Petty Rocks Spectrum With Satellites, Del Fuegos

The potential for boogie overload hung as heavy in the air as the marijuana smoke when Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Georgia Satellites and the Del Fuegos rolled into the Spectrum Thursday night.

Although the Del Fuegos and Satellites turned in rock 'em, sock 'em performances, the headliners prevented the evening from degenerating into a demolition derby.

Petty and the Heartbreakers presented a long and varied set that was brilliantly conceived and executed. The band hit the ground sprinting with ''Breakdown," a menacing ramble that is one of Petty's earlier songs and still one of his best. More runaway rhythms followed, including "American Girl," before Petty eased back the tempo on "My Life/Your World," a waltz to alienation from the band's most recent album, Let Me Up (I've Had Enough).

From that point, Petty played his audience like a yo-yo, alternating revved-up rockers with more genial pieces.

Pace was not all that set Petty apart from his full-speed-ahead opening acts. He and his band have always worked from an unusually broad emotional palette. Even on the Heartbreakers' hardest-hitting songs, there are attractive country and folk undertones. In concert even more than on record, the guitar textures, chords and vocals show Petty's debt to the Byrds. The lovely piano playing of Benmont Tench and the pretty vocal harmonies of bassist Howie Epstein also had a noticeable leavening effect.

Unlike the group's last tour, there was no entourage of horns and backup singers to muddy the lucid, plain-spoken sound. Few bands could color the explosive "Jammin' Me" and the elegiac "Runaway Trains" as richly as the Heartbreakers did. The hero of the evening was guitarist Mike Campbell. He gathered up the electricity in every song and wrung it out through his guitar in terse, stinging solos.

Petty offered most of his better-known songs and the audience sang along with most. But there were also extremely deft covers of Buffalo Springfield's ''For What It's Worth" and the Clash's truncheonlike "Should I Stay or Should I Go."

The surprising aspect of the performance was the political tone of Petty's soliloquies between songs, touching disparagingly on the CIA, nuclear power, unemployment and other issues. This led to a moment of high irony.