"Down There By the Train"

'Orphans: Bawlers', 2006

Every Tom Waits Song is an email newsletter covering just that, in alphabetical order. Find more info here and sign up to get it sent straight to your inbox:

In October 1992, Tom Waits spoke to his friend Jim Jarmusch about his new album Bone Machine. In the course of the conversation, he mentioned some intriguing outtakes:

Jarmusch: Man, you have so many songs. There are other songs you played for me that aren’t on Bone Machine, like “Filipino Box Spring Hog.”

Waits: Yeah, and “Tell It to Me,” and “Mexican Song,” “In the Reeperbahn,” one called “Shall We Die Tonight,” a suicide pact ballad, and then a couple for John Hammond at the same time, one called “Down There By the Train.”

Jarmusch: Did he record it?

Waits: No, nobody did. And we couldn't find a way to do it either that felt good, so we just left it, and it’s just sitting there.

It didn’t sit there for long. A few months later, Johnny Cash and Rick Rubin were on the hunt for songs for the first American Recordings album. Cash and Waits shared a collaborator in guitarist Smokey Hormel, so Hormel asked Waits if he had anything lying around. Tom said he thought to himself, “Hey, it's got all the stuff that Johnny likes: trains and death, John Wilkes Booth, the cross…OK!”

A few months later, the world first heard “Down There By the Train” this way:

Cash’s version doesn’t sound much like the one Waits would eventually release on Orphans. Unlike later albums in the American Recordings series that would feature a host of backing musicians (including Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers), the first volume was entirely solo, just Cash and his guitar. It’s quiet and understated, Johnny’s inimitable voice carrying the song with no wasted effort.

Tom, on the other hand, bellows his version to the church rafters. The arrangement remains minimalist—just Tom on piano and Larry Taylor on bass—but the effect is maximalist, all loud-quiet-loud dynamics. He re-recorded it for Orphans; the Bone Machine outtake he sent to Cash remains unreleased. In this incarnation, it’s a full-throated gospel ballad that sounds like a direct successor to “Come On Up the the House.”

Personally, I prefer Waits’ version to Cash’s. I generally like the later American albums more, when Cash has other musicians with him. Tom himself might not agree with me though. He told Terry Gross years later, “I was like ‘That's it, I'm all done now. Johnny Cash did [my] song. All done, thanks very much.’”