18 months after I copped tickets to see Tom Petty at Beacon Theater, and raved for some 1000 words, rock nyc scribe Margaret Mullen invited me to check Tom and his Heartbreakers a second time, this time at MSG. The diiference was huge, I left half an hour in, but I don’t think it was a question of the performance falling apart, the half hour I caught had two excellent songs off Hypnotic Eye and personal fave “Free Falling”.
But I found Tom relentlessly boring, and I felt the same way the last two times I caught him at Arenas, once at Prudential and earlier still with him getting blown off stage by Jackson Browne at MSG -in 2002 he was pretty damn boring as well. It may be a problem with rock and roll as such, I feel the same way about Kings Of Leon, Black Keys, many others, they can’t project at an Arena level the way they can at even at a 5000 seater.
I’ve never worried too much about proximity , for one thing you need to be able to check out bands the way the average concertgoer does and for another I usually don’t get good seats any way. But with an artist like Tom Petty, whose coolness increases the closer you get to him, being close made worlds of difference. The man is expressive but more with his face than his body, and his cocamaraderieith the Heartbreakers is completely lost from a distance, even close circuit TV doesn’t express it.
From far away Petty seems to be phoning in but up close it isn’t like that at all: he is almost physically averse to the largest gestures, he keeps the band and himself in check and it simply doesn’t project. However, I am sure Margaret disagreed so hang loose for her full review.
