Tom Petty - RIP

The past couple of years have been hard on musicians from my youth.  Of those who have shed their mortal coil and gone to the great gig in the sky, the passing of some was expected [Gregg Allman, BB King], and some unexpected [Prince, Chris Cornell, David Bowie].  Tom Petty’s death on October 2^nd fits in the latter category.   One week he’s playing the last show of his band’s tour at the Hollywood Bowl, and the next week he drops dead of a heart attack.  He talked about this tour being the last long tour, and that he wanted to be around family more, especially his granddaughter.  When I heard the news, I did what I always do – complete immersion in the music.  I wanted to meditate for a good long time to rediscover the material that made Tom Petty a star, and I wanted to play catch up on the stuff that had come out since 1993.  That is a lot of music, and he and the Heartbreakers made it look so easy.  It’s not easy, but they made it look that way.  Such was his material that regardless if it’s the first time you’ve heard it or the hundredth time, you can’t help but think “anybody can do that”.  But you’d be wrong – creating good music is a craft that one has to work at for a long time.  And because Tom Petty had worked very hard on his craft, the music just flowed like it was always the soundtrack of your life.

I have three or four Tom Petty playlists on my iPod.  One playlist is the “no brainer” playlist.  It looks a lot like his Greatest Hits record for MCA, that covered everything Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers did between 1976 and 1993.  It includes a couple of tunes from the Travelling Wilburys.  Another playlist is from that first pre-Heartbreakers, pre-fame band, Mudcrutch.  The other two playlists divvy up tracks from Wildflowers, Echo, Highway Companion, The Last DJ, Mojo, and the last TP and the Heartbreakers album, Hypnotic Eye.  I’ve got some stray tracks that didn’t make any albums, and a couple from a soundtrack album called She’s the One.  Why so many playlists?  Simple – I don’t really like long playlists.  I group my music by moods, sometimes by sounds, sometimes chronologically.  It just depends…

Free Girl Now [Echo, 1999]

Swingin' [Echo, 1999]

The Wrong Thing To Do [Mudcrutch, 2008]

First Flash of Freedom [Mojo, 2010]

The Trip to Pirate's Cove [Mojo, 2010]

I Should Have Known It [Mojo, 2010]
Lover's Touch [Mojo, 2010]

Something Good Coming [Mojo, 2010]

Good Enough [Mojo, 2010]

Fault Lines [Hypnotic Eye, 2010]

Red River [Hypnotic Eye, 2010]

All You Can Carry [Hypnotic Eye, 2010]

Forgotten Man [Hypnotic Eye, 2010]

Shadow People [Hypnotic Eye, 2010]

Rhino Skin [Echo, 1999]

Can't Stop the Sun [The Last DJ, 2002]

Lover of the Bayou [Mudcrutch, 2008] – A great Roger McGuinn song from the Byrds’ Untitled.

Bootleg Flyer [Mudcrutch, 2008]

I Forgive It All [2, 2016]

Hungry No More [2, 2016]

Crystal River [Mudcrutch, 2008]

Got My Mind Made Up [Nobody’s Children, 2015] – there are two versions.  Bob Dylan has the other one…

Waiting For Tonight [Nobody’s Children, 2015] – The Bangles!

Wildflowers [Wildflowers, 1994]

You Don't Know How It Feels [Wildflowers, 1994]

You Wreck Me [Wildflowers, 1994]

Honey Bee [Wildflowers, 1994]

To Find a Friend [Wildflowers, 1994]

Crawling Back to You [Wildflowers, 1994]

Don’t Fade On Me [Wildflowers, 1994]

Cabin Down Below [Wildflowers, 1994]

Walls (No. 3) [She’s the One, 1996]

Angel Dream (No. 4) [She’s the One, 1996]

Rusty Cage with Johnny Cash [Unchained. 1996]

Room at the Top [Echo, 1999]

Saving Grace [Highway Companion, 2005]

Square One [Highway Companion, 2005]

Down South [Highway Companion, 2005]

Ankle Deep [Highway Companion, 2005]

Mary Jane's Last Dance [Greatest Hits, 1993]

Learning to Fly [Into the Great Wide Open, 1991]

A Face in the Crowd [Full Moon Fever, 1989]

I Won't Back Down [Full Moon Fever, 1989]

Runnin' Down a Dream [Full Moon Fever, 1989]

Tweeter and the Monkey Man [Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1, 1988]

Last Night [Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1, 1988]

Wilbury Twist [Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3, 1990]

Southern Accents [Southern Accents, 1985]

So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star [Live] [Pack Up the Plantation, 1986]

Keeping Me Alive [Nobody’s Children, 2015]

You Got Lucky [Long After Dark, 1982]

The Waiting [Hard Promises, 1981]

A Woman in Love (It's Not Me) [Hard Promises, 1981]

Even the Losers [Damn the Torpedoes, 1979]

Here Comes My Girl [Damn the Torpedoes, 1979]

Refugee [Damn the Torpedoes, 1979]

Don't Do Me Like That [Damn the Torpedoes, 1979]

I Need to Know [You're Gonna Get It!, 1978]

You're Gonna Get It! [You're Gonna Get It!, 1978]

Listen to Her Heart [You're Gonna Get It!, 1978]

Breakdown [Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, 1976]

American Girl [Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, 1976]

Sorry – no Free Fallin’.  The chorus ruins it for me.  It’s bad enough Jeff Lynne ruined the drum sound, but then he had to sing, too!

“I’ve read that Echo is my ‘divorce album,’ but Wildflowers is the divorce album.  That’s me getting ready to leave. I don’t even know how conscious I was of it when I was writing it. I don’t go into this stuff with elaborate plans. But I’m positive that’s what Wildflowers is. It just took me getting up the guts to leave this huge empire that we had built, to walk out. My kids … I knew this was going to be devastating to the whole family.”

According to biographer Warren Zanes -“Time to Move On,” “Hard on Me,” “Only a Broken Heart,” “To Find a Friend,” “Don’t Fade on Me”—they were all snapshots in a dark family album. When the Pettys gathered at their beach house in Florida to listen to the finished record, as they always did, Adria Petty says she “knew the marriage was over.”

Wildflowers is a very good “singer-songwriter” album.  There’s a lot of good stuff to be heard here, hence so many songs from that album on my playlist.  For many, the title track is their favorite from this album.  For me, It’s Good To Be King.

Echo is the post-divorce, deep, dark depression album by a guy with a heroin problem.  Again from Zanes - “Counting on You,” “Free Girl Now,” “Room at the Top,” “Swingin’”—these were songs written by a man fumbling for his keys in the darkness of unmanageable loss. If Petty and Mike Campbell have a hard time listening to the record, it’s likely because they’re seeing that man. And another: Howie Epstein.  Howie Epstein also had a heroin problem, but his was much worse, and heroin killed him.  Tom Petty cleaned up after he began the relationship with the woman who would be Mrs. Tom Petty #2, but Echo is the sound of a songwriter who is really pissed.  There’s heartache, melancholy, regret, and anger.  And look closely at the album cover – somebody is missing.  It was Howie Epstein.  No doubt the sight of their bass player wasting away before them cast a pall over the proceedings as they recorded Echo.  Despite all the problems, Echo is still a good listen.  Regardless of what TP thought at the time, I think Echo is TP’s Blood on the Tracks – it’s that good.  My favorite from Echo is Swingin’.  Rhino Skin is TP’s commentary on the survival techniques needed in the world.  It included the thick, tough skin of a rhino, with a dose of elephant balls thrown in.  Rhino Skin is a moody piece, but I really like it.  For all of the work he’s done with the Heartbreakers, currently my favorite stuff is also his most recent.  Mojo [2010] and Hypnotic Eye [2014] were the last two albums he did with the Heartbreakers. 

Before the Heartbreakers, there was a band from Gainesville, Florida called Mudcrutch.  They included TP, fellow Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench, Tom Leadon [brother of Eagle/Flying Burrito Brother Bernie Leadon], and drummer Randall Marsh. They moved to Los Angeles around 1974, got a record deal, but then broke up before they could make their first album.  In 2008, TP got the band back together.  I think only he knows why he did it, but they finally recorded that debut album [Mudcrutch, 2008].  Mudcrutch was the sum of a lot of things - Laurel Canyon folk-rock, psychedelic-infused bluegrass, scrappy boogie-woogie, the country rock of the Flying Burrito Brothers and the swampiness of Clarence White-era Byrds, and extended excursions into Allman Brothers territory.  Mudcrutch screamed “roots”.  The album was recorded in the Heartbreakers’ rehearsal spaces, live on the floor.  Having captured that rootsy vibe in Mudcrutch, Petty, Campbell and Tench carried that over to the next Heartbreakers album, Mojo [2010]. 

Many critics have labelled Mojo a “blues album”, but this album is more than that.  The one thing Tom Petty wanted to do with Mojo was to give Mike Campbell’s guitar another “voice”.

“I really wanted to get Mike up to the front.  He’s such an incredible guitarist.  He also plays with a lot of taste.  He edits himself back a lot of the time.  And I told him “this time I really want you right up front. Let’s look at this like it’s a John Mayall record or a Jeff Beck record where the guitar is right up in the front.  You’re gonna be the other voice on the record.”

Mike got a 1959 Les Paul…and all hell broke loose.

Normally, Mike Campbell is a guitarist in the George Harrison mold – he plays whatever the song requires and doesn’t overstay his welcome.  But on Mojo, Tom Petty uncaged a guitar god beast.  Campbell and Petty do a great imitation of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts, playing harmony guitar parts in First Flash of Freedom.  Campbell throws down the Led Zeppelin “hammer of the gods” with I Should Have Known It, and he summons the ghost of John Lennon’s I Want You [She’s So Heavy] on the album’s final cut, Good Enough.  Not content with just “blues rock”, there’s real honest-to-God blues with U.S. 41 and Lover’s Touch, there’s what I like to call “music noir” [like 1940s film noir, only musical] with The Trip to Pirate’s Cove and Something Good Coming.  The band even throws in a little white-boy reggae with Don’t Pull Me Over [full disclosure – I don’t like this one, but I mention it to highlight this album’s musical diversity].  Benmont Tench is his usual, superb self, providing the right colors with acoustic piano, Hammond C-3 organ, and Wurlitzer piano.

The Heartbreakers’ next [and so far, last] album, Hypnotic Eye [2014], returned to shorter songs. 

When asked about the direction of Hypnotic Eye – “As far as being a rock and roll record, you know where the first things we caught were some blues, we got three or four blues that came out very well.  I didn’t feel that that was the road to go down.  I felt like we’d been down that road, and though they came out really well, the next batch of songs tended to be different and when we recorded those suddenly we’re in rock-and-roll world and it’s going really well and I think that kind of dictated – this is all very subliminal – I mean, do I sit down and think about, you know, what direction I’m going?  I’m going with what’s working…

I really wanted a groove more than anything…you know, I just wanted the bass and drums to really groove.  I want the groove to be good on everything, and that’s missing from a lot of people that still try to do the rock-and-roll.  The rhythm section is so important, you know, it must be, it must create almost a trance, you know, between the bass drums and the rhythm instruments.  And that’s easy to say and hard to do – it’s not so easy but I guess our opinion is if we’re gonna do this as old men, then we should probably bring some level of sophistication to the table like we’ve gotten better at this and there’s actually a reason for us to do it…

Campbell’s guitar sound is razor sharp, and he plays his share of face-melting solos.  But it’s bassist Ron Blair who stands out.  On first listen to the groove-fest that is Fault Lines, I wondered when Ron Blair turned into Jack Bruce.  Not that Blair’s playing is overly busy, but his bass sound is huge.  I’ve never heard the bass so prominent in the mix on a Heartbreakers album.  Check out Fault Lines, Red River, and Forgotten Man and you can hear for yourself the bass’s newfound prominence on a Heartbreakers record.  Ron Blair and drummer Steve Ferrone are as solid a rhythm section as they come.  For each song, they get right in the pocket [Duck Dunn and Al Jackson, Jr would be proud].  They never make a misstep.  There is some blues on Burnt Out Town [the piano of Benmont Tench is especially impressive], and the Heartbreakers throw us a curveball with the jazzy [in a good way] Full Grown Boy.

Tom Petty is gone now, but he left us a lot of good stuff to listen to.  Rest in peace.