UNEARTHED! PETTY’S ’97 TREASURES WITH JOHN LEE HOOKER AND MORE…
ON JANUARY 10, 1997, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers took the stage in San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium, opening with a pair of hits, I Won’t Back Down and Jammin’ Me, before veering way off their usual arena-show script into a full evening of deep tracks and bar-band covers. And it was like that for the next four weeks: a historic residency of 20 nights in that psychedelic intimacy packed with songs by Bo Diddley, The Zombies and Ray Charles; Petty rarities and guest slots by idols such as John Lee Hooker and The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn.
Petty wanted to “get away from the land of videos and records for awhile,” he told Bay Area journalist Joel Selvin ahead of the run, quoted in the latter’s linernotes in new box set, Live At The Fillmore 1997. “We want to get back to what we understand… It’s been a long, long time since everyone’s been this up about anything – to just play and be a band.”
“Ben and I were always complaining, ‘Change your set!’” Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell told me for Sirius XM’s Tom
Petty Radio, referring to pianist Benmont Tench. Petty’s response, as Campbell put it: “‘No, we got something that works for us’ – the whole showbiz shtick.” But at the Fillmore, “we dropped all of those preconceptions. If there were some things we didn’t quite know, we’d run them over [in soundcheck] and put them in the show that night.”
There was even writing on the spot. One day, playing guitar in his hotel room, Campbell came up with a riff that was part Eric Clapton and “kinda Zeppelin… I took it to soundcheck and Tom said, ‘Let’s do it tonight.’” There was no title so Petty made one up: The Date I Had With That Ugly Old Homecoming Queen: “That’s how spontaneous it was.”
“The Fillmore was a chance to be who we were,” Tench affirmed to me on Sirius XM. The left turns in the box’s 72 tracks
– a deep-blues reading of Bill Withers’ Ain’t No Sunshine; Ralph Stanley’s bluegrass tale Little Maggie; a revival of On The Street by Mudcrutch, Petty’s early band with Campbell and Tench – reflect “how The Heartbreakers were when nobody was looking and the one I always wanted everybody to hear.”
Live At The Fillmore 1997 includes Petty and The Heartbreakers’ turn as The Byrds, backing McGuinn on four of that band’s classics including It Won’t Be Wrong from 1965’s
Turn! Turn! Turn!. “It’s a really intricate vocal piece,” Campbell noted. “I was proud that we pulled that one out.” And in their Fillmore finale on February 7, Petty’s group backed John Lee Hooker for a furious mini-set of blues and boogie that appears in full in the box.
“All they said was, ‘Don’t change chords,’” Campbell remembered. “You watched his foot. And he had the best socks. He had these great suits [with] slacks that came down not quite to the shoe. You could see the fine satin socks he was wearing. We watched him like a hawk.”
Live At The Fillmore 1997 is out this month on Warner.
“It’s how The Heartbreakers were when nobody was looking.” BENMONT TENCH