Full Moon Fever

About

Whether he was explicit about it or not, you got the sense that Tom Petty always wanted to carry the mantle of the classic-rock artists of the 1960. So when Bob Dylan adopted the Heartbreakers as his opening act and backing band on a 1986 world tour, the sense wasn’t just of personal and professional validation, but of a historical continuum ensured: Here was one legend giving the nod to the next, seeing to it that rock should—and would—live another season. A year later, on tour in London, Petty got a birthday visit from Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, and others just as hurricane-force winds settled onto the coast: A cataclysm, ye, but for Petty, who had lost his home to arson earlier in the year, the biblical signs of a new beginning. A solo album mostly in name and spirit (the Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell can be heard throughout, and there are also contributions from Benmont Tench and Howie Epstein), 1989’s <i>Full Moon Fever</i> reestablished Petty as an inescapable presence on radio and MTV, thanks to back-to-back-to-back hits “I Won’t Back Down,” “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” and “Free Fallin’.” But it also gave new angles and fresh paint to a now-familiar sound. When it came to the studio, the Heartbreakers had always been realist, a live band who treated recording equipment as tools to capture, not conjure. <i>Full Moon Fever</i> producer Jeff Lynne—who’d crafted FM magic with Electric Light Orchestra, and who’d help fine-tune Harrison’s sounds for the 1980s—wa, by contrast, a stylist: The playing mattered to Lynne, of course, but it was always second to the sound, texture, and character of the recording. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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