Flying Lessons Tom Petty takes his bearings
                                         by Robert Lloyd /   from L.A. Style, October 1991
 
 
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 i s 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."¶

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Copyright Robert Lloyd © 2006