TOM PETTY, THE MASSES AND ME

I went to Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night to see Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, with Buddy Guy opening up; if you want to read my more formal review of the show, which was excellent, it's over here.

I've seen a bunch of concerts at Madison Square Garden over the years—Dio, Radiohead (twice), Coldplay, Iron Maiden (also twice), Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Nine Inch Nails, AC/DC, Bob Seger, Metallica, Mötley Crüe...a surprising number of shows in all, considering how ambivalent I am about the whole arena experience.

Some of the music I listen to is really popular; I have a shit-ton of classic rock in my iPod, along with a bunch of classic hip-hop, loads of big-name metal bands, et cetera, et cetera. Some of it's not popular at all. This has never really concerned me—I don't spend much time thinking about whether other people like the stuff I like. (This is very different from thinking about why I don't like stuff lots of other people do like, which I do all the time.) When I write a review, for example, there's an element of the utilitarian "consumer guide" to it, but I'm not really trying to convince other people that they should buy the album in question, even if I write that way sometimes. I'm just saying that I think it's good, and trying to explain why in some kind of coherent way while avoiding masturbatory theoretical bullshit.

Because of my lack of interest in music's relative popularity, the atmosphere of a massive arena show, with thousands of people screaming and singing along, doesn't really have much effect on me one way or the other. I don't care that all these people standing around me like Iron Maiden as much as I do; I just care that Iron Maiden is one of the best live acts in music, that they put on a fantastic, well-paced, consistently entertaining show. Sometimes, though, it can provide an element of surprise that's fun.

At the Tom Petty show, for example, I was surprised to see people singing along with such fervor to slow songs like "Free Fallin'" and "Learning to Fly." I like "Free Fallin'" a lot, that first verse is an absolute killer, but I'm a much bigger fan of some of Petty's earlier, meaner songs. He's got a real talent for creating evocative, minimalist images. Think of the first two lines of the song he opened the set with, "Listen to Her Heart": "You think you're gonna take her away/With your money and your cocaine." You know exactly who that guy is. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker would have devoted a whole song to painting that asshole's portrait; Petty conjures him and dismisses him in two lines.

I like that side of Tom Petty more than the jangly balladry that inspires girls to sing along and hug their boyfriends at his concerts. And/but watching that audience reaction made me think mine was a minority opinion. It reminded me that Tom Petty hasn't been that snarling guy for quite a few years now (though he still transforms into him from time to time, like on "It's Good to Be King" or "I Should Have Known It"). And that you can probably sell more albums and concert tickets by making girls hug their guys than by making guys pump their fists and snarl.

But here's my point: I think I could have enjoyed that concert just as much had none of those people been there. They weren't an important part of my aesthetic experience. And I'm wondering whether I'm alone on this one, whether the feeling of being surrounded by fellow Tom Petty fans enhances the experience for other people in some major way. And I'm trying to figure out when I started feeling this way, because it wasn't always the case. I used to like mingling with crowds, especially when that meant getting into a sweaty moshpit. Now I'm old(er), and my legs hurt if I stand up for two hours at a show, so I'm much more likely to go to something big enough (in an arena, say) that there's a seat there for me to flop back down into when things get boring (and every show gets boring at some point). A thing like the Summer Slaughter Tour, which features eleven or twelve death metal bands in a row, many of which I like a lot, but is held in a tiny sweatbox of a club with no seats and starts at three in the afternoon? You can forget about that bullshit.

Still, pure physical discomfort isn't what makes me so unconcerned with being part of a crowd. It's something larger, something I can't put my finger on yet, and/but it's something that's making me re-evaluate rock music as a whole. Because for a lot of people, the idea of rock (and pop) as communal experience carries a lot of weight. Someone whose preference is for solitary listening seems to be in some way "doing it wrong," or having an "incomplete" understanding/experience of the music. I'm not convinced. In fact, I think rock music may be best experienced in focused solitude. Because it's not part of a total package—it's not just the sonic component of an evening that depends on beer, lust and air thick with sweat to be complete. The music is enough all on its own, for me anyway.

TOM PETTY, AGAIN

I've never been a major, diehard Tom Petty fan. Only ever owned one album, Full Moon Fever, as a kid. But I grew up in America, so I know all the hits—heard them my whole life on the radio, and they're all pretty great, one or two boring ballads aside. I have the boxed set, Playback, and last year's Live Anthology in my iPod. I haven't talked about that latter item here, but it's fantastic—four discs (five if you buy the super deluxe edition) of songs from shows going all the way back to 1980, and the band's so tight throughout, with only three membership changes in 35 years, that it could have been one long-ass concert. And the price was unbeatable; I got the four-CD version at Target for $22. What kind of major artist puts out a four-CD live box for $22? That's what you call fan service.

So anyway, the new Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album, Mojo, came out today, and it's really good. As the video clips posted online indicate, the album was recorded almost entirely live in the studio, with minimal overdubbing and stripped-down arrangements. The liner notes even describe not only the session dates but the specific guitars and pieces of equipment used on each song, which is a little more than I need to know, but I'm sure someone cares. The point, for me, is that the songs are good to great. There are too many of them—fifteen in 65 minutes—but only a few drag, and none feel like outright mistakes.

What's really interesting to me is how different it sounds from all the other Petty records I've heard. The acoustic-guitar-led countryish stuff is kept to a minimum, and the jangling, Byrds-y side is tamped down, too. This is a fairly hard blues-rock album, driven by electric guitar and organ. The album's second track, "First Flash of Freedom," is close to seven minutes long, and its middle stretch is a meandering jam that sounds like the Grateful Dead, or the Allman Brothers, or some combination of the two. "I Should Have Known It" is so cranked-up and live-in-the-room, it sounds like the band is covering a track off Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti, especially when the bottleneck guitar solo kicks in. Other tracks have an almost Doors-y feel, minus the lyrical pretentiousness. Organist Benmont Tench gets a lot of spotlight time on this record, and he makes the most of all of it, without ever unleashing his inner Jon Lord or anything like that.

This is a band that communicates on an almost telepathic level. It's the kind of thing more veteran acts should be able to tap into, but can't, for some reason. ZZ Top can; I've seen them live and they're absolutely locked-in, and their strict policy in the studio, never violated, is that no sound will appear on a ZZ Top album unless it's been made by a member of ZZ Top. The horns on "She Loves My Automobile" from Degüello? They learned how to play 'em.

The Rolling Stones don't come close to this kind of cohesion. I don't think they ever had it. They've got (and have had, in the past) some great individual players, Charlie Watts in particular, but they couldn't make a live-in-the-studio album like Mojo if you put guns to their heads.

Contemporary rock bands, especially metal bands (much as I hate to say it), don't know how to make a live-in-the-studio album. Nobody's ever asked them to try. It's all about punching it in, laying down 50 versions of a riff until it's inhumanly perfect. Even Nirvana did it. I remember hearing my audio engineering professor play me "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and pointing out that Dave Grohl had only played his drum part once—one time through the verse, one time through the chorus—and Butch Vig, the producer, had cut 'n' pasted it to get through the rest of the song. How punk rock. How "real."

But I digress. My point is, this new Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album is great and you should listen to it. I foresee myself listening to it a lot this summer.

TOM PETTY

I bought Tom Petty's 4CD Live Anthology box a couple of months back (I saw it in Target for $22 and couldn't pass it up), and it's fantastic. The songs were recorded at shows in 1980-83, 1986-87, 1993, 1995, 1997, 2002-3 and 2005-6, and the band is so damn tight, even with a change of drummers, that it could all be one epic gig.

Now I've heard a few songs from the forthcoming album Mojo (out 6/15), and it appears the live-rock fervor has hit Petty in a big way, because the album was recorded live in the studio, with everyone playing in one room. I admire the cussedness of that; I like that Petty has stopped caring about anything but making records he's happy with. It's obvious to anyone who gives it a moment's thought that he's not gonna have a Top Forty hit, and I like that it's obvious to him. He's made a record that his existing fan base—folks who admire rock music as a craft—are gonna respond to, and he's gonna support it on tour. He's got a circa-2010 merch strategy for the record and the tour; if you buy a ticket, you get a digital download of the album on the day of release, and when the tour's over you can download eight live tracks. I think it's working; a lot of tickets to a lot of shows are gone already. (If I want to see him in New York—and I do—I'm gonna have to round up a review assignment from somewhere.)

I've only ever listened to one Tom Petty album, Full Moon Fever, all the way through. I really don't need to hear the cranky-old-man routine he cut loose with on The Last DJ. But his greatest hits disc is pretty much unassailable. And as demonstrated in the video above, the band kicks ass. I think I'm gonna buy his new album.