Tom Petty has died. The 66-year-old rocker suffered a hear attack in California, cutting short a long career and leaving fans like me a bit dazed.
It’s been a rough stretch for musical icons — in the last two years we’ve lost Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Maurice White, Phife Dawg, Merle Haggard, Leon Russell, Glenn Frey, Sharon Jones, Charles Bradley, Keith Emerson and Greg Lake, George Michael, Grant Hart, Glenn Campbell, Walter Becker, Gregg Allman, Don Williams, Chuck Berry, Clyde Stubblefield and so many others.
Perhaps more Han all of these artists, however, more even than Bowie and Prince, Petty is a part of my personal artistic mosaic, a musician whose work has helped remind me to push ahead with my own vision and not to concern myself with fads or convention. Petty was the first of these artists to capture my musical soul (I heard Bowie first, but fell in over with Petty’s music before I fully internalized Bowie’s) and, as such, helped develop my ear and erect the structures of taste that have guided my fanatical interest in rock and roll and soil and their various offshoots.
It was Petty’s third album that first caught my attention. Damn the Torpedoes is one of those rare records, nearly perfect, not a bad song. Released in 1979, the album wasn’t easily placed within the radio music of the time — it wasn’t metalesque stadium rock or disco, which was dominating the airwaves. It was something else, something a bit closer to rock’s roots. Like Bruce Springsteen, Petty had stripped things down — guitars, drum, bass and organ. Push the tempo. Write about love. It was a formula as old as rock, owing more to Buddy Holly than most of what could be heard on the radio at the time.
Keep in mind that 1979 was also the peak of punk and new wave’s first movement. Petty wasn’t punk or new wave, but he fit within the broader confines of this shift in sound. Damn the Torpedoes opens with a drum figure that snaps the listener to attention — like Dylan on “Like a Rolling Stone” or Springsteen on “Born to Run” — and quickly moves to a guitar riff that is now instantly recognizable. “We got somethin’, we both know it / We don’t talk much about,” he sings, “Ain’t no real big secret all the same / Somehow we get around it.”
Something shared. Something urgent. But couched in a nonchalance. “We both know it.” Petty’s voice, always a rough instrument, is almost matter of fact, until the music rises in pitch and he follows, his voice turning plaintive, pleading. “Listen, it don’t really matter to me, baby / You believe what you want to believe” he offers, bringing his point home with the chorus, “You see, you don’t have to live like a refugee.”
This line is key to understanding Damn the Torpedoes, an album on which love battles pain and hopelessness and that ends with the singer’s character on the road and profoundly changed and saved by human connection. “Refugee” sets the tone thematically, offers the listener a sense of permission: You can come in from the cold, can engage, be a part of something good. All you need is someone, however temporary.
On Damn the Torpedoes Petty mines the same vein that Springsteen mines on Born to Run — another near-perfect recording — and enters and decodes the American Zeitgeist. Remember, the late-1970s were years of waning American confidence, as we dealt with the hangover from the debacle in Vietnam, a series of oil price shocks, inflation, failing infrastructure and a long-simmering white backlash against the modest gains of the civil rights movement.
A new generation of teens were coming of age post-1960s. The optimism that marked much of 1960s rebellion — that sense that the new generation could remake the nation as a more humane place — remained was giving was to the dark undercurrent that was always a dangerous part of what the decade was about. I’ve written about this before, in an essay on Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. The ‘60s too often is characterized as a decade of hope, of joy, of love. But it also was a decade in which political assassination played a prominent role, a decade that gave us Charles Manson and Altamont, a decade in which brutal and violent biker gangs like the Hells Angels were lionized. Yes, change was in the air, but every change and every protest designed to press for change — whether for civil rights or against the war — was met with a harsh backlash. In the end, Nixon had won the White House and Johnson’s anti-poverty programs would fail to reach their potential because of his obsession with Vietnam.
This is how the ‘60s end and the ‘70s begin, the war continuing for five more years, a president resigning, New York nearly falling into bankruptcy, and Americans falling prey to a host of crazy self-help and self-realization movements and cults.
Petty is not writing about these things anymore than Springsteen is, but he is writing within this milieu, he is soaking it up, has no choice but to respond. Petty, Springsteen, Neil Young on the brilliant Rust Never Sleeps, the punk movement, hip hop, even disco’s rush into pure hedonism (partying as a way to escape the terror) were responses.
On “Even the Losers,” Petty sings that, because of a moment of love, “time meant nothin’ anything seemed real.” The losers do get lucky, he says, using a phrase he’d revisit in his ‘82 single “You Got Lucky,” though without the anger he’d later heap on the girl that walked away. In 1979, he’s still thankful on some level that this momentary love “could kiss like fire” and make him “feel / Like every word (she) said was meant to be.”
Yes, “even the losers / Get lucky sometimes / Even the losers / Keep a little bit of pride,” but only if the romanticism is tempered by a bit of reality.
Two cars parked on the overpass
Rocks hit the water like broken glass
Should have known right then it was too good to last
It’s such a drag when you live in the past
Petty release a lot of great albums after Damn the Torpedoes, some that deserve to be discussed as among the best in the rock era. But Damn the Torpedoes is his one unassailable classic, he single record that makes his reputation. Few artists can claim to have created something so pure and direct that it both explains its moment in history and stands above it and continues to speak decades later.Send me an e-mail.
Hank Kalet 