Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers Play It All

Live at the Fillmore, 1997: Nuggets from a Reclaimed Garage Band

A song by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers nearly broke my heart.

October 15, 2022. My team, the Louisiana State University Tigers, had a comfortable 42-21, three touchdown lead, over the University of Florida Gators at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville, Fla., which is also Tom Petty's hometown. The stadium is also known as "The Swamp" and holds around 90,000.

The Swamp is not as dangerous as it once was; still, like LSU's own home field in Baton Rouge, known as "Death Valley," even a flawed team like Florida in recent years, especially in the fierce, competitive, Southeast Conference (SEC), can rise up to intimidate an opponent.

In football, a raucous and united home crowd is often known as "the 12th man." The Swamp's "12th man" is now Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and you can feel its power.

There's a new game in Gainesville, and it is this: after the third quarter, and before the fourth, everyone stands up and sings along to Petty's indomitable "I Won't Back Down." The whole song. The sound is loud and formidable even through the TV set. It sent shivers of fear through me. The fear was justified.

The first or second play of the fourth quarter, as I recall, right after "I Won't Back Down," Florida's Anthony Richardson ran for an 81 yard touchdown. LSU 42, Florida 28. Next possession, LSU could not move the ball against Florida's now stout defense. They really wouldn’t back down! LSU punt. Florida got the ball back and went on a time-consuming drive that ended with Trevor Etienne punching it in from the one-yard line. With extra point, 42-35. Dang! That Tom Petty mojo was working!

My team was spooked and needed an antidote to the hex. I went through my Spotify and "I still call it iTunes" libraries. The situation called for small batch Cajun and/or indigenous Baton Rouge music. I couldn't just put on Dr. John or Huey Smith or even Professor Longhair, all from New Orleans, and hope for the best. I went to the musical medicine chest for some "Geaux Tigers" brand elixir, used only in emergencies.

Poured on a little Balfa Freres, and Austin Pitre & the Evangeline Playboys. I needed just a little insurance, so with my iPad pointing at the TV set, threw in some Alphonse "Bois Sec" Ardoin with Caray Fontenot.

Finally, I reached for the Amédié Ardoin, the complete recordings, 1929-1934. This music sounds like it was recorded in a cemetery, with Ardoin moaning from the grave. The first time I heard Amédié Ardoin was after my mother died in Florida in August 2012. I came back down from New York and was cleaning up her condo and papers one night that fall when I read a gripping article about Ardoin by Amanda Petrusich, in the Oxford American. I downloaded his music and listened with the lights on until I fell asleep.

My potion worked. The LSU defense stiffened. LSU kicked a field goal, and won 45-35.

I was exhausted. This was painful, because I love Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. You never want to "unhex" this band, because it will wear you out. Anytime I went to a TP&HB concert and was spacing out before the show, thinking "another night at the office" and feeling disconnected, I realized: "Wait! It's a Tom Petty band concert, and they don't have any bad songs!"

Now that we're cleared that up that mess, I have been making my way through the most unusual concert album Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers Live at the Fillmore 1997. (Released Nov. 25, Warner Records.) There are 72 listed tracks, 58 songs and 14 brief spoken word introductions and comments by Petty, to give you the flavor of the shows. In addition to Petty, Mike Campbell (guitar), Benmont Tench (keyboards), and Howie Epstein, bass, (who died in 2003, heroin) it's my understanding that the band also included drummer Steve Ferrone and multi-instrumentalist Scott Thurston.

TP&HB were tired of the predictable setlists and intense focus required of the arena and stadium tours, and sought out a smaller venue with some benign musical vibes, the Fillmore in San Francisco. They played 20 shows in 30 days during that run; a subculture developed around those shows, in which the group sought to reclaim its small club, minimal set list, bar band roots.  

The set comes in all sorts of holiday-gift sized packages, from a two- or four CD set, three and six LP limited edition sets, and merch for every taste, from wearables to tote bags to coasters, to baseball cap to deck of cards.

I was spotted a download of what I think to be the full set, four hours of listening. There is a slower, kind of acoustic version of "I Won't Back Down," and other hits. But the jolt is mostly in the covers: One of the greatest bands of its era, just having fun playing songs they love for which they don't own the publishing. So refreshing.

When I say bar band covers, I mean "Louie Louie," and when was the last time you heard a fresh version of that? "Shakin' All Over," "High Heel Sneakers," "You Really Got Me," the latter a version that by design mimics the Kinks, rather than Van Halen-izing it. This was the music of every 1960s garage band that dreamed of the big time, which may have meant being the best band in your school, or recording a local single that might have been added to the jukebox of the town's bowling alley.

There are Rolling Stones' covers: An "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" that will give you a fresh buzz, and songs the Stones covered: Chuck Berry's "Around and Around," and Irma Thomas' "Time is on My Side," Bobby Womack's "It's All Over Now." There's Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," Little Richard's "Lucille" and "Rip It Up," the latter sounding like the version that baffled me when I heard it as a kid on The Fabulous Style of the Everly Brothers.

At the time, I was probably 10, I was quite the purist, and didn't understand covers until a few listens and realized the Everlys weren't competing with Little Richard's song, but completing it in a different way. They do Bo Diddley's "Diddy Wah Diddy" (best cover: Captain Beefheart's early Magic Band).

The two guests who performed blocks of songs with TP&HB are John Lee Hooker ("Serves You Right to Suffer" and an eight-minute "Boogie Chillun'" jam are just OK), and the fascinating appearance of Roger McGuinn.

If you remember the emergence of TP&HB, entering the crowded and starting-to-fragment music field of 1977-1978, the first reaction to songs like "American Girl" and "Breakdown" was: Hey, they sound like the Byrds. Petty, in fact, introduces Roger (nee Jim) McGuinn as "my mentor for so many years," and TP&HB become his backing band for a selection of Byrdsongs. They include "It Won't Be Long," Dylan's "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" (definitive version: the Byrds' "Sweetheart of the Rodeo"), and the stinging satirical McGuinn/Gram Parsons song "Drug Store TruckDrivin' Man," thought to be a slap at former Nashville disc jockey Ralph Emery, who did not care much for hippies, even if they played music that might otherwise hit his sweet spot. There's also "Eight Miles High," which sounds like the Byrds live, only better.

What about TP&HB's own songs? There are plenty of them too: a punkish "Jammin' Me," a slurry "American Girl." Long and very good: “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.”

There are a number of songs from Petty's Wildflowers (1994):  a great 12-minute "It's Good to be King," like Crazy Horse with cleaner solos, and deep tracks "Cabin Down Below," "You Wreck Me," "Honey Bee." For superfans, there is "Heartbreakers Beach Party," a crowd favorite, that originated as the B-side of the 1983 single "Change of Heart."

But I keep going back to the covers, because they are so good and often strange. There are movie themes: "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" (version credited to the Ventures, though composed by Richard Rodgers) and "Goldfinger." There are Booker T. and the MG's instrumentals, "Hip Hugger" and "Green Onions." There is a ten minute version of "Gloria," on which, according to an interview with Campbell in the San Francisco Chronicle, Petty would base his long narrative on what he had heard that afternoon in the hotel watching the "Sally Jessy Raphael" talk show.

But if there's one song I want to keep hearing, it's Petty and company doing Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Call Me the Breeze," written by J.J. Cale. On YouTube, the Skynyrd version features a Southern lady in a Confederate flag bikini. Skynyrd was from Jacksonville; in college football, they'd represent the in-state rivalry between Florida State and Florida. Not that it matters, but when Skynyrd's plane crashed in the Mississippi woods decimating the band in 1977, its destination was Baton Rouge.

That was Skynyrd, this is Petty. Petty and Campbell's guitars give way to a Tench piano solo, which was probably supposed to be shorter. But twice, Petty encourages Tench to keep going: "Let the boy play." It's just a great solo, and when the song is over, Petty crows proudly: "Benmont Tench and his unchained piano!"

The Petty video is animation, and it's all about the dream of getting on the highway and driving to California. Or heading South. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers went west, palm trees to palm trees. They got to live that dream, from the Sunshine State and its eccentricities and limitations, to the Golden State's eccentricities and opportunities. They battled bad record and management deals all the way: They wouldn't back down. They became the quintessential L.A.-based American band, played long and played well. (Petty died in 2017. Cardiac arrest/drug overdose. Malibu, Ca.) But for a month in 1997, they reclaimed their heart in San Francisco.