“Something magic”: Tom Petty on the best show he ever played
There’s no real formula for what constitutes a great rock and roll show. Even though some people might try their best to get by on the strength of the songs, there has to be that unknown element to a band getting up onstage that gets the audience to go wild every time they see them. Although Tom Petty usually only needed to play the hits to get the audience at his feet, he felt this controversial show was among the finest Heartbreakers events ever.
But listening through to the Heartbreakers throughout their tenure, they may as well have been a well-oiled machine. Half of them had been playing together since they were teenagers, and even when there were some lineup changes, having someone like Howie Epstein anchoring everything down must have been a godsend when they were working on albums like Southern Accents.
By the time Petty reached the 1990s, though, the Heartbreakers were more than a little bit disjointed. His solo album Full Moon Fever did nothing to impress the rest of the band, and even when they took the same approach to a full-band record on Into the Great Wide Open, the results felt a lot more mechanical than the rootsy rock and roll that they were used to.
If they wanted to get back to organic playing, Wildflowers was the best place to do it. Even though it’s a solo album in name, Petty always thought it was one of the greatest efforts the band made as a unit, but none of them were prepared for their long stint at The Fillmore. This was the kind of venue that artists only dream of playing in, but even when the band was locked in, they weren’t safe from a few rough patches.
Since Stan Lynch was gone behind the drumkit, Steve Ferrone remembered Petty showing him how to play the groove to the song ‘Breakdown’ backstage during one show on the tour minutes before they were due to go on. And even for an album heavily based on acoustic material, they weren’t safe from a few troublemakers in the crowd, including one show where the crowd had to be evacuated after someone lit off a can of pepper spray midway through the set.
Even though everything had to stop, Petty still considered that date to be one of the peaks of their powers, saying, “The pepper-spray show was probably the best show I’ve ever done. There was something incredibly magic about that show. I thought it probably had to cosmicly stop at that point, or something was gonna blow.”
Then again, most of Petty’s best moments have come from getting that euphoric reaction out of people. Even though it’s far from metal-show levels of heavy, seeing him break down a song like ‘Mystic Eyes’ by Van Morrison is downright shamanistic when listened to in context with the rest of his live material.
And since this was the record that had songs like ‘You Wreck Me’, it’s no wonder why fans flocked to hear what Petty was saying. This was an artist getting grittier in his old age, and even with grunge firmly in control, the heartland rocker could still prove to everyone why he was worth keeping around for a long time.
