Richard Lloyd - The Cover Doesn't Matter

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Anthology: Through the Years

Television maestro Lloyd transforms a residency of sorts (he's purportedly been gigging the living shit out of these tunes for around a year now) into a journeyman's rock and roll dream. Slicing and dicing with his trademark, albeit overshadowed and undervalued, Television agit-guitar Lloyd turns in a batch of songs that get rough around the edges and bleed pure rock and roll crimson from the heart at the center. Sure his singing sounds strained at points, and, yes, the lyrics meander here and there, but the guy has that Midas touch when handling the fretboard and this thing simmers like all get out, and the bulk of work on The Cover Doesn't Matter is top-notch rock and roll served up by one of the subject matters finer purveyors. Christ, I pine for this sort of noise nearly everyday - usually I'm digging for some nuevo rock star doing it - but if gramps Lloyd has to be my man, well then I'm gonna ride with who brung me here.

Of course, I shan't forget the scraggily haired hippy out-of-time Tom Petty when railing about who brung me. The man's Hard Promises was some of the spark that sent me careening into this horrible music addiction. Now we have something titled Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Anthology: Through the Years, and I'm damn glad we do. It not only reaffirms my early beliefs in the man and his band's music, but it plants him (and them) firmly in history as the reverse John Fogerty (and CCR). Petty has always sounded like the spectacular California byrd that was Fogerty's pedigree, and, in turn, Fogerty and his gang fooling the senses by sounding like some weird, psychedelic Floridian swamp band. The Anthology disc gives a hefty dose of the best and most relevant Petty work right up through cut six on disc two (the mandolin wind of "It'll all Work Out") which is where the thing leaps into the post Heartbreakers Petty of the Traveling Wilbury's. The beauty here though is that the masterworks up to that point airbrush the blemishes that became so patently obvious on stuff like "Runnin' Down a Dream", "Learning to Fly", and the other substandard (but above the dreadful output of most artists) later-day releases. It all gets righted with the addition of "Surrender" a little ditty from somewhere between the eponymous debut and You're Gonna Get It, and just outside of the superstardom that was inevitable for a die hard rock and roll believer. In the name of the father, the son...Amen!

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