I Showed You Stars You Never Could See: Tom Petty

Seems more and more like this blog is turning into 'musings on dead heroes' since I don't hardly ride my bike anymore. This past week I've been thinking about Tom Petty a lot. 

This photo is how Tom Petty makes me feel. 

Cool. Mysterious. Cuban-heeled. Coy...but confident. Approachably androgynous. And a tractor-beam death-ray stare that will make you forget your own name. The Eddie Cochrane album sitting next to him is like a cherry on a delicious sundae, but the god's honest truth is I'd listen to John Phillips Sousa with him if that was what he was into. He's a guy you don't just want to be with, you want to be ~around~. 

His look was the lure but the songs were the bait. The way he sang about women, about love, was where his real power lay. Even when he was old and beardy I could forget that he looked like Farmer Gandalf. Because those songs, man...those songs were...are...everything.

The women in Tom's songs have agency, control, and independence. His wry insecurity never gave you the impression that any of these women were His. Tom Petty's women were more like bolts of lightning that he was trying to grab onto, ever the unsure-yet-sincere paramour. One stray thought that came to me tonight is that Tom Petty was the emo corollary to Dion: Dion cautioned to keep away from Runaround Sue; but if that song had been written by Tom Petty, he would have declared that he was in love with Runaround Sue. Despite his intense love for the 50's and 60's, he let his women live outside the stereotypes  adhered to by his musical heroes. Tom Petty was never threatened by a women who held all the cards; if anything, he loved her all the more.

That's why I hold the devout opinion that Rock Guys don't sing women like Tom Petty sings women. There are very few Rock Guys that can thumbnail sketch the life of a fictional woman that actually feels lived-in, but Tom does it repeatedly. 

Listen: I love Bruce Springsteen more than life itself but Bruce hasn't come close to writing a woman with an inner life like the woman in 'American Girl'. (No tea no shade, Wendy.) I don't even care that Tom calls half his women girls. That's how good he is. It's the tiny details and the blank spaces that make them so real. From the short-story sketches of the woman in 'Mary Jane's Last Dance' to the wisp of smoke woman that can't be held in 'The Wild One, Forever', to the woman who speaks French in her sleep in 'Shadow of a Doubt (Complex Kid)'. Even that poor Elvis-loving broken-hearted good girl in 'Free Fallin'' feels like a real girl. 

Tom Petty doesn't tell you what a woman is wearing, or the color of her hair, or how good she looks in lingerie or on his arm or what she's like in bed; he brings his women to life by describing how they feel, what they want, (and how they kiss), and makes them live from the inside out. 

That's why I will always hold Tom Petty and his music so deep in my heart, and that's why when we finally meet in the great hereafter, I'll totally lie down on the shag carpet and listen to Eddie Cochrane records with him.