Name: The 1977 Performance Review
Brand: Tom Waits

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

db2cd001

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Colour

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2016-03-09

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

Plastichead

Tax rate GB

UPC / Barcode

0823564676623

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Total Cap

2 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

Artist

Tom Waits

Genre GB

Classic

Label GB

By 1976 Tom Waits was drinking heavily and life on the road was starting to take its toll. In reaction to these hardships he recorded Small Change which found him in cynical and pessimistic mood lyrically. With the album, Waits asserted that he "tried to resolve a few things as far as this cocktail lounge, maudlin, crying-in-your-beer image that I have". The album was a critical and commercial success and far outsold any of Waits' previous records. This resulted in a much higher public profile, which brought with it interviews and articles in Time, Newsweek, and Vogue. Following the release of Foreign Affairs (1977), musically in a similar vein to Small Change but showing further artistic refinement and exploration into jazz and blues styles, Waits and the Nocturnals went out again to play a handful of gigs in support of the new album in October '77 - four to be precise! Two of these shows are contained on this double CD set. From 10th October at New York's legendary 'My Fathers Place' venue, out on the city's Long Island, comes the first of the two recordings, taken from a superb broadcast of proceedings transmitted across the area by local station WLIR-FM. The second show included is from a couple of weeks later, recorded at the equally famous Agora Ballroom in Cleveland, Ohio, and featuring too a performance shared across the locale by way of another FM radio broadcast. Illustrating superbly that by this point in his musical career Tom Waits was nothing if not a consummate professional, despite his troubles and indeed his efforts to, on occasion, cover up his professionalism with fake amateurism, these shows find Tom on superb form and in hilarious mood, performing gigs of pure delight which, as proven here, remain among the best he has ever played.

The 1977 Performance Review

Music GB