C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley both died on the same day as the JFK assassination. It’s an odd bit of historical trivia that often gets cited to show how even important markers can get lost amid earth shattering news. It might be as stretch to compare Tom Petty to those intellectual titans, but it would also be a mistake to underestimate what a beloved figure he was. That Petty died in the wake of one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history seems somehow too coincidental not to notice.
It’s an especially cruel irony, because one of the reasons why Tom Petty was so beloved was that, beyond his musical output, Petty was the rare rock star who wanted all of the attention focused on his prodigious and worthy catalog of hits. Petty’s death at age 66 might be the one time where the attention deserved to be focused on the man himself, and that’s understandably very hard to do right now.
Over the course of a 40-plus-year career, the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers experienced some of the inevitable rock ‘n’ roll drama. One of the band’s bass players, Howie Epstein, died of a heroin overdose in 2003. There were the requisite divorces. But somehow it was never the stuff of sordid rock ‘n’ roll gossip. Unless you were some kind of superfan, you likely knew none of these things. All you knew is that when a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers song came on the radio, the dial stayed where it was.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ eponymous first record came out the year I was born. I have never known a time without Tom Petty reliably on the radio, and even as a burgeoning rock music obsessive, I sort of took them for granted. About a decade ago, I realized that I reflexively knew every word, guitar lick, drum fill, and keyboard accent for more than 50 Tom Petty songs. And yet, I had only owned exactly one Tom Petty record. (That was his 1989 solo album, Full Moon Fever with “Free Fallin’,” “Running Down a Dream,” and “I Won’t Back Down.” And even that CD I possessed solely because one my sister’s friends left it at my parents’ house.) Oddly, this realization coincided with another, more startling realization: I liked Tom Petty. A lot.
My musical awakening came in the late ‘80s/early ’90s, and those younger than that might not have a sense of how oppressively omnipresent classic rock radio had become. In an FM dominated, pre-Internet world, pop music fans basically had a choice between radio stations that played Whitney Houston all the time or radio stations that played Led Zeppelin all the time. When Nirvana cleaned the Augean Stables of rock ‘n’ roll my freshman year in high school, it was quite a relief.
But not for rock ‘n’ roll’s old guard; for a few years there the music press was full of angry spats from multiplatinum hair metal bands and AOR juggernauts attacking the new alternative vanguard for sweeping them out of the spotlight and off the charts. (I vividly remember Billy Corgan responding to some pointed criticism from Toto’s virtuoso guitar player Steve Luthaker by snapping, “I would say that if ‘Hold The Line’ was the best rock riff I’d ever written, I think I’d keep my mouth shut.”)
But after Kurt Cobain killed himself, one of the first public appearances by Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl was sitting behind the kit with Heartbreakers on Saturday Night Live in 1994. Symbolically, it was a huge healing moment for rock ‘n’ roll. (The prospect of Grohl joining the Heartbreakers was even briefly entertained, before Grohl went on to front the Foo Fighters.) Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were perhaps the only American band that were both a fixture in the classic rock firmament, but not wholly of it, such that they could have united these disparate generations of rock fans. And so it was that even arrogant young indie rock snobs like myself were disarmed by Tom Petty.
It helped that, unlike most of their rock ‘n’ roll peers that came out of the ‘70s, the Heartbreakers remained commercially and culturally relevant for an astonishingly long time. While Toto was confronting the prospect of touring the county fair circuit, Petty was big as ever thanks to steady hit-making. Petty’s seemingly effortless songcraft is perhaps best illustrated by the following detail: In 1993, the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers released their first greatest hits record. At the time, there was an industry trend for bands to record at least one new song to throw on their greatest hits record, the thinking being that new material would entice people to buy a CD of repackaged songs they might already own . Invariably, this new song was as half-hearted as you would expect from a forced marketing ploy.
Nonetheless, Petty and the Heartbreakers bowed to commercial imperatives and tacked a new song onto their greatest hits record, a bone simple cowboy chord Am-G-D vamp that a chimpanzee left alone with a guitar could teach himself to play. The song was “Mary Jane’s Last Dance.” It landed at No. 14 on Billboard and is one of Petty’s most enduring songs. And so the egregiously superfluous song on their greatest hits record ended up being one of the band’s actual greatest hits. That’s how good a songwriter Tom Petty was.
The actual story of the formation of the Heartbreakers—from when Petty traded his slingshot for a collection of Elvis 45s to his days fronting a popular college band named Mudcrutch that evolved into the Heartbreakers—is ably told in the wonderful, and wonderfully exhaustive, four-hour documentary Running Down a Dream. (Directed by Peter Bogdanovich of The Last Picture Show fame, it’s available on Netflix.) But I’m not sure learning, say, that Petty had a difficult and abusive relationship with his father really provides a satisfying degree of insight for an artist that seemed so fully formed by the time they packed up and arrived in L.A. to record their first record.
“Breakdown,” the first single off their first record, was a bona fide hit. (In concert, the band would often slyly mash-up “Breakdown” with “Hit the Road Jack.”) From the slinky pentatonic guitar hook to the acidic lyrics of the first verse—“It’s alright if you love me/It’s alright if you don’t/I’m not afraid of you runnin’ away honey/I get the feeling you won’t”—Petty and the Heartbreakers announced their arrival with remarkable confidence and maturity. And then they never left. The stats gurus at 538 crunched the numbers, and Tom Petty is responsible for one out of every 40 songs played on classic rock radio. This is an indictment of the staid state of commercial FM, sure, but you have to admit Petty earned this airwaves domination.
Petty didn’t reinvent the wheel musically. His voice is often compared, for obvious reasons, to Dylan. (He’s a better singer than Dylan, backhanded compliment though that may be.) And I seem to recall an interview once where he described original conception of the band as being the Byrds meet the Rolling Stones, which is an impressively self-aware and well-realized vision of what Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers sounded like.
But a close listen reveals an impressive amount of variety lurking in Petty’s catalog. There are tender ballads such as “Southern Accents” and “Wildflowers.” There’s Warren Zevon-esque storytelling in “Into the Great Wide Open.” There’s slick, synth-tinged hits such as “You Got Lucky” and the Dave Stewart-produced, immortalized-on-early-MTV “Don’t Come Around Here No More” that got the band occasionally pegged as New Wave. There are garage rock, hit-the-open-road rave ups such as “I Need To Know” and “Running Down a Dream.” And there’s even lots of late career Petty songs that never got the air play they deserved, including the aching and exquisite “Room at the Top.”
For all that can be said for Petty’s recorded output, there’s still the question of Petty the man. From what glimpses I’ve seen, he was very contradictory by nature. His personal demeanor is laconic, and yet he was obviously a very driven and demanding man. You did not want to get crosswise with Petty in business dealings—he was victorious in a groundbreaking lawsuit against his record label that many thought was career suicide at the time. But Petty was also enormously loyal. Even on his solo records, he often worked with Heartbreaker mainstays, guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboardist Benmont Tench, arguably the two most tasteful and underrated sidemen in the history of rock.
And his loyalties to rock ‘n’ roll as an art form speak for themselves. He was a member of the supergroup the Travelling Wilburys, with George Harrison, superproducer Jeff Lynne of ELO, Roy Orbison, and Bob Dylan. Those names need no introduction, but Orbison was the only one of the Wilburys whose career was flagging in the 1980s. It was Lynne and Petty’s mission to resuscitate Orbison’s career. When Orbison died unexpectedly in 1988, he was the first musician since Elvis to die with two albums in the top five—the Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 and the Jeff Lynne-produced solo record Mystery Girl. The hit single off of Mystery Girl, “You Got It” was written by, yup, Tom Petty. Orbison got the sendoff his talent deserved.
Petty also didn’t just look to revitalize existing rock ‘n’ roll legends, either. The Replacements are often cited as the greatest what if? story in rock history. In Bob Mehr’s terrific bio of the Replacements from last year, Trouble Boys, he recounts at length the futile-but-still-heroic career intervention efforts of Petty and the Heartbreakers after they selected the Replacements as an opening act toward the end of the ill-fated band’s career.
America is grieving today for several reasons. And the shooting in Vegas is a tragedy that threatens to divide us along political lines. I’d like to think a huge swath of America, across beliefs, cultures, generations, and races, would want to claim Tom Petty’s music and feel some solidarity in his loss. We need unifying cultural figures and artists now more than ever. We simply can’t afford to lose our Tom Pettys.
