Tom Waits: Rain Dogs (Island)

THIS IS HOW the other half lives, the dark underbelly for whom being born in the U.S.A. means Huey Long, Lenny Bruce on a bender, and losing a week's pay in a two-minute game of three-card monte. Waits' Rain Dogs is American Gothic at its sordid best. It features Waits as the "demented drum major" of a Salvation Army band that features Keith Richards, John Lurie, the Uptown Horns and Robert Quine. Instead of sampled synthesizers, it's got Waits whacking a chest of drawers with a two-by-four. But most of all, it's got all the "small-time Napoleons," "shadow boys," and "gun street girls" who didn't make it onto the star-spangled bandwagon, but wound up on this disk instead. Which isn't such a bad place to end up.