Hello again! It’s not even Christmas yet, and already I’m back from my reluctant but much-appreciated breather and short break from The Memory Cache. It was refreshing to take a break, and spend more than a week in Hawai’i with family and friends, with the trade winds blowing, warm weather every day, and gorgeous ocean views everywhere. I took a helicopter tour of Maui, saw a sea turtle underwater at close range with my mask and snorkel on, went to the aquarium, and appreciated my life and my closest loved ones. It was wonderful.
This has been a surprisingly active bounce-back year for travel in our family, after the past two years of the COVID pandemic and lockdown. In October, my wife and I took a trip back east for a wedding in the Cleveland area, and then on to several family visits on the east coast. One fortuitous benefit of the Ohio visit, of particular interest here since it is once again Rock and Roll Friday on this blog (the fourth Friday of each month) was that we were able to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where we’d never been before.
It's a lovely museum, perfect for a lifelong popular music fan like me, with exhibits covering the entire history of rock since the late 1940s, including pictures, clothing, various rock stars’ guitars and other artifacts, and many explanatory articles and posters.
The featured display at the time was one about the Beatles, tied to the recent Peter Jackson documentary about the making of the Let It Be album in 1969 (previously reviewed here), along with many other exhibits of interest, as well as mock-studio space where visitors can try playing instruments, and rocking out with a couple of on-site cover band musicians. It was a really fun museum, and if you’re ever in Cleveland, I highly recommend it.
While I was there, I also saw a large poster for a new YouTube documentary I’d not heard about called Somewhere You Feel Free: The Making of Wildflowers. It’s a movie that was released more or less contemporaneously with last year’s release of the “missing” Wildflowers recordings made by Tom Petty and his collaborators, including members of the Heartbreakers, the noted music producer Rick Rubin, and other musical luminaries such as Ringo Starr (from the Beatles) and Carl Wilson (from the Beachboys).
The movie itself is not overly long at a run time of about an hour and a half. Most of it was pieced together from recently discovered 16-mm film shot during the period of the Wildflowers album recording sessions, with supplemental interviews (from both then and now) and candid conversations with some of the principals, especially Petty’s close friend, sometimes co-songwriter and lead guitarist Mike Campbell, Heartbreaker pianist Benmont Tench, Rick Rubin, Petty’s now-adult daughters, and a few other cameos.
Several people in the film claimed that Tom Petty believed that the Wildflowers solo album was his greatest work and accomplishment. That message was pushed throughout the movie, as it was in the promotions for the anniversary release in 2021 of all the supplemental recordings from that period. The film makes very clear that it was a time of major growth, change and transition for Petty, both as an artist and as a person, which had impacts on the sorts of sounds he created, and on the artists around him who contributed to the work from this period.
I’m not personally convinced that this album contained the greatest songs of Tom Petty’s long and prolific career as a songwriter and recording artist. I’ve always felt that the heavily acoustic guitar-based sound of these recordings, and the deeply personal, often somewhat somber and depressive lyrics, were not nearly as compelling or exciting as much of the other classic rock material of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
A perfect example of this is shown in the film, with the story of a short "side" recording session Petty did with the Heartbreakers while he was mostly focused on recording his own solo album. The session was needed to record two new songs for the band's last album for MCA (which was otherwise intended to be a greatest hits collection), before entering a new contract with Warner Brothers.
One of the two new “filler songs” for this MCA-produced Greatest Hits album that Petty quickly wrote (and the full Heartbreakers band recorded) was “Last Dance with Mary Jane” – a monster hit and perennial crowd pleaser, which I believe will forever dwarf almost all of the songs on Wildflowers in popularity, except perhaps “You Wreck Me”.
Nevertheless, whatever you might think of the Wildflowers album and this stage of Tom Petty’s career and life, the movie is a fascinating, informal view into the personality, relationships, creative processes, and artistic development of one of the greatest rock stars ever, at this one particular point in the long arc of his career.
If you are at all curious about how top musicians write and craft their songs, and how their emotional states, random events and collaborations with other musicians and recording engineers shape the outcomes of their efforts, this documentary is a fascinating and unvarnished view into the creative processes of one of the world’s favorite and most legendary popular musicians. It's also essential viewing for die-hard Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers fans. Recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment