Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers coming to town
By Ray Rudolph
St. Petersburg Independent - July 5, 1985
The concert is still a week away, and though tickets were still available earlier this week, they were going fast for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at the Sun Dome on July 12. Petty is a Gainesville native, a local boy who made good, and made it big with lots of determination and push.
Southern Accents is the sixth album for the group, and its first in almost three years. Recently released, it has many firsts for the group. Petty co-wrote three songs with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, bringing in outside collaboration for the first time.
It also is the first time the group has used an orchestra -- 26 pieces in all, rounding out the hard rock edges. Female backup singers are a new addition on several tracks. All these changes simply mean that Petty and his Heartbreakers have what it takes to keep up with, and perhaps stay a step ahead of, rock music's school of hard knocks.
The foursome of Petty, lead guitarist Mike Campbell, keyboardist Benmont Tench and bass player Ron Blair emerged from northern Florida as a group called Mudcrutch. They made their mark locally, then broke up. But that wasn't the end. They all turned up in Los Angeles pursuing individual careers. The idea to get together again did not come from Petty, but from Tench, who called on his old buddies to help him with a demo tape. Stan Lynch was asked to join as drummer for the group. Petty then became the leader, and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were born in 1976 with a self-titled debut album.
Shut your eyes and listen to Tom Petty and band
By Keith Thomas
Winnipeg Free Press - July 7, 1985
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers | Make It Better (Forget About Me)
Man, is this clip stupid. No wonder people complain about the effects of rock music on a person's hearing. Petty and the boys are supposed to be playing in some woman's year in this childish effort. She even flushes Petty out with an oversize Q-Tip. Gross! It's really a shame this clip is so bad because the song is great. Petty's Southern growl and the harmonies are fabulous. The Heartbreakers and the horn section are heavenly. Mike Campbell's ringing guitar is explosive. I must admit, I did like the scene with the guitars falling from the sky -- make that her head. I'm just sorry the video stinks because the song certainly doesn't. Buy the record and forget the video. Oh, yeah, better check your ears. You never know who might be filming a video in there.
Editor's Note: A shorter version of this article was also published in the July 9 issue under the title "Dixie-inspired Petty energizes Summit crowd."
Petty, cool customer of rock, warms up for Summit stand
By Marty Racine
Houston Chronicle - Monday, July 8, 1985
The man in black and red was again cool as ice but he never sounded hotter.
Tom Petty, buoyed by being down in Dixie on his "Southern Accents "tour, took enough inspiration from a cheering "Texas" crowd of 12,000 Sunday night at The Summit to finally get loose like he'd always threatened but never allowed in all the other shows I've seen him perform.
The Florida native liked this rebel yell. And he responded by melting that cool demeaner which throughout his career has distanced his brand of songwriter rock 'n' roll from the emotion you'll receive from, say, Springsteen or Seger.
Tom Petty still a Southern boy
By Gary Graff
Lakeland Ledger - Wednesday, July 10, 1985
Tom Petty is a Southern boy who found you can go home again. In spirit, at least.
Two years ago, in the midst of the creative dry spell, the Florida-born pop star turned to his roots for inspiration. He crafted an album called "Southern Accents" -- full of good ol' boys, strong-willed women and rebels with "One foot in the grave, And one foot on the pedal" -- that marched into the top 10 when it was released this spring.
Musically, however, Petty and his group, the Heartbreakers, shot off in all directions, merging his tales of the new and old South with all manner of musical styles -- from straightforward rock 'n' roll to rhythm 'n' blues and avant-garde pop -- in an effort to rejuvenate his interest in making music.
"I did this to save my sanity, really," Petty, 33, explained by telephone from his manager's Hollywood office. "We were on the 'Long After Dark' tour (1983) and I couldn't get interested in just going out and playing the hits night after night.
"I wanted to get into something bigger, something that was more interesting than another album of love songs."
With only a slight drawl remaining after 10 years of living in Los Angeles, the singer-songwriter-guitarist said a good portion of his character remains Southern. His father and brothers still live in Florida, and Petty often visits them with his wife and two daughters.
Editor's Note: I bolded the relevant part as it can be hard to catch.
'Live Aid' Provided Reunions Of 60's Bands
By Robert Palmer
The New York Times - July 15, 1985
''It's incredible, it's just absolutely incredible.'' MTV's video jockeys, blissfully unhampered by even the vaguest notions of rock's history and heritage, resorted to this formula again and again during the cable television channel's complete coverage of the marathon ''Live Aid'' concerts for famine relief at Wembley Stadium in London and John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia on Saturday.
The commentators for Metromedia, which covered morning and afternoon portions of the event, and ABC, which broadcast the last three hours, were more restrained and often better informed. But for once, the hyperbole of the video jockeys was not entirely beside the point. The 16-hour telecast, much of it intercutting live segments from simultaneous performances on opposite sides of the Atlantic, was an unprecedented musical event. Many of the performances actually lived up to their advance billing.
Watching a 16-hour rock telecast could have been a numbing experience. But home viewers undoubtedly got a more intimate look at the onstage action than the stadium audiences did; the pitiless sunlight, stage lighting and close-up shots made it easy to tell which performers were emotionally involved and which ones were sleepwalking through their star turns. The incessant commercials, easy enough to endure with the sound turned off and a good book in hand, and the time constraints of the concerts themselves conspired to package the music in easily digested segments of two or three songs each. And there was enough genuine excitement to keep the proceedings from going stale.
The Red & Black - July 11, 1985
The Omni -- July 11: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Though it seems that his last two albums haven't been quite up to scratch, Petty onstage always pleases due to the hit-after-hit nature of his shows. ("Refugee," "American Girl," "I Need to Know," etc.) Lone Justice opens. This Los Angeles outfit has hit the charts recently with the Petty-penned "Ways to be Wicked." Singer Maria McKee has a great voice, though her band lacts true country conviction. Despite that minor shortcoming, this should be a show worth seeing if you don't have to sit too high in the cavernous Omni.
Off the record: Byrd-watching with Tom Petty
By Jon Marlowe
The Miami News - July 18, 1985
TAMPA -- It comes screaming right out of the top balcony of the University of South Florida's Sundome concert hall. One of those giant, thick, heavy plastic, bright yellow Frisbees. Only a NASA engineer could compute the intense speed and velocity at which this object is traveling as it zooms straight into the ground-floor seating area and crashes full force into an unsuspecting woman's left eye.
Crowd loves what Petty has to offer
By Phil Chen
The Stanford Daily - Tuesday, July 30, 1985
The Concord Pavilion, a grass-and-concrete bowl located in the hills east of Berkeley, was th site Saturday night of performances by a new band, Lone Justice, and by a group that has been around since 1975, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Lone Justice is a Texas-based country-rock outfit that has been hyped into hyperspace by Geffen Records as rock's Next Great Breakthrough. With promotion like that, I was not surprised to find myself disappointed in the band. Maria McKee can certainly sing; she had a good range and was capable of packing real emotional punch into her delivery. However, I didn't care much for her screechy little-girl voice, which always made her sound as if she were throwing a tantrum.
Musically, the band sounded like many other "cowpunk" bands: basic rock beat overlaid with Marlboro Country guitar riffs. Guitarists Ryan Hedgecock and Tony Gilkyson, bassist Marvin Etzioni and drummer Don Heffington worked together to form a competent, dull unit that never explored beyond its own very constrained musical limits.
Lone Justice ran through almost every song on its current LP, including the Petty-penned "Ways To Be Wicked." Fortunately for the band, the crowd was in a terrific mood and cheered raucously after every song; even so, Lone Justice declined to play en encore when its set ended.
But the crowd, an older-looking bunch (definitely not teeny-boppers), came to see Tom Petty and his Heartbreakers, and from the opening chords of "American Girl" to the last encore an hour and 40 minutes later, he was clearly their rock 'n' roll hero. Every word he uttered and every song the group played drew an awesome response from the crowd. When Petty asked them, roughly a quarter of the crowd indicated that they had seen his show in Berkeley the night before.
Petty And Lone Justice Home Again At Forum
By Robert Hilburn
The Los Angeles Times - August 3, 1985
Tom Petty and Lone Justice both had something to prove in their homecoming performances Thursday night at the sold-out Forum. Only Lone Justice fully succeeded.
Petty and his augmented Heartbreakers band played relatively long (nearly two hours) and most definitely hard in their first local appearance in two years.
And there were glorious moments as they reprised many of the inspiring anthems--from the opening "American Girl" through "Refugee"--that established Petty a few years ago as one of the most popular and respected figures in American rock.
For all its crowd-pleasing vigor, however, the concert failed to resolve a problem that has been nagging Petty ever since his hugely successful "Damn the Torpedoes" album in 1979: the suspicion that this slender, Florida-born rocker has peaked.