TRIPLE DISC BROADCAST COLLECTION FEATURES THREE COMPLETE LIVE SETS FROM ACROSS THE 1970s
In 1975, Waits moved to the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard and released the double album Nighthawks at the Diner, recorded in a studio with a small audience in order to capture the ambience of a live show. The record exemplified this phase of his career, including as it did the lengthy spoken interludes between songs that punctuated his live act.
Waits recorded Small Change (1976), which portrayed a much more cynical and pessimistic mood lyrically, with many songs such as The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) (An Evening with Pete King) and Bad Liver and a Broken Heart (In Lowell).
Small Change, which was preceded by the double A-side single Step Right Up/The Piano Has Been Drinking, was a critical and commercial success and far outsold any of Waits' previous albums. With it, Waits broke onto Billboard's Top 100 Albums chart for the first time in his career (a feat he would not repeat until 1999 with the release of Mule Variations).
This 3 CD set includes radio broadcasts transmitted during this initial period of Tom Waits career, and features complete live performances recorded in; 1975 at the studios of KRQS FM, Minneapolis, featuring just Tom alone at his piano; in December 1976 at Media Sound Studios – another in studio session during which, between numbers, Tom is interviewed by by the station presenter; and in 1977, back in the big apple at the famous, My Fathers Place venue, out on Long Island.