Mike Campbell began his acceptance speech at the 25th Annual Americana Honors & Awards ceremony at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium Wednesday night with a line that landed less like a joke than a promise.
“Lifetime achievement? I’m not done yet,” he said.
Minutes earlier, the Tom Petty guitarist and career-long second-in-command led his Heartbreakers bandmates and fellow honorees — keyboardist Benmont Tench, bassist Ron Blair, Swiss Army-knife sideman Scott Thurston, and drummers Stan Lynch and Steve Ferrone — through a three-song opening set that saw contemporary living legend Chris Stapleton pinch-hitting for Petty. The namesake leader of the rock band died in 2017.
Was the reunion just a one-off? Let’s hope not.
The Heartbreakers opened with “American Girl.” Picking up where they left off, it was the same song the band closed its final show with Petty, at the Hollywood Bowl on Sept. 25, 2017. If there was any rust on the outfit from nine years of inactivity, it was knocked off the instant the song’s trademark chiming riff gave way to the thwack of Lynch’s snare drum, bringing the band to life. Lynch, the Heartbreakers’ original drummer, split with the band in 1994 and hadn’t performed with them since their 2002 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction.
Every bar band in this nation knows — or at least should know — “American Girl.” It only has five chords, but only one band can make it sound as sweet as this. And Stapleton, for his part, sang it smoother than Tennessee whiskey and sweeter than strawberry wine. It all gelled with such intimacy and immediacy that, if the 2000-plus people packing the Ryman’s pews are the only ones to ever experience it, it would be a rock & roll crime. The Heartbreakers featuring Chris Stapleton need to take this show on the road.
The world’s greatest bar band? The world’s greatest baritone? It’s a no-brainer.
Stapleton is uniquely suited for the gig — he is constitutionally incapable of doing a Temu Tom Petty impression. He’s his own animal, an anti-frontman. Much in the way Campbell has never made a stank face during a guitar solo, the ever-stoic Stapleton hides behind a big beard and searching eyes, and lets his big voice do the heavy lifting.
But even that was understated this past Wednesday night.
Stapleton is an unmatched master chef when it comes to the show-stopping soulful bellows and howls that are a hallmark of his own gigs, but here he largely kept them holstered. Of course, he rose a few thousand neck hairs and belted out the “it’s alright” refrain during “Breakdown” (the second song in the set), but only enough to relieve the tension of Tench’s vamp drop that tees it up.
The Grammy-winning country singer was fronting the band without fronting the band, approaching — serving — the songs with the deference of a supporting player. And the Heartbreakers are perhaps the most tasteful song-servers in rock history. Stapleton’s neat trick was never asking the room to forget who wasn’t there. Petty’s physical absence remained conspicuous, which only made his spiritual presence loom larger — in Campbell’s soundtrack-to-100-million-lives guitar licks and leads, Tench’s tickled keys, Lynch’s pocket groove reaching deeper than the Mariana Trench, the economy of the arrangements and, obviously, the songs themselves.
In a moment of dead air between songs, as Lynch left the stage and Ferrone (who manned the skins through the latter half of the Heartbreakers’ career) claimed it, Campbell and Stapleton could be seen sharing some words and cracking each other up. It conveyed the kind of loose, joyous, brotherly ease you seldom see on the stiff, stodgy stages of awards shows. It was raw chemistry on display.
A moment later Ferrone and Thurston settled in and the band tore into its Nineties power-pop anthem “You Wreck Me.” The set-closer peaked with Campbell and Tench trading solos in an extended jam, only further whetting the crowd’s collective appetite for more and closing the case for a tour.
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