Gonna Leave This World for Awhile

Warning: this is long. Stupidly long. It’s what I do, I guess. So grab a comfy seat, some coffee or vitamins, and please indulge me in somewhat of a personal history lesson to celebrate the life and music of Tom Petty.

My first concert was . . . Petty, right? Nope. It was Jethro Tull. Worcester Centrum, 1982. I was in 8th grade.

I don’t really count Tull as a “first concert.” It was almost accidental. I think we got the tickets for free (or maybe one of us won them from WAAF or some other local rock station?). A buddy back then got us a free ride 45-min to/from Worcester on the Gray Line bus. And, frankly, maybe the whole outing was just something for bored, semi-bubble-wrapped Wellesley kids to do that felt “gritty” and “edgy”: OOOOOOH, WE’RE VENTURING INTO THE MEAN STREETS OF WORCESTER WITHOUT PARENTAL SUPERVISION! TRY NOT TO GET DIRT OR BLOOD ON YOUR KHAKIS AND IZODS, BOYS!

Looking back, we probably had no idea whether Jethro Tull was the whole band, or just that one bearded dude prancing around like a minstrel having a stroke and playing (of all things) the rock/jazz-flute. (It was the whole band; the minstrel was Ian Anderson.) And we didn’t care. All I know is we got a pretty solid contact high sitting in the nosebleeds behind the stage; we pretended to know/like Aqualung, Skating Away, Locomotive Breath as much as the rockin’ burnouts around us; and I think one of us might’ve even enjoyed a real “Wuhstah” street experience: getting punched in the head for no good reason by some older kid while filing into the concert. Memory’s foggy, but I distinctly recall one of my friends getting violently shoved up against a cement wall and popped in the ear by some delinquent dressed in—OH MY STARS! HE’S WEARING A LEVI’S JEAN JACKET WITH THE VAN HALEN “VHF” PATCH ON IT AND MOTORCYCLE BOOOTS! HE PROBABLY HAS A SWITCHBLADE, TOO! Then again, we didn’t look too threatening in our Member’s Only jackets and our lingering Polo cologne prep school musk; I probably would have punched us, too, just on sheer principle.

Anyway, while Jethro Tull still trailed some 70’s Brit Arena Rock street cred in their wrinkly wake at the time, and I’m not utterly embarrassed by my first concert—it wasn’t “Wham!” or “Abba” like some friends of mine who shall remain nameless—my first REAL concert, the one I’ll always revere and mythologize, was at that same Worcester Centrum a year or so later: Tom Petty. The “Long After Dark” tour. Early spring, 1983.

It only felt tight that I was finally setting out on my own into the musical stratosphere.

My parents, Lynn and Lou, had (still have) great musical taste, so I think had a good head start in that department. Starting as early as five or six-years-old, I remember knowing that early Elton John was the gold standard in our house—“early” as in, 70’s: Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across the Water, Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player, Captain Fantastic, Honkey Chateau, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Caribou, Blue Moves; the Elton I revered was dead to me the second “I’m Still Standing” came out.). Elton was the king even more than Elvis. His “Greatest Hits” was the only cassette that my parents played in the wood-paneled station wagon as we drove 1,300 miles back and forth from Boston to Florida for vacations.

My parents had eclectic taste, too. Their vinyl and 8-track collection included everything from Sly & the Family Stone, Marvin Gaye, Ray Charles, The Jackson 5, and the Fifth Dimension to Burt Bacharach, Van Morrison, Simon & Garfunkel, and a brash NJ youngster named Bruce Springsteen. (I remember Lou, in my brother’s room one day in the late summer of 1975, holding up a white album whose cover featured a thin, scraggly-bearded guy holding Fender guitar, and decreeing, as if yanking Excalibur from a stone, “Boys, this guy’s gonna be even bigger than Elton John!” It was the ultimate praise imaginable. That album was Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”)

And, of course, there was Beatles. Always, and often, the Beatles. After all, it was the ’70’s, back when kids were actually allowed to be by themselves for ten minutes at a time. So whenever I wasn’t busy playing Wiffle Ball, riding my bike or lighting things on fire, I was in my room listening to vinyl and 8-tracks of every conceivable Beatles album. I think starting from about 1973, when I was in first grade, I was raised by nannies like Penny Lane, Lady Madonna, Julia, The Walrus, Jude, Eleanor Rigby, the Fool on the Hill, and the Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Fab Four might as well declared me as a dependent on their tax forms.

By parental osmosis, I devoured all the British Invasion (and post-BI) bands—the Stones, Who, Kinks, Animals, Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, Bowie. And the 70’s arena monsters—Queen, Grand Funk, Bob Seger, Blue Oyster Cult, AC/DC, Rush, and of course local boys, Aerosmith and Boston. And California’s pre- and post- Laurel Canyon crew—The Byrds, Hollies, Fleetwood Mac, Beach Boys, Zappa, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Crosby, Still, Nash, the Doors, Carole King, James Taylor, Mamas & the Papas. (The only one I didn’t “get,” and still really don’t, was the Eagles; the singing drummer might’ve thrown me off.). And, of course, Dylan. Hours and hours of Dylan. And sifting through his vapor trail I glommed onto The Band, Creedence, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, solo Neil Young, Allman Brothers, and more.

But it was in 1979, at age 12, that I “met” one Thomas Earl Petty.

My brother, Doug, introduced us. In the late ’70’s/early ’80’s, Doug interned at now defunct Boston rock station WCOZ. He would consistently “borrow” (okay, steal) albums by bands/artists that took, baton-like, what my parents had handed us and further helped form my pre-teen musical tastes—Elvis Costello’s “My Aim Is True” and “This Year’s Model;” “Outlandos d’Amor” and “Regatta de Blanc” by The Police; Clash’s “London Calling”; Bob Marley; Sex Pistols; Joe Jackson; Ramones; Lou Reed; and on.

But one day, he brings home yet another milk crate of pilfered vinyl and I, thinking it was actually Joni Mitchell on the cover, slid out an album called “Damn the Torpedoes.” If you look closely, he resemblance between Joni and the long blonde haired/black jacket/red T-shirt/Rickenbacker guitar-holding Petty on the DTT cover was striking. So much so, that it took a second to realize the sleepy-eyed, big-toothed blonde was actually a young Florida dude named Tom Petty.

From the opening riff of “Refugee,” Petty, even more than John, Paul George, Ringo, Page, Plant, Jimi, Janis, Dylan, more than ANYONE . . .Petty. Just. F’n. Owned. Me. I was hookesd. And like many of you, I’m sure, his songs instantly became omnipresent in my life. Everywhere I went that Fall of 1979—roller rinks; department stores; hell, I think he even played in Church basements and funeral parlors—I couldn’t avoid “Refugee,” “Here Comes My Girl,” “Even the Losers,” and “Don’t Do Me Like That.”

I soon scraped together lawn-mowing money and over the next couple years, like a pubescent archaeologist, I dug up his earlier albums: 1976’s “Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers” (“Breakdown,” “American Girl”); 1978’s “You’re Gonna Get It” (“I Need to Know,” “Listen to Her Heart”); and then I got “Hard Promises” in ’81 (“The Waiting,” A Woman in Love,” and “Listen to Her Heart,” which I’d play whenever I got weepy after some girlfriend who seemed utterly crucial to my present and future happiness at the time would dump me for someone much cooler… although, being in middle school, I doubt she was lured away by “money and cocaine” like Tom’s shiftless ex- in the song; although, truth be told, I’d have grudgingly respected the kid for having such access to cash and blow in 8th grade, when the rest of us were asking our older siblings to buy us Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers, like I soon did for my sister, Leslie. (Cue the “Lion King” theme…ah, the magical circle of underage drinking life!)

So come 1983, having just turned 15, I was hell-bent on seeing Petty live for the very first time when he came to Worcester on Thursday, March 24. And I did.

Expectations are a funny thing. Too high, and you’re always crushed; too low, and you’re just kind of a buzzkill to be around. Therefore, I went into the Centrum that night having set my hopes on medium. Don’t even remember who I went with because, far as I was concerned, this was a private show by Tom, just for me, screw everyone else. But in a weird way I was scared because I so badly wanted him to live up to the studio rockin’ magic I’d heard on his albums.

Yeah, I shouldn’t have worried. True to the indefatigable, balls-to-the-wall form he and the Heartbreakers cultivated playing dumpy Gainsville bars and would carry through the next several decades until literally last week, September 25 at the Hollywood Bowl, he lived up to even my highest expectations. And then some.

With the possible exception of Springsteen, no one, I mean no one, I’ve seen since put on a live show and left it all on the proverbial stage like Petty. From the first opening, jangly, D-chord riff of “American Girl” it seemed like they played for nine hours. I was utterly withered afterward. Spent. Sweating as if I’d played the show myself, as were the 15,000 other grinning fans around me. And as burgeoning, would-be, half-assed rocker myself—I’d started playing drums in 7th grade and a few pals & I had a middle school band, played dances and parties—I was exhilarated. Lightning-charged. And even though Doug was the true musical talent in our family, for a brief second—again might have been a contact high (or, sorry mom and dad, perhaps an intentional one?) I actually thought I could EVEN BE TOM PETTY someday!

Or at least I could be drummer Stan Lynch. Yup, screw it, I’d have to be Lynch. Which was pretty damn good because Stan Lynch was the backbone of that band. Plus, my dad had spent his hard-earned $300 for a Slingerland 4-piece drum set at Jack’s Drum Shop on Boylston Street. And he’d have probably been pretty pissed if I just grew my hair into that long, feathered Gainsville, Florida surfer ‘do and switched to a Fender Telecaster.

But fatherly disappointment aside, why didn’t I think I could/should be Tom Petty? Because even

(A) my life was thrown upside-down by a sudden family move to Connecticut in ’84, and

(B) I didn’t yet have many new friends that summer so I started messing around in my basement with a shitty acoustic and learned my first simple, D-A-G, three-chord Petty tune—a cover of John Sebastian/Billy Joe Thomas’s “Stories We Could Tell” from his “Pack Up the Plantation: Live” album—even then, “only” about seven years into his Rock ‘N roll Hall of Fame career, I knew damn well there was already one Tom Petty. One.

And for however long he or I lived, there would always—WILL always—be only one Tom Petty.
Monday was abysmal on several levels. The tragedy in Vegas alone made me just want to crawl under the covers and weep for the fetid shit-stew that humanity has become. But the dampening sadness was also, clearly, because Petty, his Heartbreakers, and their music have been “a thing” nearly as long as I have. (They just had their 40th anniversary tour; played at Red Rocks, which I missed despite it being only a half-hour down the road here in Colorado. We always think we’ll have yet another chance to see our best friends, right? Well, this once again proves that’s not always the case.)

But I think my gray mood also stems from thinking about that period of my life. Of the friends I had then. Seemingly great, super tight friends at the time with whom I basically lost touch the second I crossed that state border into Connecticut. Turns out we weren’t that close, after all, ya know? Not their fault. Or mine. It’s just kids acting and reacting to life like, well, kids. Baffled teenagers trying to pretend they know everything while secretly fumbling around terrified, blindly navigating their hormones and ever-growing quirks and hang-ups. They were all good dudes—even the one who got punched in the face before Jethro Tull (especially him, if he took one for the team)—and I hope they’re all doing great. Because, just like music itself they were emblematic of a certain period of my life. A living, breathing, human soundtrack. Images and, more than that, melodies, harmonies, poetry that will always be echoing and scuttling around in my brain somewhere, like mice in a dark, cobwebby attic.

And that’s the thing about music: it’s always there. It might come and go, but it never realy changes. Once recorded and heard by human ears, it’s ironclad. Non-negotiable. A fact. A tangible, reliable, loyal “thing” that, ten, twenty, forty years later, makes you feel the EXACT SAME WAY you felt when you first heard it. It’s a loyal companion that goes where you go, like all my Petty tapes did when we moved one state away and I reluctantly shoved my old life into a cardboard box, where it’s mostly remained since 1984.

I can barely remember who I was around that time. Who my friends were. What girls I thought I loved and, perhaps foolishly—we were all many years from being mentally equipped to handle such a daunting, chest-crushing concept as love—thought they loved me. I forget what aspects of life and people I liked, hated, mocked, feared, or admired. It’s all a blur.

But I sure as hell remember all the lyrics to “Shadow of a Doubt.”

It’s no coincidence, I feel, that one of my breakthroughs into my new Connecticut life heading into my junior year of high school—not the easiest time for a kid to be uprooted—was through music. I played drums well enough to be dangerous by then. I knew loads of songs. I met a guy named Mark McKay like my second day as a junior at my new school, Westminster. Mark played guitar, sang, wrote songs—thankfully, still does: http://www.markmckayband.com/—and even at age 17 was a soulfully rockin’ throwback to Dylan, John Fogerty, Springsteen, Jerry Garcia, and Steve Earle. We started a band with another classmate, Kristin Kelley—a piano-playing virtuoso and the second coming of Joni Mitchell and Stevie Nicks—and a senior named Alan Potter, who had ot have been the best teen guitar player in the universe, an intelligent, intensely studious mashup of technicians like Walter Becker and Robert Fripp . . . who could also freestyle like Jerry Garcia and rock like U2’s The Edge.

Through Mark, Kristin and Alan—and therefore through music—I quickly met other Westminster kids and suddenly had a group of friends and like-minded confidantes just like I’d had in Boston. Music instantly erased the doubts and fears of my strange, intimidating ‘new’ life in 1985 and turned it into just . . . my life.

So it was no coincidence that, months later, at a New England Prep School “Battle of the Bands” down at Choate School, the first song I ever dared sing as a drummer was Tom Petty’s “Breakdown.” Must have been a comfort zone thing. Remember, I didn’t quite “get” Don Henley singing behind the drum kit with the Eagles years before, but somehow, playing and singing Petty felt oddly right and natural to me. (That said, it was Alan’s opening riff on the very first song we played, that won the night. We went on last. While the other bands had been clumsily stumbling through remedial, three-chord tunes like “Stray Cat Strut” for two hours, Alan plugs in, and after a solemn nod to the rest of us, with a flash of his wrist he launches into the bone-rattling, reverb-driven intro to Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.” That was it. Five seconds. Audience faces melted. Other bands’ spirits crushed. Game over.)

Music opened doors. Calmed nerves. Secured insecurities. Broke down walls. Helped end and start new relationships. It helped me move on. Cameron Crowe, who’s forgotten more about music than any of us will know, once said of “Lloyd Dobler”—John Cusack’s character in “Say Anything”—that he wanted to create a un-jaded rebel who wasn’t angry. And that, to me, was Tom Petty: a renegade, a rebel, a shit-stirrer who, unlike most, wasn’t angry or jaded. If he had any cynical or political leanings, he kept them mostly hidden. He was both a southern boy and a citizen of everywhere. A rocker and a folky. A brash punk hidden under a pop idol’s hair and smile. He was a character that even Crowe couldn’t have fabricated. Perhaps why Crowe, when selecting a song for Tom Cruise/”Jerry Maguire” to play on the rental car radio after successfully retaining his top client early in the film, chose “Free Fallin'”—the one song in human history that perhaps embodies pure, untethered jubilation, hope, freedom and triumph more than any other.

So how do we reconcile the passing of Petty, someone we didn’t really know at all yet knew so completely (and vice-versa)? Speaking for myself, I’m just gonna listen to what I feel is one of his best songs—“Time To Move On,” from one of his more criminally underrated albums, “Wildflowers”—and remember the quietly intense, grinning, big-toothed, foppy-haired, sleepy-eyed, Florida-drawling lightning strike that Petty was for me and millions of others. Despite his ubiquity on MTV, in what used to be known as “record stores,” and on the radio, he was always just humming along there underneath, around, within us. Just on the periphery, the margins. Never barging in and demanding ongoing respect as fans like myself shifted in and out of HIS life in favor of the Dead, Springsteen, Police, Smiths, U2, Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Oasis, Black Crowes, Wilco, and countless others.

But every few years, thanks to a new song, or video, or tour, we always seemed to come back to him. Always.

Petty seemed content to just humbly write, record and deliver the flat-out, bonafide rock’n roll goods. Songs that suggested, in their own forceful but polite way, that we should have always paid even more attention to him than we had. But at the same time, never making us feel bad or guilty for occasionally straying. He was a pro. He was like that running back who scores touchdown after touchdown but, instead of doing some stupid dance after each one, doesn’t say shit. No bragging. No smack-talking. No doing the fucking worm or pretending to urinate on a fire hydrant. No, he just hands the ball to the ref and walks out of the end zone, knowing he’ll be back real soon.

Basically, Tom Petty is the rock equivalent of fellow Florida Gator, Emmitt Smith. TD after TD. Hit after hit. They let their actions, not their words—unless those words were being sung into a mic—do their talking.

So did I—any of us—truly appreciate Petty as much as we should have when we had the chance? Did we always see him as one of the mold-breaking, legendary American rockers, or do we just see it now after his death? Maybe. Maybe not. But I happen to think he deserves to be on our American Rock Mount Rushmore. Hands down. Who else is up there, we could debate for weeks. Johnny Cash, Ray Charles, Dylan and Springsteen? Elvis, Hendrix, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly? Duane Allman, Ronnie Van Zant, Little Richard, Brian Wilson? Eddie Vedder, Kurt Cobain, Billy Joe Armstrong, and Flea? Hell, I know at least one person out there who’d make an impassioned argument for all four members of Van Halen!

Regardless, for me it comes down to three aspects:

(1) As a music fan, I loved arrangements and melodies that positively burrowed into your brain and pitched camp forever.

(2) As a writer, I loved his sparse poetry, his supernatural ability to tell a vibrant, multi-volume story in three minutes. Hell, three seconds.

And (3) as a kid who, luckily, by no means had a rough childhood, but certainly dealt with the typical uncertainties and fears of growing up, I loved his music simply for its ability to make me feel human.

Alive. Just a hair more certain and less fearful of . . . everything. Because every three-plus rockin’ minutes of Petty was the doctor’s recommended dosage of hope and confidence injected into me, usually when I needed it most.

Okay, I admit it—that was WAY too long. (Hey, I warned you upfront; don’t bitch about word count now.) But when I wrote this last Monday, it was a rare rainy, cold, eerie, gloomy day in Boulder. One of those ‘reflecting” kind of days that makes you write 2,000 more words than you should. But I don’t give a shit. Because until a few minutes before I started typing, I guess I’d never truly processed how vital and ubiquitous a part of my life Tom Petty and his music had always been. How unfortunate it is that he won’t be putting pen to paper, fingers to strings, or feet on-stage ever again. Or how, above all, we’re all so lucky for his having shared all that, and more, with us, total strangers, for the past forty years.

RIP Tom. Time to move on, time to get going, what lies ahead we have no way of knowing…

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