The Tom Petty songs that were “too good” not to release
Tom Petty was no stranger to making the kind of perfect rock and roll tunes that people wanted to hear.
He may have had a retro aesthetic even when he debuted, but judging by all of his albums, there were never that many times when he completely struck out when he walked into the studio. He could always whip any song into shape when he needed to, but even his label knew it shouldn’t have been sitting on the shelf.
Looking at the amount of magical tunes that he put out during his time, it’s clear that Petty never half-assed any of the songs that he worked on. ‘Casa Dega’ is one of the best ballads that he ever made that got relegated to a B-side, and while there would be the occasional one-off single that struck a nerve like ‘Peace in LA’, the fact that a song as lighthearted and stupid as ‘Girl on LSD’ is actually still pretty decent by his standards is the kind of magic most artists wish they could be working with.
But by the time that Petty had entered his solo career, he had begun to tap into material that seemed reserved for the true legends. Full Moon Fever may have been rejected by his record company initially for not having singles, but judging by how half the record reads like a greatest hits collection, it’s no wonder that the heartland rocker figured it was better to take his music to where it would be better appreciated.
After moving from MCA and Warner Bros, though, people had to be wondering if Petty had anything else to say. Not many artists that are in the business for as long as he was usually put out any classic material this late in the game, but when talking about Petty’s mentality during the Wildflowers session, Rick Rubin remembered him saying that the material was so good that it almost scared him.
A lot of that could have been him grappling with his marriage slowly falling apart, but when he first looked at the material he had piled up, it was enough for a double album of material. That kind of announcement could have easily been mainstream poison if he released the record as it was in the 1990s, but when he first started putting together a box set of the music that he had piled up from those sessions, his label had other plans than the typical compilation album.
Despite much of the second half of the record ending up on the soundtrack to She’s the One, the label told Petty that both sets of songs deserved to be released in the way it was originally intended, saying, “The original plan was to release it as as the complete Wildflowers album with the original album and this. And Warner Bros. came back to us and said, ‘Look, this is far too good a record to just send straight to the catalog racks. We’re going to put it out as its own album.’ I was behind that decision too.”
And if taken with the original album, Wildflowers and All the Rest is a much more compelling listen with the other songs. Tunes like ‘California’ and ‘Hung Up and Overdue’ felt like they were always to be a part of the record, and even when the demos like ‘Harry Green’ got fleshed it out, it only served to add a little bit more character to the songs rather than detracting from what he originally had.
It’s not exactly hard to see why Petty made the decision to trim it down back in the day, but the newest version is far more than a simple reissue. This was always a family of songs from the day that they took shape in the studio, and even if it took a while for all of them to fit under one roof, it did make for one of the best albums that Petty ever released.
