Tom Petty’s Unwavering Uncertainty
On October 2nd the world, but more accurately we as Americans, lost a singularly special voice in Tom Petty. In the hours (for the most talented writers) and the days and weeks to pass (for those that understandably need time to process and reflect upon what he meant to our culture), there will be a number of afterwards. But this is mine. And a particularly painful bottoming out on a day when the national conscience weighs heavy underneath the burden of 59 bodies (and counting) and hundreds more injured in Las Vegas.
What makes the one-two punch of the loss of Tom Petty and the devastation in Las Vegas so difficult is, now I have to listen to Tom Petty as I reflect on Las Vegas.
Tom Petty is a hard voice to hear right now because he never gave us answers. He wrote with an impossible sense of confusion that we all feel. He was free fallin’; he was into the great wide open; he was waiting. He was butting his head against the limitations of what it meant to be raised on promises in a world that continually offered a rawer deal.
Other artists, Tom Petty’s contemporaries that can be classified as heartland rock, found a lot of their strength in articulating the grand narratives of the characters they created. And as a result, he gets lost somewhere in the conversation of Great American Songwriters. He was easy to miss even when he was here. He wasn’t the prodigious poet laureate of the New York underground like Bob Dylan, or possess the wry outsider genius and humor of Paul Simon. He was a guy from Gainesville, playing in a band of Heartbreakers made up of fellow Floridians, and Ohioans and Wisconsinites.
There will be a number of obituaries that go through the tracks that defined Tom Petty’s storied career; one that successfully spanned four decades in a way of which few artists are capable. One can’t begrudge those writers. Any opportunity to revisit his work; work that defined transformative moments in people’s lives due to their permeance in the culture (and classic rock radio), is never without place.
But as I sit here, the only song I really want to talk about is “Even The Losers,” the third track from Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers’ third album, 1979’s Damn the Torpedoes.
We open with Tom and some unknown woman, presumably. It’s nearly summer, in some flux of seasons; a conscious noncommittal as profound as the opening line to “God Only Knows”. They’re smoking cigarettes and staring at the moon in a beautiful articulation of an intimate remembrance of killing time. As we pull back further we find out this relationship is done. It’s somewhere in the rearview, with Tom reflecting on whether or not this woman still remembers him. But he was lucky, once: an underdog who had this fleeting moment of connection. And by the end he concludes that “It’s such a drag when you live in the past.”
Everything from the scene, to the soul within every chord, to the acute awareness of the narrative’s inherent melancholy, is transmitted like a magic bullet to the heart of every listener. It’s this universality of voice that Tom Petty holds above nearly every songwriter in history.
And the reason why he’s so hard to hear today. On a day when we’re all more aware of not only our own mortalities, but the futility of begging for change in a country that all too often feels indifferent to our voices. Because the one thing Tom Petty did better than anyone else is connect with the uncertainty of purpose so many of us feel. It’s an uncertainty that rears its head at various points in our lives: graduating college, entering the workforce, witnessing senseless, preventable death, turning 40, seeing the endlessly scrolling feeds of our fellow citizens’ thoughts and wondering how we got here, retiring.
Tom Petty wrote, “You don’t know how it feels to be me.” But we did. In every note, in every line, we as Americans know how he feels. Because we all feel the same.
As with any artist taken too soon, it’s important to be grateful for the body of work they leave behind; to find some connection in our modern times to words written decades ago. And I am grateful to have that. Tom Petty made more than 15 albums, many of which were great. Yet in the same breath as you say “Thank you,” it’s hard to ignore another voice wondering what could’ve been.
Tom Petty’s songwriting style and voice was uniquely attuned to confronting both aging and mortality. It’s a shame that we’ll never get to see what his American series, or his Adios, or his The Wind looks like. Instead we’ll have to speculate, and find comfort in knowing what he knew: that he didn’t have the answers. And he was right there with us, trying to figure it out.
RIP Tom Petty, 1950–2017.
