After Jude and the boys went to bed Monday night, I walked through the neighborhood past midnight, listening to random songs by Tom Petty, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Traveling Wilburys and Mudcrutch. I needed to be by myself, somehow, to process the loss. It felt, and still feels like, my world shifted.
A few of my oldest friends reached out to me because they knew how I felt about Tom Petty. As I was walking, I got a text from Jay Miller in San Francisco. We went to high school together. His text was simple and to the point - "RIP Tom Petty. That show we went to at the Opry is one of my fondest HS memories." I convinced 12 or 13 of my friends to go to that show in 1982 or 1983 (my junior year of high school). My mom and I waited in line at Port-o-Call in Harding Mall to get tickets and Doug Brown and I sat on the front row. When the band was playing "Refugee" for the encore, we rushed the stage. As Tom Petty played guitar, he walked up near the edge of the stage, reached down, and grabbed my hand. True story.
Here's an early MTV video of "Refugee:" dhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFnOfpIJL0M
Tom Petty had already been my dude for four or five years at that point. I fell in love with the Heartbreakers in 1978, when they released "You're Gonna Get It," their second album. "Damn the Torpedoes" came out in 1979, when I was 13 years old, and I was off on a ride with Tom Petty that I never thought would end, at least not this soon.
I worked from home yesterday and, for the most part, sat on our back deck and listen to a Tom Petty playlist on Sonos on our outdoor speakers. It was a beautiful fall day but as I listened to so many familiar songs, I was in a fog. It still didn't seem real, somehow, that Tom Petty would never make any more music. Our next door neighbor, Maureen, also working from home, leaned over the fence and we commiserated and exchanged Tom Petty stories. Last night, I went down the rabbit hole and read obituaries and tribute pieces on the internet. The obituary in the New York Times was excellent.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/arts/music/tom-petty-dead.html?_r=0
I knew - I always knew - that when Tom Petty died, I would be profoundly affected. And I was right. There is no other celebrity whose death could seem so personal to me, so life altering. And, yes, I didn't know Tom Petty and he didn't know me but, still, his music was the soundtrack to my life for almost 40 years, from my early teens to my early 50s. It feels like I lost an old, longtime friend, as strange as that sounds.
I've spend a considerable amount of time the last couple of days trying to understand what it was about Tom Petty that resonated so deeply with me, so early and for so long. Tom Petty stayed relevant for me, and for so many others, for four decades. Why? Those are two different questions, I think.
For me, as a 12 or 13 year old, Tom Petty just seemed so fucking cool. I can remember staring at the album jacket inside "Damn the Torpedoes" over and over again. I think it was a profile shot, with Tom wearing dark sunglasses and smoking a cigarette. The background was green, I think. He would have been around 28 or 29 years old at the time. But he just looked so fucking cool, insouciant, really.
And he stayed that way for the next 35 + years. Cool, rebellious and anti-establishment. He fought with record companies. He refused to allow the record company to raise the price of "Hard Promises" to $9.98, rather than $8.98. He threatened to change the name of the album to "This is $8.98" until, finally, they relented and didn't raise the price. That's the kind of shit he did. Tom Petty always seems to stand for something, to stand on principle, even if it meant suing his record label and going bankrupt in the process. That happened.
I think I identified with the fact that Tom Petty was not a good looking guy, certainly not in the classic, lead singer/movie star sense. He was average looking. And, though I loved - and I mean loved - his voice (I still do) - he didn't have a beautiful, traditional singing voice, not by any stretch of the imagination. I identified with that, too.
Tom Petty taught me, on some level, to listen to the words of a song and not get caught up in how the voice singing the words sounded. As a result and no doubt because of Tom Petty, I became big fans of artists like John Hiatt, John Prine and Lucinda Williams, to name a few. As my longtime legal secretary, Lisa Johnson, once said, "you like all of the same artists - strange sounding voices but great songwriters." Damn, she was right on the money with that observation.
I think I grew to appreciate great songwriting because of Tom Petty. He wrote amazing songs all the way until the end. "Trailer," a song he wrote and sung a year or so ago with Mudcrutch, his original band from Gainesville, FL, is fantastic.
As Rob Harvilla wrote in an obituary on The Ringer, everyone knows probably 25 Tom Petty songs by heart. "'Know by heart is a very different notion than 'have them memorized.'" Damn, that is so true. I can play a Tom Petty song I haven't heard in years - and I've done that a lot the last two days - and its lyrics and the music come back to me immediately. Why? Because I know them by heart. They're ingrained on my heart. Here's a link to Rob Harvilla's obituary:
https://www.theringer.com/music/2017/10/3/16407332/tom-petty-dies-obituary
I also think in high school and later, in college, I enjoyed being identified as a huge Tom Petty guy. Everyone knew he was my dude. In every dorm room, fraternity house room and apartment I had in college, I had the same five Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers posters on my wall. People gave me some shit about it, but they admired me, I think, because I stuck by him. They knew I didn't give a shit if anyone else liked Tom Petty or thought he was cool. It turned out, of course, that in the end, almost everyone liked him and thought he was cool. I was just in on him early and never left.
I saw him in concert several times, of course. I'll regret, though, for the rest of my life, not seeing him at Bridgestone Arena when he came to Nashville a few months ago. At the time, I looked on Seat Geek and saw I could buy a ticket on the second row for $500. It was his 40th anniversary tour and I thought I would treat myself to a night with Tom Petty on what might be his last big tour. Ultimately, I decided not to go because I was busy at work, had a mediation the next day, etc. I'll catch him next time, I thought. Well, there won't be a next time. Shit.
At every important time in my life, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were there. As a teenager, on MTV when it was new, learning to drive, working my first job at Wal-Mart, going off to college, going to law school, getting married, getting divorced, getting married again, having children, turning 40, turning 50 - all of that. Tom Petty was the soundtrack for all of those important events in my life. Jason Isbel, who is an amazing songwriter in his own right, felt the same way and said it much more eloquently:
https://twitter.com/JasonIsbell/status/914938291400708096
When Ann and I were getting divorced 1997, and for the year or so after, I was in a dark place. So was Tom Petty. He and his first wife were divorce in 1996 and out of that divorce came the album "Echo." It is, without a doubt, the band's darkest album, but it's one of my favorites. Then, when I listened to "Room at the Top" or "Echo," it felt like he had written those songs for me. That was comforting for me at the time, really comforting. Hearing him sing those songs - those songs he had written during a difficult time in his life - helped me get through my difficult time. I don't know why, but I know it did. After the tour to support the album, Tom Petty quit playing songs off "Echo." He said it was just too hard and brought back bad memories. Here's is a video of "Room at the Top":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQFCF9KESic
Tonight, while Jude was at book club, J.P., Joe and I watched a baseball playoff game (Arizona - Colorado). Before bed, I switched over to Youtube and played some Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker videos. When I played a video of "Refugee" live, in concert, from 1982, J.P. watched and listened intently, like he does when he hears a song for the first time. I smiled as I watched him, watching Tom Petty. Maybe Tom Petty will be his dude, too.
I could ramble on forever about Tom Petty and how his death has hit me so hard. I've listened, really listened, to so many of his songs the last two days. Some of the lyrics haunt me now that he's going. This, from "Walls (Circus)", for example:
Some things are over.
Some things go on.
Part of me you carry.
Part of my is gone.
R.I.P. Tom Petty
October 20, 1950 - October 2, 2017
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