"Downtown Train"

'Rain Dogs', 1985

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:

“Downtown Train” is Tom Waits’ third most-played song on Spotify. That probably won’t surprise you. What I found a little more surprising was the two songs that beat it: “Martha” and—with almost three times as many streams as anything else!—“I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You”!

I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked that his debut-album songs stream so well. Normal people like Tom Waits more when he doesn’t sound like Tom Waits. Who knew?

I’ll tell you who knew: Rod Stewart. In 1989, four years after Tom’s Rain Dogs original, Rod covered “Downtown Train” for the career-spanning box set Storyteller. His “Downtown Train” was essentially one of those “force the superfans who already have everything else to buy this too” add-ons that record labels used to do for greatest-hits sets. It reached number three on the US charts, and earned him a Grammy nomination for “Best Male Pop Vocal Performance.” It even led Stewart to release essentially a greatest hits set of his greatest hits set, paring the four-CD box set down to one disc. It was titled, naturally, Downtown Train.

Rod Stewart wasn’t the only one to figure out that “Downtown Train” had hit potential. Patty Smyth (that’s the Scandal '80s hard-rocker, not the differently-spelled Patti Smith) had tried two years earlier. Both her and Rod’s covers got the sort of big industry push that has record labels taking out full-page ads in industry trade magazines:

Bob Seger thought it would be a hit too! In fact, he’d recorded his cover before Stewart did—but took too long to release it. In 1990, as Stewart’s cover was climbing the charts, his longtime manager Punch Andrews complained to the Boston Globe. “We were livid. I called the publisher long ago and was willing to buy the song, for heaven’s sake. But I was assured that wouldn’t be necessary, and that we would still be the only major artist to cut it. Then all of a sudden, Stewart’s version comes out. We couldn’t believe it.” They scrapped it, though Seger re-recorded it years later, adding backup singers and timpanis. Seger himself called Stewart a “nonperson” for supposedly stealing his idea.

Stewart was less than magnanimous about the situation. “I hear Bob Seger just recorded the same number,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I wonder if he knows we’ve beaten him to it?” Elsewhere he said, “The geezer knows very well the full truth. It sounds like sour grapes to me.” Keeping the bad vibes going, Waits reportedly called Stewart’s cover “trash,” though the only citation for that I could find comes second-hand in this Record Mirror blurb, so, grain of salt.

(The Eagles quote is definitely real though)

So Stewart, Seger, and Smyth all knew the song had hit potential. And one other person knew too: Tom Waits himself. “Yeah, that's kind of a pop song,” he told an interviewer when Rain Dogs first came out. “Or an attempt at a pop song. You know?”