When I was young, before MTV and before I was going out to gigs, I didn’t have any sense of music being attached to fan hysteria or anything like that. I just thought of music as a place you could kind of enter. And my dad was very conscious of taking me there. He was like, “Hey, do you want to check out this beautiful place where I go a lot?” Music was so important to me growing up, because of that. So even though my dad was very private about his writing, he’d bring me in.
—ADRIA PETTY
Mudcrutch released their record, and the band did a short tour on the West Coast, playing the Troubadour in Los Angeles and the Fillmore in San Francisco, among a handful of other stops. It did for Petty just what he hoped: got him some songs and inspired him to go after more. It also gave him a vision for how he wanted to make the next Heartbreakers recording. No studio rentals, no producers. Petty wanted his band to meet where they stored their gear and make something that captured the sound he heard when no one was around but the six of them.
During that same time, Ryan Ulyate was digging through the Heartbreakers’ vaults, attempting to make order of the vast collection of live recordings the band amassed over three-plus decades. Over a period of several months, Ulyate pulled what he felt were strong recordings from across their career, hundreds of cuts for Petty and Campbell to review. What they put together from all of that could have been many different kinds of collections, depending on the emphasis, the sequence, the years from which they culled recordings. But by the end of the process, Petty felt that The Live Anthology was a testimonial in forty-seven tracks. He was struck by what Ulyate had found. For thirty-five years, Petty had been too busy to look at last night because he was preparing for tonight. There was a lot to forget along the way, covers he didn’t remember doing, originals he didn’t recall having ever performed. And there was his rock-and-roll band: the most consistently great American band to have come out of the seventies and found their way into the new century. “It’s the most accurate record,” Petty says, “of just who we are.”
The sequencing on the collection isn’t chronological. It’s intuitive. “Nightwatchman” opens the first disc, a clue that this isn’t going to be a straight road through town. “I didn’t want it to be the greatest hits, played slightly faster,” Petty remarked. “And I wanted the view from inside the house. It’s a good place to take it all in from.” The recordings are a reminder of just how much Stan Lynch brought to the band’s musical identity during his time as a Heartbreaker. Howie Epstein’s high tenor is as beautiful against Petty’s lead as any voice ever would be. Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell, good enough to take a song anywhere but always knowing where it was meant to be. Steve Ferrone, Ron Blair, and Scott Thurston, giving the Heartbreakers a second life and sound. For all of the hard choices Petty had made in order to keep his band together, here was a collection that told him it had been worth it.
* * *
The tours through that period were intermittent, mostly summer affairs, with sets built around the big songs. From the time Dana Petty first came into Tom’s world, the longer outings were kept to the warmer months, when school was out, so that Dylan wouldn’t miss classes. It was a reflection of changing priorities. Petty wasn’t the man he’d been at twenty-six. But even by the time he was coming into his early sixties, he still struggled with stage fright—if “stage fright” is even the right term for what sometimes took him by the throat. Its appearance was irregular but powerful when it came, and the irregularity left Petty not knowing when he needed to be on his guard. By the early nineties, he’d stopped doing sound checks because of it. “I was extremely neurotic about them,” he says. “I’d get to the sound check and become incredibly nervous, and this would make me neurotic, driving the monitor people crazy, driving everyone on stage crazy.” Even before that, however, Petty had started avoiding guests before and after the shows, streamlining the entire performance process. He stuck to the job and left the social part of it to others. “TCFP,” Stan Lynch called it. Too cool for pussy. “No, that’s not quite it,” says Petty. “My adrenaline would go so high during a show I wouldn’t come down for hours. I’m kind of delicate mentally. People would be talking to me backstage, and I couldn’t take in much of anything they’re saying to me. You start to feel hypocritical. I’d be in such a different place than the folks coming back to see me. But, on another level, imagine if I rolled into some guy’s office, sat down next to his desk, and said, ‘Let’s get drunk! Let’s smoke one, whaddya say? I got some people I want you to meet!’ Right? When I’m playing a show, I’m at the office.”
Were it not for the fans and the records that needed support, the touring might have ended already. But the records never stopped mattering to Petty. In 2010, after taking the Heartbreakers into the band’s clubhouse to make a record in the same manner as Mudcrutch’s debut, Petty had an album on his hands, Mojo, which he loved, and loved enough to know he had to tour behind it. Everyone in the band wanted to get out there. So did Petty, with reservations. He knew that the stage anxieties would be there waiting for him. And if they hadn’t gotten worse, they had certainly become more of a burden to deal with.
Mojo was introduced as the Heartbreakers’ blues album, but in some ways the description fails the project. There was more to Mojo. It wasn’t blues in the sense that most people thought of the blues, through no fault of their own. When the Heartbreakers played the blues, they tended to do it in the way that Slim Harpo had, in the way that Jimmy Reed had, as songs, two-and-half- and three-minute things. “Jefferson Jericho Blues,” “Candy,” “U.S. 41”—those Mojo cuts fit the Heartbreakers’ version of the blues. It wasn’t guys making contorted faces while they bent strings for long periods of time. But Mojo also had songs like “First Flash of Freedom,” “Don’t Pull Me Over,” “No Reason to Cry,” material only tangentially related to a strict blues tradition. Regardless of the misdirection of the “blues” tag, it was a Heartbreakers project, and a lot of people had been waiting for it. The Heartbreakers were more like the great country acts of the past, getting better as they logged miles and years. New territories were still opening up.
On the tour, opening acts included My Morning Jacket, Joe Cocker, Drive-By Truckers, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. The Heartbreakers brought on performers, young and old, whom they respected. In the case of Cocker and CSN, Petty had his heroes opening shows. “When we first played with Crosby, Stills, and Nash opening,” Petty says, “we’d been on tour for a while by that time, with no real problems of me being nervous or anything. We were in Atlanta when they joined us. Stephen [Stills] especially was a big hero of mine. But all these guys, really. Buffalo Springfield, Byrds, Hollies, this is heavy for me. I walked out and watched for a little from the side of the stage, and they were really good that night, really hitting it, and the place was going crazy. I got nervous, thinking to myself, ‘God, I can’t follow that. I can’t possibly follow that.’ So I go to my dressing room to pull myself together. Then the door opens and it’s Stephen, and he wants to rap. And that just makes me more nervous.”
Though the Heartbreakers didn’t notice, and the arena of fans didn’t notice, Petty got lost somewhere in his head. By the time he was onstage, aware that Crosby, Stills, and Nash were at the side, watching him, Petty was slipping. “I felt like I couldn’t sustain a note,” he says. “My voice started to kind of quiver. It was driving me mad. I was thinking, ‘I have to pull this together. I can’t sing in vibrato through the whole show. This is bad news.’ It took me like three or four songs, but I got to where I could sustain notes without vibrato. On the plane that night, I asked the band, ‘Did you notice that I sang the first quarter of the show in vibrato?’ They said, ‘No, you didn’t.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I did.’ Scott said, ‘No, I would have heard that. I have your voice right in my ear.’ I thought, ‘Did I imagine that I sang in vibrato?’ And then the next day, it was all fine. We played two more weeks with them. Nothing.”
On their first trip to Japan, in 1980, Petty had buckled over with stomach pains in the hours before a show and was rushed through the streets to a doctor, who pronounced Petty “nervous.” During the Into the Great Wide Open tour, with Petty down to 140 pounds and struggling with stomach issues, George Harrison sent his friend to an acupuncturist, who put needles into the singer, burned herbs around his stomach, and finally concluded that Petty was “nervous.” “I’m enough of a pro to calm myself down, to relax and do the gig,” he explains. “I can do that, and no one will notice. But inside, when it happens, I’m dying. Sometimes years have gone past without any trouble. And then it comes back. Sometimes I just need to be told that I’m nervous, and things improve. But it’s always back there as a possibility, even when those years go past.” Playing the Super Bowl, headlining Bonnaroo, the possibility was there with him, something he lived with. It was a private affair but robbed him of some joy, made it harder to let spontaneity guide an evening onstage. The structure of a set list was something to lean on.
“Oh, you have no idea,” says Adria Petty. “It was always there. I think some people think that he’s kind of antisocial or just doesn’t like people. Really, he’s just terrified. I remember my dad met a Formula One driver with George [Harrison], and my dad asked him what he did to avoid being nervous. The driver told my dad that he ran the whole track in his mind, did the race mentally, visualized winning. And I think that helped. But I don’t know where it comes from. Was there a moment when he just wasn’t prepared? I don’t know. He’s so prepared now. His discipline is extraordinary.” The 2012 European tour found Petty hitting a new level of comfort, as if something had come off his back. Without acupuncture and the burning of herbs, there was a shift. It was a quieter, more comfortable time on the road. Not quick to trust any such change, Petty nonetheless entered a period in his life when he felt the years of anxiety lift a little. The tours that followed confirmed it. It helped that Dana Petty was out there with him, letting him know he was nervous, when that’s what he needed to know.
In 2013, Petty took the band into the Beacon in New York City and the Fonda in Los Angeles for residencies, bringing to those cities what the Heartbreakers had done at the Fillmore in San Francisco some years earlier. The smaller rooms gave the band more room to run. The set lists went into album tracks and a few unexpected covers, and you could see Petty enjoying himself. It didn’t hurt that by that time he had another recording nearly finished, Hypnotic Eye, cut in much the way they recorded Mojo. Hypnotic Eye reminded him anew just how good the band had gotten. Life had changed enough that the group members would go months without seeing one another. But when they came back together, Petty couldn’t help but be struck by the way they dropped into new material. Were they actually getting better? It made him more interested than ever in making records.
“I’ve come full circle,” Petty says. “When I make a record now, I know what I want to do. I don’t need that spark of an outside producer. I spark myself. I don’t want anybody’s advice. And I could not possibly put up with any kind of struggle with a producer, about how to do something. I’ve worked with great, great producers and learned a lot. And I’m sure there’s something I could gain by working with another one. But it would also take things away. At this point in my life, I’m just happy doing it myself. I’ve got a good team, with Ryan and Mike to bounce things off.” After the tour that included the Fonda and Beacon shows, Petty went in to finish Hypnotic Eye, with a second Mudcrutch album already in the back of his mind. Even if the record business had changed, and recordings just didn’t sell like they used to, it was too late to make Petty into a different man. He’d been in the album cycle since he was a kid, and he was going to stay there as long as he could. There was no reason to do otherwise. He didn’t have any other tricks.
The songs that emerged as the Heartbreakers started making Hypnotic Eye looked outward as much as they did inward. Perhaps still affected by the backlash that met The Last DJ, Petty was careful not to make his view of contemporary life and its sad contradictions overly explicit—but it was clear enough from the record that the world he would be leaving behind for his children and their children isn’t one that leaves him feeling he’s done them right. But if that message is there, it’s embedded in a rock-and-roll record that doesn’t let up. With only enough time between tracks to take a gulp of air, he keeps it moving, limiting the recording to eleven tracks. One journalist started a Hypnotic Eye interview by asking Petty, “Did you know you didn’t have to make the album this good?” He’d done enough by that time that he could rest on reputation, if he wasn’t still busy trying to top himself. Like Mojo, it was nominated for a Grammy. And it entered at number one on the album charts. His first number one record, after decades of getting close. Even now, with Petty in his midsixties, his fans knew that the next Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers record might be the best of the lot. That’s always been the deal. That’s the brand.
“I hadn’t seen him in, I guess, six months,” says George Drakoulias. “But I wanted to talk to him, just to say, ‘Well, you did it!’ I called Dana, and she gave me his number. What I didn’t know was that he’d just gotten his first cell phone, his own number. I mean, just gotten this thing. So it rings, and he figures out how to answer it. And I realize that he’s like, ‘So, now this thing works? And it’s going to ring?’ Instant regret. But I was just happy for him, having the number one record in the country, and wanted to say it. Past due. Well deserved. He made another great record. Another great record. There’s just no one like this guy.”
With a new record out there, people wanted more of the “work” out of him. The interviews, appearances, the tweets he hadn’t fully accepted as a part of his life. “It’s like Tom Waits said,” Petty remarks. “‘I’m an artist, but I’m still in show business.’ At this point, though, the show business part of it is what I’m trying to keep to a minimum. With all of the social media and Internet outlets, promoting a record these days is almost like being punished for making it. I remember doing a European press tour for Wildflowers, that far back, and I was doing press all day, from morning through dinner, realizing after four or five days that it had gotten to be too much. I said, ‘Either you show me that this has really got some huge return to it, or I’m not gonna do it, because you’re using me to throw darts at the wall in hopes that something sticks.’ I started taking a different approach.” His first inclination with Hypnotic Eye was to avoid touring and simply do the bare minimum press and promotion. He wanted to start on a new Mudcrutch recording, just stay in the studio. But the thought that fewer people would hear Hypnotic Eye if he didn’t tour behind it made him reach for his luggage. He wonders some days how long he’ll have to keep doing this. On others he worries that he’ll have to stop.
* * *
The music business has taken different forms since Tom Petty first entered a recording studio. There are now more people who have left the industry than stayed to watch its dissolution. Boom times these are not. Music isn’t going anywhere, of course. It’s in more spaces, public and private, than at any previous time in history. But the means of distribution, the processes through which artists and songwriters will be compensated, the strategies for promotion, the role of the record company: all will likely change a few times before the future of the music business reveals itself. It’s a good time for charlatans and bullshitters, or, at least, an even better time than usual. Anyone who can convincingly say they know what’s coming next, or even how to handle the present, can have a lot of influence and make a lot of money. For a few minutes.
The music business toward which Tom Petty turned a critical eye in The Last DJ is now a thing of the past, almost quaint when compared with what’s followed. But Petty has grown less interested in attempting to understand the industry’s careening path, its next developments and disintegrations. He leaves that for others. His mind is elsewhere. Even as he continues to make records, as inspired as he’s ever been, he’s more detached from what has become the sometimes desperate search for a way to get music out there. “There are records that make their way through the sheer force of the music,” Petty says. “Good recordings seem to find their way into the world. Gram Parsons never had a hit record. But his stuff came through, people found it. Ann Peebles, one of my all-time favorites, was teaching in a preschool or something when I first heard one of her records. Now I play her music all the time on my radio show. What these people created got to me—and not through anyone’s marketing plan. I have to go on this. I have to let that mean something to me. Things happen with good records. Maybe not right when they come out, maybe not for millions of listeners. But good records seem to get to the people who need them the most. I guess I have to believe that the best marketing tool is still a good song. And that it’s probably better that I put my time into writing one of those than learning how to do social media properly.”
Petty’s songs do keep finding the people who need them. And they’ve gotten their own celebrations over the past few years. In New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Seattle, and Nashville, with more cities coming, musicians have been gathering to play material from Petty’s catalogue. It was nothing he saw coming, nothing he knew about until it was already happening. They call them “Pettyfests.” Jakob Dylan is among the many who have shown up to play a song. “You just can’t find a Petty song that’s not worth singing,” Dylan says. “And at those shows, the songs just fill the room with joy. I don’t know how you write songs that are that good that consistently.” To watch one of the Pettyfests from the back of the hall is to be reminded of what Tom Petty shares with songwriters like Buddy Holly and Hank Williams, artists who created songs that are easy to get into and hard to forget. But as it is with Holly and Williams, once you’re in a Petty song, another world is unlocked, a place of story, emotion, characters you feel you know, longing, some sense of freedom. And when a group of people gathers to play those songs through, it is as Dylan says: a joy comes into the room. Song after song. In their own way, those shows are one more reminder that Petty belongs to a tradition of American songwriting that includes only a handful of masters.
But Petty won’t be remembered as a great songwriter who grabbed pickup bands in whatever town he was in. Chuck Berry’s problems were never Petty’s. Petty remains a band member, a band leader, and that will be as much a part of his legacy as the songs themselves. “He could have been a solo artist,” says Mike Campbell. “But a band is cool. If it’s a real band. And he’s a good leader. I think I know him pretty well. I know how I look at the band, and I think I know how he looks at the band. I think of Tom as a best friend. I didn’t bellyache, and when he’d turn to me and say, ‘What should we do here?’ I’d say what I thought. If it was a good idea, he’d respect me for it. What can I say? He treated me good.” The life of Petty’s songs was made longer and richer because the guys who first played them kept playing them.
“I don’t know how you keep a group of musicians together that long,” Jakob Dylan says. “But I think this is the goal. And ninety-nine percent of us probably fail at keeping anything together half as long as Tom Petty’s kept his band together. But their example makes you believe that you can come up with these people, at a young age, and make that bond, musically. But, let’s face it, it’s an opportunity that comes when you’re really young, when all anybody needs is a little food and rent. You don’t make really great groups in your thirties. Petty did it at the right time, and then, incredibly, he kept it together. I’m lucky that I got to watch a few guys do it, whether it’s the Rolling Stones or Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. They’ve done it for so long that I get to learn from them. I don’t think those bands had anyone to watch in that way. Tom has said that he had no idea he’d get to do this his whole life, year after year. But I know you can—because I got to watch him do it.”
Benmont Tench, sitting quietly for a moment after a few hours of talk, most of it about band politics and the changes that came as the Heartbreakers struggled to stay together, breaks his silence as though he’s caught himself. “I’ve got massive respect for Tom and massive love for Tom,” he says. “I can tell you all about the things that went on, how crazy it might have gotten at times, but being a part of this band has been so important to me. I would never want to be the one who brought this to an end.” Earlier in that conversation, he’d inadvertently given what might have been the best description of the Heartbreakers. “It’s Tom’s band,” he said. “It’s Tom and Mike’s band. But it’s Tom’s band. It’s our band, all of us. But it’s Tom’s band. You know?” And that’s about as simple as anyone was going to be able to make it.
* * *
Tom Petty hasn’t ever made it his business to explain himself, to tell you the story of who he is, to construct a master narrative that positions him in some larger framework of American artists. He’s let the songs do the bulk of that work, going home when the show is over. His social life has been quiet, the friendships limited. The major artists who have worked with him have either come upon Petty by chance or actively sought him out, many of them sticking around to provide the most formative friendships of Petty’s life.
Of those in the band and on the crew, it’s Bugs Weidel who saw Petty up close more than anyone, who more than the others got to look in through what Jeff Jourard called Petty’s “tinted windows.” The two of them were side by side in Weidel’s pickup truck, for decades, stuck in traffic half the time, just like any other Angelenos. The two of them, talking. Sitting for the only interview he’s ever done, Weidel doesn’t even think to say his boss is a perfect man. But, like most everyone who’s made a life in and around music, Weidel isn’t much interested in perfect men.
Petty has a mind that pulls toward the darkness. It still moves in on him sometimes. Who knows how much of that is born of what he went through as a child, or what he repeated from that childhood in his first marriage. But there’s little question that songwriting has been the thing that has made it all more livable. The songs have been his safe house. In them you can hear a man wanting a little more freedom and a little more peace. It’s something people can connect with. “As an artist, as a husband, as a father, as a friend,” Bugs Weidel says, “this guy has spent his life trying to improve. In every single way. That’s what I’ve seen.” Weidel knew Earl Petty, heard some things about the world Tom Petty came from, even saw parts of it firsthand. He knows the distance Petty has come.
But the trouble Petty’s walked away from is something he talks about less these days. He speaks more about his children, Adria, Annakim, and Dylan, about his granddaughter, Everly, about Dana. He reschedules an interview session because Everly is missing her pacifier. He and Dana drive to Venice from Malibu to deliver the one that was left at their house. “One of the great moments of my life,” he says, “was seeing Everly when she realized I was coming in with that pacifier. We stayed for hours, didn’t care how late it was.” He talks about his daughters, how much it means to him to watch them as artists. Tells me Dylan is writing songs with someone and happy with what he’s getting. Describes the Christmas season, when his brother comes to Malibu with all of the cousins, with his own grandchildren and in-laws. “We were poor kids,” Petty says, “and there’s still enough of that inside of us that it means something when we say, ‘Okay, it’s Christmas, and we’re gonna live like kings. We’re gonna watch Westerns, go to Lakers games, hire a chef.’”
Surrounded by his family, he’s got a little more quiet around him. But sometimes, when the house is dark and the others are sleeping, he goes out to the studio, turns on some lights, and looks to see what might come. And a few songs have been coming lately. He’s not sure if they’re for Mudcrutch or the Heartbreakers. He can figure that out later.