Tom Petty saluted in new album
The memorial box set ‘An American Treasure’ features 11 previously unreleased recordings
Lonesome Dave, one of 11 previously unreleased recordings among 60 tracks on the forthcoming Tom Petty memorial box set An American Treasure, captures much of what made the rock star so special to band mates Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench.
“I like that one because it’s so raw,” Heartbreakers lead guitarist and Petty’s frequent songwriting collaborator Campbell said, leaning back into a sofa and occasionally plucking the resonator guitar he’d picked up in his home recording studio in the San Fernando Valley on Thursday.
Tench sat a few feet away, leaning on the other arm of the well-worn couch. “We had barely learned it at that mo- ment, and we were all laughing about the lyrics.”
The track was recorded in 1993 while Petty was working on his second solo album, Wildflowers, but still had the Heartbreakers with him in the studio. Campbell recalls the group discussing the prospect of their next tour together, and someone asked, “Whatever happened to Lonesome Dave?” referring to Dave Peverett, the lead singer and rhythm guitarist for English rock band Foghat, a band that famously burned out through relentless touring.
The Heartbreakers agreed that they didn’t want to follow that example, quickly concocting a breakneck rock boogie in the vein of Chuck Berry with a Southern rock slant. Petty spun out lyrics that included the line, “Whatever happened to Lonesome Dave?”
Campbell and Tench remember Petty inventing lyrics in the moment. Tench says, “If you listen to the lyrics all the way through, it’s seamless. That’s the kind of writer he was... I always say I’m an evangelist for Tom, because I think the world needs to know just how great he was.”
That’s a motivation for Campbell and Tench in collaborating with Petty’s widow, Dana, his daughter, Adria, and recording engineer Ryan Ulyate on a fourCD set slated for a September 28 release, four days ahead of the first anniversary of Petty’s death at age 66 from what was ruled to be an accidental overdose of prescription painkillers and other medications.
The compilation includes many of the band’s biggest hits in their original studio versions as well as alternate takes, live performances and demo versions of songs spanning not just the life of the Heartbreakers, which formed in 1976 in Los Angeles, but stretching further back to sample the members’ earlier work together in Gainesville, Florida, as Mudcrutch.
Petty’s record label, Reprise, released a new crowd-sourced video for another of the previously unreleased tracks, Keep a Little Soul, which filmmaker, art director and editor Adria oversaw and unveiled to several dozen invited guests at a playback in West Los Angeles of highlights from the box set and a question-answer featuring Campbell, Tench and Ulyate.
Adria noted that the recording used home movie footage her father and others shot playfully while on tour in 1980.
“I think it shows the magic of my dad, his personality and his sweetness,” Adria told the about 75 attendees, among them George Harrison’s son, musician Dhani Harrison; Doors lead guitarist Robbie Krieger; Willie Nelson’s guitaristsinger-songwriter son Lukas Nelson; Dana; and Petty’s longtime manager, Tony Dimitriades, among other industry executives and music writers.
An American Treasure is being released in multiple configurations, including a super deluxe version with an expanded 84-page hardbound book.
The event ended with the premiere of another video, this one crowd-sourced, for the previously unreleased track You and Me (Clubhouse edition), featuring Petty, Campbell and Tench in the rehearsal and recording studio the band used extensively in recent years, known as The Clubhouse.
It’s a stripped-down version of the song that originally appeared on the group’s 2002 album, The Last DJ, and it served as a poignant salute to Petty’s fans and to his band mates and what he envisioned as a long future together: “Take a look at what I got / I can’t promise a lot / But you and me and the road ahead.”