What to know
- The Wallflowers performed their 1996 breakthrough album Bringing Down the Horse in sequence at a sold-out Danforth Music Hall on Friday.
- The anniversary set included defining hits “One Headlight,” “6th Avenue Heartache,” “The Difference” and “Three Marlenas.”
- Jakob Dylan and the band then turned to one of their biggest influences, performing nine songs from Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers’ 1982 album Long After Dark.
- The show underscored the musical connection between the two records, while Dylan spoke about his history with Petty and his admiration for the late rocker.
- The encore closed the circle with The Wallflowers’ “Love Is a Country,” followed by Petty classics “Refugee” and “The Waiting.”
“We don’t normally open up with ‘One Headlight,’ and then go right into ‘6th Avenue Heartache,’ but as you know we’re playing Bringing Down the Horse in its whole sequence — and this is what happened next,” said The Wallflowers frontman Jakob Dylan at their sold-out show at Toronto’s Danforth Music Hall Friday night (Aug. 21), going right into track three, “Bleeders.”
It’s the 30th anniversary of the band’s breakthrough album, which received a triple-platinum award in Canada in 1997 — then signifying 300,000 units sold — from staff at Universal Music after they headlined the 16,000-capacity Molson Amphitheatre (now RBC Amphitheatre). They were that big. Shortly after, the record went 4x platinum, and, as defunct trade paper RPM Weekly wrote at the time, “continues to sell briskly at retail.” Music Canada certified the album 6x platinum in 1998.
Produced by T Bone Burnett, Bringing Down the Horse contains 11 songs, clocking in at 51 minutes, so on this 80-plus-date anniversary tour, which wraps up in Dublin in November, Dylan also chose to play one of his favourite albums in its entirety, 1982’s Long After Dark by his childhood hero Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. Dylan inducted the band into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, recalling spending time with them in 1986 and taking it all in from side stage.
“I remember sitting with his daughters, I remember thinking, ‘Jesus, your dad is Tom Petty,’” he quipped in his speech, to laughter. Jakob’s father, of course, is Bob Dylan — regarded as rock’s greatest songwriter, who played with Petty at the inaugural Farm Aid concert in 1985, then toured together in 1986 and 1987, before co-founding the Traveling Wilburys in 1988.
In 1997, The Wallflowers got to open for Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers during some of their Fillmore residency in San Francisco, and again on some spring dates in 2001.
At the Danforth, which holds about 1,400 people, there were diehards propped against the barriers, making connections with Dylan, who frequently points at random audience members, puts his hand on his heart and cups his hands in a gesture of gratitude. He’s warmer than his dad is onstage but every bit as cool.
With Dylan’s weathered, conversational voice at the centre, The Wallflowers’ current lineup — multi-instrumentalist Ben Peeler, bassist Whynot Jansveld, keyboardist Aaron Embry, drummer Mark Stepro and guitar shredder Chris Masterson —were chill but masterful, moving through Bringing Down The Horse, which also included “Three Marlenas,” “The Difference,” “Invisible City,” “Josephine” and closer “I Wish I Felt Nothing.”
Dylan, whose last studio album with The Wallflowers was 2021’s Exit Wounds and previous to that 2012’s Glad All Over, is the band’s lone original member, but most of the line-up has played with him since 2021; Peeler is the only current player who did a stint with The Wallflowers in 2000-2001, before returning in 2021.
When Dylan sang the line “The only difference that I see / Is you are exactly the same as you used to be,” it resonated. It felt the same way for many of us.
Bringing Down The Horse is a strong album to revisit in full, one that could easily have been released today. The album produced four singles — “6th Avenue Heartache,” “One Headlight,” “The Difference” and “Three Marlenas” — and remains The Wallflowers’ biggest-selling album, reaching No. 4 on the Billboard 200 and eventually being certified quadruple-platinum in the U.S. (four million albums). “One Headlight,” meanwhile, became The Wallflowers’ signature song and won the 1998 Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal.
When they concluded with “I Wish I Felt Nothing,” Dylan explained that it was now time for their favourite album and the backdrop switched from The Wallflowers’ navy, starred album art to Petty’s album covers and photographs.
It must be said that while it’s fun for The Wallflowers to play their favourite album, it is also brave — brave to put their landmark record beside an album by one of the artists who helped shape their music.
They played nine of the 10 songs from Long After Dark, beginning with “A One Story Town” and continuing through “You Got Lucky,” “Deliver Me,” “Change of Heart,” “Finding Out,” “We Stand a Chance,” “Straight Into Darkness,” “The Same Old You” and “Between Two Worlds.”
“If we had more time,” Dylan said later, “I’d be here all night playing all your favourite Tom Petty songs, but we don’t have much time. It’s a long list. Too many songs to get to. So, you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to play my favourite Tom Petty songs,” adding, “My favourite is this one,” before performing “Straight Into Darkness.”
There are obvious connections between the two records: the muscular but unflashy rootsy guitar rock, the emphasis on character and storytelling, and a distinctly American sense of place. But Long After Dark also gave The Wallflowers room to step outside their own history and inhabit someone else’s.
Petty died in 2017, but his influence on The Wallflowers’ musical DNA was still unmistakable Friday night.
The Wallflowers have spent much of their career living in the shadow of one enormous album. Thirty years later, Dylan turned that fact into an opportunity: first to show exactly why Bringing Down the Horse still holds up, and then to point directly toward one of the artists who helped teach him how to make that kind of record in the first place.
The encore brought the two worlds together again. The Wallflowers returned with “Love Is a Country,” then closed with two of Petty’s best-known songs, “Refugee” and “The Waiting.”
