Southern Man

Tom Petty, like rock ’n’ roll, was born in the South. He has created timeless music that surpasses most of his influences.Philip Martin

Let me remind you that this ain’t the end. I can still kick some ass. — Tom Petty, accepting his Billboard Century Award in December Rock ’n’ roll belongs to anyone who wants it bad enough. It doesn’t much matter what you sound like when you open your mouth to sing or who your daddy was or what star you fell to earth from. If you’ve got aspiration and arrghh and a way of connecting with the boys and girls, you don’t need much talent. It’s a democratic form; all you need is a back story and something to bash on.

But we do have to insist that you acknowledge it started here, below America’s belt. Elvis and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins and Ike Turner and Sam Phillips and Dewey Phillips and all those wild Burnett boys who started the grass fire that would consume the world were Southerners. Rock ’n’ roll was born Southern. Rock ’n’ roll’s an equal opportunity employer, but facts are facts.

To understand the subject of this essay, a Floridian with Indianstraight corn-silk hair and a crooked grin named Tom Petty, it’s important to know that rock ’n’ roll — as opposed to the corporatized “rock” — is essentially a Southern thing and always has been. Whether it’s Jersey-boy Springsteen affecting the beat-down vowels and mumbled “sirs” of the sharecropper or Britishers Mick and Keef droppin’ their g’s or even Dylan — the boy from the Iron Range — trying to sound like Blind Willie McTell, the inflections and vernacular of rock ’n’ roll have always been Southern.

This is one of those years when people will talk a lot about Petty and how he fits into our cultural landscape. November will see the 30 th anniversary of the release of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, probably the greatest debut album ever by an American band. In December, Petty was honored with Billboard magazine’s highest honor, the Century Award. Last year, Petty’s first “biography” (actually an extended dialogue with writer / musician Paul Zollo titled Conversations With Tom Petty was published. In the foreword, Petty promised an autobiography at “another time” ). Later this year — possibly as early as this month — Petty will release his next solo album, Highway Companion. There is an often-told story about Petty meeting Elvis Presley on the set of a movie improbably titled Follow That Dream. Petty’s uncle Earl Jernigan — “the only Northerner in the family” — worked a lot with film crews shooting in Florida. One day he brought 11-year-old Tommy with him to the set. “I didn’t know a lot about Elvis Presley,” Petty told Zollo. “I couldn’t get into my head who Elvis was exactly. I knew he was a rock ’n’ roll star. And I’d never thought much about rock ’n’ roll until that moment.” Elvis said hello and smiled and nodded. Petty doesn’t remember what he said. You can make it out to be like that moment when Bill Clinton shook JFK’s hand in the Rose Garden if you want to, a signal moment of torch-passing.

UNDERVALUED? People like Petty. They love the expansive jangle and grace of his singles. But they don’t necessarily consider him an important artist. He’s not Bruce Springsteen singing about the socioeconomic consequences inherent in the paradigm shift from industrial to service economies, and he’s not Bob Dylan muttering mad prayers. He works a vein of mainstream pop, singing mostly about girls.

If you’re going to make a case for Petty and his Heartbreakers as the pre-eminent American band of our time, you’d better prepare your case carefully. The same is true if you’re going to suggest that maybe the Heartbreakers are the direct descendants of Creedence Clearwater Revival or the American equivalent of the Rolling Stones — that is, if you don’t like Petty, you don’t like rock ’n’ roll.

Which goes back to the idea of rock ’n’ roll being essentially Southern and the existence of a specific genre known as Southern rock. It’s pretty much over now, although you still hear residual traces of it in bands like Drive-By Truckers and My Morning Jacket and in the truculence of country jingo singers like Toby Keith and cracker rappers like Kid Rock (who despite his Motown roots is pure d redneck trash ). Southern rock flashed across the empty skies of the 1970 s and was gone.

Southern rock could be provincial and reactionary, a stubborn regional sound with thuggish fans who didn’t for a minute buy into any of that hippie-dippy peace and love junk. It was a kind of “know-nothing” music, redneck rock that wrapped itself in the Stars ’n’ Bars as well as Old Glory.

Lordy, it could be some dumb music. Sometimes it celebrated getting drunk or getting stoned or getting into a fight or getting a gun. Sometimes it dealt in stereotypes, sometimes it encouraged mindless rowdyism as the answer to systematic exclusion from full economic participation in America.

Sometimes, though, it was better than that. Sometimes it offered up the concerns and attitudes of ordinary working-class folks as well as any form of pop expression. Sometimes — as when the clean lines of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts’ Gibson guitars snaked around each other, when brother Gregg Allman’s bluesy voice began to ripen and roar — Southern rock could be majestic, lyrical and sweet and beyond interpretation.

And while Southern rock is over — it ended violently, amid the torn rubber and twisted steel of various motorcycle and plane crashes — it isn’t dead. It got assimilated, just like the rest of us. Petty comes straight out of that tradition, although he’s an assimilator himself. Early in his career someone asked him what the major influence on his career had been. “The radio,” he replied.

That’s probably not an answer anyone could give now because the radio blew up and fragged into a thousand disparate demographically designed channels. But back in the day, young people, everybody knew the 40 songs on the radio — we all heard Wilson Pickett and The Turtles’ “Elenore.” It was a crowded house back then, everybody rubbing off on everybody else. Now you look at the charts in the back of the magazines and pick one or two or three streams you can sort of follow if you’re interested. (If not, you can just tune in the TV pap and diva shows and accept the manufactured vacuum-formed models the industry stamps out. ) But as late as 1976, when Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers broke out, it was still possible to see a folk tradition at the heart of American pop, to discern regional accents and country-gone-totown giddiness in the chime of a 12-string Ricky.

ECONOMIC AND URGENT When they first surfaced as a national act after years of woodshedding in Florida bars, the Heartbreakers were often mistaken for a “new wave” act, and their economical singles — songs such as the Byrds-like “American Girl” and the Stonesish “Breakdown” — and emotional urgency could have been read as a rebuke to the indulgences of the bloated, faceless corporate competence of bands like Journey and Styx rather than a continuation — and advancement — of the mainstream pop tradition. No wonder the Heartbreakers were booked with bands like the Ramones and Blondie. No wonder that high-school punk rockers were working out versions of “I Need to Know” and “Refugee.” “ It would have been real easy to say, ‘OK, we are new wave,’ and get the skinny ties, ” Petty told writer Dave Marsh. “But it never looked like much of a challenge to me. It looked like a bigger challenge to work in the mainstream, to play to everybody. I never understood being so cool that nobody heard it.”

Underpinning Petty’s most obvious influences — his ringing Rickenbacker 12-string and his nasal upper register are reminiscent of the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn — is a certain bluesy grit and the clean, muscular lines of the Allmans and Lynyrd Skynyrd. (Mudcrutch, Petty’s first band, occasionally shared the bill with pre-fame Skynyrd in Gainesville bars. )

While he is basically a rock ’n’ roll fundamentalist who turns to the Byrds (and to their antecedents Dylan and Nashville ) for melodic elegance and to the Stones for sheer power, Petty’s Southernness never prevented him from incorporating other styles into his music. He has enjoyed fruitful collaborations with Eurythmics’ techno-guitarist Dave Stewart (“ Don’t Come Around Here No More” ) and Jeff Lynne, the former guiding light of Electric Light Orchestra turned Beatles-esque producer who collaborates with Petty on Highway Companion.
For more than 30 years, Petty and the Heartbreakers have been amazingly consistent in commercial stature and artistic quality. There have been no obvious false steps, and even now none of the early songs sound anachronistic. His name may not be the first that comes to mind when talking about the bona fide first-tier rock ’n’ roll pantheon; perhaps it shouldn’t be too far down the list. Presley, Dylan, Springsteen, Berry... Petty ?

Petty has outdone most of his influences. His legacy is likely to outlast that of the Byrds or the Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Skynyrd. Petty’s openness to new approaches has helped his music retain a certain freshness, although it no doubt helps that he writes economical, punchy pop songs that sound timeless. Songs mainly about girls.