Tom Petty's Live Anthology to Play Info Superhighway

Monday, 28 September 2009 , 0 Comments

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers will launch an event being dubbed the Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers Superhighway Tour. This tour however will require no roadies for it’s about the variety of media in which the set will be made available and the array of channels from which it can be purchased. The four-disc set entitled The Live Anthology will be released on November 24th and feature 48 rousing performances of the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer’s spanning the 30 years back to 1978. It contains has no overdubs. The cover is a Shepard Fairey, of Barack Obama poster fame, creation.

A deluxe edition will be available on November 22 exclusively at Best Buy and feature the four disc standard, a fifth disc with 14 bonus tracks and two DVDs: a New Year’s Eve concert in 1978 from Santa Monica, CA and the previously unreleased Petty documentary 400 Days, filmed the 1995 Wildflowers tour. The set will also include a re-mastered vinyl disc of the 1976 album Official Live `Leg, a Blu-ray disc covering all 62 tracks for the deluxe Anthology, backstage pass reproductions, booklet, lithograph and concert poster. This thing is jam packed with goodies.

And if all of this wasn’t enough, Petty and the Heartbreakers will release a 51-track vinyl deluxe box set, described as “mastered directly from the uncompressed 24-bit 96k files and pressed on seven 180-gram audiophile quality vinyl LPs.” The set will be available wherever fine vinyl recordings are sold beginning Nov. 24.

Petty has been around long enough to have been part of the music scene when touring was predominantly for supporting album sales. However, like many bands of the era, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers forged a reputation as a live band. The studio versions of songs never displayed the energy of their live performances. The Live Anthology will bring home that power should be a classic.

As the business has evolved and bands rely on touring as a major source of revenue the concept of recording everything from sound checks to final encores fills the vault with potentially monetizable product. No indie artist should take this material for granted and keep these recording cataloged and safe. You may just be planting the seeds of your own deluxe live collection.

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