Jim Phillips, a Santa Cruz native, is a graphic artist whose design work includes rock posters, skateboard decks and surfer T-shirts. Permanently settling in California in 1968 with his wife and new son, Phillips began designing for Bill Graham Presents and Family Dog, where he later became Art Director. Phillips has always encouraged beginning artists, and he continues to paint surfer and skateboard art, designs the infrequent poster and collaborates on various projects with his artist son, Jimbo.
Jim Phillips, a Santa Cruz native, is a graphic artist whose design work includes rock posters, skateboard decks and surfer T-shirts. Permanently settling in California in 1968 with his wife and new son, Phillips began designing for Bill Graham Presents and Family Dog, where he later became Art Director. Phillips has always encouraged beginning artists, and he continues to paint surfer and skateboard art, designs the infrequent poster and collaborates on various projects with his artist son, Jimbo.
Designed by Jim Phillips, a Santa Cruz native, is a graphic artist whose design work includes rock posters, skateboard decks and surfer T-shirts. Permanently settling in California in 1968 with his wife and new son, Phillips began designing for Bill Graham Presents and Family Dog, where he later became Art Director. Phillips has always encouraged beginning artists, and he continues to paint surfer and skateboard art, designs the infrequent poster and collaborates on various projects with his artist son, Jimbo.
Live Broadcast Recording from Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s classic FILLMORE shows during the early 1990s they d been on a hiatus of sorts, but by 1995 Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had fully reunited to coincide with the release of their six CD Playback box set. After an extended tour, the band spent much of 1996 writing and recording the soundtrack album Songs And Music From “She’s The One”. While not one of their most successful records, it still produced three Top 20 hits while featuring appearances from Lindsey Buckingham, Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Carl Wilson. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers began 1997 with a staggering 20-date residency at The Fillmore in San Francisco, which ran from 10th January to 7th February. The final date of this extended run was deemed, in most quarters, one of the finest shows the group had ever performed, and was luckily recorded for live FM broadcast. Now included in its entirety on this triple CD box set for the first time, the show features a mix of hits, rarities and covers – including numbers originally by The Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Van Morrison, Booker T. And The MGs and a host of others – and includes too a guest appearance from blues legend John Lee Hooker, who joins the band as lead vocalist for three of his own songs.
you play guitar, you’ve likely strummed “Learning to Fly.” And if you’ve driven a car while celebrating some achievement or another, you’ve almost certainly belted out “Free Fallin’” at the top of your lungs as you drummed the steering wheel, just like Tom Cruise in that indelible scene from “Jerry Maguire.”
That’s how widely the music of Tom Petty reached over the course of his decades-long career, which came to an unexpected close when this most universally beloved of classic rockers died at age 66 after he suffered cardiac arrest at his home in Malibu this year most tragic loss.
The singer, guitarist and songwriter — who thrilled tens of thousands of fans just months earlier in an acclaimed three-night stand at the Hollywood Bowl with his longtime backing band, the Heartbreakers perhaps Petty was the quintessential American rock star, with an iconic shades-and-long-hair look, a nasal voice gloriously unsuited to any other genre and a seemingly bottomless bag of tunes that felt as though he’d written them to soundtrack the specifics of your life.
Petty even had a song from his stripped-down 1994 solo album “Wildflowers” — about how hard it is to explain your feelings to another person, despite the fact that that’s precisely what his music did for a diverse audience that spanned generations and encompassed folks from various walks of life. In his typical plainspoken fashion, he called the tune “You Don’t Know How It Feels.”
Born and raised in Florida, where he started out with the band Mudcrutch, Petty didn’t take long to hit his stride after he moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s and relaunched Mudcrutch as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The group’s self-titled debut, released in 1976, contained two of his most enduring songs in “American Girl” and “Breakdown” both of which showcased his ability to synthesize the music of his influences from Little Richard to Elvis Presley to the Beatles to Johnny Cash — in original material as catchy as it was emotionally legible.
“She was an American Girl raised on promises,” he sang over a jittery yet irresistible groove, “She couldn’t help thinking that there was a little more life somewhere else.”
Three years later, the Heartbreakers found commercial success to match their easy likability with 1979’s “Damn the Torpedoes,” which sold millions and spawned additional rock radio staples like “Refugee” and “Don’t Do Me Like That.”
Petty himself became a sharp-featured heartthrob in 1981 when he duetted with Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac in “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” a tune Nicks famously swiped from Petty for her first solo album, “Bella Donna.”
Yet if Petty burned bright from the beginning, he maintained a consistency over the next couple of decades . His continued relevance derived in part from Petty’s facility for the then-emerging art of music video; some of the singer’s elaborately designed clips, such as those for “Don’t Come Around Here No More” (a creepy riff on “Alice in Wonderland”) and “Free Fallin’” (with its swooping crane shot over Ventura Boulevard) are still among the most recognizable of the MTV era.
He also knew how to adapt his music to reflect the shifting sound of rock, whether it was emphasizing BenmontTench’s eerie synth lick in “You Got Lucky” or building “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” around a heavy, low-slung beat Petty’s stint at the Bowl wrapped up a long tour meant to celebrate the Heartbreakers’ 40 years together. But in addition to the classics he did every night, Petty routinely played “Forgotten Man,” a noisy portrait of a guy in pain from his most recent album, 2014’s “Hypnotic Eye.” It was just one of the vivid tunes Petty wrote and recorded years after many in his position would’ve stopped searching for inspiration.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers perform Room at the Top and Swingin’ on Later… with Jools Holland in 2009
Compared with recent Super Bowl halftime shows, Tom Petty’s appearance at Super Bowl XLII was a fairly low-key affair. It was enough that he ran through “American Girl,” “I Won’t Back Down,” “Free Fallin’” and “Runnin’ Down a Dream” in a performance that lasted 12 minutes and left everybody Googling for more.
Petty kicked things off with “American Girl,” a 1976 song from the Heartbreakers self-titled debut album. It’s a song that just doesn’t age. He followed that up with the aggressive “Won’t Back Down,” from 1989’s “Full Moon Fever.” Next up was “Free Fallin’,” probably the top commercial single song Petty ever produced, also from “Full Moon Fever.” Then the rocker and his band capped it off with a rousing performance of “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” the third straight song from “Full Moon Fever” to close out a strong four-song performance.
The 2008 game in Glendale, Arizona., was memorable for other things, such as the New England Patriots’ bid for a 19-0 season falling short and David Tyree’s miraculous catch for the New York Giants. Against that backdrop, it’s easy to forget that TomPetty and the Heartbreakers delivered a great show, hitting on some of his best material.
0:15 – American Girl 3:29 – I Won’t Back Down 5:54 – Free Fallin’ 9:19 – Runnin’ Down a Dream
“The Last DJ” is the eleventh studio album from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The tracks “The Last DJ”, “Money Becomes King”, The former is a bitter lament for the loss of free thought in pop culture, using the DJ as a truth-telling seer; the latter is a rewrite of “Into the Great Wide Open,” all about a favorite artist who sells out. Both are didactic with their tortured metaphors and stretched narratives, but they seem subtle compared to the fourth song, “Joe,” a heavy-handed tirade about a record company CEO that is unbearable as its awful, and “Can’t Stop the Sun” are attacks on the greediness of the music industry. These front-loaded tracks obscure the lovely “Dreamville,” the best song here.
Although he first claimed that the album and title track were both works of fiction, Petty later admitted that both were inspired by Los Angeles DJ Jim Ladd, although he had already claimed this on Ladd’s radio show, prior to the album’s release. The album also marks the return of original Heartbreaker Ron Blair on bass guitar, replacing his own replacement, the ailing Howie Epstein. His return was late in the recording process however, and Petty and Campbell contributed most of the bass work themselves.
In an episode of The Simpsons titled “How I Spent My Strummer Vacation”, Homer receives song-writing lessons from Tom Petty, and in the original airing the track “The Last DJ” can be heard playing over the radio in the final scene. The song “Dreamville” is played at the end of the DVD that was released to commemorate the 2002 Anaheim Angels’ World Series win.
A “limited edition” digipack version of the album was also released, including a DVD of music videos and other footage shot during the album’s production.
American musician Tom Petty died on October 2nd, 2017 in California aged 66, says a statement issued on behalf of his family. Petty was found unconscious, not breathing and in full cardiac arrest at his Malibu home early on Monday. He was taken to hospital, but could not be revived and died later that evening. Petty was best known as the lead singer of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers rock band, producing such hits as American Girl, Breakdown,Free Fallin’, Learning to Fly and Refugee. “He died peacefully at 20.40 Pacific time (03.40 GMT Tuesday) surrounded by family, his bandmates and friends,” said his long-time manager Tony Dimitriades. Petty and the band were on the forefront of the heartland rock movement, alongside artists such as Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger. The genre eschews the synthesizer-based music and fashion elements. Petty was also a co-founder of the Traveling Wilburys group in the late 1980s, touring with Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Jeff Lynne and GeorgeHarrison. “It’s shocking, crushing news,” said Dylan, according to the Los Angeles Times. “I thought the world of Tom. He was great performer, full of the light, a friend, and I’ll never forget him.” Petty also found solo success in 1989 with his album Full Moon Fever, which featured one of his most popular songs Free Fallin’, co-written with Jeff Lynne. In 2002, Petty was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers The Record Plant, Sausalito April 23, 1977. Very good to excellent WXRT FM broadcast. Originally broadcast over KSAN Radio. With Byrd’s riffs and Stones swagger, Tom Petty & TheHeartbreakers burst onto the scene in ’76 blending British invasion, US garage rock with the urgency & vibrancy of current new wave bands. This is one of their earliest radio shows broadcast by KSAN-FM from the Record Plant, Sausalito on April 23rd 1977. Captures the band ripping through their current set in front of a small audience in remastered sound quality. Original performance on LP (“Tearjerker” bootleg) .
Surrender 3:10
Jaguar And The Thunderbird 2:49
American Girl 5:20
Fooled Again (I don’t like it) 5:35
Luna 4:42
Listen To Her Heart 3:13
I Need To Know 2:36
Strangered In The Night 4:12
Dogs On The Run 10:25
Route 66 3:50
Tom Petty – guitar, vocals Mike Campbell – guitar Benmont Tench – keyboards Ron Blair – bass Stan Lynch – drums Guest. Al Kooper
Classic ALABAMA BROADCAST Recording from 1995 – Presented across 2 CDS By the beginning of the 1990s, with their MCA contract coming to an end, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers were proving as popular as ever they were. 1991 s Into The Great Wide Open was received warmly by critics and fans alike, and their 1993 Greatest Hits album sold in excess of 10 million copies. Now signed to Warner Bros., the group – sans original drummer Stan Lynch – teamed up with producer Rick Rubin to record Wildflowers, released on 1st November 1994. The album sold over three million copies and produced the Top 20 single You Don t Know How It Feels . To support this latest release, the band embarked on an extensive tour of North America, playing over 90 dates that year. The recording featured on this two disc set is taken from their performance at The Coleman Coliseum in Tuscaloosa, AL on 6th October 1995, a show recorded for FM radio broadcast nationwide in exceptional audio quality. Containing hits from across their entire catalogue – including You Don t Know How It Feels , Free Fallin , Don t Come Around Here No More and American Girl – this CD is sure to become a must-have live album for Tom Petty fans everywhere.
Initially following its release, the album received little attention in the United States. But Following a U/K tour, it climbed up the UK album chart and the single “Anything That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll” became a hit in the UK. After nearly a year and many positive reviews, the album reached the U.S. charts, and eventually went Gold.
It’s a great American rock album with beautifully constructed songs and a passionate vocal from Tom Petty.
It runs in at a little over 1/2 an hour so it is slightly short by today’s standards but the music there in is wonderful.
Before I mention the songs individually , I should say that there isn’t the searing guitar overload of a live performance, in that the solos are short and not as stand-out in the mix.
Live, there was more emphasis on soloing but the songs are rock ‘n’ roll works of art and this is an album that you can’t tire of. Luna, is a beautiful ballad, is my favourite song of the album and I would say that it is a unique song , part blues, part lullaby , with a beautiful organ melody that you’ll never forget.
huge anthemic track American Girl is a joy and the guitar solo at the end is a piece of magic, The Wild One Forever and Mystery Man are beautiful , gentle songs with melodies to die for.
Throw in Fooled Again, Breakdown and Strangered in the Night et.al. and you have one of the best albums ever made. Wonderful stuff !.
The singles “Breakdown” and “American Girl” became an FM radio tracks that can still be heard today.
The album was recorded and mixed at the Shelter Studio, Hollywood, California.
The Fat Angel Sings 