SAN FRANCISCO — THE misadventure began, as so many do, in a dingy Florida strip club. This one was called Dub's, and it was cinder-block roadhouse in Gainesville where, in the early 1970s, a dancer named Bubbles shimmied for students, townies and truck drivers while a band with the unfortunate name of Mudcrutch played muscular music that melded old-man country with new-kid rock. It was a Southern solution to the British Invasion.
Mudcrutch was better than good too. They did five shows a day, six nights a week and, by all accounts, they were the second most interesting thing on stage. Everyone predicted the scruffy kids would be stars someday. That didn't happen, at least not the way anyone expected.
The young band headed west to L.A. and cut a single, but the record fell flat. Mudcrutch was one and done, so, 33 years ago, the members called it quits.
The story should end there, but it doesn't. They have a new album -- their debut album, in fact -- hitting stores Tuesday from Reprise Records. They are on tour too and have six sold-out nights booked at the Troubadour after a recent run at the Fillmore in San Francisco, despite never having been played on the radio.
The reason for all this? The band's lead singer and bassist is Tom Petty, who of course became one of the signature rock stars of his generation as well as one of its maverick souls. Now one of the great things about being a rock star is watching your whims come to life, and that's exactly what happened when Petty decided last year, against all logic, that Mudcrutch should live again.
"You wouldn't exactly call it a career move, would you?" Petty says as he doodles on a pad of Clift Hotel stationery. He was sketching a picture of the man sitting across from him, Tom Leadon, Petty's childhood friend and fellow Mudcrutch founder. "What this is all about is the music. Being in this band is so much fun, there's something pure about it."
Petty was speaking with nostalgic endearment, but the expression on Leadon's face was the kind you see in snapshots of wide-eyed lottery winners. "When Tom called and said he wanted to get the band together," Leadon says, "I felt like a bolt of lightning went through my body."
Leadon was headed home with a carload of groceries on a Saturday morning last year when his cellphone rang and he heard a voice -- it sure sounded like his old buddy Petty -- on the other end talking about a Mudcrutch reunion. He thought it was a prank.
