Running down his dream: Tom Petty’s Wildflowers reissued

As the already-straining bespoke piece of furniture we had built in the summer testifies, there is no shortage of hefty box sets and ‘super deluxe editions’ peddled in good faith to purveyors such as myself (i.e. middle aged, curious, compliant). Some are genuinely worth it. Some offer a volume of richness to justify the expense, whether unearthed rarities or newly remastered albums are your thing. Some, though, can leave you cold, little more than the original albums filled out with studio offcuts, which were probably rejected at the time for all the right reasons.

It is, when you pull back and observe from cruising height, a bit of a racket, but there’s plenty of us willing to part with hard cash. The question, though, is often whether these box sets become trophies to put on display or genuine artefacts to savour - in other words, listen to. 

I recently had this conversation with a musician friend of mine, who has probably done more than most to fuel the collectables trade by being a pre-eminent master of producing multichannel remixes. I’ll admit, as a lapsed audiophile from my Philips career, there is something enjoyably fetishistic about listening to previously binary stereo albums three-dimensionalised by the application of surround sound. But it is, I recognise, enormously niche. Some artists make it worthwhile: Jimmy Page has personally worked on the numerous Led Zeppelin box sets, and the duty of care he applies is there to be heard, both in the production work and in the extras thrown in. The Bowie box sets, my other touchstone, are clearly aimed at completists, but the recent online (and soon, physical) releases of his 1990s live albums have provided much needed perspective on just how good The Dame was in a period many consider his wilderness years (or post-wilderness, if you consider the mid-80s to be his barren time). 

Recently I eulogised about the Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup reissue, not for the excellent live album that comes with it (it’s an irrefutable fact that the Stones will never release a bad live album), but for a chance to reassess a studio album often disregarded because it came after the band’s run of classics, and to do so with new sonics to boot. Others, sadly, are often cynical exploitations, and I’m not going to waste your eyeball time here on a lengthy list of offenders.

Many box sets are, however, the product of passion, of a desire to reflect a legacy rather than a chance to fleece the fan. One case in point is Tom Petty’s newly-released Wildflowers And All The Rest, a five-CD/nine-LP package built around the late rocker’s tour de force 1984 solo album, Wildflowers. What makes it such an exception is that the package bears the hand of Petty himself, despite his death three years ago this month. Rather than merely being a reissue of the original album plus a few extras that didn’t make the original release, it is a rich and seemingly endless mining of the exhaustive process that Petty and producers Rick Rubin and Mike Campbell went through to produce what could have been originally a double-album of at least 25 songs, were it not for the record company insisting on it being a single-disc record.

This clearly stuck in Petty’s craw, and before his untimely demise he made it a personal ambition to restore Wildflowers to the album he’d originally wished to put out. “I broke through to something else. My personal life came crashing down, and it derailed me for a while. But I was at the top of my game during that record,” Petty has said. Thus, the new package contains the original 15-track Wildflowers, plus the All The Rest collection, which contains ten additional tracks planned for the original release, as well as five previously unreleased tracks, as well as home recordings and alternate versions of tracks that were eventually committed to record, all helping frame a creative process that yielded one of the most satisfying showcases of Petty’s songcraft. And as if all that wasn’t enough, the new release also includes 14 live recordings of songs from the Wildflowers sessions. 

Posthumous releases can, often, appear to have the ghoulish hand of record company exploitation, but there is a profound sense with Wildflowers And All The Rest of it being a heartfelt continuation of Petty’s own dream, with his widow Dana, daughters Adria and Annakim, and Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench of The Heartbreakers all involved in lovingly curating the project. The end result is a 54-track immersion into Tom Petty at his very best. Thematically and tonally, it fits within the cadre of Petty’s career, dating back to the swampy blues of Mudcrutch, the band he formed with Campbell and Tench in Gainesville, Florida, in the mid-1970s. That might suggest a lack of expansion or evolution, but you wouldn’t accuse Bruce Springsteen of varying little beyond his blue collar, blue-jeaned roots rock’n’roll, and that, at essence, is what Petty has shipped, and shipped so well throughout his time on Earth. 

From the oustset, the bluegrass-tinged title track, the original album meanders effortlessly through a brand of music that only Americans seem capable of pulling off authentically. The stomping You Don’t Know How It Feels is a worthy steering wheel-tapping radio hit, all drums, bass string riffs and harmonica fills, and the kind of chorus refrain that Petty should get far more recognition for as a pop artist. There are more familiar Petty sounds on the likes of You Wreck Me, with its grinding guitars and youthful vocals harking back to American Girl or Refugee, while Cabin Down Below gets into a pithy Southern groove. There are more downbeat moments, too, such as House In The Woods, which takes a slower pace and a grungier tone that could easily have come from one of Neil Young’s more oil-stained denim outings.

As for the ‘extras’ (or, to be more correct, All The Rest), it would be hard to say that they represent a Petty aiming for something different or reactionary. But it’s also hard to understand why Warner Brothers felt that what didn’t appear on the original release wasn't worthy, then, of airtime. Because, simply put, there’s not a duffer amongst them. Somewhere Under Heaven jangles away delightfully, with Petty’s shimmering™ Rickenbacker 12-string giving it the inevitable Byrds/Dylan comparison, but also a dramatic, even prog-rock landscape. California is full of optimistic pep, a paean to the Los Angeles the Floridian Petty made his home, and redolent of everything aspirational you can imagine about the state (and resonates with me as the part of America I have experienced more than anywhere else, and even lived in for a couple of years). In contrast, the introspective Harry Green finger-picks its way bucolically through a restrained rant about a redneck.

Picture: Mark Seliger

While the whole project is seen as a Tom Petty solo album, he is rarely far from the Heartbreakers, of whom most make appearances, as well as a couple of Petty’s celebrity chums, like Ringo Starr, drumming on To Find A Friend and Carl Wilson adding his vocals to Honey Bee. Personnel, however, rarely define a solo album, however. All, no matter how collaborative, depend on the direction of the principle, and that makes the ‘Home Recordings’ disc arguably the most interesting of all, as it features Petty’s demos for what would have constituted the full 25-track album he’d intended Wildflowers to be. Stripped to the intimacy of voice and acoustic guitar, these are more than just ‘unplugged’ arrangements, but black and white pencil sketches before the full colour rendering, and while they clearly provide the colouring-in template for the final versions, the performances of Wildflowers, You Don’t Know How It Feels and a couple of unused track, Confusion Wheel and There’s A Break In The Rain (Have Love, Will Travel) strip things away to the heart of what Petty was trying to achieve as a songwriter.

Posthumous releases are all-too often money grabs by greedy record companies trying to cash in, or even - sadly - desperate attempts by the bereaved family to make a few bucks out of their loved one’s legacy. No matter how much they get packaged up as “something for the fans”, usually they are often about exploiting the fans. Wildflowers And All The Rest is not one of those exercises. In fact, rather than being a rushed-out greatest hits collection, it is a lovingly-curated, delightfully engaging example of how best to let the music do all the talking. It is the perfect self-tribute.