The shows that Tom Petty said were the best thing for the Heartbreakers: “We want to play”
Any band that has been in the game for a while needs to make sure things don’t start becoming stale. It’s important to challenge yourself at every turn, and even if it doesn’t work out, it’s easier to learn from those mistakes than have to worry about sounding too much of the same on every single project. While Tom Petty would often take hold of the Heartbreakers on any new venture they went down, he had to admit that there was no better way to show their stuff than on the live stage.
After all, Petty got his start playing onstage, and he knew that the measure of any good rock and roll band was their ability to show their stuff in front of an audience. Especially during the era when punk rock was dominating every single club and underground radio station, the Heartbreakers were almost an anomaly, considering how much they had worked on some of their Byrds haircuts and Rolling Stones-style guitar riffs.
By the time they reached the 1990s, the Heartbreakers had two different sides to themselves. Petty had already begun road-testing the sounds that he had made on epics like Southern Accents, but after getting finished with Full Moon Fever, he knew that there was much more to offer than the live show. The studio was a place for creating textures, and when he hooked up with Rick Rubin, he finally found a way to bring both mediums together.
Despite Wildflowers feeling like a studio record, there were always subtle hints of what the band could do when they worked together, like Benmont Tench’s piano break on ‘To Find a Friend’ or the sound of all of them cutting loose when working out the basis of ‘Honey Bee.’ Even up until the end of his life, Petty always confessed that Wildflowers was the best Heartbreakers album they ever made despite being technically his solo album.
But the measure of any of those songs was only going to work once they played them live, and their shows at the Fillmore offered them the perfect place to hone their chops. They could have as many takes as they wanted in the studio, but this was when they could actually present a tune like ‘You Don’t Know How It Feels’ in all its glory or turn ‘You Wreck Me’ into the massive rave-up tune that it was always destined to be.
“We’ve made so many records in the past five years, I think the best thing for us to do is just go out and play.”
tom petty
Leading up to the shows, Petty thought that this was the optimal way for the Heartbreakers to stay together as a unit, saying, “We want to get back to what we understand. We’re musicians, and it’s a life we understand. If we went out on an arena tour right now, I don’t think we’d be real inspired. We’re musicians, and we want to play. We’ve made so many records in the past five years, I think the best thing for us to do is just go out and play, and it will lead us to our next place, wherever that may be.”
And it’s easy to see why those stadium shows wouldn’t have worked. Something like Pack Up the Plantation may have had its moments like the massive stretch of the song ‘Shout,’ but the minute that people heard him in this more intimate setting and playing with artists like Carl Perkins made it more of a celebration of the band’s music rather than the standard rock and roll show.
But even with all of the bells and whistles removed, none of the songs ever lost the magic of those early years. No matter how many times they played ‘American Girl’ or worked out a new version of ‘Free Fallin,’ everyone could hear the kids from Gainsville in those songs who were still hungry to push themselves.
