The whimsy and weariness of Tom Petty
This could well be your last stand. Hold the sunlight in your hand. Spread your fingers, feel the sand fall through. I’ve done all I can do. Now it’s up to you. You’re flirting with time baby Flirting with time, but maybe, Time baby, is catching up with you. – Tom Petty, “Flirting With Time”
It was always a matter of time for Tom Petty. That may seem glib, but it’s not in reference to drug addiction, the rockand-roll lifestyle (so well documented in Runnin’ Down A Dream) or even his tireless touring schedule. Petty wrote music that was about time; about being in the moment; about watching it pass.
So much is written, shared and expressed following the death of a celebrity. The best of these pieces manage to say something about their subject that is close to universally felt, but not often articulated. The worst are sort of tolerated with an implicit acknowledgment that artists affect each of us in different ways – even wildly popular ones.
Tom Petty didn’t teach me that it was alright to be weird. I didn’t buy any of his albums and then start my own rock band. There are probably a million more- accomplished people than me on whose lives he had a significantly larger impact. And yet, I can’t ignore the urge to write about him; what his music meant to me; how he came to so clearly define a part of my life.
In the summer of 2006, my friends and I would gather three to five times per week to play wiffle ball, drink beer and listen to Tom Petty. We were a couple years out of university with entry level jobs that fell short of defining us, but still granted us a disposable income for the first time in most of our lives. We had no family commitments or social responsibilities of which to speak. We were at that glorious age where nothing ties you down, and you have the means and freedom to do anything you want within reason.
So, we spent our time getting drunk after work and on weekends, playing the laziest version of baseball imaginable – with plastic bats and balls, no running, and a fielding strategy that prioritized not spilling beer from a tallboy can (which was held and consumed while manning a position) over getting outs from ground balls. All the while, a curated compact disc (burned from iTunes on my iMac G5) played the same 14 Tom Petty songs (a Greatest Hits collection with the addition of “Two Gunslingers”) over and over again from a $ 25 boom box ( bought from a “used” electronics store in Kensington Market) that powered by eight C batteries (which typically had to be replaced after every outing).
The Petty soundtrack occurred organically. And then it just became a thing to be enforced. No other music was allowed. There was something deeply American about his songs that matched the baseball we played, the Budweisers we drank and the sunshine in which we soaked. But more than what we were doing, his music matched how we were doing it: with a wilful ignorance (not a naivete) to the real shit that life eventually throws at you, at a period in our lives in which we were yet to arrive anywhere.
Petty’s music combines whimsy and weariness, which has always made it perfect for road trips. His were melodies and lyrics meant to be listened to on journeys – both real and metaphoric. A traveller needs that sense of whimsy to make it through the weariness of being on the road. That’s why his songs evince a sense of being on the cusp of arrival, especially for those who never had a destination in mind.
Though none of us were mentally equipped to appreciate it in the moment, that summer was the last bit extensive idle time – before girlfriends turned into wives and family, before work turned into a career, before renting turned to owning – that our lives would enjoy. It’s not as though we thought we could be Peter Pans forever – Tom Petty wrote reflective songs as well. It’s that we could choose not to think about the future while wasting away the present with play. And Petty’s music facilitated that freedom in a way that no other artist could. And while we may have misgivings over our fashion sense and taste in beverage at the time, there are no regrets over the music that came to define that period in our lives.
At the end of that summer, my friends took me to see Petty perform at the Molson Amphitheatre as part of a birthday present. After his set ended, Petty answered the uproarious applause by coming back on stage for his encore. He spoke into the microphone, “We’re just getting started, Toronto.”
Within seconds, t he heavens opened and rain poured into the crowd. His band sped through “Runnin’ Down A Dream,” completed an unenthusiastic version of “Mystic Eyes” and then seemingly sang “You Wreck Me” at the weather.
It was over after that; a concert, a time in life that ended prematurely. But any ending for Tom Petty, any conclusion to the freedom one experiences in their mid-20s was always going to feel the same: as though it came much too soon. It’s a sentiment that’s also felt this week,