I’ve spent the last couple of months doing an album by album listen of Tom Petty’s catalogue solo, with the Heartbreakers, with Mudcrutch, and the Wilburys. I also rewatched the excellent 4+ hours Runnin Down A Dream documentary, and the less good but still fun to watch Heartbreakers Beach Party. Finally, I spent time with live clips online - there is a lot including some great, whole concerts from the early years and Grey Whistle Test etc performances.
Petty was important to me in my musical ‘journey’. A friend lent me one of his records when I was 12-13 and it became my route into the Byrds and from there Dylan. I only saw him live three times, including on the Bob Dylan/Tom Petty/Roger McGuinn tour. He was in excellent form on the Into The Great Wide Open tour even at the ghastly Forest National venue in Brussels (there is a live video from that tour on YouTube, let down a bit by the “MTV style” camera work)
One of my 2 or 3 big concert regrets is not going to see him at Hyde Park. I’d heard so many bad things about bad sound quality at those concerts, I decided to give it a miss. I think it was the last UK concert he played before he died.
There were no major surprises revisiting all of his recordings. He was consistently strong across the years. Although I would struggle to recommend The Last DJ, Mojo and Let Me Up to many, even they contain good songs. I prefer the Angel Dreams album to She’s The One. And some of the 2000s albums needed to be quite a bit shorter. The various Wildflowers albums and outtakes are excellent.
He has also been well served by box sets. Playback is excellent as is the Live Anthology. And Live At Fillmore Set is great fun.
My top ten Petty albums are:
Wildflowers
Damn The Torpedoes
Full Moon Fever
Into the Great Wide Open
Hard Promises
She’s The One / Angel Dreams
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
Echo
Hypnotic Eye
Southern Accents
Thoughts? Does he get the credit and attention he deserves or he is just too “Dad rock”?
(the only previous thread I could find was the RIP one and so I started a new one because I didn’t want people to think someone else from the Heartbreakers had passed).
Adore the man. The Heartbreakers were such a well-oiled machine, with long running guitarist Mike Campbell, phenomenal live. First concert I ever saw when I was 14 years old was Petty and Heartbreakers on the Dogs with Wings Tour in New Haven, CT with the Jayhawks opening. Here’s the setlist:
The man knew how to write a hit and get a hook out of a song. He can be pure in your face rock and roll man, soft balladeer, heartland rock. It’s his 3 solo records (with some scattered musicians from the Heartbreakers here there) that I always come back to the most. Wildflowers, Full Moon Fever, and Highway Companion.
Some favorites, countless others:
Although, I’ve never seen the movie (never will) the She’s the One soundtrack he does is severely underrated as well. Only one I don’t really go back to all that much is Echo (mainly because this was his heroin phase/album and a lot of it hits to close to home on the addiction front).
But yeah, I have a lot of time for Petty, love the man.
Quickly became my favourite music memoir and I’ve read A LOT! So humble yet entertaining. Absolutely loved it and like a great novel, miss the characters now that it’s over. I’ve ended up listening to loads of podcast interviews with Mike in its wake just to keep hearing more stories.
