Hey, I remember reading about this band! This was Tom Petty‘s Gainesville, FL band before he was signed as a solo artist, putting Mudcrutch bandmates Mike Campbell (guitar) and Benmont Tench (keyboards) on the payroll. Last month saw the release of an honest-to-goodness Mudcrutch album, with guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh easing back into what must have been a 32-year interrupted dream. Meanwhile, the three who carried over to the Heartbreakers get a chance to cultivate their beards, get their garage band improv back on, and stray-with-permission from the endless open marriage that is the Heartbreakers.. As Campbell told The Boston Herald, “One of the problems with the Heartbreakers is too many hits…There’s very little room for spontaneity and discovery. This band is all about that. As a musician, that’s just a gift.”
Petty and his Heartbreakers buds have been showering lovers of well-crafted, old school rock ‘n roll radio with gifts for years, so they’re more than welcome to treat themselves to a quickly produced getaway with the old gang, but someone’s gotta listen to this album. Considering that Petty long ago fired Heartbreakers’ powerhouse drummer Stan Lynch; played bassist Ron Blair like a yo-yo; made solo albums, per se, without the Heartbreakers that were indistinguishable from the albums with his backing band; and got to mix it up with The Traveling Wilburys, it was hard to imagine how different the reunited Mudcrutch could sound with Petty on bass and two other guys replacing the members of the Heartbreakers with more tenuous grips on their jobs. Was this some elaborate plot to ditch Blair for a second time along with drummer Steve Ferrone and the band’s “Oliver”-turned-fulltime member, Scott Thurston? Was this a softball for director Peter Bogdanovich, who directed last year’s Petty and the Heartbreakers biography, Running Down a Dream, to develop a screenplay?
As I spun this thing the first couple of times, sure enough Mudcrutch sounded very much like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, with three key exceptions.
On the album’s opening track, the country-rock shuffle “Shady Grove”, another singer takes lead vocals on a verse – and it’s not Stevie Nicks! It’s Petty’s childhood friend, Leadon. The act of Petty giving up complete control of a recording after all these years of running the tightest ship in rock since the days of Jeff Lynne leaving no hook unattached in ELO, was shocking.
“The Queen of the Go-Go Girls”
As a result of Petty’s generosity, the production is laid back, flat, and inviting, like a Mudcrutch album might have sounded had this been released in 1974. The glossy, artfully deliberate overdubs that have marked all Petty releases since he first hit his stride, with the Jimmy Iovine-produced Damn the Torpedoes, are bypassed. For instance, the single “Scare Easy”, maybe Petty’s the 19th variation on his Key Message of letting us know that he’s a tough cookie, plods along like Neil Young and Crazy Horse captured live in the studio to an 8-track deck. Although the song will likely suffer on the charts, for the truly Classic Rock fans that Petty’s releases serve, this is a welcome break from his ringing, multiple acoustic guitar and tambourine-fortified Wall of Sound. It was never enough that Petty told us he wouldn’t back down; he had to wheel out that Martin guitar army at every chance. Petty’s been toying with the Neil’s bag of tricks for some time, as Mudcrutch also does in “Last Dance for Mary Jane” fashion on their cover of The Byrds‘ “Lover of the Bayou”, but for the first time he embraces his Topanga Canyon freak flag, allowing the band to actually jam out, mannnnnn. The Dude doesn’t have anything new to say, but it’s cool to hear it come directly from The Dude’s mouth, without all the usual fanfare and Schwab’s drugstore-styled myth making.
The jamming, as I’ve mentioned, is the third delightful departure from a typical Tom Petty release. It’s never been a secret that Campbell and Tench have been Petty’s Cliff’s Notes of Bob Dylan backing musicians, or Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper, and The Band packaged as Tom’s Oscar Mayer Lunchables. The Heartbreakers have hinted at great musical depth, even backing up Dylan on an unsatisfying 1986 tour, but as Heartbreakers the musicians get in and out with their spotlight moments, with not a measure lost. This has made for airtight, rock solid radio rock, but can make for some suffocating album listening. Five songs into any Petty album but Damn the Torpedoes and I’ve needed to open some windows and catch my breath. With Mudcrutch, however, Campbell, Tench, and Leadon get to feel their way around, have the chance to let their solos wander and sneak up an unexpected path. “Crystal River” stretches out its Youngbloods-inspired groove for more than 9 minutes, with dueling guitars and piano that hint at the band members’ regional forefathers, the Allman Brothers. Rarely does anyone develop an instrumental part into something so memorable that it’s worth young musicians slaving over and learning note for note, but damn if it’s not cool to listen to a half dozen album cuts and not feel the weight of Petty’s all-encompassing Vision.
The album is fleshed out by gentle country rockers like “Oh, Maria” and “Orphan of the Storm”, which recall Graham Parsons and his influence on The Byrds and subsequent California bands stretching into the ’70s. The re-emergence of Tom Leadon, brother of Flying Burrito Brothers (whose “Six Days on the Road” is covered) and Eagles guitarist Bernie, solidifies Petty’s links to this tradition.
Campbell has expressed the possibility that the Heartbreakers will take a few years off and the hope that Mudcrutch will go back in the studio and do a little more touring. The conundrum that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers/Mudcrutch presents is that, with The Dude stripped bare, these guys finally get to make an album as low key and undramatically personal as some band that’s never had such mainstream success, like The Jayhawks. Should Campbell get his wish and Mudcrutch gets to carry on, avoiding another rote performance of Petty’s greatest hits, what’s left, another veteran entry on the jam band circuit, alongside The Black Crowes? Without the pomp and circumstance of the tasty packaging, I’m not convinced that Petty and his buds have a whole lot more to offer. But what’s it matter? This is about the gift that keeps giving.
Gram Parsons. Short for Ingram.
This review is absolutely spot on.
Great job KingEd. Nice to see that you can let a little sunlight in once in awhile.
Hmmm. I have a little soft spot for Mr. Petty and wanted to like this album just for the attitude that it was made with but…
What I’ve heard just sounds like a pretty good bar-band and not much more.
Ed, in general, I agree with you about this stuff: I like it, too.
But I think you’re overplaying the contrast between the “produced” Petty and the “spontaneous” or “raw” Mudcrutch. And there’s no need to overplay this distinction.
In the bigger picture, most of the Petty albums, even the ones with Lynne at the Helm, are pretty spartan affairs compared to some of rock’s more baroque efforts.
And productionwise, this stuff has more persnickitty-ness than you let on. The backing vocals throughout Topanga Cowgirl are pretty thought out and precisely executed…as much as anything on “torpedoes” or “hard promises”. The instrumentation on this song is also pretty finely arranged, for each instrument to get out of its own way. And the tempo is so steady, they’re definitely playing to a click track: I’ve stuck the tune in Garageband, found the song’s tempo, and sure enough, it “snaps to grid” without the slightest deviation.
I could go on in this way about the other tunes, but there’s no need, because there’s no need to overplay the so-called spontaneity of this stuff.
It’s enjoyable anyway. On that, we agree.
is one isn’t all that different from some of the more Those Petty albums
oops. sorry about the “outtake” flotsam at the bottom of the post. just ignore it….or try to muse on what i was going to say, but didn’t.
Oh, you can make a little more out of it than that, Mr. Ismine. Firstly, it didn’t strike me people were saying it was sloppy. Everybody sings the right notes and so forth. I’m listening to “Queen of the Go-Go Girls” just now, and I’ve heard a little warble or two in there, though. And I can hear the sound of drums in a room. True, they may be artificial, and masterfully and expensively re-cheap-assed. But either way, that, and the genuine-sounding piano make this a much more inviting sound to me than some of his recent stuff. If it’s only a matter of turning off the Lynne-O-Tron, then it’s a huge deal to the overall sound. Mr. Clean, I guess what you said is how I’d usually describe Petty’s stuff, and why I never get excited beyond a certain degree with him.
Once I had a conversation about Petty with my brother. It was about the album that has “Free Fallin'” and all – the huge one. My brother is a non-musician, but has a decent ear for things, and he said, “That album sounds fantastic! You can hear everything, and it all sounds great. Why doesn’t everybody record like that?” It was hard, on the spot, to verbalize a response. The record was new, and *did* sound great. But hearing that sound too much is freaky. That über production is thick as pea soup. And I hear this stuff as more “real” sounding than even his pre-Lynne stuff for a while. Now, I haven’t plotted it on the thingy to check or anything, but it is at very least a delightful simulacrum of a better than decent bar band. Rock on, Mr. Petty!
Points well taken, Slocum!
But you can hear “everything” on this Mudcrutch stuff, too. And it doesn’t sound any looser to me than, say, “Even the Losers”.
There IS a relaxed *vibe* to the Mudcrutch stuff, however. It’s not the same thing as production, but it definitely does make the production seem more informal.
But in places, even the vibe is manufactured (as you say, “re-cheap assed”, an effort to sound informal, like the way GQ might recommend we loosen our neckties *ever just so*: I’m thinking of that perfectly placed little “alright michael” comment by Tom before the vocals start, designed to make us think, “Gee, these guys are just throwin the shots back, lettin’ the tape roll, and whatever happens, happens, man! Wow!”).
I forgot to mention the experience that prompted my comments above, however. I was in North Carolina from Thursday to yesterday, and while taking a cab from the train station to the hotel, I heard a double shot: “Queen of the Go Go Girls” and “You don’t know how it feels”. In fact, relatively speaking, it was “Queen” that was more cluttered with instrumentation. “Feels” suffers from drums that are mixed to high, sure, and while there aren’t lots of drum fills, it sounds like a an actual drum kit. Petty’s vocal is single tracked, almost spoken in places, hardly manufactured until we get to the chorus. And when we get there, we find a group vocal that suffers none of the persnicketty trappings of a Lynne production. There *are* sharps and flats in the backing vocals there, too.
Is the Mudcructh song less formal than the late Petty song (which I despise, by the way)? Sure. But not by nearly as much as Ed says.
So hearing that, and then reading Ed’s review made me think that these sweeping distinctions between the “two Toms” were a bit simplistic.
I think overall, Petty has always strived for a nice balance between radio friendly productions and a live sound, with only a few exceptions. And I think the Mudcrutch stuff isn’t much of a deviation from that plan.
Best not to get carried away with this notion that this is like a warts-and-all Zuma era Crazy Horse production. It just isn’t.
Saturismine wrote:
With all due respect, it’s your reading of what I wrote that’s a bit simplistic. The differences I try to point out are subtle, and no matter how uncluttered some Petty hits sound, there’s A LOT going on in the production of those songs that allows you to hear how uncluttered they seem to be. This Mudcrutch drummer may keep time to a click track, but he’s hanging on for dear life with his limited chops – and he’s without that safety net of well-placed percussion and acoustic guitars to cover for his choppy hi-hats.
What I found most interesting was hearing Petty drop his single-minded facade and just play music with some dudes from his past. It must have taken a lot for the man to filmed without his make-up, without the lighting set just so. I hope I was clear that there were few musical revelations in his doing so.
Much of what I was trying to get at had little to do with the music itself. Remember that “You deserve a break today…” ad campaign? Tom and the boys dropped all subtle pretenses for once and ate at McDonald’s.
…Flying Burrito Brothers (whose “Six Days on the Road” is covered…
Pince nez alert: “Six Days on the Road” was first a hit for Dave Dudley in 1963 (written by the awesomely named Earl Green and Peanut Montgomery). Dudley proceeded to build his career around truck driving songs.
The Wishniaks used to cover Peter Laughner’s “Sylvia Plath”. Only we covered the version done by Philly locals the Johnsons. To this day, I don’t think I’ve heard the Laughner version.
Take it easy Ed. Sorry if I was a little heavy-handed. Travel weary and all that.
I read everything you write closely. You should know that by now. In fact, don’t think anyone here on RTH has paid more attention to the details of your reviews than I have. And I’ve backed you as often as I’ve been critical.
It was just that the language in a sentence like “The glossy, artfully deliberate overdubs that have marked all Petty releases since he first hit his stride, with the Jimmy Iovine-produced Damn the Torpedoes, are bypassed” seems ill-equipped for pointing out “subtle” distinctions, and also clearly has more than a “little to do with the music”.
But in fairness, it also seemed only a little overplayed.
My point was simple. The Mudcrutch album doesn’t strike me as THAT different from previous Petty efforts (in sound or in vibe).
“Scare Easy” is so easily mistaken for a Lynne produced (or Rick Rubin produced) Petty song that it’s enough to make these distinctions seems exaggerated.
And what about “Shady Grove”? Those guitar tracks are pretty intricately interwoven.
You write of Petty’s previously “single minded facade” as well as his relinquishing of “complete control” on the Mudcrutch album. But we’re talking about a guy who has allowed Iovine, Dave Stewart, and Jeff Lynne to put their own stamps on the sound of his records.
So to my way of thinking, he was never single minded, or in complete control.
And as such, your notion that this album is akin to Petty being “filmed without his make up” seems a bit exaggerated to me compared to what I’m hearing, that’s all.
Don’t believe the one-sheet hype.
Ed can get carried away with himself, can’t he? Way to put the man in his place, Sat. Let’s hope he graces us with checking in before his next entry. What you give around here is what you get, right?
Famous last words.