The four surviving original members of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers walk onto the Ryman Auditorium stage tonight to open the 25th Annual Americana Honors & Awards, where the band will receive the Americana Music Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench, Stan Lynch and Ron Blair will play together with Chris Stapleton standing in the place Tom Petty occupied for forty years.
It is the first time the Heartbreakers have performed in full, under that name, since Petty died in October 2017. Individual members have turned up together at tributes and one-off shows in the nine years since, but as Rolling Stone reports, never the whole lineup and never billed as the Heartbreakers. Steve Ferrone and Scott Thurston, who joined in later years, will come out for a final song. The show starts at 6:30 pm CT in Nashville.
The drummer who has been gone since 1994
The detail that gives tonight its weight is Stan Lynch. Lynch played drums on the Heartbreakers records from the 1976 debut into the 1990s, and left the band in 1994. Ferrone took the drum stool and kept it for the rest of Petty’s life. Tonight is the first time in thirty-two years that Lynch has performed as a Heartbreaker, and Ferrone, the man who succeeded him, joins him onstage before the night is out.
Ron Blair’s history with the band contains its own long absence. He played bass on the first four albums, left in 1982, and did not return until 2002. Howie Epstein, who held the bass chair in between, died in 2003. Between Lynch’s exit, Blair’s twenty-year gap and Petty’s death, the original four have not stood on a stage together in a very long time, which is why the reunion is being billed as the first in decades rather than simply the first since 2017.
Stapleton’s role is the part likely to divide people. Nobody involved has framed him as replacing Petty, and he is not being presented that way. But somebody has to sing “American Girl” if the songs are going to be played at all, and the choice of who does it says something about where the band believes its music now sits.
Fifty years, and a box set to mark it
The award and the reunion arrive alongside the band’s fiftieth anniversary. On November 6, UMe releases Origins 1971-1978, a box set that traces the years before Petty was famous. It comes as a five-LP set, a four-CD set and a deluxe edition with Blu-ray and DVD, wrapped around an 88-page fanzine with liner notes by David Fricke and Bud Scoppa and track-by-track annotations from the original band members.
The centerpiece is No Sleep Til L.A., a twelve-track collection built from the years between Mudcrutch’s first recordings and the moment the Heartbreakers actually became a band. Press materials describe it as “a 12-track document of Tom Petty becoming Tom Petty”, following sessions from Miami to Tulsa to Los Angeles, including the 1971 date at Criteria Studios and the Tulsa sessions where Campbell, Tench, Lynch and Blair learned how to make records together.
Seven of those tracks have never been released. The first, “Parade of Loons,” is out now, with a video directed by Peter Sluszka starring Iain Armitage.
The set also carries newly remixed versions of the first two albums, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and You’re Gonna Get It!, remastered from the original multitrack tapes by longtime engineer Ryan Ulyate, with extended takes of eleven songs including “Breakdown” and “American Girl.” There is a 1977 live radio broadcast from the Record Plant in Sausalito with Al Kooper guesting, a disc of Petty working outside the band with session players and Leon Russell, and a filmed BBC Old Grey Whistle Test performance.
Accounts differ slightly on that last item: Ultimate Classic Rock dates the television appearance to 1979, while the box set’s own track listing gives it as 1978. BBC host Bob Harris, writing in the Blu-ray booklet, calls it “one of the greatest performances we had ever seen”.
What comes after tonight
There is no tour attached to any of this. The band reconvenes on Thursday morning for a panel at the AmericanaFest Business Conference titled Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers: 50 Years, at the Embassy Suites in downtown Nashville, and that is the extent of the announced schedule.
Petty died on October 2, 2017, one week after the Heartbreakers finished their fortieth anniversary tour at the Hollywood Bowl. For nine years the surviving members have handled his catalog carefully: archival releases, the occasional tribute, Campbell and Tench turning up in other people’s bands. Campbell has spent much of the last decade with the Dirty Knobs and a stint in Fleetwood Mac; Tench remains one of the most recorded session keyboard players in America.
What makes tonight different is the name. Playing Petty’s songs is one thing, and the surviving members have done that plenty. Agreeing to be the Heartbreakers again, even for the length of a couple of songs at an awards show, is another, and there is nothing in the announcement to suggest they intend to do it a second time.
