With a pending break from touring with The Heartbreakers, TOM PETTY revives his original band, MUDCRUTCH, 35 years later.

At the end of the story—well, the end so far—we arrive at the beginning. “I hadn’t thought about it that clearly,” allows the man who is both summing up and starting over, “but I guess that’s probably true.” In the studio of his Malibu hacienda, tucked away in the trees just off Pacific Coast Highway, Tom Petty is the sort of person who doesn’t so much gaze at the garden outside his window as peer at it, leery it might stare back. He’s just returned from a gig at San Francisco’s Fillmore, a week into a West Coast tour with his band Mudcrutch.

Wait. Mudcrutch? That’s not the band’s name is it? Isn’t there another? Isn’t referring to Petty’s band as Mudcrutch a little like referring to Paul’s band as Wings, even as an earlier shadow is so large as to swallow up the surrounding ground? Except this is stranger—as though Wings had preceded those other guys before Paul returned to them, as in fact Mudcrutch preceded The Heartbreakers, the band with whom Petty found fame over the last three decades and stormed the citadel of immortality. “The funny thing,” Petty says, “is we’re making better music than we ever have.” But then, who is this “we”?