Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
Globen (Globe Arena)
Stockholm, Sweden
March 7, 1992 Saturday
(Slowburn Master Series Volume 4)
Recording: Sony ECM-929 mic > Sony D3 DAT
Transfer: DAT Master > Fostex D-5 > digital XLR-cable > Edirol R-4 Pro > 16/48 .wav file > iZotope RX / ozone 5 (mastered) > Peak Pro 6 (16/44 downsample > post production) > xACT > FLAC
01 King's Highway
02 Too Good to be True
03 I Won't Back Down
04 Free Falling
05 Out in the Cold
06 Psychotic Reaction (Count Five cover)
07 Ben's Boogie
08 Don't Come Around Here No More
09 You Get Me High
10 American Girl
11 I'm Tired Joey Boy (Van Morrison cover)
12 Lonely Weekends (Charlie Rich cover)
13 Something Big
14 A Face in the Crowd
15 It'll All Work Out
16 Bright Lights, Big City (Jimmy Reed cover)
17 Ballad of Easy Rider (Byrds cover)
18 On the Road Again (Canned Heat cover)
19 Into the Great Wide Open
20 Yer so bad
21 Drivin' Down to Georgia
22 Love is a Long Road
23 Refugee
24 Runnin' Down a Dream
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25 Learning to Fly
26 Makin' Some Noise
27 Come on Down to My House
28 Long Time Gone (York Brothers cover made famous by The Everly Brothers)
Known Faults:
-Runnin' Down a Dream: start cut
Welcome to Volume 4 of the Slowburn Master Series, this week's installment features what appears to be a previously uncirculated show/recording of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers @ Globen in Stockholm in 1992.
Slowburn picks up the story of this show and an unfortunate Malm� recording incident leaving the last show of the tour lost to the ages.
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I don't have too many specific memories of this show. Meet up with a bunch of friends, several I'm still in touch with today. Had a great time. Listening now it's a very nice Petty show. Apparently Chris Whitley opened this tour, I seem to remember Jeffrey Gaines, maybe they both opened. I do remember Jeffrey for sure from the other show described below. I have no recording of Chris or Jeffrey. This show was held at Globen, official name at the time Stockholm Globe Arena, but no one ever called it anything but Globen, this is of course that big golfball you've probably seen in pictures. Main use is hockey but a large number of other events are also held there. For concerts it holds 15-17000 or so. I don't remember how the attendance was for this show. Globen opened in 1989 and this might have been my first visit. Certainly the first time I taped there. In the next few months I would be back for Mellencamp and Springsteen.
Ticket stub is included in the torrent. I remember being on the floor close up center and the ticket suggests I was in the third row.
This sounds pretty good. So why had I almost forgotten about this show and recording and not listened to it for close to 30 years? Probably because of the disappointment I had several weeks later at the tour's final show in Malm�. Bear with me.
Now in the nineties Malm� did not get many arena artists at all. There really wasn't a suitable arena. Plus the closeness of Copenhagen and to some degree G�teborg meant no one at the 10000 level draw ever played here. Possibly some hard rock bands I didn't care about but no mainstream rock acts.
So imagine the surprise when it was announced that Tom Petty's final show of the 1992 tour would be held in Malm�, Sweden in an ancient hockey arena simply named Isstadion (Ice Stadium) with a capacity around 4000. To this day I have never seen another show there. I can't even phantom how this happened. Opening the tour in Oslo, G�teborg and Stockholm, almost a month later, after playing shows all over Europe, in mostly vastly larger arenas, they came back to Scandinavia for one final show. Makes no sense at all. If held at all this show should have been in Copenhagen.
Anyway, after enjoying this Stockholm show I was stoked for a hometown show. Well aware it was the final show we had high expectations and the band delivered a spectacular show with an extended encore. Tom and the band were in that festive mode you always imagine artists are at the end of a tour. Now memories are fuzzy but I've always remembered it as them playing more or less the regular setlist and then instead of the regular three song encore they did eleven songs!!! Most of them covers. Talking to a friend about it now he says he remembers there being at least five covers in a row included in the encores. The tours at the time had a lot of covers rotate in and out of the setlist but at this final show they seemed to play them all.
I had a great seat with great sound and no disturbing neighbors and I walked out of there expecting to have a spectacular recording of a spectacular show.
At the time I was using this Sony stereo mic named ECM-929. Surprisingly good if used correctly. You can google it for a picture but it kinda looks like a small pistol. Yeah, bringing that to a show these days would probably not be the best idea. With no real security at this one off show I started pulling my equipment as I was walking out of the venue. I stopped dead in my tracks when I got the mic out and saw that the plastic lid holding the battery in place was missing, as was the battery. As people were pushing at me for blocking the exit I just stood there with a sinking feeling.
Yeah, when I finally got outside and could check the tape I had about 30 seconds of the first song and then 2+ hours of silence. I must have done some movement when I checked the levels at the start. Putting the deck away I didn't notice the plastic battery lid on the mic somehow got unscrewed allowing the battery to fall out. You better believe I put several layers of tape over that lid at future shows.
Easily my biggest recording screw up ever. I remember almost crying when I got home. Anyway, that disappointment is probably the reason I never pulled the Stockholm tape out again.
Now neither of these shows seem to be circulating. The Malm� show may be lost to history but at least now everyone can listen to the Stockholm show. Enjoy.
As always thanks to mjk5510 for doing all the hard work so I can concentrate on listening to the shows, reminiscens and writing these notes. More to come.
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When Slowburn mentions this capture as very good he is underselling a fabulous recording with a little frequency tweak in mastering it has to be one of the best audies of the tour.
Long set list with a nice cross section of originals and covers.
Artwork included...
Slowburn and mjk5510
Images for all shows as well as full size images for this show.
Images for this show: