Album of the Week
Let's hear it for the band! Though live albums are often given short shrift as afterthoughts, career stopgaps or greatest-hits releases with applause, this labor of love represents a four-disc legacy that builds a strong case for the Heartbreakers as America's premier rock ‘n roll classicists--bar band, arena band, whatever's in between--for more than a quarter century.
Here, Tom Petty serves not so much as a frontman but as a bandleader and rhythm guitarist, one who recognizes just how blessed he has been to be flanked for all these decades by lead guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench. Campbell has been as crucial to the sound and dynamic of the Heartbreakers as Keith Richards is to the Rolling Stones, while Tench, too soft-spoken to make the claim for himself, is the Booker T. Jones of his musical generation. (Or maybe the McCoy Tyner of rock.)
This set snuck under the Christmas tree with comparatively little fanfare as a present to true fans, who recognize that the Heartbreakers are a concert band above all else, despite Petty's considerable success with studio hits. Rather than the more typical live set that presents a single concert or two to stand for them all, Petty reportedly sifted through mountains of tape, searching for the best recording of the concert staples, interspersed with more than a smattering of the obscurities and cover versions that have long distinguished the band's live performances.
The results are priceless, but Petty has put a price tag on the package that encourages buying the whole thing rather than settling for digital downloads--$25 list for the 47 cuts and accompanying annotation (widely available for as little as $18). Collectors can (as collectors will) opt to pay a couple hundred bucks for a deluxe set, with a fifth CD and some video performances, but the standard bargain package is designed to satisfy as many listeners as possible.
The set should provide plenty of revelation even for diehard fans. As with a concert, the set list begins and ends with crowd-pleasing hits on discs one ("Even the Losers," "Here Comes My Girl," Refugee") and four ("I Won't Back Down," "Free Fallin'," "The Waiting"). Yet in between are performances that you might never suspect would be tour de force highlights just from scanning the list of selections.
Like "It's Good to Be King," which I'd always considered droll but minor Petty, but is here extended to more than twelve minutes, with musical interplay that justifies every second. Like the lesser-known "Melinda," which Mike Campbell's electric mandolin sends into the Twilight Zone, in complement with the stately piano of Benmont Tench.
Or like the transformation of "Mystic Eyes," which pays homage to the original version that Van Morrison cut with Them, but takes a turn toward the transcendence he would subsequently achieve in Astral Weeks and Moondance. Just compare with renditions of early Petty such as "American Girl" and the blitzkrieg tribute to the Dave Clark Five in "Any Way You Want It," and you can see how far this band has come, how much it has grown.
Yet as the performances skip back and forth across the decades, with the rhythm-section shifts in personnel (bassist Howie Epstein, RIP; drummer Stan Lynch, MIA), it all sounds so much of a piece that you realize how timeless is the musical dynamic of this five-man band. It helps that the hit that might have sounded most like a period piece, "Don't Come Around Here No More," is one of the few obvious omissions. Not only does the sequencing sustain continuity over the entirety of the set, but each disc is its own distinct entity--with a beginning, middle and end.
By disc four, the set feels like it has taken the listener on a journey, burning its way through the early adrenalin rush and raging hormones of "I'm a Man"--done as Petty and band first heard it, Yardbirds rave-up style--and the hunger of "Breakdown" to a grown-up brand of rock. Even "I Won't Back Down" sees quiet determination supplant youthful defiance, while the midtempo tenderness of "Crawling Back to You" and "Have Love Will Travel," the older but wiser "Square One," suggest the maturity of a band comfortable in its own skin.
The set builds as it must to "The Waiting," the song that marked a turning point in Petty's musical perspective and remains his best. And it ends as it should with "Alright for Now," a benediction, a lullaby, a prayer. There's a sense of wonder that a band and its music has come so far, ranged so wide, yet remained so true to itself.
