Nighthawks At The Diner (Remastered Live) Tom Waits

• 1 Opening Intro (Live) 02:56
• 2 Emotional Weather Report (Live) 03:46
• 3 Intro To On A Foggy Night (Live) 02:15
• 4 On A Foggy Night (Live) 03:47
• 5 Intro To Eggs And Sausage (In A Cadillac With Susan Michelson) (Live) 01:52
• 6 Eggs And Sausage (In A Cadillac With Susan Michelson) (Live) 04:18
• 7 Intro To Better Off Without A Wife (Live) 03:02
• 8 Better Off Without A Wife (Live) 03:58
• 9 Nighthawk Postcards (From Easy Street) (Live) 11:27
• 10 Intro To Warm Beer And Cold Women (Live) 00:55
• 11 Warm Beer And Cold Women (Live) 05:19
• 12 Intro To Putnam County (Live) 00:47
• 13 Putnam County (Live) 07:33
• 14 Spare Parts I (A Nocturnal Emission) (Live) 06:25
• 15 Nobody (Live) 02:49
• 16 Intro To Big Joe And Phantom 309 (Live) 00:41
• 17 Big Joe And Phantom 309 (Live) 06:27
• 18 Spare Parts II And Closing (Live) 05:16
• Total Runtime 01:13:33

Info for Nighthawks At The Diner (Remastered Live)

A major part of Tom Waits's mystique has always been his complex, intriguing persona; part Bukowski-esque barfly poet, part Kerouac-inspired hipster, part Hoagy Carmichael troubadour. Nowhere has that persona been more fully utilized than on "Nighthawks At The Diner". Throughout the album waits unfurls his colorful, charismatic, artfully amplified personality. It's like spending the evening with a lounge lizard/raconteur/beatnik standup comic who also happens to compose strikingly beautiful tunes that could have come from the Great American Songbook if not for their lyrical quirkiness. Though it would be a few more years before Waits would reinvent himself on "Swordfishtrombones", the character who stomps through your brain on "Nighthawks At The Diner" with both guns blazing is as original and impressive a character as you could want.

Recorded in front of a live audience at the Record Plant recording studio in Los Angeles in 1975, Nighthawks at the Diner debuts some of Waits’ greatest classics like “Warm Beer, Cold Women” and “Eggs and Sausage” with a crack Jazz ensemble backing him up and some of the greatest stage patter ever committed to record.

"For his third album, Nighthawks at the Diner, Tom Waits set up a nightclub in the studio, invited an audience, and cut a 70-minute, two-LP set of new songs. It's an appropriate format for compositions that deal even more graphically and, for the first time, humorously with Waits' late-night world of bars and diners. The love lyrics of his debut album had long since given way to a comic lonely-guy stance glimpsed in "Emotional Weather Report" and "Better Off Without a Wife." But what really matters is the elaborate scene-setting of songs like the six-and-a-half-minute "Spare Parts," the seven-and-a-half-minute "Putnam County," and especially the 11-and-a-half-minute "Nighthawk Postcards" that are essentially poetry recitations with jazz backing. Waits is a colorful tour guide of midnight L.A., raving over a swinging rhythm section of Jim Hughart (bass) and Bill Goodwin (drums), with Pete Christlieb wailing away on tenor sax between paragraphs and Mike Melvoin trading off with Waits on piano runs. You could call it overdone, but then, this kind of material made its impact through an accumulation of miscellaneous detail, and who's to say how much is too much?" (William Ruhlmann, AMG)

Tom Waits, vocals, guitar, piano
Pete Christlieb, tenor saxophone
Mike Melvoin, piano
Jim Hughart, bass
Bill Goodwin, drums

Recorded live and engineered at The Record Plant and Wally Heider Recording, Hollywood on July 30 & 31, 1975
Engineered by Bones Howe
Produced by Bones Howe

Digitally remastered

In the 1970s, Tom Waits combined a lyrical focus on desperate, low-life characters with a persona that seemed to embody the same lifestyle, which he sang about in a raspy, gravelly voice. From the '80s on, his work became increasingly theatrical as he moved into acting and composing. Growing up in Southern California, Waits attracted the attention of manager Herb Cohen, who also handled Frank Zappa, and was signed by him at the beginning of the 1970s, resulting in the material later released as The Early Years and The Early Years, Vol. 2. His formal recording debut came with Closing Time (1973) on Asylum Records, an album that contained "Ol' 55," which was covered by labelmates the Eagles for their On the Border album. Waits attracted critical acclaim and a cult audience for his subsequent albums, The Heart of Saturday Night (1974), the two-LP live set Nighthawks at the Diner (1975), Small Change (1976), Foreign Affairs (1977), Blue Valentine (1978), and Heart Attack and Vine (1980). His music and persona proved highly cinematic, and, starting in 1978, he launched parallel careers as an actor and as a composer of movie music. He wrote songs for and appeared in Paradise Alley (1978), wrote the title song for On the Nickel (1980), and was hired by director Francis Coppola to write the music for One from the Heart (1982), which earned him an Academy Award nomination. While working on that project, Waits met and married playwright Kathleen Brennan, with whom he later collaborated.

Moving to Island Records, Waits made Swordfishtrombones (1983), which found him experimenting with horns and percussion and using unusual recording techniques. The same year, he appeared in Coppola's Rumble Fish and The Outsiders, and, in 1984, he appeared in the director's The Cotton Club. In 1985, he released Rain Dogs. In 1986, he appeared in Down by Law and made his theatrical debut with Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in Frank's Wild Years, a musical play he had written with Brennan. An album based on the play was released in 1987, the same year Waits appeared in the films Candy Mountain and Ironweed. In 1988, he released a film and soundtrack album depicting one of his concerts, Big Time. In 1989, he appeared in the films Bearskin: An Urban Fairytale, Cold Feet, and Wait Until Spring. His work for the theater continued in 1990 when Waits partnered with opera director Robert Wilson and beat novelist William Burroughs and staged The Black Rider in Hamburg, Germany. In 1991, he appeared in the films Queens' Logic, The Fisher King, and At Play in the Fields of the Lord. In 1992, he scored the film Night on Earth; released the album Bone Machine, which won a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album; appeared in the film Bram Stoker's Dracula; and returned to Hamburg for the staging of his second collaboration with Robert Wilson, Alice. The Black Rider was documented on CD in 1993, the same year Waits appeared in the film Short Cuts.

A long absence from recording resulted in the 1998 release of Beautiful Maladies, a retrospective of his work for Island. In 1999, Waits finally returned with a new album, Mule Variations. The record was a critical success, winning a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk album, and was also his first for the independent Epitaph Records' Anti subsidiary. A small tour followed, but Waits jumped right back into the studio and began working on not one but two new albums. By the time he emerged in the spring of 2002, both Alice and Blood Money were released on Anti Records. Blood Money consisted of the songs from the third Wilson/Waits collaboration that was staged in Denmark in 2000 and won Best Drama of the Year. After limited touring in support of these two endeavors, Waits returned to the recording studio and issued Real Gone in 2004. The album marked a large departure for him in that it contained no keyboards at all, focusing only on stringed and rhythm instruments. Glitter and Doom Live appeared in 2009. Waits didn't release another studio album of new material until 2011, when he issued Bad as Me on Anti in the Fall. He uncharacteristically issued a track listing two months in advance of the release, and the pre-release title track as a digital single. He also took the unusual step of releasing a video in which he allowed bits of all the album's songs to play while he scolded bloggers and peer-to-peer sites for invading his privacy. (All Music.com)

This album contains no booklet.