Tom Petty performs in concert with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers during their "Hypnotic Eye Tour 2014” at the Wells Fargo Center on Monday, Sept. 15, 2014, in Philadelphia.(Photo by Owen Sweeney/Invision/AP)
Tom Petty met Elvis Presley in Ocala on the set of the movie “Follow that Dream” in the summer of 1961. Petty was young and impressionable and understandably converted by the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. When the skinny Petty kid got back home to Gainesville he soon procured a guitar. Petty has been writing and singing rock ’n’ roll songs ever since. One of the best live rock ’n’ roll acts around, Petty and his Heartbreakers return to Amalie Arena (formerly known as Tampa Bay Times Forum) Sunday in support of the new album “Hypnotic Eye.” Here are three of my favorite Petty songs. These are songs he wrote and recorded for various projects, which, for whatever reason, were never hits but meant something to me.
“Southern Accents”
When it comes to the arts, particularly music and literature, the South has been eclipsing the North since the late 1880s, when guys like Scott Joplin and Mark Twain started unleashing works that were as pure and dirty as America herself; unlike the Northern output that still aped Jolly Olde England. Alas, the South’s scars from the old days are harder to hide than the North’s and those scars make a song about Dixie pride a difficult sell. Already a rock star, or at least a rising rock star, Petty made his homeland hymn “Southern Accents” the title track to the Heartbreakers’ album that came out in the middle of the MTV golden era of 1985. MTV, record label MCA and radio wanted Petty’s “Don't Come Around Here No More,” the slick sounding nonsense co-written by Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, and they got it, goofy video and all. Petty’s real fans, us rednecks I guess, embraced the lesser hit “Rebels” and, more than the rest, “Southern Accents.” The opening verse alone, four lines every bit as poetic as Elvis’ presence must have been in 1961, should make every skinny kid from Florida feel proud that he comes from the same state as Tom Petty.
“You Took My Breath Away”
I made some money bootlegging the Traveling Wilburys while putting myself through college in the late 1990s. I slammed the supergroup’s two albums onto a single CD, added a “bonus” track or two, and sold it through a record store near my cruddy apartment way too close to notorious Suitcase City in Tampa. The original, legitimate CDs were out of print, Roy Orbison was dead and I didn’t think his fellow, surviving Wilburys – Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne – would mind if some young, poor, big fan of all their music made a little money in the name of supply and demand. During the illegal “burning” process I listened to these Wilbury albums a lot. The first, from 1988, is solid through and through. But the second album, from 1990, is another group effort but with only two diamonds in the rough and they are both basically solo, or solo/producer, contributions: Dylan’s “If You Belonged to Me,” which sounds like an outtake from his masterful “Blood on the Tracks,” and Petty’s “You Took My Breath Away,” which sounds like the best thing he ever did with over-producer Jeff Lynne.
“Crystal River”
Petty’s love for Elvis, a love shared by most men born in the 1940s and early ’50s, eventually grew to encompass numerous 1960s acts but probably none more so than The Byrds. Petty so expertly channeled the group on his 1977 breakthrough hit “American Girl” that when Byrds leader Roger McGuinn first heard it he reportedly asked, “When did I write that song?” But while Petty became rich and famous using McGuinn’s succinct rock ’n’ roll songs as a springboard for his own rock ’n’ roll jingles he was also apparently smitten by The Byrds ’15-minute, live opus “Eight Miles High.” In 2008, wealthy beyond his wildest dreams and living in Malibu, California, Petty reunited Mudcrutch, the band he called his own in Gainesville before making it big with the Heartbreakers. The self-titled Mudcrutch album includes the 9-minute gem “Crystal River” that one can only imagine was inspired by the manatee-filled, seven-mile tributary in Citrus County that flows into the Gulf of Mexico. For good measure, the same year Petty’s Mudcrutch released its album proper came a live extended play from Mudcrutch featuring, yes, a 15-minute version of “Crystal River.”
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers with Steve Winwood
7:30 p.m. Sunday; Amalie Arena (formerly known as Tampa Bay Times Forum), 401 Channelside Drive, Tampa; $48-$148; ticketmaster.com
