To follow up a Super Bowl performance that was viewed by more than 90 million people, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are going incognito.
Petty and longtime bandmates Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench are planning to hit the club circuit with the original members of Mudcrutch, the name of their group when they were still relegated to playing diners in their hometown of Gainesville, Fla.
After nearly 30 years, the five musicians—Petty, Campbell, Tench, Randall Marsh and Tom Leadon—reunited last summer on the West Coast to record an album.
"I just finished a record with Mudcrutch, my old band before the Heartbreakers," Petty wrote in a message posted on his website. "I am over the moon about it. I couldn't have hoped for it to be as good as it came out."
Mudcrutch will next crisscross California for about two weeks, starting April 12 at a benefit in Malibu for Los Angeles' Midnight Mission and winding up with a four-night engagement at the famed Troubadour in West Hollywood.
But although Petty has released 15 albums with the Heartbreakers (Campbell, Tench, Stan Lynch and Ron Blair, who quit in the 1980s to be replaced by Dan Epstein), Mudcrutch's upcoming effort will put that band's total at exactly...one.
The self-titled debut, featuring a 14-track combination of new and rerecorded tunes, is due out April 29.
In 1975, back when records were records, Mudcrutch released one single, "Depot Street," along with a B-side, "Wild Eyes."
Leadon, a childhood friend of Petty's who left the band in 1972 and now teaches guitar in Nashville, told the Tennessean newspaper that Mudcrutch's 2007 reunion was "just entirely unexpected."
"It was like a dream, the whole thing," he said. "Tom couldn't have been nicer. It was great to hang out with him again."
Meanwhile, Petty will return to his day job fronting the Heartbreakers on May 30 when the "Free Fallin'" rockers kick off a three-month North American tour in Grand Rapids, Mich.