| T |
wo days ago lightning struck Tom
Petty's house on St. Augustine Beach, Florida. Tom and Jane, his
wife, were sitting in the living room watching the bolts come down
on the Atlantic when every- | thing around them suddenly went white; the thunder was so loud
"that the house shook more than an earthquake. And then we started to
smell smoke; and then the alarm went on, and it wouldn't go off." There
was no fire, but every circuit and appliance in the house -- the TV, the
washer and dryer, the garage-door opener -- was fried out of commission.
"The smoke alarms had holes through them." T.P. shakes his head in
wonder. Now there's a tiny "emergency" TV sitting next to a big, blown-out
one. "You wouldn't want to be without a television here," says Tom. "That
could have been serious, sitting out each night with ...
nothin'." |
| St. Augustine Beach is where Petty comes
to do "as little as possible, to sit on the beach and clear my head" when
the pressures of being a pop star in a pop town grow too burdensome, or
when life gets too "frantic." His life was frantic for years: "We were
always doing something. We were staying up all night and playing music,
traveling. Now I sort of try to control that aspect." And so he's made an
escape from daylong rounds of press and promotion for Into the Great
Wide Open (MCA), his first record with longtime band the Heartbreakers
after four years, a triple-platinum solo album and two outings as a
traveling Wilbury. It reached the point where Tom couldn't spend one more
second talking about himself -- probably not a hard limit for him to reach
in the most natural circumstances -- and he and Jane and their younger
daughter Kim, who's nine, packed out of the big house in Encino and came
to Florida. (Daughter Adria, 16, is spending the summer in a writing
program at Barnard College.) |
| You might find him here fishing, or
riding his Little Honda 50 ("not very macho at all") down along the
waterline or over to the Seaview Cafe. "I probably never exceed
twenty-five miles an hour," he says -- it's the slow lane, baby, all the
way. Yet it's been a little less than dull, what with the lightning, and
sharks offshore and in the newspaper. Just the other day, Tom pulled Kim
from the water after a neighbor directed his attention past the breakers.
"I never saw a fin, but I could see that big black movement under the
wave. It kind of ended swimming for the day. |
| Petty grew up an hour and a half west,
in swampy Gainesville. As a kid, he'd sometimes make a field trip to St.
Augustine, America's Oldest City; as a teenager, he'd sometimes come here
to surf. Today, sitting on a high stool at a kitchen counter, he looks the
surfer still, with his lank blond hair and sun-red nose, his T-shirt
sleeves rolled and a thin choker of tiny black and white beads encircling
his throat. He hasn't shaved, and there's a patch of gray on his stubbly
chin. |
| He's 40 years old now. There are metal
bones in his right hand to replace the ones he atomized when, in 1985, he
slammed his fist into a wall out of frustration with his music and life;
it took a lot of physical therapy to get it working again, but nowadays he
notices the metal bits only when the weather gets very cold. He's had
surgery on his right knee, wrecked from years of "leaping off drum
risers"; his left foot is arthritic, possibly from pounding it onstage in
time to his music. "I have to survive on medication the rest of my life in
order to walk," Petty says. "That's something I can deal with, I suppose."
"A lot" of hearing in his left ear is gone; both ears ring. "I feel
sometimes like an ex-football player. I'm just becoming aware that my
body's been beat up really bad. |
| All this he has endured for rock &
roll; after his family, it has been and remains the significant force in
his life. It shaped him, and fed him, and made him famous; it drove him to
drink, and helped restore him to his senses. Still, he's developed a sense
of proportion about it. He's had to. You can only go so long busting your
bones, or beating your head against the Business. Tom has a long history
of that last activity, having taken on MCA Records (still his label, but
with a more congenial administration) over unfair contracts and higher
record prices -- fighting, basically, to keep from feeling like a pawn in
their game, like "a piece of meat." "The first million dollars I made in
my life," he says, "I paid in legal fees." |
| "People in the music business tend to do
things to you, like, if you sell three million records one time and the
next time you sell a million and a half -- they'll make you feel
bad about that. I see that it's smart to be aware of whether people
like what you're doing or not, but I don't want to be one of those people
who are miserable even when they're successful. That is not the way I want
my life to go. I've listened to so many people say, like, 'Hey, you're
gonna be the greatest, kid.' It's like ... boxers. And it's just not my
nature. It was never my nature to be a public personality. I just wanted
to be in a band, like I'd been in half of my life -- before these
guys were in the music business. I just wanted to
play." |
| He's learned that "work isn't the only
place your life can pay off. You've got to be happy, spiritually I
suppose, about yourself and how you fit into the world. It's all the
things that come with age -- just getting more aware of wasting a day. But
it's easy to say and hard to do, isn't it?" |
| His battered joints notwithstanding,
Tom's feeling pretty good these days -- not exactly mellow, never
mellow -- but glad to be here, sure of his priorities. It's a
different sort of self-possession than that which made him so quickly
persuasive as a brash young rock & roller, and it's present in his new
songs (more reflective, more frequently funny) and in the way he sings
them. On some recordings from the mid-'80s -- back when Petty was feeling
creatively dead, and his marriage was shaky and he was drinking too much
and writing songs with titles like "Make It Better (Forget About Me)" --
you hear him push his voice way up into his sinuses and lock his throat
behind it, so that singing becomes an exercise in self-strangulation. As
he came finally to cut himself some slack, he found a new voice (you begin
to hear it on the Wilburys records), uncommonly sweet and clear and
confident, relaxed but muscular, and exceptionally good-humored. It's the
sound of someone laughing to himself. |
| T |
here's a cheaply framed picture of
the Beatles on the wall of Tom's Florida bathroom; one of Elvis
Presley sits on a bookshelf next to Monopoly and bingo games and
arithmetic flash cards, and | Laurel and Hardy hang in the kitchen. Elvis and the mop-tops are
inspirations obviously enough, but there's more than a little Stan Laurel
-- an imp behind a dead pan, a deceptively quiet man capable of inspiring
great havoc -- in T.P. as well. |
| It was Elvis that made the deepest
impression. When Petty was 11 years old, and more interested in Zorro than
in music, he shook Presley's hand at a Florida location for the movie
Follow That Dream. It was his first encounter with something bigger
than life, the kind of moment upon which men used to found churches. Tom
traded a slingshot for a friend's stack of golden-era 45s and began to
imagine the person he wanted to become. |
| He'd sit in his room, "trying things" on
a $5 Kay electric guitar. At local dances, he'd see bands like the
Escorts, from Daytona Beach, featuring brothers Duane and Gregg Allman. "I
would literally just sit in a folding chair and watch five hours of this.
I was in heaven." Gainesville is a university town, and "you could go to
Fraternity Row and walk down behind it, and hear thirty bands in an
evening -- they all had a band, every Friday and Saturday
night." |
| Petty's first band, the Sundowners,
emerged overnight out of his own big mouth. Tom was 14 and at a school
dance, when "a girl I really liked, a really pretty girl who didn't pay
much attention to me, came over. There was a song playing, the Beatles'
'Twist and Shout.' She said, 'I really dig this song.' I said, 'Yeah, I
like it too.... I've got a group myself' -- you know, I didn't. She
goes, 'Really? I'm in charge of entertainment for the next dance.
We're having a deejay, but maybe your group would play in the breaks.' And
I was, like, hey, no problem, baby, great. I left the dance that night in
a panic." |
| He called a classmate who played drums
and knew another guitarist, and the next day they assembled in Petty's
parents' den, plugged into one "enormous Sears amplifier with six inputs,
and just started wailing away. It was such an incredible rush."
They learned three numbers -- instrumentals, as they had no microphone --
and on the appointed night dressed in blue shirts and white Levi's and
"went to the dance, extremely nervous. And then the break came, and we
came up to play, and it went over so well we had to play the same three
numbers three times. By the end of the dance, not only did we all have
more female attention than we'd had in our life -- though I don't
think it really made us ladies' men, either -- but then this guy walks up
and says, 'That's a good group you have there. Maybe you'd like to play at
our fraternity. We'll give you a hundred bucks' -- he might have said a
million. 'But you're going to have to have more songs than
three.'" |
| How could he have turned back then? The
Sundowners were in rehearsal again the next day. They acquired a
microphone and began to collect better equipment and sharper outfits. They
won a battle of the bands at the Moose lodge against "a band who didn't
have nearly our determination," and Tom went home with $25. "My mom was
amazed. She said, 'Where did you get twenty-five dollars?' 'I
earned it. I played music.' She goes, 'You've never even had a
lesson, how could you possibly play music?' I said, 'Well, the other guys
teach me stuff, and we just work it out.' And she thought it was great.
'But you're not going to play in bars' -- that's what she said next.
'Don't think you're going to be down in the bars playing.'" |
| P |
etty is
an oddly cross-generational performer. Despite his constant presence
on the new oldies radio he's never traded in nostalgia, and in spite
of not being exactly the day 's featured flavor, he's
never | seemed as out of time
as, say, the Rolling Stones regularly manage to. ("I don't want to wind up
just touring around playing my old hits," he says, adding straightfaced,
"unless I really need the money someday.") Though his first album didn't
appear until 1976, when it was taken for "new wave," he's been a working
musician since the mid-'60s, and in the Traveling Wilburys has merged
seamlessly with players (Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison) a decade
his senior. He comes out of a world before acid- or art-rock, punk or
electro-pop, hip-hop or house, and when he calls himself a "purist," he's
talking about rock & roll -- a music some like to claim is "dead" and
of whose practitioners even Petty thinks, "We could all wind up the same
as guys that are really pure about jazz and blues, over to the side, with
a smaller audience -- and a more dedicated one." |
| In concert, Tom pays his roots homage,
persuasively covering songs like "Shout," "Little Bit of Soul" and "Route
66." Yet his records have always belonged to their time: Into the Great
Wide Open, coproduced by fellow Wilbury Jeff Lynne, Petty and
Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, is significantly less retro than
the new, hot discs of many bands a generation or two younger. There are
plenty of graying and balding pates in Petty's crowd, but nobody sells
more than three million records (as he did with Full Moon Fever a
couple of years back) without some of that audience being
kids. |
| He believes in the kids, as he believes
in rock & roll, and kens that the hope of each resides in the other.
"The music business has put itself in a position now of being
completely overthrown," he says. "Not subdivided, or restructured
-- forgotten. I'd love to see some kids come along and tear the
whole thing down. And they will. Because music executives may be good at
business, but they don't sing, or write songs. At this time -- thanks to
the heavy metal boys, for the most part -- they really think they know
what's going on. And anything they don't understand is weeded out of the
picture completely -- and that isn't by coincidence, it's because they're
fucking afraid of it, and that it may become hugely popular and
they wouldn't know how to get money out of it. A bunch of kids who didn't
give a shit if they were famous or making money -- which is probably how
all this started -- would overthrow the entire thing." |
| Tom Petty is famous and makes
money, but he remains in his heart an outsider. His own dealings with the
industry have been famously adversarial. After the Heartbreakers (Petty
and fellow Floridians Campbell, drummer Stan Lynch, keyboardist Benmont
Tench and bassist Ron Blair, later replaced by Howie Epstein) recorded two
well-received albums for ABC, the company was sold to MCA; Petty, ABC's
prime asset, took the occasion to try to renegotiate an unfairly skewed
contract, wound up in court and fought all the way to personal bankruptcy.
He emerged in the end with an MCA-distributed custom label and the album
Damn the Torpedoes, which went to number two and established him as
a major artist. When MCA wanted to raise the retail price of his next
album by a dollar, Petty threatened to withhold the LP (or title it $8.98,
the lower price) and organized a letter-writing campaign among his fans.
He won, "but to no avail. 'Cause nobody else tried to lower their record
prices. I felt very betrayed, by everybody -- like they let me go
out there and drive a stake through my head. Then came "the big payback"
-- years of "no promotion. You ever see an ad for one of my
records? Fucking with the list price was the last straw. I think at that
point they just viewed me as someone who was there to make trouble." It
wasn't until the late '80s brought a change of company management that
Petty and his label ever became friendly. |
| H |
e began hitting other walls --
figuratively and literally. The very fine records that followed
Damn the Torpedoes did well, but not as well. The
making of Southern Accents, in 1985, was beset
with | turns and blind alleys;
a half-brilliant album resulted, but by the end of it Petty was suffering
from creative exhaustion -- and a pulverized hand. Tom and Jane separated;
Tom and the bottle got intimate. |
| A couple of things helped pull him back.
Petty and the Heartbreakers went on tour as Bob Dylan's backing band,
which took his mind off his own music; onstage, Dylan is so addicted to
spontaneity -- chaos -- that any sort of self-absorption because
impossible. And then, in 1987, someone set fire to his house. |
| "It seemed like my personal life came
together, strangely enough, right as my house was burning down," he says.
"As soon as I was kind of okay, and Jane and I were getting along again
and living in the same house, someone burned it down, burned down
everything we owned, literally, even our shoes. We were very nearly
killed. And that point I became only interested in my life, in my
little family and me. I felt like, 'I've got to defend the family against
whatever's out there trying to destroy me.' And that included all demons
from drinking to ... politics. And so we became more like a gypsy family,
where we just all lived in a bus and traveled. It was a good
time." |
| He built a new, fireproof house and
"quit worrying about having hits or sustaining anything commercially. I
was just so happy to be alive." He began "really enjoying playing my
guitar, alone, sitting in my room, working on songs." When George Harrison
and Jeff Lynne, both of whom were living near Tom's temporary digs,
started going in with him, "it was that nice feeling again of learning a
new chord from a guy." Looseness was all, and the season of relaxation
that began with Dylan continued through the Heartbreakers' Let Me Up
(I've Had Enough) ("We went back to square one"), the Wilburys albums
and Full Moon Fever (working title: Songs From the Garage).
Petty and his various collaborators were at times recording songs
faster than they were writing them. |
| Into the Great Wide Open
maintains that easygoing spirit, but sharpens the focus. Petty says
becoming a better songwriter is at the top of his agenda. In fact, he's
been a first-rate songwriter all along, though his music sounds so
effortless and his appeal is so "mainstream" that more Deep Thinking
critics have severely underrated him. (Village Voice critic Robert
Christgau has called Petty "dumb," "brainless" and "a real made-in-L.A.
jerk." Petty says he's never heard of Christgau.) But a phrase like
"raised on promises," from Petty's "American Girl," says as much about why
a person might feel born to run as Bruce Springsteen manages in a whole
song. "Straight Into Darkness" looks as unflichingly at the big black void
as does anything on Springsteen's Nebraska. |
| The new album contains, among other
things, a funny parable about gunslingers who refuse to fight, elegies for
men and women who betray their better selves for money or power, a song
about rock and rejuvenation, and love songs that seem very much addressed
to Jane. If you care to read the writer's own life into his songs, you can
find plenty of textual evidence that Petty's "maturing." Where in his
early songs love is a concept almost invariably measured by pain, it's
come more and more to represent a redeeming, centering, strengthening
force. |
| "I think they're more honest songs now,
in a lot of ways," he says. "I think it's good to be in love, and to
believe in the power of love. [For a time], we were all afraid of being
old-fashioned or corny, when in fact that's the only thng that will save
your ass, in some respects." |
| Tom Petty loves his work, his wife ("one
of those people who are bigger than life, a really interesting person to
me still") and children; he may not have always been the most normally
present sort of father, but he's come to be devoutly a dad. "It's the
greatest thing life has to offer, probably," he says of the family way.
"But you work for it. It's a long project, a life project. I wonder
sometimes if these yuppies realize that. If you shove 'em off to nannies
and hire people to take all the unpleasant tasks out of it, there'll be a
day when they turn on you for that, when they confront you with it. And
you can't hide, either." |
| I |
t gets to be lunchtime. Petty dons a
pair of slightly goofy orange sunglasses and we go out into the
neighborhood, a casual collection of beach houses set back from
sidewalkless streets. "A lot of
these | people work in towns
thirty, forty miles inland; they come out here every night.... That lady
that lives there brought me a big cookie she baked yesterday, introduced
herself.... This guy's a coast guard commander, drug intervention squad.
Goes out and busts the dealers on big ships." Kim likes this place, says
Tom; it's the first real neighborhood she's ever had. In Encino, they're
sort of insulated, living up in the hills, behind high hedges, at the end
of a cul-de-sac. Here, most yards don't even have fences. "Just being able
to ride her bike up and down the street gives her a terrific sense of
independence." |
| "It's kind of charming," he says of St.
Augustine. "It hasn't been ruined like Orlando yet. Last night I was in a
restaurant and I told the waitress, 'I want French fries with this.' She
goes, 'Well, you know, it'll be another twenty-five cents if you order it
that way -- but you could do it this way and save the twenty-five
cents.'" |
| The Seaview Cafe is a regulation
beach-strip shrimp house, with a low-ceilinged dining room approached
through a low-ceilinged bar. A few of the few heads present turn Petty's
way' even in this familiar, out-of-the-way place, he seems painfully
conscious of wearing a famous face. "It can be an awfully long walk
through that bar," he sighs. |
| In the evening, Petty says, the
shrimpers come in to unwind after work. "It gets pretty colorful. I always
enjoy that as long as I don't have to get drawn into the middle of it."
Now, a TV plays cartoons, there's a game of darts in progress, and Sinatra
is on the jukebox: If I can make it there, I'll make it
anywhere. |
| "That has to be a yankee that played
that," says Tom. "They move down here from New York." |
| Well, I say, you can never get away from
Sinatra. |
| Petty nods. "Still on the road at, what
is it, sixty, seventy?" |
| Seventy-five. |
| "Wow. All those years, and he's still
never found anything to do." |
| The waitress comes and goes and Petty
says, "Bob Dylan told me once that Billy Idol should play Las Vegas; he
could see a day when that would be real accepted there. I think there'll
be a time when the Scorpions play Caesar's Palace. It'll be a popular
deal: Go there and gamble and hear all those heavy metal groups -- anybody
that does a big show." |
| As for his own future, "I don't think
it'll be in Las Vegas. With my kids getting older now, I could see, as
long as I'm physically able, touring quite a bit. Jane and I really enjoy
it; we like being in a bus, traveling around. I have no interest in
producing records or anything like that. |
| "What I don't ever want to see happen to
myself," he says, "what I find the most embarrassing thing in this
business, is to see an older person trying to put themselves over in the
same sort of clothes and style of a younger person; I would feel very
embarrassed doing that. I think the challenge for me is to find a credible
and entertaining way of growing up and still play music -- and have the
music grow as well. I don't think the music has to be cast away, just
because time has gone by. It's like, 'Okay, you're forty -- should you
quit?' No, no, I don't want to quit. 'Well, are you in the way?'
No, I don't think so -- certainly not in the way of much, I'll tell
you that. |
| "So I'll just keep doing it as long as
anyone wants to hear it. And," he adds, laughing, but not kidding, "for a
few weeks thereafter."¶ |