Tom Petty On Blu-Ray
Tony Dimitriades sent me watermarked CDs, warning me they might not work in every player.
That’s an understatement. They froze my Mac. Well, not the whole computer, just the disc drive, it was completely dead. But helping a friend with this exact problem the week before, I knew there was a solution. A bit of research reminded me to reboot holding down the mouse button. Voila!
Well, I’m not gonna try that again…
Which means I’ve got to fire up the big stereo. Which is four feet away, but oh so inconvenient. And with an intermittent JBL.
So I turn on the Sony CD player, the best one built by machine, you can pay more for a hand-built one, but why be ridiculous? It’s single disc, you put a weight on the CD, and then the disc, not the lens, moves.
Then I fired up the amplifier that gets complaints if I turn it up beyond 2. And what came out of the speakers was a joyful sound, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers live in concert. But I’ve become accustomed to the music right in front of me, on either side of my computer monitor, via my Aux speakers. To listen on the big stereo…I just wasn’t close enough. And then, as track after track played, I was noticing the edge, the brittleness on the high end. I turned it off. And didn’t play it again.
I’ve got a superior car system, with Focal speakers and an Audison amp, the best you could buy at the time, but I was afraid of the watermarked discs locking up the Alpine head unit. I waited until I got to Felice’s to play the Blu-Ray disc.
Yes, Tom Petty is releasing a five CD live album, with the entire set deposited on one Blu-Ray disc, which supposedly has 256 times the resolution of a CD.
I have a love/hate relationship with the PlayStation. Designed by committee in Japan it’s unintuitive, and when you hit a wall, experience a glitch, you want to hurl the thing through a window. When it finally works, the images are breathtaking. But today was one of those days when it was recalcitrant, the controllers just wouldn’t function, but then they did.
I removed the Beatles’ Rock Band disc and inserted Tom Petty’s Blu-Ray. And was confronted with the mediocrity of the Yamaha soundbar, the top of the line, but no match for the dedicated stereo in the other room, which didn’t have a TV set attached, never mind an HDMI input. And what emanated from the soundbar was both clear and distorted, kind of like listening to the best stereo known to man over the telephone.
Then I hit "Breakdown".
I was at this gig, back in June of ’81, at the Forum. Tom was better at the Whisky, I don’t have the fondest memories, maybe because my seat wasn’t up close and personal. But now, listening on Blu-Ray, the show was better than I remembered. It was the crowd.
Turns out the soft numbers work on the Yamaha, maybe it’s television range, but suddenly it was like Tom was truly in the living room. But what shocked me was the audience, in the middle of the song, singing "I’m all right". I was on the couch alone, but it felt like someone was sitting on either side of me, I felt like I was on the floor of the Forum, if someone spilled a beer and bumped their sweaty arm into me, it would truly be like being there.
Mike Campbell is playing the guitar, and it’s like I’m in the very first row, I can see him!
"IT’S ALL RIGHT!"
I was enjoying the covers, "Something In The Air" and "Friend Of The Devil", then I hit "Learning To Fly".
And on the screen I see that it was recorded June 16, 20006, at Bonnaroo.
I’m getting chills listening now.
Well I started out down a dirty road
You start your journey to the rock festival alone, leaving your house to join your buddy, for a long drive with the iPod to a new state. You camp, you wallow in the dirt, all for the music. And nothing sounds as good as it does there. But this Blu-Ray version sounds even better. You can tell that it’s dark, with the amplified sound floating out into the Tennesse atmosphere, not reverberating, but spreading over hill and dale, as if rock and roll was the most important thing in the world, all that mattered.
It’s a stripped down version of the studio take. It’s almost like we’re all learning to fly together, admitting our flaws, our inexperence, and giving it a shot.
Well some say life will beat you down
Break your heart, steal your crown
The rappers tell us how good it is. The popsters are just completely mindless. But we’ve got this rich rock star leading the throng in a singalong about how difficult life is. In the end you’ve got to be optimistic, then again, do you have any choice?
The most surprising cover is "Any Way You Want It", by the Dave Clark Five.
And you’ll love hearing "Goldfinger" and "Green Onions".
But also included is my favorite Tom Petty song of all time, "The Wild One, Forever".
The strangest feeling came over me down inside
No matter what it takes
I’ll never get over how good it felt
You have no idea how difficult it is to navigate the menus of the PS3. A million buttons on the controller, each one bringing up a different menu, causing the music to go fast forward, thirty times in reverse, stop. If Blu-Ray is the future of music, we need a complete hardware/software upgrade. If Steve Jobs still cared about music, he could devise a playback system that worked, but he’s concerned with apps:
And I want my music to be portable.
But listening to Tom Petty on Blu-Ray, even through this imperfect system, brings tears to my eyes.
