When asked for a song to include in writer-director Edward Burns‘ romantic comedy She’s The One, Tom Petty responded with an entire album. Though nominally a film soundtrack, the Warner Bros. collection stands proudly with the singer-songwriter’s best work of the 1990s. Cut with producer Rick Rubin and the ever-reliable Heartbreakers, Songs and music from “SHE’S THE ONE” has a relaxed feel and eclectic mix of material (including Beck and Lucinda Williams covers) that give the impression Petty was really enjoying himself. Which doesn’t mean his customary craftsmanship is absent; the dozen originals include such terrific songs as “Climb That Hill” and single “Walls (Circus),” which features guest vocals from Lindsey Buckingham. Released in 1996, SHE’S THE ONE is an album sometimes forgotten but well worth rediscovering.
The album was not mentioned on the four-hour documentary Runnin’ Down a Dream, though Petty could be seen doing a studio session of the song “Angel Dream (No. 4)”.
Some songs were originally recorded for Wildflowers and were put on this album to fill it out. When In April 2015, when Tom Petty’s back catalog was released in High-resolution audio, this was one of only two albums not included in the series (the other being Wildflowers).
There are two songs on the disc that Petty chose to record and release in two different versions. The first is Walls which kicks off the album with its Beatles- and Byrds-inspired psychedelic version, aptly titled Walls (Circus). The version appearing later in the disc is more barren and Dylan-esque in nature. The second song to appear twice is Angel Dream. Both versions borrow a page from the Simon and Garfunkel book. The first to appear is more like the Bridge over Troubled Water era, while the later version borrows from the Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. era. One of my favorites on this disc is Hung Up and Overdue which borrows heavily from The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album.
Most notable on this disc is Petty’s merging into a pattern similar to Neil Young’s. His Heartbreakers are like Young’s Crazy Horse, and his sound blends from solitary acoustic music to all-out feedback-laden rockers. It certainly keeps things fresh with the stark contrast between the styles and seems to fit Petty as well as it fits Young.
American Treasure, is a 60-track box set featuring previously unreleased live and studio material from Tom Petty, will be released on September. 28th. The songs on the collection are reportedly drawn from all phases of Petty’s career with his longtime band the Heartbreakers.
Full details including a complete track list are expected to be announced soon. The news was revealed today on Petty’s SiriusXM radio station, along with the debut of the first track from the box set, 1982’s previously unreleased “Keep a Little Soul.” American Treasure was reportedly compiled by Petty’s daughter Adria, his wife Dana, Heartbreakers guitarist and keyboardist Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench and “studio collaborator” Ryan Ulate.
After the countdown clock emerged this morning, many fans speculated that the news would be concerning the release of a double album version of Petty’s 1994 record Wildflowers. He had originally intended for the album, his second solo effort, to be a double album, but, at Warner Bros. request, he scaled it back to a single disc.
In 2014, it was reported that a set expected to be called Wildflowers: All the Rest, that restored the complete track list, was in the works to coincide with the album’s 20th anniversary. Only the song “Somewhere Under Heaven” has officially surfaced, appearing during the closing credits of the Entourage movie.
He was planning to support the release with a unique tour. “I want to take the Heartbreakers and whoever else I need to reproduce every sound in a big way,” he had said. “That album was really about sound in a big way. I would like to go out there and perform the entire album as it was originally conceived with all of the songs.”
“That would have been smaller-scale, away from the hits,” guitarist Mike Campbell later added. But he said that the plan, to which Norah Jones had signed on, was scrapped in favor of a career-spanning trek to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Heartbreakers. Unfortunately, Petty died a week after the last date of the tour, a September. 25th show at the Hollywood Bowl.
Tom Petty‘s family and former collaborators compiled the four-CD box set of previously unreleased material by Petty and the Heartbreakers, for release on September 28th, SiriusXM announced. The release, called An American Treasure, marks the first posthumous album of Petty material since his death in October. The SiriusXM broadcast debuted a clip from one of the unreleased songs from 1982 called “Keep a Little Soul.”
An American Treasurewill contain previously unreleased studio recordings, live recordings, deep cuts and alternate versions of popular Petty songs,. The collection will encompass 60 tracks in total. A less expensive two-CD set will also be available for purchase.
Petty was as prolific as he was talented. During the Eighties and Nineties, he released albums at a rapid pace. His studio productivity dipped slightly in the new millennium, when he put out an album roughly every four years. The last album Petty released under his own name was 2014’s Hypnotic Eye. He also contributed to 2016’s Mudcrutch 2 with members of his pre-Heartbreakers band.
Petty was found unconscious at his home in Malibu on October 2nd, 2017. He was taken to the hospital and put temporarily on life support. He died hours later.
In January, a medical examiner ruled that the singer died of an accidental overdose. Petty had been prescribed drugs to treat emphysema, knee issues and a fractured hip, according to a statement from his family. “On the day he died, he was informed his hip had graduated to a full-on break,” Dana and Adria wrote. “It is our feeling that the pain was simply unbearable and was the cause for his overuse of medication.”
Although Johnny Thunders legacy remains underground, there are no end of ‘Top 10..’ listed artists who name check the New York Doll / Heartbreaker as a major influence. His musical legacy has outstripped any empirical chart statistic. His most fertile and unparalled contributions were made in the 1970s, when his songs became a lifelong soundtrack for fans, and his emblematic guitar style bonded with his charisma and thrift couture to influence peers and generations thereafter. Between January and June 1978 Johnny enrolled producer Steve Lillywhite and recorded a wealth of material which contributed to his first solo album ‘So Alone’. To celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the album Johnny self proclaimed as the best album he ever made, Remarquable Records is releasing a special companion to add further insight to that creative period and showcase a bedevilled artist supported by an unrepeatable cast of friends and musicians which allowed Johnny more time and more control in the studio than he ever had in his truncated life. Consisting of previously unreleased studio recordings ‘So Alonesome’ is an essential sibling to ‘So Alone’. Featured msuicians include Steve Jones & Paul Cook (Sex Pistols); Peter Perrett & Mike Kellie (The Only Ones); Paul Gray & Steve Nicol (Eddie & The Hot Rods); Walter Lure & Billy Rath (Heartbreakers); Phil Lynott (Thin Lizzy); Steve Marriott (Small Faces/Humble Pie); John ‘Irish’ Earle (Thin Lizzy); Chris Wood (Traffic); Chrissie Hynde (Pretenders) & Patti Palladin (Snatch).
tracklist:
Pipeline (Alternate Mix); Dead Or Alive? (Alternate Mix); (Give Her A) Great Big Kiss (single version 2015 mix); Leave Me Alone (Hot Ones Version); So Alone (Heartbreakers Version); Daddy Rollin’ Stone (Thin Ones Version); London Boys (Alternate Mix); (She’s So) Untouchable (Early Version); Subway Train (Basic track – Early Versions); The Wizard (Full Length Version-2015 Mix)
He was the New York Doll-turned-junkie poster boy who had it all – and threw it away. Even many years after his death, the friends, lovers and people who knew him best reveal the man behind the myth.
April 29th, 1991. A leaden grey sky hangs oppressively over St. Anastasia’s Roman Catholic Church on 245th St, Queens, as friends and lovers, united in grief, gather to pay their final respects to John Genzale; husband, brother, son and father. Mariann Bracken has lost the prodigal kid brother she’d introduced to the New York City melodramas of the Shangri-Las when he was just a fresh-faced altar boy. Leee Black Childers is inconsolable – the former manager of the deceased fainted when informed of his death – unable to imagine life without the man he was “totally” in love with. Susanne Blomqvist, only now realising the true depth of sacrifice her life partner made when he walked out of the home they shared with their infant daughter for the last time, absently registers the names on the cards of the numerous floral tributes piled on the back of a black El Camino: Deborah Harry, Mötley Crüe, Aerosmith – a stark reminder of Genzale’s other life, the one that always seemed to get in the way of their ephemeral moments of domestic bliss.
Johnny Thunders’s story is so steeped in doomed glamour and junkie mythology that somewhere along the line the man that was John Anthony Genzale has been lost in the telling, but to know one you have to know the other. Born in the middle-class Jackson Heights area of Queens on July 15, 1952, the boy who would be Thunders was irrevocably shaped in infancy by the departure of his father Emil Genzale. A serial womaniser of no little prowess, Genzale Sr ultimately chose swordsmanship over fatherhood, leaving little Johnny to be brought up by his mother Josephine and doting elder sister Mariann.
Haunted by rejection in his formative years, yet indulged by his matriarchal Italian upbringing, the young Genzale grew up spoiled but unsatisfied. Initially infatuated by baseball, he finally found a focus for his adolescent anger and angst in the perpetual soundtrack of Brill Building rock’n’roll drifting across the hall from his sister’s Dansette; shrill, urban dramas of switchblade romance and leather-clad Lotharios, delivered by keening teenage girls teetering on the brink of hysteria.
As Genzale matured he developed musical tastes that reflected his self-image. A born dandy with a taste for the urban blues, haphazard ebony locks, and a rebellious streak the width of Broadway, it was inevitable that he should come to idolise Keith Richards. Entranced by rock’n’roll, Genzale made the leap from observer to protagonist in his mid-teens.
“Me and my cousin Janis used to go to the Fillmore East every Saturday,” his childhood friend Gail Higgins remembers. “Johnny and his friends would be on one side of the room, and we’d be on the other, staring at each other.”
The 16-year old Johnny and Janis eventually started dating. They rented an apartment on New York’s First Avenue, where Johnny took up the bass. They caught shows by The Who, The Hollies and Small Faces, they drank beer with Rod Stewart backstage at the Newport Folk Festival, and Johnny was even captured on film gazing in awe at Keith from the front row of Madison Square Garden in the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter. In 1969 they travelled to London to sample the scene. But it was the sound of Detroit that particularly struck a chord with Johnny.
“We would drive eight hours to see the MC5 or The Stooges,” Gail attests. It wasn’t long before Johnny abandoned the bass and set about learning the guitar. “Whenever he was practising, I used to yell into the bedroom: ‘Give up, Johnny’,” says Higgins.
Never one to blend into his surroundings, Johnny always stood out from the crowd: long, spiky hair, and a penchant for borrowing his girlfriend’s clothes. His style was extreme. “He had high-heeled boots, velvet jackets and pants, bowling gear,” says Heartbreaker Walter Lure. “I’d see him at all the shows – mostly the British bands, as opposed to the Grateful Deads and Jefferson Airplanes – so I’d seen him around for years. Then when the Dolls started happening I said: ‘Holy shit! There’s that guy.’”
Looking For Johnny, The Legend of Johnny Thunders.
Directed by Danny Garcia (The Rise and Fall of The Clash), Looking For Johnny is the definitive documentary on New York legendary guitar
It’s about an hour before Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers play Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre for what may be the last time. Backstage, Petty is in his dressing room putting on a frontier rebel’s headdress to fight the chill. Keyboardist Benmont Tench is tweeting about the sad state of our country under Donald Trump. Bassist RonBlair has battled stage fright for years since rejoining the Heartbreakers in 2002, after a 20-year sanity break. He wanders into Tom Petty’s dressing room and cops to something you’re not likely to admit to your bandleader unless you’ve known him for 40 years. “I’m kinda nervous, you know,” says Blair in a quiet voice.
Petty rarely describes himself as the leader of his band, but as “the older brother they sometimes have to listen to.” Tonight, he gives Blair some fatherly assurance and a toothy Southern smile: “Let me be nervous for you.”
The band takes the stage and blows through “Rockin’ Around (With You),” the first song on its self-titled first album, from 1976. Petty ends the next few songs strumming in front of the drum set, trading man-crush smiles with drummer Steve Ferrone (Tench jokes, “They should get a room”). Petty even grins through a joyous version of “Walls,” from 1996’s She’s the One, an album he’s complained about for nearly 20 years.
And then there’s a flash of lightning. Rain pours down. The Heartbreakers are shooed into the catacombs of Red Rocks, and 9,000 fans head for cover.
As the bandmates wait out the rain, Petty asks if they want to add their 1999 song “Swingin'” to the second half of the set. Everyone agrees: They do. The Heartbreakers aren’t a democracy, but more of a benevolent dictatorship. This is true when it comes to the set list. “We can make suggestions,” says Tench with a wry smile. “Sometimes they’re even accepted.”
After 20 minutes, the Heartbreakers retake the stage. They play “Swingin’,” which has a chorus where Petty lists icons who “went down swinging,” including Sonny Liston and Sammy Davis. Tench, who sings with Petty on the song, switches it up. Epstein provided the beautiful high harmonies on the record, so Tench sneaks in a tribute to his departed friend: “He went down swingin’/Just like Howie Epstein.”
Petty is supposed to do some acoustic numbers from Wildflowers,his 1994 solo album. There’s just one problem: His guitar is dead, soaked by the rain. There’s confusion and uncertainty on the band mates’ faces for a moment, like it’s a 1975 show at a honky-tonk in Gainesville. Then Petty and Campbell shout across the stage, “Ben, play something!”
Tench, the best keyboardist in American rock, breaks into a pastiche of boogie-woogie, a homage to pianist Pete Johnson. The group chimes in, not quite in sync, until Petty switches to Chuck Berry’s “Carol.” The Heartbreakers fall in line, sounding like the best bar band you don’t want to tell your friends about.
They encore with “American Girl.” The bandmates take a bow, wiping sweat and rain off their faces. Everyone exits, but Petty seems reluctant to leave. He takes a few steps toward the front of the stage and gives a last wave.
One word Petty and the band never mention: retirement. Petty still goes into his Malibu home office to write songs right across from his home studio. He’s mostly a homebody, rarely even venturing the 45 minutes into Los Angeles unless it’s to see his two daughters and his young granddaughter. There was a Mudcrutch tour last year and a turn producing a record for former Byrds bassist Chris Hillman. The Heartbreakers will record again and play live in some capacity. After 40 years, it would be surprising if there weren’t a few regrets. “Howie should’ve gotten some lead on a record,” Tench says of Epstein. “He should’ve produced a record for the Heartbreakers. I would’ve loved that.” Then he shrugs. “But I’m not in charge.”
There’s been a valedictory feel to the Heartbreakers‘ 40th-anniversary tour, which Petty says is the band’s final country-spanning run – the “last big one.” Everyone else is a bit skeptical. “I’ve been hearing that for 15 years,” says guitarist and original Heartbreaker Mike Campbell. “We’ll see.”
The crowds are still there, something Petty is clearly proud of when we sit down in a hotel room on an off day. To be honest, he looks more jittery offstage than on. This may be because he is chain-smoking, alternating between Marlboros and vaping, perhaps as a concession to the Denver Ritz-Carlton’s smoking policy.
Petty says sleep is now his friend. “I need a new Netflix show, does anyone have any suggestions?” he asks just before his assistant ducks out of the room. Someone suggests Bloodline, a noirish series set in his native Florida.
Petty is defiant about the hyper pace of the tour, which hits 30 cities this spring and summer. “Unless you’ve done it, you can’t understand what it is,” says Petty, brushing his scarecrow hair out of his face. “And if you’re not really experienced, you will fall.”
What keeps the Heartbreakers together is simple: The band has been their life since 1976. BenjaminMontmorency Tench III, was a prep-school kid and piano prodigy. Tench wears suits and went to Exeter, but he’s the fiery one. In the Peter Bogdanovich documentary on the Heartbreakers, 2007’s Runnin’ Down a Dream, Tench can be heard screaming at his bandmates to take things seriously. His nickname is Mad Dog. When Tench used to go on one of his tirades, a roadie would slide a dog bowl of water under his piano.
Petty, Campbell and Tench formed the nucleus of the band Mudcrutch, which morphed into the Heartbreakers in 1976, after adding San Diego native Blair on bass and Stan Lynch on drums. Blair fried out and bailed in 1982. He opened a bikini shop in the Valley and was replaced by Howie Epstein, but the band loomed in his subconscious. “I’d dream I’d be walking to the stage, and be like, ‘I don’t know “Mary Jane’s LastDance,”‘ recalls Blair. “I had half a dozen of those nightmares, so I started learning those songs so I could get a night’s sleep.”
This proved fortuitous when Epstein died of heroin-related complications in 2003. “I don’t think the band continues without Ron,” Tench tells me. “Bringing in someone new wouldn’t have worked.”
“About 20 years ago, we stopped doing soundchecks,” says Petty. “It eats up the whole day and we’d argue, and then you’d come back and the sound would be completely different with a crowd.”
The other game-changer was Dylan. By 1986, the band had toured relentlessly for a decade. Off the road, everyone was a mess – some members dealing with substance issues, some just dealing with real life. “The road and the studio are the only places I’ve ever felt completely OK,” says Petty, lighting another Marlboro. “In any other life situation I’m terribly retarded.” Petty got a call from Dylan asking if the band would back him on a tour. Petty raced out a “hell, yes.” Watching footage, you can see him smiling his head off, ecstatic to not be leading the show. The experience taught him how to be inthe Heartbreakers, not just lead them. “That’s when we learned how to really be a band,” says Petty.
One word Petty and the band never mention: retirement. Petty still goes into his Malibu home office to write songs right across from his home studio. He’s mostly a homebody, rarely even venturing the 45 minutes into Los Angeles unless it’s to see his two daughters and his young granddaughter. There was a Mudcrutch tour last year and a turn producing a record for former Byrds bassist Chris Hillman. The Heartbreakers will record again and play live in some capacity. After 40 years, it would be surprising if there weren’t a few regrets. “Howie should’ve gotten some lead on a record,” Tench says of Epstein. “He should’ve produced a record for the Heartbreakers. I would’ve loved that.” Then he shrugs. “But I’m not in charge.”
Writing a great song is tricky enough, but writing a standout duet is an even more difficult bit of business than that. After all, you have to make room for two contrasting perspectives without pulling the song apart at the seams in the process. And, since the majority of duets are inter-gender, you have to be able to write believably for the opposite sex.
Most people would agree that Tom Petty pulled off one of the great duets in rock history when he penned “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” and joined Stevie Nicks on the justly celebrated recording. The only problem with that story is that the song wasn’t meant to be a duet at all.
As Petty recalled to author Paul Zollo in the book Conversations With Tom Petty, the Fleetwood Mac chanteuse was enamored with his music and wanted him to write a song for her. “Stevie came to me around ’78,” he said. “And she was this absolutely stoned-gone, huge fan. And it was her mission in life that I should write her a song. And we were a little wary of Stevie. We didn’t quite know whether to like Stevie or not, because we kind of saw this big corporate rock band, Fleetwood Mac, which was wrong, they were actually artistic people. But in those days, nobody trusted that sort of thing and we just kept thinking, ‘What does she want from us?’”
Nicks was persistent and Petty eventually attempted a song for Nicks to be included on her first solo album. He wrote a ballad called “Insider,” but when the two sang it together, Petty liked it so much he decided to keep it for himself. He included it on The Heartbreakers’ 1981 album Hard Promises, even using a line from the song to give the album its name.
At the time that this was occurring, Jimmy Iovine, who was Petty’s producer and also was lined up to produce Nicks’ album Bella Donna, asked Tom about another song from the Hard Promises sessions with lyrics by Petty and music by Heartbreaker guitarist Mike Campbell. The Heartbreakers (with Donald “Duck” Dunn filling in for the band’s usual bassist Ron Blair) had finished “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” right down to Petty’s lead vocal, but Iovine persuaded him to give this track to Nicks after he had taken “Insider” back.
As a result, what you hear in the recording that became a #3 Billboard hit in 1981 is Nicks singing on top of the Heartbreakers recording. In the verses, Petty’s vocals, with the exception of a couple lines, were wiped away to make room for Nicks. To keep up the appearance of a duet, Nicks sang with Petty’s vocal in the refrain, actually taking the high harmony part since Petty already had the main vocal line covered.
The funny thing is that the song works better as a duet. It’s got a typically sturdy Heartbreakers foundation, featuring Campbell’s moaning guitar and Benmont Tench’s creeping keyboard. Nicks is right at home in this bluesy backdrop, imbuing Petty’s conversational lyrics with oodles of fiery attitude and a tinge of genuine hurt. “This doesn’t have to be the big get even,” she warns the guy who comes “knocking on my front door” with the “same old line.” “It doesn’t have to be anything at all.”
Having Nicks take the lead puts an interesting spin on the cautionary lines from the final verses (“Make a meal of some bright-eyed kid/ You need someone looking after you.”) Normally this would be the thing that the older guy would say to the young girl, maybe even in condescending fashion. Since it’s the woman making that statement, it levels the playing field. The guy is reduced to telling her that he’s onto the fact that, though she might be protesting at the moment, she’s the one who’s making the decision to leave: “I know you really want to tell me goodbye/ I know you really want to be your own girl.”
Petty’s lyrics are stinging and evocative in the run up to the refrain: “Baby you could never look me in the eye/ Yeah you buckle with the weight of the words.” The play on the phrase “weight of the world” is telling, because that’s the kind of pressure this fading relationship seems to be exerting on the principals. It all leads up to the title’s desperate plea for mercy, Petty and Nicks both going to the top of their registers to highlight the urgency, “Stop draggin’ my/ Stop draggin’ my/ Stop draggin’ my heart around.”
There are so many tantalizing hypothetical scenarios here. Would Petty’s solo vocal take have become quite as big a hit? Would Nicks have taken the intensely personal “Insider” and made it universal as well? As always, fate has the final answer. And the answer is that, to reach its full potential, “Stop Draggin My Heart Around” simply needed two to tango.
THREE DISC BROADCAST COLLECTION DISC 1 – The Coliseum, Jacksonville, FL, 24th July 1987
DISC TWO Deans Dome, Chapel Hill, NC, 13th September 1989 DISC 3 – RARE TV BROADCASTS 1978 – 1994
This three disc set adds to Tom Petty’s body of work by making available in one collection these broadcast recordings from the live canon of one of Pop & Rock music’s most respected and successful performers
His first album hit the streets in 1976 and initially its arrival caused few heads to turn. Music fans were confused; were these a bunch of punks or 1960s revivalists with a liking for Gene Clark era Byrds? Fortunately, as is so often the case, the UK seemed to ‘get it’ pretty soon after the record s release there and it reached #24 on the British chart. News traveled West, and a full year after the home turf release Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers entered the Billboard chart. Shortly thereafter second album You’re Gonna Get It! was released, and became a hit right away. The rest, as they say, is history. But it s relatively recent history about which any number of books, films and of course superlative albums are readily available for students of this remarkable performer to delve into. What a fantastic release! Three CDs of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers live and at their very best. Good sound quality and some of their best material
ARecord Store Dayrelease on multi-coloured vinyl of the classic live album, with the rarely heard Volume 2 added for the first time on vinyl.
Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan formed the Heartbreakers out of the ashes of the New York Dolls in 1975. Gaining infamy in London touring with the Sex Pistols on the Anarchy tour of ’76, they went on to produce just one album, the classic ‘L.A.M.F.’ in 1977.
The Heartbreakers split up When Track Records folded early in 1978. But in the fall of ’78, Johnny Thunders,Billy Rath and Walter Lure found themselves in New York and decided to do a couple of gigs for ‘old times sake’ and some ‘chump change’. Jerry had moved on to play with The Idols and Sid Vicious, so they got together with drummer Ty Styx for some farewell gigs at Max’s Kansas City. The resulting album was issued in 1979 on Max’s Kansas City Records in the US and Beggars Banquet in the UK.
It sold well, so Max’s Tommy Dean and Peter Crowley decided to record a Volume 2. A long weekend of shows was booked, this time with original drummer Jerry Nolan, but ‘chemical imbalances’ ruined all but half of the last show. Beggars turned down the tapes, and Volume 2 remained unreleased, appearing only briefly on CD in the mid-90’s.
Now for the first time, both volumes are brought together on double-vinyl, in a Record Store Day release of limited, spattered red, yellow & black double vinyl. Disc 1 is the original 1978 live album and Disc 2 is Volume 2 recorded 1979 but unreleased until 1995 and never before on vinyl. The album comes in a gatefold sleeve with the original artwork, together with an insert with notes by Johnny Thunders’ biographer Nina Antonia.
VOLUME 1: Side One Intro, Milk Me, Chinese Rocks, Get Off The Phone, London, Take A Chance, One Track Mind. Side Two All By Myself, Let Go, I Love You, Can’t Keep My Eyes On You, I Wanna Be Loved, Do You Love Me. VOLUME 2: Side Three All By Myself, Pirate Love, Too Much Junkie Business. Side Four Don’t Mess With Cupid, So Alone.
1977 TOM PETTY BROADCAST FROM MY FATHER S PLACE, NEW YORK, PLUS TWO BONUS TRACKS After gaining local popularity in Gainesville, Florida with his band Mudcrutch, Tom Petty hooked up with The Heartbreakers (Mike Campbell, guitar; Benmont Tench, keyboards; Stan Lynch, drums; Ron Blair, bass), went to L.A., signed to Leon Russell s Shelter Records, and cut Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, the debut album released in 1976. Although Petty, as the primary singer and songwriter (and a solid rhythm guitarist), deserved top billing, The Heartbreakers (at the time causing some confusion as ex New York Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan in tandem with Television s Richard Hell were calling their new group the same name) were a great band in their own right, Campbell and Tench (also fine songwriters) in particular being much sought after session players.
Anyway, Petty and co. were unique in 1976 in that they didn t really have an image beyond being a really good 60s influenced (The Beatles and The Byrds most obviously) rock n roll band; while trends such as punk and new wave came and went, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers have always done their own thing. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers was a solid debut album that, like much of their consistently strong output, is primarily remembered for its singles: Breakdown , American Girl and Anything That s Rock N Roll . The group supported Nils Lofgren in Europe during the summer of 1977 but returned to the US for the fall and played a number of shows as headliners including the gig presented on this CD, on Long Island, New York at the famous My Father s Place venue on 29th November.
Largely pulling tracks form their debut and sophomore albums (You re Going To Get It would come out in May 1978) they also covered two 1960s classics in the form of Shout and Route 66 , alongside an early version of a song that wouldn t receive its studio album debut until the release of Southern Accents in 1985, the wonderfully titled Petty/Campbell composition Dogs on the Run . What this fine show, broadcast as it was on WMIR FM New York.
This CD illustrates nicely and to full effect is that while Tom and the Boys were largely influenced by the music of the previous decade they were not immune to the energy and dynamism of the punk and new wave genres then making waves in the UK, Europe and in New York, and this show reveals a unit as tight and punchy as any then knocking em dead at CBGB s or at London s Vortex club. Two bonus cuts included on this CD, also from a 1977 radio broadcast, but recorded earlier in the year at LA s Record Plant, are equally vital and make for a fine collection of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers live in the year of their emergence on the music scene.Now available on Amazon and only £7-99.good price and a great show.
Tom Petty is 64 years of age today here is a great clip of the band at Farm Aid in 1985 with the band playing “Refugee” so a big happy birthday to Tom….
Well, I'm dyslexic so writing about something I love: Music, might help but it's most likely just full of mistakes. That title is also lyrics from The Drones song called I Don't Want To Change. Oh, my name is William and thanks for having a look.
