Tom Petty
Opener: Steve Winwood
Aug 19, 2014
Tom Petty belongs to an exclusive club of aging songwriters (Bruce Springsteen being the most obvious example) who are still able to excite the masses with new material. This doesn’t mean Tuesday’s Saddledome crowd won’t be waiting for their favourites, but Hypnotic Eye is a solid set of rock songs that seem custom-made for a stadium and properly show off the Heartbreakers’ understated virtuosity. Critics are calling it his best record in years, a return to the concise writing. Musicians like Tom Petty have a true workman’s approach to their music. They write good music consistently, tour frequently and during their live performances there is a no nonsense approach, they play through many songs and perform them flawlessly. The focus for many modern musicians is on theatrics, whereas bands like The Heartbreakers, a live concert is about the music they can perform. I appreciate the honesty and reality of, you know, actual music.
Everyone knows Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers have a lot of good songs, but it really sinks in when you see them live and fifteen of the songs they play are classics where you knew every word, and the new songs they played were blending in seamlessly. Tom Petty has so many equally good songs, that no one in particularly really stands out, it is very difficult to pinpoint one individual song to talk about.
“This song comes from 1991,” said Tom Petty, early on in his set Tuesday night at the Saddledome “It may be the only thing I remember about 1991.” Part of a lengthy intro to the loping, singalong classic Into the Great Wide Open, Petty apparently has been recycling this joke during his current tour.
The Florida native, in fine form with his razor-sharp, impossibly tight Heartbreakers, has been kicking around long enough to know the classic conundrum of acts that have reached a certain vintage and can call upon a staggering back catalogue of crowd favourites. But, like Bruce Springsteen and a dwindling number of aging rockers, Petty has always seemed intent on showing audiences that he’s no jukebox act and backed it up with remarkably consistent material. While the 63-year-old songwriter may not be quite as adept at throwing unexpected curveballs into his sets as The Boss, it’s telling that two his first three songs Tuesday night were covers: A stinging Rickenbacker-blast through the Byrds’ So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star to open things up and a playful take on the blues chestnut Baby, Please Don’t Go not long afterwards. It was appropriately high-octaned start to an evening full of Pete Townshend windmills and drawn-out crashing ends to epic rockers.
But it certainly bodes well for Petty that some of the early highlights came from his excellent new album Hypnotic Eye, an assured group of guitar rockers that seem custom-built for the stadium. The riff-heavy American Dream Plan B and bluesy snarl of The Forgotten Man proved that his new material holds up to his classics, already sounding more-or-less timeless.
Granted, that doesn’t mean the crowd didn’t leap to their feet at the first note of the familiar jangle that opens Free Fallin’ or filled the stadium with an appropriate aroma during an early run of the cannabis anthem Mary Jane’s Last Dance.
There were a few (relatively) deeper cuts from his past as well, of course. He pulled out a wonderfully twangy version of the Traveling Wilburys’ Tweeter and the Monkey Man and offered a dreamy run through the underrated Two Gunslingers. The crowd was enthusiastically singing along to Petty’s sly ballad, Yer So Bad, and Learning To Fly, which have both turned into nostalgia-baiting classics over the years. With any luck, killer tracks from Hypnotic Eye such as Shadow People and U Get Me High — both delivered with gusto Tuesday — will enjoy a similar fate a few years from now.
Well, even if I wanted to say something special about Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers there is little to add to what everyone already knows. They put on a good show in Calgary and I am glad I saw it.
Opening act Steve Winwood showed no reservations against full-blown nostalgia. Winwood’s legacy in the history modern music stretches even longer than Petty’s. His songs are older … and much, much longer. It offered a very different groove than the headliner’s concise, song-focused dynamic. Winwood’s classic tunes tend to erupt into saxophone and guitar-fuelled marathons. Winwood even managed to turn his AOR mid-1980s hit, Higher Love, into a lite-funk excursion. But for the most part, he travelled back even further: opening with a suitably jammy I’m A Man and ending with Gimme Some Lovin’. Both were from his mid-1960s early years as a teenager in the Spencer Davis Group and both were played with an amped-up urgency. Not surprisingly, he also dipped into his years in Traffic, offering marathon versions of Medicated Goo and Dear Mr. Fantasy. He even a soul-rattling run through Can’t Find My Way Home, taken from the limited canon of his late-’60s supergroup Blind Faith.
At 66, Winwood’s voice is still an impressive instrument, as powerful and soulful as ever and his band sounds wonderfully expansive, even when tucked onto the corner of the stage as an opening act.
