11 COMMON ENOUGH EXPERIENCES THAT COULD HAVE BEEN EVOKED BY TOM PETTY
In the historical context, Petty rules for having nevertheless persisted during pretty dingy eras of rock’n’roll. In the food context, Petty is pizza. You’re dangling on the sick fringe if you can’t find delicious profundity in such a simple pleasure. His songs were often great because they were like him. Authentic, rooted, and familiar. More than anything, Petty gave room for a massive audience to be inspired to feel out their lives through his music.
His songs linked to our own experiences.
Below are ones that could be mine, but as easily, could they be yours?
It’s half-time on an 11” tube. You’re uninsulated in Southie, deep in enemy territory. Behind Broadway, a thin brick wall between you and the opioid crisis. You’ve got no love for either team. In a different world, one in which sickos couldn’t take lives, you’d say you’d wish the stadium would blow up in snarky jest. You don’t know who’s up because you don’t care. Birds ain’t in it and beers are going down. Slim Tom Petty is cutting up the stage at which point you know it. You know, somehow, Eli’s gonna shit stain those undefeated tight white Pats pants because even the losers get lucky sometimes. You too are feeling like a heartbreaker in this cold dump of a city that holds your love hostage.
2. DON’T COME AROUND HERE NO MORE
It’s just too cold on a Friday to go to that single class. It’s a semester you can’t care about it in a neighborhood that can’t care about you. They proved it last week. You were a mark. So at least you have someone to count on, the one you’re waiting for. You smoke a ton of fun rolled up in strawberry jackets. You remember being a kid, some vision of a psychedelic toy factory. Was it a music video, or a dream? Now behind sunglasses in your rectangle room you share this. Cool. You synchronize your movements, symphonize the song. Open and close the drawer of a dresser. Pass, puff. Pencil tap the desk. Shoe phone to ear. Boat row mime. Rhythmic robotic motions. The night is up in smoke. You hang tough. Someday, you’ll never have to come around here no more.
You believe in past lives in a way that is purely convenient and you are uninterested in gaining any meaningful erudition that would attempt to either encourage or deny your simple gut check on the subject. Sometimes it’s beyond past life, maybe parallel life. Or alternate universe. Or same universe but alternate persons? There are times, you know, when relationships, inclinations or moments are beyond associative. They had to have happened to you before. You lived it. So, you were a Traveling Wilbury. It was a good run, a touch of grey moment. You were happy to be part of the supergroup, privileged to collaborate for the fucksake of joy in a shared medium with buddies.
A peer died. You didn’t think you cared because it didn’t feel appropriate, there was enough distance where you shouldn’t have been obligated. You blacked out on the news that night, a rare and unintended error. The benefit of drinking beyond taste is to get loose not lost. You did shit past its expiration date, you were slated to make those mistakes years ago. You say no thoughts at all. They must have been buried in the person you thought you used to be. So you went to the water for penance, pitifully beached on a Sunday morning. You didn’t leave until you finished the job. You buried that person you used to be, there in the sand. No second thoughts.
Before you ran into them, you had just peed on church grass. Approaching the pre-party, you were coming and they were going. But you were magnets. Hands locked instantly. And you both left. It was unexpected but inevitable. Later you’d play jukebox games. Cross-crowded bar eye bats. The whole time you knew there was no going home before night moves. Aimless street walks leading through school fields. Secret, sacred youth. Stars aligning, though it was dawn by the time you’d secure your specific time and place to exist perfectly, forever.
You’re kind of an adult now. You had this post-adolescence awakening recently, realizing that you are autonomous, you are free and need to feel free. But you remember childhood, you’re close to it. You need a lullaby. And you have people close to you that are on the other side of the threshold. You share with all of them this reminder, this little lullaby promise of wildflowers on the other side of growing up, for whenever they get there.
You’re in a South Philly dive bar, a North Philly college party, a New England bonfire, a Sebring rattling up the PCH. Sub the descriptors, it still plays right. Beyond, you’ll hear. It’s the anthem to an East German karaoke club. You go on and sing it with two brothers from Singapore. They learned everything about America from Terminator 2. However old, it’ll always take you back to fast feet fast feet fast feet wrist flick wrist flick air guitar. Arms around your people eyes closed tightly in universality. You all know something that’s been so close, but still so far out of reach. It’s why you scream along both back-ups and lead when you want to make the good stuff last all night.
You had a good gig. It wasn’t glamorous or especially respectable, but it was good. You had a lot coming in and not a lot going out. All energy to late night hangs, pricey wine downs. You didn’t have to pay rent or make dinner. You had a wild animal best friend and the woods and a king size bed. You had the guise of degree attainment to live off naps, ignore which way was up. You spent a lot of time in traffic, crossing bridges. Those were the times you had to think about where you were going beyond where you were going. You finally followed the right beat to move on, it’s always the right one that gets you going. You may never really want to leave this or that but must to sharpen that dull self fat on ease.
This made you feel better when you just quit your seasonal mall job, when you left that wake, that really good barbecue even though you had to stay sober to drive home but it was worth it because there’s no traffic only the sunset on Ocean Parkway. The more memories you can layer on a song the richer your life is. You think of that night in a wood-paneled room where you and your people lyrically deduced the song to Started out / Starting it out / Started out / Starting it out. Now harmonize. Now argue that starting it out is even more important than learning to fly, in life and lyrics.
You got a white van gill-packed with books, records, sweatshirts and a bed. You got a useless tape deck and staticky stations. Q104 threw you this bone of a song and you’re pedal to the metal. But in three hours you’ll be tired of this drive, this moving shit chamber. Fuck runnin’! Another three, you’re still snailin’ down a dream like a slug, underwater in Baltimore. You’re gonna be tired of this song when it comes on again. You’re gonna forget the dream after the final three. 9 hours: NY to DC. You know you’re gonna make it a good run here, but you also know the dream ain’t gonna last. You’ll be ready to run down the next one with an aux cord.
You think back to your younger self on a friend’s roof overlooking a slow town working up to a full inhale of an early cigarette and you hear this song playing from inside the window you crawled out of. No one is born with patience. You thought you’d gained enough of the virtue with siblings and coping with a general feeling that you’re misunderstood. You had to be patient that someone was going to get you someday. If and when you’re lucky enough to meet that person, you learn there’s more to wait for. That was a mere foundation upon which being together meaningfully happens. And say they’re years from ready, and you’re not ready either. But you’re staunch. So you wait as long as you treat waiting as an action. Any age is no age to be passive. And you might learn that if waiting for someone is the hardest part, then the rest can be nothing less than a dream. And you’ll know it when you’re last row at an arena spilling overpriced mugs of beers all over each other dancing and Petty drawls, Baby, don’t it feel like heaven right now? Yeah it does.
