Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
Live at the Paradise Rock Club, 1978
SHELTER
Save for the radio-station rarity of 1977’s Official Live ’Leg—a one-sided album recorded in 1976 when Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers were still on the opening act circuit—no other Petty/Heartbreakers concert recording has been a contact high connected to the sage rage of the band’s earliest punk-rock days. Making up for lost time and lesser quality bootlegs, then, is this limited-edition (limited to only 3,000 copies) pink-and-green split-dye vinyl release Live at the Paradise Rock Club, 1978, recorded via two-track by WBCN-FM Boston in time for the band’s sophomore album, You're Gonna Get It!
The live setting is where this band lived rangiest and loomed largest—especially in the swelter of a sweaty rock bar. Though crammed into the post-Ramones punk moment, Petty and his Heartbreakers were more of a straightforward rock band with attitude than art-school dropouts, glue sniffers, or wanna-be Warholians (besides, if you wore leather jackets in Gainesville’s oppressive heat, you likely looked really stupid). No longer damp behind the ears from having left the Florida swampland, Petty, his lifelong stalwarts Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, and original Heartbreakers Stan Lynch and Ron Blair had yet to expand their crush and crunch into full-blooded rapture when hitting up Boston’s then-beloved Paradise Rock Club. This quintet was lean, mean, and rapidly rushing to fruition, yet also tilted angularly, giving then-new originals like “Too Much Ain’t Enough” just enough quirk to satisfy the safety-pin set. That’s the rhythm section’s angst for you: move quickly, bend slightly.
What gave Petty & the Heartbreakers a rock classicist’s edge was the thick Southern tangle of tightly knit guitars woven by Petty and Campbell together with Tench’s globby organ-keyboard sound. Before the dawn of the 1980s, the Heartbreakers sounded as if someone had rolled the heaving palette of The Band into a fat joint, sprinkled angel dust and pink cocaine into its mix, and smoked it. Into this heady grass, Petty added that sneery smear of a voice—that dry-ice, smoothed-over cackle—and his self-assured lyrics. The other, larger signature of Petty & the Heartbreakers from the start, one that lasted until their boss’ 2017 passing, was the ensemble’s affection for clever and cutting cover songs. Like the very best university-based bar band working for tips and beer, this quintet lent its unbridled passion here to an “I Fought the Law” that would make The Clash swoon, a rootsy, punkish take on the highway classic “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66,” and a buzz-bombing version of Slim Harpo’s “I’m a King Bee” that I bet would wash his blues away.
The latter-day Petty live stuff is great, but let’s hope his estate starts at the beginning and goes forward with what I’m certain is a deep vault’s worth of worthy tapes.
