The Proud Pain of Tom PettyBy Nicholas DawidoffAugust 4, 2017Tom Petty’s apolitical catalogue has suddenly run coterminous with a lively political strain in the current American grain, the aggrieved feeling of victimization.Illustration by Vivienne Flesher / Source Photograph by Jeff Kravitz / GettyIn 1979, I was an undersized FM-generation high-school junior with avoice that wouldn’t change, a stressed single mom, and a bedroom in arented gray two-family house in which I had to play my stereo low so Iwouldn’t disturb all the people living close around me. And then mydaily affront at this complete lack of agency found validation when someskinny blond dude calling his album "Damn the Torpedoes" uplifted myevenings with a simple phrase about being cut down to size on a regularbasis: "Don’t do me like that." He wasn’t celebrating humiliation—heunderstood the condition, which is, foremost, the inability to make thehumiliation stop. There was nothing to do except to say to hell withannoying Mom and the neighbors and, in my alarmingly pitched treble thatsounded like a radio veering between frequencies, to sing out thatambrosial phrase right along with Petty: "Don’t do me like that."Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers have been filling the air with popmasterpieces for forty years now. Their hits have spent so much time incars, in grocery aisles, in offices, and on beaches, and have such auralclarity that they are instantly individuating—you can be immersed inyour own business, busy with tasks, and within three bright chords youare sure to recognize "American Girl" or "Runnin’ Down a Dream" or "IWon’t Back Down." That kind of cultural endurance is sufficientlyunusual that this summer, during what Petty has said is the band’s finalbig tour, I have found myself circling back and wondering what it isabout Petty that’s kept him so much around. Certainly, Petty’s earlyembattled lyrical world view wouldn’t have promised such resilience; andthe days and nights seemed to press hard on his gaunt, underfed pallor.But protecting Petty against the inimical forces through the years havebeen his many admirable qualities: wry detachment, a bitter-green senseof humor, understated layers of musical ingenuity, and a completelyoriginal delivery. That voice! The incomparably distinct Petty vocal isthin, top-register, nasal, and yet cured in oak barrels. No white man inAmerica works his septum through a vowel as distinctively as Petty,except maybe Jack Nicholson on a very good day. The voice is soseductive that it’s possible to listen to Petty describe the absolutemundane quotidian and feel completely ecstatic: "It was a beautiful day,the sun beat down, I had the radio on, I was drivin’." Most advantageousof all, the voice communicates Petty’s great subject, which is strain.As I grew older, Petty became for me a classic-rock fave; I was alwaysglad when the songs appeared, but didn’t habitually seek them out. Andthat’s why it took me a long time to notice that, over the years,Petty’s alluring vocals, plugged into the beautiful, purring engine ofhis band, contrasted in their bright-sized vitality with what Petty wasactually saying—which was pretty near the same thing that first broughtme to him as a kid. Even twenty years into his career, on his 1994 solohit "You Don’t Know How It Feels," the message still seemed caught inthat aggrieved adolescent moment. There were, in fact, so many songs ofgrievance, so many songs casting unhappily inward, so many songsexpressing the perpetually injured and afflicted American male. Thatman’s wounds are inevitably some woman’s fault. She leads him on. Shekeeps him waiting. She wrecks him. He knows her heart’s beyond wicked,but he can’t kick it. Yes, there’s the occasional bluesman brag: "Yougot lucky, babe, when I found you." But even then, it’s all about him—andthat glint of grievance. He’s sticking around to take it because takingit is what he does.The emotions Petty describes are, of course, emotions most peopleexperience, and to Petty’s credit, they aren’t what most people like toadvertise about their inner lives. If for some the songs were awash inself-pity, many others heard the adversity in them and located somethinghopeful and persevering—they listened and thought, That’s me. (This was,perhaps, especially the case during breakups.) And Petty could alsowrite excellent songs in a more romantic key, such as "Wildflowers."Yet, in the end, so many of his memorable compositions work a pathbeginning with pain and leading to resentment. This is even true of"Here Comes My Girl," in which a primary benefit of enduring love isthat it enables a man feeling stuck and discouraged to "tell the wholewide world to shove it!" That thick and affirming carapace of injusticesuggests that a man can subsist a long time on nothing more than hisfavorite grudge. As Petty writes of a man in "Rebels," his charactersare "a little rough around the edges, inside a little hollow."Recently, after all this time of casually going along in life to ahaphazard Petty soundtrack, I decided to go hear him play. The concert Ipicked was in late July at the Royal Farms Arena, in Baltimore; I wentwith an old friend who’d played in a college jazz band and is now adoctor. When Petty took the stage, he was hidden behind shades, wearinga striking magenta shirt, a loose and colorful necktie, an amplyzippered coat that he soon removed, and a vest. He had a face full ofbeard and, at sixty-six, his famous lank blond hair was perfect. Thearoma of weed was thick enough to knock a horse into free fall, and yet,at the sight of Petty, the audience went wild. Petty spent a momenttaking it in.Petty is from Gainesville, Florida, and some consider him the SouthernSpringsteen. Bruce Springsteen is only a year older, and the twonear-coevals are the rare figures who have successfully maintained anentire professional life span in rock and roll, the music of youth. Bothhad frustrated, belittling fathers, and both found escape and salvationin popular music, specifically that of Elvis Presley. Both created formidablerock bands that appeared to serve as replacement families. (A few ofSpringsteen’s E Streeters became very well known in their own right;Petty’s guys, too, are revered by other musicians—this is especiallytrue of Benmont Tench, the keyboard player whom Petty met whenhe was twelve or thirteen, and the guitarist Mike Campbell, such abrilliantly nonchalant virtuoso that it’s possible to imagine himkilling an offstage game of speed chess in between the delicious licksthat are, by now, probably wired into his fingers.) Both men have workedrelentlessly, and both have admitted to nearly debilitating emotionalstress mid-career.Each man left home for Los Angeles, but while Springsteen eventuallyreturned to New Jersey to raise his family, Petty stayed out on the WestCoast. (Petty is a Southerner who seems Californian, the way John Fogertyis a Californian who seems Southern.) Springsteen became a working-classhero who wrote vignettes steeped in his family’s blue-collarexperience—and, as he aged, he began to advocate for those whose livesinspired his songs, charging his lyrics and his down time with political activism.Petty, on the other hand—though he’s expressed sympathy for Democraticcauses, and ordered Republican candidates not to play his music from the hustings while allowing Democrats the privilege—hasnever seemed terribly politically engaged. For a while, he used theimage of the Confederate flag onstage, only later to castigatehimself for how oblivious this was, calling himself "downright stupid" for doing something that would cause many people pain.Petty’s songs are unspecific enough that they become vulnerable to manykinds of interpretation—and there is a recurrent internal vagueness thatredirects his suffering antiheroes away from the real heart of thematter and off, instead, into the great wide open. Consider Petty’smysterious rainy-day traveller in "Running Down a Dream" next toSpringsteen’s worker in "Downbound Train," who gets laid off, loses hisgirl, and is now miserably employed at the car wash, "where all it everdoes is rain." Both are fine songs. One, in the way of rock anthems,creates a big, monochromatic American canvas ("It was always cold, nosunshine"). The other pointedly describes what’s led someone to feeloverwhelmed and disappointed, making vivid the deep causal views of thewriter.In Baltimore, everything about the show was well rehearsed. "Faithfully"was the way the Baltimore Sun described Petty’s renditions of the hitsthat were as burnished as sea glass. Not everyone can perform the samesongs over and over for decades on the road; Paul Simon once told methat, for him, doing so was the enemy of creativity. But as Petty sangthe audience’s applause was rapturous, even by arena standards, and heseemed sustained by it. Standing there, I remembered what he’d toldRolling Stone recently: "The road and the studio are the only placesI’ve ever felt completely O.K." His voice was remarkably intact andstrong, whether Petty was singing or even just speaking. He said thingslike, "I feel a little mojo building up in here tonight," and hedescribed his show as a "one-sided vinyl record." He could havereported, "My knee hurts," and everybody would have gone nuts all overagain at the deep thrill of all that septum.Fronting his band, Petty was, in fact, a huddled, gingerly presence,rigid-spined, his neck all but gone missing, leaving him to turtlearound the stage. His infectious shit-eating grin often appeared, andyet my doctor friend wondered whether Petty was wearing a body brace.There were winces and grimaces; the torment Petty sang about seemed veryreal in him. Then, seven numbers in, Petty sang perhaps his mostcelebrated song, "Free Fallin’," which tells of a bad boy who breaks agood girl’s heart and doesn’t care. The character’s so numbed up andchecked out that he craves the disaster of free fall, the abnegation of will.But onstage Petty was suddenly the opposite—so completely revived thathe momentarily became one of the song’s San Fernando Valley vampires.There seemed in Petty both the joy of doing the thing he loved and theburden of performance, the tremendous physical and psychic cost ofleading a beloved band for so long.I met Petty once, in 1995, after a Johnny Cash concert at the PantagesTheatre, in Los Angeles. Cash was then making his classic late-life"American Recordings," and many music celebrities turned out for theevent—figures as various as Sheryl Crow, Joe Strummer, George Thorogood,and Henry Rollins. Amid the fizz, Petty was a chill figure who, despitewearing sunglasses indoors, conveyed both bemused detachment andhappy-to-be-there appreciation. I knew he was a guy who’d fought hisrecord company to keep prices lower. I knew he’d made public statementsabout free expression, the rights of artists. I knew his house had beenburned down. Up close, I had the impression of somebody who enjoyedtaking in the jive and hustle of it all. He had a lovely smile thatcould quickly spread into that wonderful grin. I knew that he wasadmired by many iconic artists: over the years he has seemed close toBob Dylan, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and,of course, Cash. A brief collaboration with Prince produced one of themost transporting moments in recent musical history. I thought I could seewhy. There at the Pantages, I found Petty immensely appealing and, atfirst blush, for someone so talented and famous, an affable sort.That brief but strong impression eventually seemed at odds with what Ibegan to think of as the persona in the songs—a little dilemma that mademore sense after I read Warren Zanes’s 2015 book, "Petty: The Biography." As a kid, Zanes went for Petty pretty much as I had. But Zanes fellharder. He considers Petty’s music to be on a level with that of theBeatles and the Rolling Stones. Zanes would open for Petty asa member of the band the Del Fuegos, giving him ample time to see Pettymoving through the world as a person. When Petty authorized Zanes towrite his life, Zanes says that Petty told him to say whatever he liked.The resulting portrait is unsettling. By age five, Petty’s father wasbeating him hard enough to raise welts. The core reason seemed to bethat Petty was different, not enough of his dad’s idea of an Americanboy. Zanes describes the musician he reveres as a man so depleted by hisabusive childhood that he’s never quite got over it. Petty is oftensocially awkward, without outside hobbies or enthusiasms, foreverhidden. "He’s got tinted windows on his soul," one source tells Zanes.Sometimes Petty isn’t so nice about other people. There was a middle-ageheroin addiction. None of this is that surprising. In the end, Pettysounds like an artist, someone who is never happy or fully himselfunless he’s working.The crowd in Baltimore wore a lot of khaki, and some parents had broughtalong their children. Everybody I saw was white, many seemed prosperousand suburban, and the crowd exulted at the most pissed-off Petty lines.This was true during the hits, and also early in the show, when Pettysang "Forgotten Man," from his most recent album, "Hypnotic Eye." ThatPetty had released yet another stellar album in his sixties, had provedhe still had his hooks in after all these years, impressed the criticswhen "Hypnotic Eye" came out, in 2014. Here, as Petty sang "ForgottenMan," I noticed that the newest song scratched at all the old Pettybittersweet spots. "I feel like a forgotten man," Petty sang. "I feellike a four-letter word . . . no lust, no rage, no wicked thoughts, justpain, that lingers on." The backdrop images projected above the stageimplied that the song was about a homeless man, but sitting there, inthe center of a mostly poor, black American city, in a concert hallfilled with white people of sufficient means to buy a costly concertticket, and yet who still felt a little kicked around, "Forgotten Man"seemed to resonate with a different side of our divided times.Tom Petty began as a young New Age rocker, providing solace foradolescent losers like me. Now, forty years later, his apoliticalcatalogue had suddenly run coterminous with a lively political strain inthe current American grain, the aggrieved feeling of victimization—theprevailing sense that people are out to wrong you, reduce you, andthere’s nothing you can do to fight back against those who want what youhave. Well, there was one thing. "I Won’t Back Down," with its "I’llstand my ground" admonition, had an awkward and inadvertent newresonance. As did another song, "Refugee," that Petty played late in theconcert. When he sang, "You don’t have to live like a refugee," it wasimpossible not to flash to refugee and travel bans, to think of what ICE is up to.The concert finale was "American Girl," Petty’s signature from theband’s self-titled début. The song tells of a girl raised on promiseswho grows up to find them unfulfilled, leaving her to think, "There wasa little more to life somewhere else." Except that there wasn’t more,and "God, it’s so painful when something that’s so close is still sofar out of reach." Tom Petty’s music, so adept at bringing pleasure toso many people across so many years, had become a cultural signifier forthe national moment in a way I felt quite sure he never imagined orintended. The powerful, angry songs had made Petty an accidental bard ofwhite resentment. There, in Baltimore, he was making American GrievanceRock.Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of five books, including "The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love and Madness in an American Family," a memoir of his boyhood.Read more »More:Tom PettyRock and RollAmericaPoliticsGet a recap of the week in culture every weekend, in your in-box. 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