet Band. It’s a mature, stadium-ready performance, and more evidence to support the crack by NME writer Biba Kopf that “Downtown Train” was the greatest Springsteen song that Bruce never wrote. Seger’s sandpapery vocals ride out the outro before subsiding over a gentle final chord.
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