The shows Tom Petty called the highlight of his career
The best way to see a band in their element is by watching them perform live onstage. Even though artists might like to tear it up whenever they enter the studio, the idea of a live band cutting loose onstage provides a rush of adrenaline that no other experience can equal. Although Tom Petty may have refined the sonics of his records on his solo material, he still thought that one run of shows was among his career high points.
Then again, Petty was slowly moving away from the traditional record-making method. Although the days of Damn the Torpedoes focused on the band getting a performance from top to bottom, Petty began to think about performance in a completely different way when working with Jeff Lynne.
Having worked with Lynne in the Traveling Wilburys, Petty thought it was so much fun using the ELO frontman’s approach to production, which involved building a track from the ground up rather than having everyone play together. Although The Heartbreakers weren’t as thrilled with the approach when working on Into the Great Wide Open, Wildflowers marked the moment when the live performance came back into the fold.
With the help of Rick Rubin, Petty began to capture the spontaneity that came from his early years, crafting songs that cut closer to the bone, like ‘Crawling Back To You’ and ‘It’s Good To Be King’. While most of the solo outing would be completed without the help of original drummer Stan Lynch, Petty thought that the next tour would have to live up to what he had done in the studio.
Throughout the Wildflowers tour, Petty played select shows at The Fillmore, featuring various material coming and going during every show. Rather than the traditional promotional setlist, much of the songs comprised different material the band would play in their glory days, where deep cuts like ‘California’ stood alongside bluesy covers like ‘Call Me The Breeze’.
When talking about the experience, Petty was confident that the shows would go down as one of the band’s career highs, stating, “We all feel this might be the high point of our time together as a group… It’s going to be hard to get us off this stage tonight”. The sentiment would be echoed years later by guitarist Mike Campbell, telling Ultimate Classic Rock, “It was one of the greatest parts of our career. We were free to not have to play the hits every night. We changed the songs and took some liberties with some of the arrangements here and there. I’m really glad we got that on tape”.
Since the band were flying blind for most of the gigs, it also made room for different experiments when playing live, including getting idols like Carl Perkins and Bo Diddley on stage with them for a select run of shows. Although the band were about to enter one of their darkest times going into the recording of their next studio album Echo, these Fillmore dates captured one of their happiest times as a group, riffing off each other and playing anything that would suit them.
