Posted by 
The second time I saw Tom Petty I loved the show. The band was just drop-dead fantastic and Petty (1950-2017) led them through hit after hit, delving deep into the his legendary catalogue and delivering everything with a laid-back confidence that just oozed professionalism.
That concert had taken place on the closing night of the Ottawa Bluesfest in the summer of ’17, and as I walked out of there that night I was struck by how I had possibly not much enjoyed the one Tom Petty concert I had seen before, on September 8th, 2006 in Toronto. I had always remembered that first show as a whole lot of ‘meh’, so much that it made me wonder if I was even really a fan of his music.
I mean, sure I appreciate all those hits back in the Heartbreakers days – heck I love some of them – but he never made it past being my fourth-favourite Wilbury, and man, did Full Moon Fever (Tom Petty’s first ‘solo’ record) get overplayed in my first year of university. That CD got spun at every party, every mixer, heck it was blaring out of every dorm room back in ’89, and I heard it so much that I worry that some of the man’s greatest pop masterpieces might make me wretch purely out of Pavlovian conditioning.
But the answer dawned on me when I looked at the old ticket stub. I had completely forgotten that I spent my first Tom Petty show standing in the pouring rain* on the lawn of the Molson Amphitheatre. And looking at the date it occurs to me I would have just returned from a very exhausting five-week long bicycle trip across Scandinavia a couple of days before, so I was probably very tired and jet-lagged in addition to being quite soggy and uncomfortable.
And as much as I critique and slag band after band both in my mind and in many of these ticket memories, in my more lucid moments I’m forced to admit that often my unmagical memories of a concert are less the fault of the band I’m blaming and more a product of the mood and/or conditions I’d found myself in before and during said show. Either that or musical acts have an uncanny knack for playing crappy shows when I’m in a grumpy mood.
Anyway, that I’ve always recalled my first Tom Petty concert as “not bad, the guy sounds just like Tom Petty if you’re into that sort of thing,” despite the fact that I was standing ankle-deep in cold Lake Ontario rain when I would much rather have been sleeping in my own bed for the first time in a month and-a-half is actually testament to how good of a performer he is. Given the conditions, had he been anything less than stellar I probably would have been miserable and hated the show, but he was good enough to elevate me from ‘hate’ to ‘meh’, a feat I’m sure only the most seasoned musical legends could pull off.
I am glad I got to see him again more than a decade later, when I found myself in a decidedly better mood. But that’s another story.
*I won’t even get into the fact that I had forgotten that The Blind Boys of Alabama opened the show. They did. I suspect I was underwhelmed. If so, there’s no way it was the group’s fault.
Todd Man Out 