| 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."¶ |