Part of the reason Tom Petty’s passing earlier this month felt so profound was his unofficial status as the mortar of classic-rock radio. The Florida-born, Malibu-haunting music lifer had top billing on a slew of songs that served as the glue between your Stones and Beatles chestnuts—the spitfire chronicle of lovers’ wariness “Refugee,” the sparkle of “The Waiting.” The format’s parameters had already been well-established by the time Full Moon Fever—the first album credited to Petty without his longtime musical pals the Heartbreakers—came out in the spring of 1989. But as soon as its first single, the laid-back yet steadfast “I Won’t Back Down,” was released, the rule book was rewritten.
Full Moon Fever came out of a most Southern Californian set of circumstances. In November 1987, Petty—then coming off his seventh album as frontman of the Heartbreakers, Let Me Up (I’ve Had Enough), as well as a May 1987 arson attack on his house—had a chance encounter with Jeff Lynne, the songwriter and maximalist producer behind Electric Light Orchestra, at a traffic light (“just before the Thrifty [Drug Store],” he told SPIN in 1989) that, as it happened, was located near where they lived. Lynne was just off producing George Harrison’s Cloud Nine, the 1987 album that spawned the surprise MTV hit “Got My Mind Set on You,” and was at work on Brian Wilson’s “Let It Shine.” ”Around Christmas that year, I wrote a couple of songs and showed them to [Lynne], and he had a few suggestions, which really improved them,” Petty told The Chicago Tribune in 1989. “So we ended up going over to [Heartbreakers guitarist] Mike Campbell’s house and putting them down in his studio… by then I was already having too much fun and I didn’t want to stop and go back to doing nothing, so I kept convincing Jeff song by song to do one more, and then finally hooked him into finishing the whole album.”
Even at its most urgent, Full Moon Fever has a laid-back feel. Petty’s sardonic observations, delivered in his wizened drawl, coast on loose-limbed riffs that were largely written with the rhythm guitar parts at the forefront of Petty and Lynne’s collective mind. Every song was written on 12-string or 6-string acoustic guitars. Petty told The Boston Globe in 1989: “I wanted to experiment with the art of rhythm guitar. Jeff and I feel that acoustic guitars can be rock’n’roll instruments, not just folk instruments.”
The sun-soaked chords that open the sprawl-dwelling and regretful “Free Fallin’” set the album’s tone. They tug the action along while Petty, half-sly and half-wistful, recounts the wounds suffered by a young woman who was focused on Elvis and horses before the allure of the bad boy creeps into her life. On the chorus, his voice cracks into a “free!” that sounds liberated, but it almost immediately skids into a descending “fa-lli-ing” that reveals the more alarming aspects of being unmoored, an uneasiness that persists even as the churning bridge rises up. The rest of Full Moon Fever balances that tension beautifully. Lynne’s restrained production and Petty’s economical, thoughtful songwriting combine into a sneakily powerful collection of songs.
Full Moon Fever is billed as Petty’s “first solo record,” although it’s not a clean break from the Heartbreakers—keyboardist Benmont Tench and bassist Howie Epstein have brief cameos, Campbell has a co-writing credit on the new wave-tinged “Love Is a Long Road” and laid down the insistent riff that propels “Runnin’ Down a Dream.” That song’s journey toward being history’s most chilled-out jock jam rides on Campbell’s blistering skill, both on the song’s signature riff and on the pyrotechnic playing that closes it out. Petty’s meditative, rueful vocal acts as a knowing counterpoint, its descriptions of frantically driving around in search of “somethin’ good waitin’ down this road” winds around Campbell’s forward momentum.
The lyrics are often minimalist, packing a punch with the subtle detailing that made Petty’s earlier work appealing to arena-sized crowds. “Yer So Bad” opens with an of-its-moment observation about a woman whose romantic trajectory veers, unfortunately, from a money-laden yuppie to a swinging singer, with Petty unable to “decide which is worse.” “A Face in the Crowd” is all atmospherics, Petty’s murmured refrain and the crystal-gilded guitars giving a rainy-day feel to its full-hearted, yet sparsely told tale of having someone parachute “out of a dream, out of the sky” and into his life.
Petty’s love of rock—specifically, his belief in its power to unite—permeates his catalog, but on Full Moon Fever it especially shines. There are references to Elvis and Del Shannon dotting the lyrics, a nod to Buddy Holly in the form of the smoothed-out rave-up “The Apartment Song,” and a reverent cover of the Byrds’ chiming 1965 single “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better,” which either kicks off Side Two of the album or follows the Petty-narrated pause that the singer helpfully inserted for CD listeners who might not get full experience of actually sitting with an album, paying attention to its nuances instead of letting it burble in the background. But it’s not an entirely besotted romance: “Zombie Zoo,” a drowsy kids-these-days lament, was inspired by Petty meeting punks who haunted a club night of the same name—Petty’s portrayal of the white-lipstick “little freak[s]” is a bit condescending (“It’s so hard to be careful, so easy to be led/Somewhere beyond the pavement/You’ll find the living dead,” he notes)—the first fissures in the rock generation gap that would eventually become fodder for his public persona.
MCA Records, Petty’s label at the time, initially rejected Full Moon Fever; once it did come out, it spawned five singles that reached the Hot 100 and sold five million copies. “I waited awhile, until the top regime at the record company changed,” he told Esquire in 2006, echoing the steely-eyed Full Moon Fever smash “I Won’t Back Down,” which uses backing vocals from Lynne, Epstein, and Harrison (Petty and Lynne’s eventual bandmate in the Traveling Wilburys) to bolster Petty’s case for staying steadfast in his beliefs.
But the damage to the label-artist relationship had already been done, and Petty signed with Warner Bros. in a deal that wouldn’t become common knowledge until two years after it was signed. Full Moon Fever, in a twist that made the early executive apathy toward it become a setup for poetic justice, became one of the late 20th century’s most storied rock albums, a stripped-down, yet richly realized presentation of the man behind the stadium-headlining star.
