R.I.P. Tom Petty

I'm pretty damn seriously bummed about Tom Petty passing on.  More so than Prince.  More so than Guy Clark.  More so than just about any artist I can think of right now.  I think a lot of us grew up on Petty.  I know my older siblings loved him as much or more than me, and yet when I was school, Petty soundtracked a long stretch of that time from junior high through college.

(look at that amazing video!  Mad Max meets Tom Petty!  I remember being entranced by the thought of finding that many TVs and a free slot machine. But they just leave almost all of it behind!  As a kid who was busily designing complicated mansion blueprints that contained at least one room full of TVs, this seemed highly suspect to me.)

I started out with Petty through the classic rock station in Austin, the usual suspects like "Refugee" or "You Got Lucky" or "American Girl."  I found my brother's copy of Damn the Torpedoes and made a bootleg tape of it in my bedroom.  It had Huey Lewis & the News' Sports on the other side of the tape.  I played that sucker a bunch, I love "Even the Losers" more than anything else on that album.  But like most other great music at the time, it just hovered around the periphery of my fandom, because I was fully immersed in the garbage pop rock of the time, whatever K-98 would play, with forays into the cool older sibling music few and far between.  I do remember making another bootleg tape of a Tom Petty album, Let Me Up I've Had Enough, which I checked out from the Austin Public Library.  This is not his best album...

The only other one of the classic TP albums that I really know is Southern Accents.  And the reason is a weird one.  When I bought a VW Jetta post college (bad ass diesel car, standard transmission, quick and tight little car, still kind of miss it), it had a tape deck and no disc player.  So the next day, I rolled over to Half Price Books in Dallas to raid their tape section (which were dirt cheap because tapes were on the way out).  I scored Born in the USA, Tupelo Honey, Synchronicity, and Southern Accents, and those became the sounds of my hour-long commute each morning and afternoon.  "Southern Accents" is a beautiful song.

But prior to that post-college Jetta, it was the Travelling Wilburys that opened up Petty to me more fully than any of the classic albums with the Heartbreakers.

My friend Jordan's mom has always been a trip, just a woman of her own design.  Not only was she just about the only adult I knew growing up who cussed without reservation (I can still clearly hear her saying "Goddammit, Jack, stop calling me ma'am!  Fuck!" when I was like 13 and trying to be all respectful and proper), she also played kick ass music while we were in the car.  She introduced me to Paul Simon's Graceland, the Travelling Wilburys, and the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, among other items.  I used to get to go along with them on road trips and ski trips and whatnot, and so the first time I recall feeling like I truly loved Tom Petty, not just heard him on the radio and could care less, was through the Traveling Wilburys.  She let me take the liner notes and read through them as we drove and so I tried to figure out which musician was doing which part.  I'm sure to most people, he was the low man on the fame totem pole, behind Dylan, Harrison, Orbison, and maybe ahead of Lynne, but Petty seemed like the star to me until I learned more about music.  Listen to that track again, does Roy Orbison have the most beautiful voice ever, or what?

Fast forward to Full Moon Fever in 1989.  Like everyone else in the world, the radio brought "Free Fallin'," "Runnin Down a Dream," and "I Won't Back Down" into constant rotation, but I love the whole album.  I remember thinking it so clever when he has the interlude to let CD listeners know that the record or cassette folks are going to have to pause to flip over their copy of the album, but asking those of us listening on CD to pause for a moment in fairness.  Always struck me as funny.  This was Petty's first solo album without the Heartbreakers, and while I don't know that I can tell an appreciable difference without his band, this was his best album without any doubt in my mind.  The amazing thing is that when I just put it back on, I still know all of the words to deep cuts like "The Apartment Song," when I probably haven't heard this album in a decade.  I love the lyrics to "Yer So Bad," for some reason as a teenager, hearing the stuff about the sister's ex-husband who can't get no lovin' and walks around dog-faced and hurt, was perfect.  "now he's got nothing, head in the oven, I can't decide which is worse."  Burn City.  I also remember listening to this album with my older sister Susan (she might have even given me my copy of the CD), because she is a TP superfan and she loved it.  Such a good disc, I never should have gotten away from it.

(ahhh, back when "yuppie" was like a curse word, like "Yankee" or "Millennial."  One thing you cannot say about TP is that his videos were normal or boring...)

Then just two years later, the next classic came out, Into the Great Wide Open, with the Heartbreakers back on board.  This album reminds me of a few very deep seated, special memories.  The first that came to mind was a childhood trip to Lake Powell in Utah.  Jordan and Andy, two of my best friends growing up, brought me along on their families' road trip up to the lake, and we all rented a huge houseboat for a week of cruising the lake and cliff diving and sleeping out and board games and swimming and general excellent fun.  If you've never been, I highly recommend it.  And this album was the soundtrack (along with, to my shame, Van Halen's For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge) in my headphones and sometimes through the boat's speakers.  I have a particular memory of the blaring guitar reverb from "Makin' Some Noise," played through the boat and echoing off the rock of a huge overhang where we had tossed down anchor to eat and then sleep for the night.  The kids would sleep on the roof of the houseboat, out under a million stars, it was rad.  "Into the Great Wide Open" and "Learning to Fly" are excellent songs, but my personal favorite has always been "Two Gunslingers."  If you've read my stuff in the past, then you know I'm a sucker for the good storytelling stuff, and the imagery of these two gunslingers deciding that they needed to take control of their lives and stop fighting for no reason, is just <Itialian chef kissing his fingers sound>.  This album was also excellent.  "All the Wrong Reasons" is classic - Tom Petty's lyricism is just rock solid.  I love this album.

By the time Wildflowers and She's The One came out, I was in college, and we were still listening to Full Moon Fever and Into the Great Wide Open, along with a personally new foray into country like Jerry Jeff and Robert Earl, sitting on rotting couches on the front porch of garbage houses in Sherman.  I bought Wildflowers at the jenky used CD store by Cici's Pizza that was close to campus, and my freshman roommate and I used to listen while getting ready to go out on the town.  But the most clear memory of that album I have is how one night as a freshman I was driving some older guys out to the one bar in town, listening to that album, and they complimented me on my music.  Now, 20+ years later, when I should care less about those dudes or what they think about my tastes, that still sticks with me that Tom Petty made me feel like I had gotten "in" with cool dudes.  More likely I was in with them because I had a big car and would drive their drunk asses to a bar.  Whatever.  She's the One reminds me of one old girlfriend - I used to have to travel down to San Marcos to visit her, and I remember She's the One and Beck's Odelay being my frequent flier choices for those drives.

I never loved his later albums nearly so much as I loved Full Moon Fever, Into the Great Wide Open, and Wildflowers.  Highway Companion was fine.  Echo was pretty good.  The Last DJ had a song or three.  Mojo was forgettable.  Hypnotic Eye was actually better than I remember now that I try it again.  I had entirely forgotten about Nobody's Children even existing.  But nothing from those had the classic sound that made Petty indelible in my brain.  There are very few artists or bands that have stuck with me as long and as well as Tom Petty.  Right now, I'm so damn sad that I didn't make it a priority to go to that last show in May at the Erwin Center.  I should have gone.  Never got to see him play live.

I'll also always have good memories from ACL 2017 about Petty, because there were many tributes.  The coolest, in no particular order:

1. Josh Klinghofer from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, coming out on to the stage all by himself and strumming his way through a spare version of "Face in the Crowd," from Full Moon Fever.  It was beautiful, and more so to me because the majority of people around me had no clue what he was playing, thought it was a new solo song or something, but I knew and it felt special to be in on it.
2. The Killers opening with "American Girl."
3. The Revivalists' version of "Refugee," which was perfection.
4. The massive all-park singalong to "Free Fallin'," soundtracked by a 2006 video of Petty's performance at ACL, where all the video screens in the park simultaneously played that video and then skydivers jumped out of an airplane and spiraled down to earth shooting sparks.  Cool feeling to sing along with the world like that.

I know many tributes have already been written and digested, so I'm not adding anything special to the world of journalism here, but now that the ACL crush is over with and I can think about other things, I just wanted to make sure that I saved my own memories of how Petty has been a touchstone in my life.  RIP.