The audience is transfixed. Their gazes tied to the five men on the stage, doing their best to bring to life one of the most seminal and unheard records of the 1980s: Tom Waits’ Rain Dogs.

Each musician adopted the persona and spirit of those who conspired with Tom to commit such wonderfully criminal acts of music. It was an honorable performance of material that few dare touch.

The gentleman who joined our table midway through the second side asked what was going on up there. What?, I thought, that deranged and beautiful caliope of sound coming from the back of the establishment?

I said, “It’s Peter Mulvey playing the music of Tom Waits. The entirety of Rain Dogs.”

“Who?”

I sighed inside. Trying not to appear as snobby as I sound right now (sorry!), I tried to explain the whos and whats as he politely listened, ducking his head below the din.

The problem is you can’t really explain Tom. He defies definition. Each album is a new journey through romantic and sometimes deranged soundscapes, from wafting ballads to twisted metal marriages of word and sound.

I told the gentleman that you either get Tom or you don’t. There are few casual fans as indicated by shows that sell-out in minutes (for which I’d sell my first-born) and gatherings that take place across the country just to celebrate the man’s music.

This show was a chance to reconnect with one of my lesser-listened-to Tom albums. And reconnect I did: I’ve been listening to it nearly nonstop since this show.

Well, what can one say about an album that contains lines such as these:

The captain is a one-armed dwarf
He’s throwing dice along the wharf
“Singapore”

Dwarf and wharf? These words rhyme with no others (or so rhymer.com tells me). So the challenge is writing a song that uses them in an appropriate context. Somehow Tom does just this.

Steam, steam a hundred bad dreams
Goin’ up to Harlem with a pistol in his jeans
“Clap Hands”

The grit and untamed fury of an angry young man.

Uncle Bill
Will never leave a will
And the tumor is as big as an egg
“Cemetary Polka”

Gross.

Put my clarinet beneath your bed
Till I get back in town.
“Tango Till They’re Sore”

“Clarinet” is a gorgeous word not often used in song like “trumpet,” “drum,” or “saxophone.” And putting it “beneath your bed” is particularly sad.

And the rooms all smell like diesel
And you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept there
“9th & Hennepin”

I smell the hotel room. I see the dank. The aged and peeling wallpaper, the tattered and bleeding curtains. The buzz and crackle of a neon sign with a few letters burnt out. And the beds that have been occupied by countless anonymous souls.

Outside another yellow moon
Has punched a hole in the nighttime
I climb through the window and down to the street
I’m shining like a new dime
“Downtown Train”

There’s an optimism that fills you once you set your feet upon the street at nighttime. You are going out. Polished and pristene. Reminiscent of my favorite Tom song, “The Heart of Saturday Night”. But the cruel deception of this song is that it is one of desperation, loneliness and obsession (I know your stairs and your doorway).

So thank you, Tom, for invading my brain. For changing how I listen and how I write. And thanks, Peter, for bringing it all to life once again.