From about the mid-1980s onwards, Tom Petty’s output was defined by a frequently infuriating contradiction. While Petty and his Heartbreakers were (obviously) as fine and fierce a rock’n’roll band as had ever been assembled, Petty seemed peculiarly insistent on making records from which you wouldn’t necessarily know it. There was rarely much wrong with the songs, but the production grew increasingly glossy and decreasingly gritty. The Heartbreakers of their first three albums – that pugnacious, ferocious and glorious hybrid of the swaggering Southern swamp-boogie of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the fidgety, skittish, skinny-tied new wave of the Attractions – got harder and harder to hear.
But as this Brobdingnagian boxset splendidly demonstrates, they never really went away. In 1997, between January 10 and February 7, Petty and the Heartbreakers played 20 shows at San Francisco’s Fillmore, legendary tabernacle of 1960s rock. The conceit was that they’d be a house band for a month, dishing up hits, favourites and requests, maybe wheeling in a few guests (a significant difference between the Heartbreakers and the band soundtracking the buffet at the Ramada in Mudville is that Petty was able to call Roger McGuinn and John Lee Hooker). All this they did, and clearly had a total blast in the process – at the end of the run, Petty described it in an interview as “maybe the best time of our lives, really”. But whether deliberately or not, Petty and the Heartbreakers also commandeered the Fillmore as a sort of lecture hall in which they delivered an expansive lesson in the history of rock’n’roll and their own, not inconsequential place in it.
There was, obviously, no shortage of material from which a monument such as this boxset could be assembled – of which varying amounts are available in proportion to outlay. There are 33 songs on the 2CD/3LP edition, 58 on the 4CD/6LP variant. Most tracks in both packages are cover versions, visiting all points JJ Cale to The Rolling Stones, Little Richard to Bob Dylan, The Kinks to Booker T & The MGs, Bo Diddley to the Grateful Dead, The Zombies to The Kingsmen, The Stanley Brothers to The Byrds. There’s even a Bondtheme (“Goldfinger”, rendered as a Shadows-style surf-rock instrumental).
The Heartbreakers were clearly determined to lean all the way into the idea of undertaking a residency – thanks for coming out, we’re here all month, try the veal, etcetera. The covers are served up with a complete absence of the self-conscious fussiness that was somewhat infesting Petty’s own albums by this point. The rowdier tunes, beginning with the boxset’s opening track, Chuck Berry’s “Around And Around”, radiate the giddy joy of a garage band plugging in what they got for Christmas (it’s possibly even more primal than that: Petty introduces “You Are My Sunshine”, co-written by former Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis in 1940, as “a song I learned at camp”).
The slower and more soulful numbers, including a show-stopping take on Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine”, remind of the sensitivity that Petty and the Heartbreakers at their best were always able to bring to bear upon their own more downbeat material. The point is reinforced, and a debt is paid, by running straight out of “Ain’t No Sunshine” into a gorgeous performance of an extended “It’s Good To Be King” which doesn’t overstay its welcome even at near enough to 12 minutes.
And here is arguably the most compelling reason for the purchase of this artefact: the gleeful, irreverent liberties taken with Petty’s own material. “I Won’t Back Down” is stripped down almost all the way to its vocal harmonies, and sounds strangely more defiant for it. The similarly acoustic-led “Even The Losers” and “American Girl” reveal the soul beneath the snarl of the originals. Live At The Fillmore 1997 stands as both an outstanding document of a great rock’n’roll band at full throttle – and as good a live album as has been made by anybody.