Austin City Limits Festival: Tom Petty
'70s refugees find a safe place with the Heartbreakers.
By Michael Corcoran
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
DALLAS — This is sad, I thought to myself last month as I surveyed the parking acreage of the Smirnoff Music Centre. Some old rockers just don't know when to pack it in, so they need to book opening acts with some youthful draw to seem vital again. Tom Petty's name was at the top of the lineup, but all I saw were scruffy college-aged kids trying to get in the right frame of mind to feel opening act Trey Anastasio, formerly of Phish. A random older couple would occasionally emerge from between cars, but mostly it was kids like the group next to my car, looking like ex-Pat Green fans who'd been growing their hair out.
"Trey goes on at 8 sharp," I told them, having seen the itinerary. "Y'all got about 10 minutes." They looked at me curiously. "Who's Trey?"
Ya know, Trey Anastasio, the guy who's sold out Madison Square Garden like eight nights in a row. "I didn't know who the opening act was," said a lanky, wispy-bearded fella who looked like he'd seen Phish, like, 47 times, dude. "We're here for Tom," he said, clinking his brown bottle of microbrew beer with a couple buddies.
Wow. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers are still big with the kids — and their parents. Once inside the nearly full 20,000-capacity amphitheater, the age range in the audience went from high schoolers to retirees, making the 30-year-old band the perfect Sunday night closing act for the fifth annual Austin City Limits Music Festival, which kicks off Friday at Zilker Park.
Myself, I wouldn't care much about T.P. and his pals from Gainesville, Fla., if a Tom Petty show hadn't, at one time, been the greatest rock 'n' roll concert that I'd ever seen. New Year's Eve 1978. Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Before "Damn the Torpedoes" introduced the band to the mallrats. Before the top hat and the trippy videos. Way before the Stevie Nicks duets and the two years backing Bob Dylan.
Petty & the Heartbreakers were considered "new wave," which is to say that they were a rock 'n' roll band that came of age during the time of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. They had two albums out at the time, the self-titled debut with "Breakdown" and "American Girl" and the ill-titled follow-up, "You're Gonna Get It" (sounds too Blondie), but they performed like veterans who knew all the tricks. Their show was a perfect mix of abandon and execution. At one point, the crowd pulled Petty into its sweaty, jubilant midst and ripped the arms right off his white shirt. I'd seen the Rolling Stones and the Faces and the Talking Heads, all masters of controlled chaos, but I'd never seen anything like that steamy bowl of humanity at the Santa Monica Civic on the last day of 1978. It was Patti Smith fronting Buffalo Springfield, a mix of swagger and finesse that was so unusual for the era. This was a '60s rock band that had to get savage to survive.
I loved the punk attitude of such L.A. bands as the Weirdos and the Germs, but deep down I'm a classic rock guy. I was looking for a band that could rile it up like the Clash, but could also open for the Rolling Stones without being booed off the stage, and I found it that night in Santa Monica.
Listening back to the first few Petty records, they just don't hold up as the masterpieces I thought they were. The sound is a bit thin, the music derivative. But this many years later, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers still represent what was good about my half-year-that felt-like-three in Los Angeles, where most of my money earned flipping doughnuts at Winchell's in East L.A. was spent on punk badges and fanzines and singles like "Homicide" by 999 and "Hong Kong Garden" from Siouxsie and the Banshees. (I remember those two in particular because after I bought them at Licorice Pizza on Sunset, I realized I didn't have enough money for the bus, so I had to panhandle. To this day, I'm a soft touch for anyone with a hard luck story about needing 75 cents to get home because he just spent his last five dollars on two records he can't even play because he doesn't have a stereo.)
Los Angeles was a town of endless possibility, stretched out, endlessly, to make it all the more difficult to find what you want. Petty and his band took what they needed and left the rest. I'd listen to KROQ for hours every day, hearing the Heartbreakers bumped up against X and George Thorogood and Tanya Tucker and the Clash and the Cars, and it all made sense. KROQ and concerts made L.A. liveable. After six months I couldn't wait to go home.
Before I left, I stopped into Tattooland on East Whittier Boulevard to get a souvenir of my time surviving the big city. I was carrying a copy of the first Petty record, with the tattoo design of a heart-piercing V-shaped guitar, which I wanted to have drilled into my upper arm. But the tattoo artist couldn't get it just right, so I went with the magenta rose instead. (Whew!)
Still not backing down
Petty, guitarist Mike Campbell, keyboardist Benmont Tench, drummer Stan Campbell and bassist Ron Blair moved to Los Angeles from Florida in 1974 because that's where the music was. Petty and Campbell, one of the greatest platonic love affairs ever, were in a country rockish band called Mudcrutch, which had outgrown the bars and frat parties of Gainesville. First day in L.A., Petty got an offer for a recording contract from London Records, home of the Rolling Stones. A few days later, he had another interested caller, Denny Cordell of Shelter Records, which was built around Leon Russell's incredible success at the time. Cordell persuaded Petty to stop into his studio in Tulsa on the way back from fetching the rest of the band in Florida. Starved for studio time, that experience sealed the deal. Mudcrutch signed with Shelter without having a lawyer review the terms, an oversight that would haunt the band, which had evolved into Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers after the first Mudcrutch single tanked and the album was never released.
Onstage, Petty comes off as a laid-back guy, but he's fought some fierce battles behind the scenes. He and the Heartbreakers sued Cordell to renegotiate their contract, spending about a year in limbo. They won a stalemate with MCA, which had bought the Shelter roster, refusing to record their third album until they got a deal which assured, among other provisions, creative control. Then there was the $9.98 controversy. MCA wanted to raise the list price of albums from $8.98 to $9.98, starting with Petty's 1981 LP "Hard Promises," but Petty stood up for the fans, fighting his battle in the music media. He tore up a dollar bill on the cover of Rolling Stone and threatened to name the album "$8.98" if MCA didn't back down. It did.
If you were to grade everything that a musician does, Tom Petty wouldn't have any 10s, but he'd have a whole lot of 8s and 9s. He's not as great a performer as Bruce Springsteen or Bono or Mick and Keith, but Petty and his incredibly tight band have been known to rock the house with some consistency. At the ACL Fest, stick around until the very end, when Petty & the Heartbreakers wrap the whole package with "American Girl" to see just how much power these geezers can produce. As a songwriter, Petty's not even in Dylan's ZIP Code, but who is? Give the 55-year-old blonde with the Cherokee features credit for such great songs as "Don't Do Me Like That," "I Need To Know," "Runnin' Down a Dream" and so many more. At the Dallas concert, Petty played only two songs from his new album, "Highway Companion" — the John Lee Hooker-ish "Saving Grace" and a solo acoustic "Square One." The rest of the two hours was filled with songs as familiar as the front lawn of the house where you grew up. "Listen to Her Heart," "Won't Back Down," "Don't Come Around Here No More," "Mary Jane's Last Dance." Think of the tunes. It's hard to not slip into the scalper Damone from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" when thinking about a Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers concert.
The kids still dig these fiftysomethings, even rip them off in the case of the Strokes (who admittedly steered the riff of "American Girl" onto "Last Nite"), because Petty and the gang tackle every tour, every studio project as if they're still young guys from Florida with something to prove. They still remember what it was like being a fan, saving up to buy records and concert tickets. "It took a world of trouble, it took a world of tears/ It took a long time to get back here," he sings on "Square One."
What a great attribute it is, to feel like starting over even after you've sold 50 million records and made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, the first year the band was eligible. Although lacking the mystique of an Iggy or a Jimi, this band is among the very best at what they do — and they do the best they can every time.
mcorcoran@statesman.com |
