(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Rock and roll was never meant to be put together in a lab. Acts like The Beatles and Queen made a habit of putting together works of art whenever they went into the studio, but that was never going to replace the feeling of euphoria that people had when seeing their favourite acts live. While Tom Petty may have had one foot firmly in both camps in terms of studio lab rat and road dog, he admitted that some of his best tunes were never going to be done justice when behind the board.
Then again, it’s not like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were the Grateful Dead by any means. They had moments when they would fly off the handle live, but many of their songs were still fairly straightforward and didn’t have much time to spread out into hour-long jams. There was always that punkish attitude of leaving everything out onstage, and there were even a handful of tracks that lived on outside the studio for years.
Take the song ‘Dog on the Run’. While Petty had a song of the same name on Southern Accents that received the full glossy production treatment, the first time he took a stab at a song with that title was a Rolling Stones-esque rocker that he always played during the live show but never found its way onto an album.
That’s not to say that he couldn’t make some of his studio creations work in a live setting. ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ was always going to be a tricky beast to tackle live, but as soon as the lights went out and the different Eastern textures started, everyone in every stadium he played was transported into an Alice in Wonderland-style world with Petty operating as the rock and roll version of the Mad Hatter.
The days of Wildflowers may have been fun, but Petty was still a rocker at heart, and Mudcrutch gave him the perfect outlet to right the wrongs of his past. Since he left his bandmates from his first band behind, their debut album in the 2000s was his chance to reconnect with his rootsy side, playing bluegrass tunes like ‘Shady Grove’ and crafting songs that may have been too bluesy for the Heartbreakers like ‘Scare Easy’ or ‘Lover of the Bayou’.
While Petty thought it would be pointless trying to make a live album, he knew that there was something different about the version of ‘Crystal River’ when they performed the tune for Extended Play Live, saying, “I didn’t want to do a live album because I thought it would be too much of a mirror image of what we had done in the studio. But when I heard things like the 15-minute version of ‘Crystal River’ from the Troubadour, my mind was changed. [Producer] Ryan Ulyate came out on the Heartbreakers’ tour and played me some of this live stuff. In my mind, it would be a nice public document of what happens live with that band.”
And the live iteration does pale in comparison to what the nine-minute version captured in the studio. Whereas most jam bands of this variety rely on the atmosphere between the notes, it’s hard to get that worked up to what is essentially the band in a rehearsal room, especially when the feedback starts coming in and sounds like an amateur garage band.
On the live version, they found their groove and tapped into the kind of naive power that Petty hadn’t seen since the 1980s. There was still room for the band to grow a little bit, but this is a snapshot of them learning to play together again and realising all the magic that was left behind when their album went under back in the day.
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