KAREEM TAYYAR

Goodbye, Dreamville: On Tom Petty & Other Marvels

1.
I don't remember the first time I heard "American Girl." Not that it matters. I don't remember the first time I read the 23rd Psalm either, or the first time I witnessed rain. Which is as it should be. Certain experiences don't need creation myths. Their meaning in our lives derives from the fact that they feel as if they've always been there, as constant as air, or a recurring dream.


2.
During my high school years there were few artists whose videos were as prominently featured on MTV as Petty's. Guns-n-Roses, certainly. R.E.M. Nirvana. Michael Jackson. Except that none of them were having any fun. Axl wanted to watch the world burn. Michael Stipe appeared to be in perpetual mourning. Kurt Cobain couldn't decide whom he hated more: himself or his public. And Jackson had moved into that unfortunate part of his recording career where his paranoia had reached Joseph McCarthy levels.

But Petty? Petty dressed like the Mad Hatter; smiled like Babe Ruth; and sang like Bob Dylan's younger, more optimistic brother. Bright colors were everywhere in his videos; sunlight too. Even on the clip for "Mary Jane's Last Dance," where Petty's costar is a dead Kim Basinger, and the narrative seems to have come straight out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, the tongue is planted so firmly in the video's cheek that the entire experience feels as ebullient as a ride at Disneyland.

My favorite is his video for "Free Fallin'," which merges a nostalgia for 1950s Americana (Elvis Presley LPs; bouffant hairdos; polka dot dresses) with a late-80s utopianism (a magic-hour stroll through the Westside Mall; smiling teens at a local skatepark) that causes the City of Angels to resemble a paradisal bliss from which neither the singer nor his listeners ever want to be expelled.

It's always summer in the songs of Tom Petty. It's always seventy-five degrees and sunny. Even when his heart's been broken, or your heart's been broken, or someone else's heart's been broken.

"It's the twelve-string guitar," said Daniel, one of my friends from high school, certain that he'd cracked the code to the joy that Petty's music always delivered to us, even on the days in our lives when nothing felt particularly joyous.

Like, for instance, the day several years later when, with Daniel on life support just a few months shy of his twenty-fourth birthday—a brain aneurysm had struck when he was sitting behind the wheel of his car—I drove Pacific Coast Highway with the windows down and played "Learning to Fly" on the car radio as I headed to the hospital to visit him.

"He's already gone," another friend said upon my arrival while nodding back towards the room where Daniel lay. "But go and say goodbye all the same."

"You were right," I said to Daniel, though his brain was no longer functioning. "It was the
twelve-string. I'm glad you told me. I'll never forget that."

I waited until I got back to the car to start crying. I turned the ignition and cued up "The Dark of the Sun," which begins with a ringing G chord played on Petty's Rickenbacker twelve-string that always seemed tuned to the key of Fraternal Love. It's one of the many Petty songs that believes hope will rise from loss, joy from sadness, restoration from fracture:

Will I sail into the heaven's
constellations in my eyes?

Yes, I said to myself, and to Daniel. You will. You already have. I know it.


3.
"There were a lot of things about the South that I was embarrassed about. But there were also things about the South that were wonderful." —Burt Reynolds

Reynolds's attempt to celebrate those wonderful parts of the South became Smokey and the Bandit. Petty's attempt to do the same thing became "Southern Accents." This song is proof that, had he wanted to, Petty could have been his generation's Willie Nelson. From the understated acoustic strum, to a vocal so elegiac it sounds like a Robert Penn Warren poem come to life, to an attention to narrative detail—"Well that drunk tank in Atlanta/Was just a motel room to me/Think I might go work Orlando/If them orange groves
don't freeze"—that would have impressed Flannery O'Connor, it's the kind of song that most musicians would have built an entire career on.

Petty never released it as a single.


4.
I remember reading once that Petty referred to himself as a fisherman, and that what he was fishing for were songs. I've always liked this, especially since Petty's music so often feels imbued with a sense of patience anathema to most popular music. Even on a song like "Runnin' Down a Dream," where Petty and his bandmates play at a speed fast enough to put them in the Winner's Circle at the Daytona 500, he sings with the relaxed assurance of a man who knows that the dream he is chasing isn't going anywhere, because it's already gone; indeed, he neither feels the need to raise his voice on the choruses, nor to lose hope just because what he is seeking has not, and will never, arrive.

This is very un-rock and roll, considering the entire point of the enterprise is to express one's desires, and then to, upon pursuing them, have every expectation they will be realized. And when they're not, that's when the listener can typically expect to hear follow-up songs charged with furor, disillusionment, and betrayal. Think Plastic Ono Band. Think Blood on the Tracks. Think Darkness on the Edge of Town.

Which explains why Petty so often sounds like Malibu’s answer to Siddhartha, a Zen strummer who long ago realized that the entire point of living was to be in the moment, and that, even in motion, one should strive to remain at rest.

This last sentence sounds like the worst, and longest, koan ever written.


5.
Something else about that whole fishing metaphor:

Part of the experience—indeed, the pleasure—of being a Tom Petty fan is knowing that some years the fish were biting more than others, and that, even on his greatest albums, there were always a few fish that he probably would have been wise to throw back: "Finding Out," "Zombie Zoo," "Rhino Skin," "Spike."

In other words, Petty was never so unerringly brilliant that, to add a third metaphor into the mix, he pitched a perfect game. He wasn't late sixties Dylan, or late seventies Springsteen. Instead, one tuned into Petty's records knowing that we'd get to see what his last few years on the water had been like—the highs, the lows, and the in-betweens—a gift that ensured his music always felt intimate, and accessible, in a way that work from some of his peers never would.

From Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea: "Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is."

Which is why Highway Companion, though nowhere near his finest album, is my favorite.

Because it is an album where Tom Petty does the thing that Tom Petty did better than anyone else: make catfish seem like bass ("The Golden Rose"), bass seems like marlin ("Flirting With Time"), and marlin seem like shark ("Square One").

How does he do it? I'm not exactly sure. But on "The Golden Rose," part of it has to do with the beauty of the way he stretches out the phrase "Go - ld - en Ro - se" so that it seems as long as the horizon line one might see from the bow of a ship as he sails toward the sun. And in "Flirting With Time" part of it has to do with the strummed energy brought to the four-four rhythm that underlies the song's verses, which features a simple Woody Guthrie chord progression, but is played with the energy of an Eddie Van Halen riff. And in "Square One" part of it is the poetry of the lyrics, which read like an unpublished verse from Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening":

Last time through I hid my tracks
So well I could not get back
Yeah, my way was hard to find
Can't sell your soul for peace of mind

Although maybe it's none of those things. Because talking about fishing is like dancing about architecture. Or is it talking about songwriting is like dancing about architecture?
I can't remember. And anyway enough about fishing. It's a pastime that I've never enjoyed.

6.
I was lucky enough to be at the Hollywood Bowl for the last show that Petty ever played, on September 25th, 2017. He closed, as he so often did, with "American Girl." L. and I danced and sang along with everyone else in the audience, in love with the music, and the band, and the city, and ourselves.

In the car on the way home I said to L.,
"I can still hear his voice in my ears."
Then, the light on Sunset Boulevard turning green,
I added, "I hope it stays there forever."

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