Tom Petty’s first official solo album, which produced five hit singles, is one of the most enduring and successful rock records of the modern era — 54x platinum in the US alone — and Petty’s uncontested commercial peak. Not bad for an album the label initially refused to release. After hearing George Harrison’s 1987 album Cloud 9, Petty immediately sought out its producer, Jeff Lynne, to co-produce the album along with Campbell and himself. It would be the beginning of a partnership that would yield three albums and one supergroup. Lynne’s notoriously fussy, antiseptic production would seem to have been tested by Petty’s approach to the writing and recording of the album, which owed more to Ginsberg’s favored maxim of “first thought, best thought” than to the immaculate studio sheen for which he is known. For Full Moon Fever, Petty and Lynne feverishly recorded songs the same day they were written, careful not to over-think arrangements or lyrics. Despite this, the sound of Full Moon Fever still manages to sound conspicuously overworked: Lynne epitomizes the producer-as-auteur theory by constantly drawing attention to his unmistakable, reverb-averse signature sound, from copious background vocals to layers upon layers of compressed guitars to gloppy, rococo arrangements. The songs that succeed on Full Moon Fever do so in spite of, not because of, co-writer and co-producer Lynne: the George Harrison-assisted “I Won’t Back Down” sounds like a trial run for the Wilburys while doubling as something of a Tom Petty anthem; the suspended chords and big, karaoke-ready chorus of “Free Fallin'” is anathema to only the hardest of hearts (and has been credited with reviving at least one coma victim); and “Face In The Crowd” — more Gene Clark than Dwight Twilley — signals, in one fell swoop, the beginning of Petty’s role as mature classic rock survivor and the end of his role as pugilistic upstart. Despite a handful of real turkeys (“Zombie Zoo,” anyone?), Full Moon Fever is as enjoyable today as it was in 1989.