You better watch what you say: Tom Petty, RIP
Penned upon his death in 2017
I grew up in the ’80s (I was born at the end of 1970), so Tom Petty was everywhere: on the radio, on MTV, and on the cover of Rolling Stone. His 1981 cover, where he’s ripping a dollar bill in half, is I think his most iconic, though — being a weirdo, and also the age that I am — the one I remember most vividly is the ’86 dual cover with Bob Dylan (“The Summer’s Hottest Ticket”!). But my god, he really was everywhere. As my pal Chris Molanphy wrote, Petty truly was “universally appealling,” charting top 40 singles in the US from 1978-1995, making better use of the music video art form than any other ’70s rockers (ZZ Top came close, but Petty was still in heavy rotation into the mid-’90s!), notching AOR hits without even seeming to try (1989’s solo record Full Moon Fever placed an astounding seven tracks on the Album Rock chart), and going from new wave-marketed skinny tie-wearer in the late ’70s (as silly as that was) to would-be grunge forefather in the mid-’90s (slightly less silly). He even (ahem) waited until 2014 to finally land a #1 album, with Hypnotic Eye.
Alongside John Mellencamp and Bob Seger, Petty was seen as the essence of a heartland rocker throughout the ’80s, even though he came from Florida and was based in Los Angeles for most of his career. I’ll certainly argue that his songs were more universal in their appeal than those of the guy looming over all of the era’s blue collar rockers, Bruce Springsteen. (I’ll take both Mellencamp and Petty over Bruce, and maybe even Seger, too.) And much like Seger, and his predecessors the Eagles and the Steve Miller Band, Petty’s hits just sell and sell and sell. Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 1994 Greatest Hits has been certified 12 times platinum by the RIAA — that’s just ridiculous. And you know every single one of the songs on it, chances are. Petty’s in the ether, and it feels like he always has been. His songcraft has an uber-timeless quality to it, and like Mellencamp, if he came out, fully formed, today, I wonder if he’d be classified as a country artist [to wit, this year’s fine cover record Petty Country]. Tom even had a pair of #1 country singles, one as a writer, the other as a featured artist.
Petty and his keyboard player, Benmont Tench, co-wrote “Never Be You” for Maria McKee in 1983; her version showed up on the Streets of Fire soundtrack but never went anywhere. Rosanne Cash covered “Never” for her 1985 album Rhythm and Romance, and it was not only the album’s second single, but the second consecutive #1 country single from the album. Her sweet vocal, paired with the song’s achingly sad lyrics, is a killer combination.
And the following year, 1986, Petty showed up — perhaps surprisingly, but not completely out of left field — as a guest, alongside Reba McEntire, evangelist Reverend Ike, and Willie Nelson, on a cover of Hank Williams’ “Mind Your Own Business” by his son Hank Jr. As Jr. was just about the hottest thing in country except for Alabama in the ’80s, it was no shock that “Business” became his 19th consecutive top 10 single, and his seventh #1 of the decade: thus giving Mr. Tom Petty a #1 country record as an artist.
I’m not gonna spool off a list of my Petty & the Heartbreakers favorites; there are so damn many. I will tell you that I’m particularly partial to 1982’s “You Got Lucky,” 1981’s “A Woman In Love (It’s Not Me),” 1999’s “Swingin’,” 1995’s “It’s Good to Be King,” and the title track from 1985’s Southern Accents. The Stevie Nicks duet “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” is, of course, eternal. There’s an awesome 2-CD bootleg of one of the Australian shows from 1986’s True Confessions tour, which saw the Heartbreakers backing up Dylan, which I highly recommend; there was an HBO special from said dates, which I pray gets a DVD spruce-up on a future volume of Dylan’s Bootleg Series. If you need a good Petty comp, skip Greatest Hits and go for the 2000 double Anthology: Through the Years — the more Petty, the better.
They’ll never be another like Tom Petty, there really won’t. And I’ll miss him.
[In lieu of a Petty playlist, I’ll offer this, led off by “You Got Lucky,” my favorite of his singles: my “Late Night Radio” playlist of songs which just sounded almost unworldly to my early teenaged ears. Coming out of the speaker on my Panasonic boombox, they were magic — even when they weren’t actually. “Lucky,” obviously, is.]