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Carrying her guitar case, Jaime Wyatt walked into the southeast Lincoln home, slipped off her jacket, put on her cowboy hat, unpacked her guitar, took out the setlist on her phone and settled in on a folding chair for what almost surely will turn out to be her most intimate show of the year. There were just a half-dozen of us in David Schleich’s home Sunday afternoon when Wyatt rolled in for her house concert, a number so small that things were disarmingly informal, with plenty of chatter, a pee break and the consumption of peanut butter cookies between songs. Appropriately enough, the outlaw country singer-songwriter started the show with a song from “Felony Blues” the autobiographical title of her 2017 debut album that’s rooted in her 9-month stint in the Los Angeles County jail — the addicted Wyatt "caught a felony” for robbing her heroin dealer.
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A few songs later, the autobiography continued with “Rattlesnake Girl,” her account of figuring out she was gay after she escaped from the small Washington town where she grew up. That song came from her Shooter Jennings-produced 2020 album “Neon Cross,” the record that put her on the Americana/outlaw country radar and contained “Hurt So Bad,” a pain-filled number with references to the “diamond needle” that turned up in an episode of “Yellowstone” a couple years ago. Wyatt played a few songs from her most recent album, 2023’s R&B-tinged “Feel Good," including her make-it-my-own cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Althea,” and she ended the show, somehow perfectly, by playing a half-finished song to get reactions from the tiny, but attentive, audience.
So, after that narrative, what does Wyatt sound like? Well, doing her songs with guitar and harmonica, she’s a traditional country chanteuse, delivering sad songs with an ache and cry in her voice and spitting out the up-tempo numbers with melodic sass. She’s very good on her ‘60s Gibson acoustic guitar as well, work that you can easily imagine anchoring the band that she usually plays with on tour. The Schleich house show, her seventh of the week, was a stop on Wyatt’s journey to Austin, Texas, for South By Southwest.
Thursday she played Willie Nelson’s Luck Reunion along with the likes of Charley Crockett, Shane Smith and the Saints, Jesse Welles and the Redheaded Stranger himself, then joined the showcase of her label, New West Records, that included Emily Nenni — who impressed last year at the Bourbon Theater. Wyatt, who played Omaha’s Reverb Lounge in January 2024, said she’d played Lincoln years ago, but didn’t remember the venue. My guess would be the Zoo Bar, but I sure don’t remember the show and nothing about it can be found in Journal Star records, such as they are.
After Sunday’s afternoon, one thing I know for sure is I’ll be at the show the next time Wyatt comes to Nebraska. I want to hear her with her band the next time ‘cause she sure was good by herself. Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party on Paramount+ An fascinatingly-fun time capsule dropped on Paramount+ last week — the remastered, augmented in newly found footage documentary “Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party.
” The documentary, framed as a “profile” by music journalist Cameron Crowe — the model for the young rock writer of “Almost Famous,” the 2000 movie for which he won the original screenplay Oscar — was shown exactly once on MTV in 1983, then pulled for being “too experimental.” That disappearance makes the doc’s reappearance revelatory as it melds together concert footage from 1982 and '83, some older live shots and interviews with Petty into a made-for-TV doc that’s not filtered by the last four decades of Petty’s life. The “experimental” part of “Heartbreakers Beach Party” is in its structure.
It’s non-narrative, even as it traces Petty and the band’s lives and career as they moved from Florida to Los Angeles, persevered through battles with record labels and became, I would argue, their era’s biggest and best rock ‘n’ roll band. So cuts of Crowe talking to Petty in the backseat of a limo are intercut with studio footage or concert clips and talk about how he wrote many of his best known songs bumps up against scenes of the Heartbreakers shooting a video in the desert outside LA — perfect for MTV, which, like Petty, was blowing up in 1983. The newly discovered footage is tacked onto the end of the original doc, along with a discussion between Crowe, who says he became a movie director because Petty made him film a song while riding on the tour bus.
“Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party” looks like a must-see for Petty fans and it’s well worth a look for anyone who wants to see what Petty and company, the rock culture and MTV were like four decades ago. Reach the writer at 402-473-7244 or kwolgamott @journalstar.com .
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