REMEMBERING TOM PETT Y
American icon leaves an enduring, unpretentious legacy of rock ’n’ roll music
What an awful 24 hours for rock ’n’ roll. As if the death of at least 59 people at a concert in Las Vegas wasn’t too much heartbreak for music fans to bear, Tom Petty died Monday evening after going into cardiac arrest. “We are devastated to announce the untimely death of our father, husband, brother, leader and friend,” his longtime manager, Tony Dimitriades, said in a statement to USA TODAY. “He died peacefully at 8:40 p.m. PT surrounded by family, his bandmates and friends.”
Petty’s premature departure feels almost cosmically cruel, considering the 66-year-old had just wrapped a 40th-anniversary tour with The Heartbreakers, which took him on the road from April through September. For fans who didn’t get to see him on this tour, who promised themselves they’d catch him next time, there will be no next
time. This is an artist who was seemingly always on the road, who embraced MTV and played at Super Bowl halftime shows and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but never seemed too far away from fans’ reach. Knowing he’s gone is enough to buckle your knees.
Losing Tom Petty now, in a year when the soul of the country seems wracked with uncertainty and turmoil, seems even crueler. Because Petty’s music sounded like America, the kind of yearning, big-sky rock ’n’ roll songs that generations of imitators will try and fail to replicate.
His most iconic singles are lean and unpretentious and airtight in their perfection. Petty was rock’s quintessential underdog, the characters in his songs always fighting for some version of survival. He approached songwriting with a director’s eye for a compelling narrative, explaining to Billboard last year: “A good song should give you a lot of images. You should be able to make your own little movie in your head to a good song.”
Over the course of his career, Petty won three Grammys (and earned 18 nominations) and sold tens of millions of records with The Heartbreakers, the group that carried him from the dive bars of
“I do feel as I get older that there’s a finite amount of time left. It’s made me more interested in making records. They last longer than me, and they don’t go away.”
Choosing 10 tracks to define Tom Petty’s legacy is, admittedly, a fool’s errand. The singer, who died Monday at age 66, leaves a rock ’n’ roll songbook that stayed dependably strong over decades of music-making. And, at his best, Petty could pack an emotional punch using fewer words and simpler riffs than nearly all of his rock peers.
It’s a testament to Petty’s enduring catalog of hits that many of his most beloved tracks aren’t on this list — apologies, Mary Jane’s Last Dance and Runnin’ Down A Dream — let alone his forgotten classics or his work with the Traveling Wilburys, both of which deserve their own countdowns. We revisit some of our favorites from one of rock’s most accomplished icons:
10 REFUGEE
From his earliest hits, Tom Petty had a cause to rail against. Refugee, from his 1979 classic Damn the Torpedoes, originally was written as a missive against the music industry, but its fistshaking anthemics far transcend whatever label squabbles Petty was involved in at the time.
9 BREAKDOWN
Breakdown is shockingly fully realized for a debut single, a Steely Dan sound-alike that was wisely slashed in half before its release on The Heartbreakers’ first album in 1976. A concise runtime would become a staple of Petty’s hits, as would his playit-cool vocals that kick down the door once they reach the chorus.
8 DON’T
DO ME LIKE THAT
Another underdog anthem, Don’t Do Me Like That is Petty at his punchy ’70s best, before he evolved into a titan of Americana, when he was still a punk puffing out his chest and sneering at the perils of fame.
7I
WON’T BACK DOWN
The lyric “You can stand me up at the gates of hell / But I won’t back down” took on a new meaning Monday as the media prematurely reported Petty’s death, then retracted their reports as the rocker hung on for a day longer. For a fightin’ anthem, I Won’t Back Down is a remarkably humble-sounding song, with Petty sounding almost sheepish as he declares he’s not giving up.
6 WILDFLOWERS
One of Petty’s most heartbreaking classics, for its simplicity and its clear-eyed perspective on loss. It’s not surprising that fans are drawing on this song ’s lyrics after Petty’s death, bidding him farewell in his own words: “You belong among the wildflowers / You belong in a boat out at sea / Sail away, kill off the hours / You belong somewhere you feel free.” 5 DON’T
COME AROUND HERE NO MORE Petty could’ve been a titan of ’80s schmaltz if he wanted to, if the drum machines and soft-focus keyboards of 1985’s Don’t Come Around Here No More are any indication. It’s probably best for rock ’n’ roll that he didn’t go down this path, but at least listeners have this gem from his synth-pop phase.
4 FREE FALLIN’
Petty probably wouldn’t be thrilled that Free Fallin’ is the defining song of his career. “There’s not a day that goes by that someone doesn’t hum Free Fallin’ to me, or I don’t hear it somewhere,” he once said, describing how he wrote the song in a half-hour. “But it was really only 30 minutes of my life.” Let it be a testament to Petty’s rock ’n’ roll genius, then, that he could record a song that dwarfs entire bands’ careers faster than it took to write this story.
3 THE WAITING
There are the hits that punch you in the stomach, and then there are tracks like The Waiting, with instantly recognizable choruses built for mindless radio singalongs. But when was the last time you really listened to The Waiting? The song, from Petty’s 1981 album Hard Promises, doesn’t have an ounce of fat between its lean guitar riffs, its “yeah-yeah” pre-chorus and, yes, even its consummately cheesy chorus. And considering how many words rock stars have spilled complaining about their jobs, you have to appreciate a phrase as concise as “the waiting is the hardest part.”
2 LEARNING
TO FLY
Petty’s rock ’n’ roll legacy is one of plain-spoken, achingly evocative songs that paint the struggles of survival with just enough optimism not to break your heart. Learning to Fly is one such song, the best of Petty’s collaborations with production mastermind Jeff Lynne, with a knife-twist of a chorus (“I’m learning to fly, but I ain’t got wings”) to keep it honest.
1 AMERICAN GIRL
At the end of this list is American Girl, a song beloved by fans and Hollywood alike for the same reasons: its soured visions of the American dream, its evocative protagonist, and a narrative with enough holes to allow the listener’s own memories to flood right in. The song has been used by Silence of the Lambs as a soundtrack for one of Buffalo Bill’s unwitting victims and more recently by The Handmaid’s Tale to send Offred off to a terrifying new beginning. Coincidentally, both scenes take place in a car, which is objectively the best venue to listen to American Girl, preferably on a highway somewhere.
Petty has been hailed as rock’s best authors of opening lines, and there’s no better example than Girl’s first verse, which contains as many questions as it has answers, particularly about that “one little promise she was gonna keep.”
But the best part of American Girl is the third verse that never appears, leaving the listener out on the balcony as its rambunctious guitar jangles fade to silence, cheating us out of our heroine’s happy ending. In American Girl, as in life, we don’t always know which verse is going to be someone’s last.