It was a couple weeks of the unexpected for me. First came a call from Diana Ross, with whom I’d had no previous contact. She left a message on my voice mail. That wasn’t something major pop stars do. Most work through handlers. She said she’d picked up my small book Dusty in Memphis in a London airport and wondered if I would be willing to sit down with her and talk about writing projects.
We met a few days later at her floor-through apartment at the Pierre, across from the Plaza Hotel. I wasn’t aware of any assistant. Lobby security checked my driver’s license, after which I took an elevator that opened directly onto Miss Ross’s apartment. She met me there, wearing jeans, her hair down, and we sat in the living room. Within ten minutes of conversation, she was crying, sharing her feeling that no book had really shown her for who she is. It was a two-hour visit. I wanted to help, we made plans, but she never returned any of my calls after that.
One week later, I got an e-mail from Tom Petty’s management, saying that Tom wanted to meet up in Los Angeles, that he’d read Dusty in Memphis and wanted to talk about it. I knew that the book was in a few shops, that it had gotten a handful of reviews, but I also knew that it was an indie affair. This Diana Ross and Tom Petty stuff was strange business. I still thought of myself as an academic. I’d gotten my PhD and stayed out of the music business for more than a decade, had only one foot in at that point. Petty and I hadn’t had any contact for fifteen years.
Mary Klauzer from Petty’s management set up a dinner in Malibu. The restaurant was off the Pacific Coast Highway, and I waited just outside, by the valet parking. Petty was a little late, so I kept an eye out for his car, standing close to a maître d’, who seemed to enjoy watching me wait, though I didn’t understand what prompted his amusement, until he said, “Good evening,” looking toward the road. Petty stepped through some bushes, wearing an army jacket. I couldn’t tell if he’d been dropped off, run across the PCH, or what. But obviously this had happened before. The maître d’ didn’t care how the celebrities got to his restaurant, as long as they got there.
Petty had just finished up or almost finished up a new record, Highway Companion, his third solo album. He’d gone back to work with Jeff Lynne but under very different conditions from those of either Full Moon Fever or Into the Great Wide Open. Time had passed. Del Shannon was dead, a suicide. George Harrison had been gone for five years at that point, Roy Orbison almost eighteen. Johnny Cash had died three years before, Howie Epstein the same year. Several of the people who first watched Lynne and Petty collaborate weren’t around to see that the friendship had lasted and music was still being made.
We sat by the ocean, talking as we ate. It wasn’t the first mealtime I’d shared with Petty. The first was in Encino in the mid-eighties. My brother and I had gone out to the Petty house on a Sunday and stuck around long enough that our hosts offered dinner. Still a little unsure how to behave at a rock star’s home, we welcomed the invitation. Jane Petty was apologetic, letting us know she wasn’t entirely sure what they had for food. We went into the kitchen, all of us, including Adria and Annakim, watching as Jane opened cupboards. She found some spaghetti and a jar of sauce but looked uncertain about what to do with it. This was something my brother and I could handle, and it felt good to have a little authority. It was only when we’d finished cooking the food that my brother and I realized the family had no intention of eating with us. They watched as we ate very large plates of spaghetti. We asked Petty questions, and he told us stories. The kids took it all in. Jane offered commentary. We drove out of the gates later that evening, thinking, “The guy who wrote ‘Even the Losers’ just watched us eat spaghetti.”
Sitting there in Malibu so many years later, Petty told me he’d written a song after reading Dusty in Memphis, and that he wanted me to hear it. After dinner, we went back to his house. I gave him a ride in my rental car. Highway Companion sounded different from the other Jeff Lynne recordings. It had a spare quality, showing off more space. It made room for the voice of what seemed to me a detached observer, in some cases a narrator-voyeur, floating above it all. “I’m passing over cities, country homes and ranches / watching life between the branches below,” he sang on the first track, “Saving Grace.” It established a position he’d take throughout much of the album, set up the proceedings. “Square One,” the second cut, seemed like the centerpiece, a survivor account. At that time, I didn’t know what Petty’s life had been like since I’d seen him last. I only knew that he was different by a shade. A melancholy was coming through, like a couple layers of anger had been peeled off, and that’s what was left.
“Down South,” the recording he wanted me to hear, went to a southern landscape as much mythic as it was based on Petty’s background. I could tell that as a songwriter he cared as much as he ever had about the craft and its powers. These were songs finely tooled, but breathing life. We listened through the whole album, drinking Cokes, talking between cuts, and I left. But everything I ever thought about the man, while listening to the records that raised me, was confirmed. Again. And Petty was himself happy with Highway Companion. As I came to see over the next several years, that’s how it’s been for Petty: he makes an album, and it buys him a number of months in which he can almost enjoy the beauty of it all. Then either he gets to work on the next thing or trouble shows up at his back gate.