Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 20-night 1997 residency at the Fillmore in San Francisco will be celebrated on the new package Live at the Fillmore, due Nov. 25 on Warner Records in a variety of deluxe formats.
Staged in an effort to get the Heartbreakers out of the studio and back on the live stages they loved, the Fillmore shows found the band changing set lists every night and rocking through old favorites by J.J. Cale, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Chuck Berry.
Culled from the last six nights of the run, Live at the Fillmore also features guest appearances by blues legend John Lee Hooker and The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn, plus a series of Petty’s between-song dialogs. Petty was so enthusiastic about the residency that he told the audience at the final show, “We all feel this might be the highpoint of our time together as a group… It’s going to be hard to get us off this stage tonight.”
“Playing the Fillmore in 1997 for a month was one of my favorite experiences as a musician in my whole life,” Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell says. “The band was on fire and we changed the set list every night. The room and the crowd was spiritual … AND … we got to play with some amazing guests. I will always remember those nights with joy and inspiration.”
The first taste of the album is “Listen to Her Heart,” a new video for which was directed by Peter Sluszka.
Live at the Fillmore will be available in two CD, three LP, four CD, six LP and “uber deluxe” 6 LP editions. The latter, available exclusively from Petty’s Web store, boasts 58 tracks across more than four hours of music. It is housed in a replica cymbal rode case and is stuffed with memorabilia, a patch, a record player slip mat, guitar picks and an embroidered Fillmore House Band baseball hat.
This is the first Heartbreakers live album since Petty’s death in 2017.
