Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

GIFT GUIDE 2009

Box Sets

• AC/DC

  Backtracks

  BY RAOUL HERNANDEZ

• Alan Lomax in Haiti

  Alan Lomax in Haiti

  BY THOMAS FAWCETT

• Fire In My Bones: Raw, Rare, and Other-Worldly African-American Gospel 1944-2007

  Fire in My Bones: Raw, Rare, and Other-Worldly African-American Gospel 1944-2007

  BY AUDRA SCHROEDER

• John Coltrane

  Side Steps

  BY JAY TRACHTENBERG

• Woody Guthrie

  My Dusty Road

  BY DOUG FREEMAN

• Dolly Parton

  Dolly

  BY MARGARET MOSER

• Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

  The Live Anthology

  BY JIM CALIGIURI

• Where the Action Is!: Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968

  Where the Action Is!: Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968

  BY AUSTIN POWELL

• The Doors

  Live in New York

  BY RAOUL HERNANDEZ

• Frank Sinatra

  New York

  BY GREG BEETS

• Rod Stewart

  The Rod Stewart Sessions 1971-1998

  BY MARGARET MOSER

• Woodstock 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm

  Woodstock 40 Years On: Back to Yasgur's Farm

  BY JIM CALIGIURI

• Gary Moore

  Essential Montreux

  BY RAOUL HERNANDEZ

• Jane's Addiction

  A Cabinet of Curiosities

  BY AUSTIN POWELL

• Boxing 2009

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

The Live Anthology, a career-spanning Tom Petty collection (1978–2007), comes in enough formats to please fans of every stripe. The basic 4-CD, 48-track minibox and the 51-song, 7-LP vinyl set will please most, but if you need the full Heartbreaker experience, go for the deluxe box with an extra CD (upping the track total to 62), two DVDs of unreleased material, a vinyl pressing of the Official Live 'Leg bootleg from 1976, and a Blu-ray disc that contains all the material on the CDs in both stereo and 5.1 surround sound, plus posters, a large format book, and other memorabilia. Fanatics can visit the Anthology website, where there's even more content. Others have released similar live collections; Bruce Springsteen and the Grateful Dead come to mind, and like those endeavors, Anthology exposes the Heartbreakers' range and influences. While some may quibble that the set isn't chronologically ordered, that makes each disc more like a concert unto itself. All the hits and some deep cuts are present and accounted for, but the covers are the most interesting, from the obvious (the Byrds' "Ballad of Easy Rider," Thunderclap Newman's "Something in the Air") to the unexpected (Van Morrison's "Mystic Eyes"). On one of the DVDs, 400 Days, a previously unavailable document filmed during the making of 1995's Wildflowers and the resulting tour, Petty perfectly describes the band's enduring attraction: "There's really not more to us than what you see and what you hear. We're not trying to deliver any hidden messages. It's all really obvious. We're just trying to make good music."