Tom Petty tours with pre-Heartbreakers band

The Quarrymen of Gainesville?

In a nutshell, that’s Mudcrutch, the band Tom Petty played in before forming the Heartbreakers. And while John Lennon and Paul McCartney never got around to resurrecting the Quarrymen, their first band, after the Beatles exploded, Petty and his long-ago mates — guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh along with future Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and guitarist Mike Campbell — have reunited to put out the debut album they never got to make originally.

“Mudcrutch” will be released April 29, and in conjunction with the album, the band will do a handful of shows along the California coast, beginning April 12 in Malibu and concluding with a four-night stand April 25-29 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood.

Of the album, Petty writes in a note posted on the Mudcrutch fan website, “I am over the moon about it. I couldn’t have hoped for it to be as good as it came out.”

Mudcrutch gained a solid following in Florida in the early-’70s, prompting the band to move to California in hopes of bigger things. But the result was just one single, and the members quickly went their separate ways.

While subsequently working on a solo album, Tench invited Petty and Campbell to join him for sessions he’d set up with the rhythm section of drummer Stan Lynch and bassist Ron Blair, the lineup that soon became the Heartbreakers.

Petty told Rolling Stone recently that the album was recorded at his Malibu home studio “in two weeks flat. We played everything live — vocals, no overdubs... It was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

— Randy Lewis

Photo of Tom Petty by Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images