Tom Petty: A fan of the greats who followed in their footsteps
Tom Petty was one of my private heroes. He made music like it really mattered to him, and it certainly mattered to me and so many other fans. Because at the heart of everything he did, Petty was a fan himself. He was a music enthusiast, electrified into creative life by Elvis, The Beatles and Bob Dylan, who carried a torch for that first flaming burst of rock’n’roll energy into a new era, staying true to its core identity for a long and ultimately very fruitful career.
He wasn’t an overnight success, and he was never really a superstar. But he really was one of the best. He came up the slow lane, but stayed the course, playing on the fringes for over a decade, honing his art, until the spotlight turned his way. He was out of step with the prevailing rock fashions of the Seventies (excessive, self-indulgent, overblown) until trends shifted and fell more in line with him. But all the while, and for his whole career, he kept writing songs that were lean and purposeful, that had rare qualities of intelligence and spirit, that understood the gutbucket drive of rock and roll but avoided the twin sins of dumbing down or blowing up.
His work and his presence had an unusual blend of humility and swagger: the humility of someone who felt like he was treading in the footsteps of giants, the swagger of an artist who knows, deep down, he is really, really good. “Music is probably the only real magic I have encountered in my life,” he told me once. “There’s not some trick involved with it. It’s pure and it’s real. And it moves and it heals and it communicates and does all these incredible things. It’s been so good to me that I want to be good to it. I want to make music that’s worth making”.
I interviewed him a couple of times, and found him thoughtful, gracious, articulate. The most memorable occasion was in 2012, when he met me at his Malibu beach house, a funky little place, full of vintage rock and roll posters, analogue recording equipment, acoustic guitars and a grand piano. He lived, for the most part, in a palatial gated house up the hill, but this was where he came to drink coffee, smoke endless cigarettes, and write music. He had a fine featured high-cheekbone beauty in those classic early photographs, with his long blonde hair cascading around his face, but in the flesh he was much tattier, stooped and balding, his skin the ashen shade of the serious smoker. There were palm trees, blue sky and azure sea, but he did not give the impression that he saw much of it. Windowless studios were far more his habitat. Someone told me once that he had a hotel suite in Dublin for a week, and he never emerged from it except to go and play concerts. He liked to stay in, read books, watch TV and listen to music.
The stars first aligned for Petty when punk and new wave brought an appreciation for the focused intent, stripped back drive and moral purpose of his music. He actually made it big in England before he was really accepted back in America. Petty was an astutely understated songwriter, polishing phrases to gleaming nuggets that integrated perfectly with melodies and rhythms. His nasal voice carried the implicit sneer of a rebel rocker but his songs were full of empathy and compassion. There are so many great ones. Breakdown, American Girl, I Need To Know, Listen To Her Heart, Refugee, Here Comes My Girl, Don’t Do Me Like That, Even The Losers, The Waiting, Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around, You Got Lucky, Don’t Come Around Here No More, Love Is A long Hard Road, Free Fallin’, Yer So Bad, I Won’t Back Down, Into The Great Wide Open, Surrender. His last album, Hypnotic Eye in 2014, was number one in America, and deservedly so. Track for track it is the equal of anything in his career.
His band the Heartbreakers were fantastic live, with a sleek energy and killer musicianship, never flash or showy but perfectly balanced and elegantly nuanced. They were together, in various incarnations, for more than 40 years, and it showed in the way they could lock in and really groove. “We’re a bad ass little guitar band and that’s all I ever wanted,” he told me. “I had no idea it would go on for this long.” Much in demand by other musicians, Petty and his band could often be seen performing with legendary figures from country stars including Willie Nelson to Johnny Cash, all the old rock and rollers such as Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, contemporaries such as Bruce Springsteen and members of the Beatles and the Stones. He told me once that he was amazed to have become friends with almost everyone he had ever admired. “I never really sought them out but they all phoned me up at some point and came around. That was just beyond anything, cos I love that music so much. I just feel so privileged.”
The root of Petty’s passion lay in a troubled background, where collecting records was his refuge from his father’s violence. “Music was a safe place for me,” he said. When he was ten years old, he met Elvis Presley on a movie set in Florida where his uncle was working. “He gave us such a smile. And that was all it took for me.”
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers toured as Bob Dylan’s backing band in 1986, and had to be on their toes, with Dylan calling out songs from his back catalogue that they hadn’t even rehearsed. “You really learned the value of spontaneity, of how a moment that is real in a concert is worth so much more than one you plan out,” he told me. He loved and admired Dylan so much, that he was happy to play second fiddle to his idol. In 1988, Petty found himself collaborating with Dylan again in The Travelling Wilburys, a band with a line-up that sounds like some kind of fan’s wildest wish list, including George Harrison, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne of ELO.
“I couldn’t have dreamed that one up. It was so crazy,” he admitted. “What I really loved was the power of the vocals. When we sang harmonies it was just chilling. And I just liked the way those guys carried themselves. They were the real thing and didn’t give a damn about anything but music. Some really good friendships were made, it wasn’t all in the sessions, it might move to my house and we’d be up ‘til late just singing and playing. They liked to drink beer.”
I remember Petty getting a bit moist eyed talking about Harrison. “You get into your late fifties, people start falling like flies all around you. I don’t take life for granted anymore. I’m really glad to be here.”
It is so hard to believe he is gone, and that music has lost another great one. And, of course, we still have the music. And it will always be great. But I am listening to Tom Petty right now, and the speakers are rattling, and my bones are rattling, and I’m singing along, and I’m raising a toast, because what I can hear is something that defies death, and defies time. I’m listening to Tom Petty, and I’m free falling. So long, Tom, so long.
