Tom Petty’s death had a resounding wake up effect on me. I always enjoyed the music he and the bands he headed made. When he suddenly died it made me resolve to not miss any more of the musical artists I revered in this life. Work could wait.
In ’74 Janet and hitchhiked from Key West where we spent our first year of living together to return to our homeland north of Chicago. It was July. At 6:30 a.m. one sticky morning we got a warning ticket from a cop in Alachua County in North Central Florida warning us ‘not to ever hitchhike in this county again’. With no car in our possession that wasn’t an option. When he was out of sight we thumbed a ride down. I was struck by how this part of Florida was so different than where we had been. This was the deep south. We had a long way to go. Janet was 18 and I was 22. It was naïve to say the least as she wore a midriff baring navy-blue halter top and I wore the look of person who’d never carried a weapon. It was scary quite frankly, but we were nearly broke and missing our families. I got the sense this territory was more hardscrabble and deeply redneck than I’d realized before this sojourn. When my sisters and I were children my experience with Florida was going to Miami Beach with our parents for a few Christmas holidays. A playground for those that could afford the Art Deco hotels, sandy white beaches and ‘Surf and Turf’ dinners, (for them) and ‘all you can eat pancakes’ for us. That was fantasyland. Safe in its bubble. Hitching up Route 27 through Central Florida with my gal was not. Many of Tom’s songs are gritty. Much of it I would attribute to the limited opportunities a kid faced growing up in this neck of the woods. He made a gift out of it.
Janet and I got home and soon broke up. Was it getting too real? I was admittedly lost. I drove a black ‘Beetle’ Volkswagen I bought for 200 bucks out to Colorado to stay at my high school friend’s place in Greely. He was going to college at UNC. I had the couch to crash on. One night I caught a concert with him and a neighbor lady seeing Linda Ronstadt and Jackson Browne in Denver. I wrote about that and meeting the amazing songbird in a hotel after the show.
The link is here.
I didn’t know the depth of the ‘Heartbreakers’ catalog of work during his lifetime. Like so many I loved the songs that burst through the charts and played on the radio. But after he passed, I started to listen to his work via the Tom Petty Radio Station on ‘Sirius XM’. www.siriusxm.com I have not stopped listening to that station yet. I am blown away by the range of the man’s work. And let’s not forget his band. Jesus! What a fucking load of talent that gathered around Tom. Mike Campbell, Benmont Tench, Stan Lynch. All of them. I came to adore the song ‘Rebels’ which I had never heard until after his passing. It opens their sixth album as ‘Heartbreakers’ and was on the album, “Southern Accents”.
“Honey don’t walk out,
I’m too drunk to follow.
You know you won’t
feel this way tomorrow.
Well, maybe a little rough around the edges
Or inside a little hollow.
I get faced with some things sometimes
That are so hard to swallow.”— Tom Petty
I’ve loved music even longer than I’ve loved words. I think most of us have. We don’t need to learn anything to listen to music it could be reasoned. But you need to learn to listen. The world around us is filled with music. The susurrations of a breeze rustling trees, a city’s syncopated traffic, a lone saxophone player heard from an unseen window. These things could escape us if we didn’t open our minds to it. Walt Whitman opened portals to the sounds of the world in his poems. I started playing music with friends in bands around my hometown when I was about 19. But even long before that we sang in our home. It was me, our maternal grandmother, ‘Nana’ mother and my two sisters. The women and girls sang with open abandon. It eventually gave me the courage to join in. We had a stereo. It might have come from Sears. Mom had a stack of records that went from Hank Williams to Nat King Cole. Nana loved opera. We went to church most Sundays and sang at least four songs each service. We sang along with great energy, smiling at each other and our beloved Reverend Fletcher at especially loved passages. To grow up with music is to grow up with hope. To grow old with music is to not grow old in your heart.
