Back On The Road
By Michael Goldberg
Rolling Stone #465 -- January 16, 1986
Tom Petty teams up with new pal Bob Dylan
The phone call came from Bob Dylan. Would Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers be willing to back him for a five-week tour of New Zealand, Australia and Japan? "Are you kidding?" exclaimed Petty, still jazzed from playing with Dylan at Farm Aid. "Put me down. Send me the itinerary!"
And so Dylan did: The tour will kick off February 5th in New Zealand. It will be filmed, perhaps for a cable-TV special. No U.S. dates had been scheduled at press time.
At initial rehearsals in Los Angeles, Petty, and Heartbreakers and Dylan were all in top form, working out such recent Dylan songs as "Union Sundown" and "In the Garden," then jamming into the night on old blues changes. "I can't remember when I've had so much fun playing," said Dylan. "They play my music great."
"It's an outgrowth of the Farm Aid rehearsals," said the thirty-four-year-old Petty. "We spent a week rehearsing [for Farm Aid], and we would play a lot every night. Hours and hours and hours. We did Hank Williams songs, Motown songs ['I Second That Emotion']. We even played 'Louie Louie' one night. And 'Then He Kissed Me,' the old Crystals song. When we went to the gigm we only did twenty minutes, so everyone was saying, 'Boy, it's a shame we can't really play for a while.'
"I think Bob's attracted to the idea of working with a group," Petty continued. "A handpicked band of good players doesn't always make a great band. Somebody like him needs a sympathetic unit that understands that music. He told me, 'This band is like talking to one guy.'"
Tom Petty gets into his shiny red 1985 Corvette, revs the engine and pulls out of the garage of his Encino, California, home. "Right now I'm into Corvettes," he says, flashing that sly, almost sheepish grin that still makes teenage girls swoon. "I like to drive my Corvette. That's my hobby."
He accelerates past his sprawling home (complete with the twenty-four-track recording studio he used to record most of Southern Accents and mix his new live album, Pack Up the Plantation), past the pool, then shoots down the long, unmarked driveway. An eight-foot-high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire circles the property; a sign on the fence warns of armed security guards, while Milo, a big German shepherd, keeps watch over the ground.
Though Tom Petty may not be a household name on a par with his Encino neighbor Michael Jackson or his buddy Bruce Springsteen, he thinks such security precautions are necessary. Fans have made life difficult for Petty, his wife Jane (they've been married for ten years) and their two daughters, Adria, 10, and Kim, 3. "[People] would steal my garbage fans," he says. "They'd steal my whole mailbox. Take it right off the post. I went through three mailboxes. And the garbage. I used to worry about what I was putting in the garbage. Finally, I said, 'Look, man, if you want to dig through the garbage for it, you're welcome to it.'"
Twelve years after arriving in L.A. as a guitar-slinging singer/songwriter from Gainesville, Florida, Petty is a bona fide rock star. He's sold over 6 million albums in the U.S. alone and has scored several hit singles. Though his manabger says Petty's "a lot more confident in himself now" than he was when he first settled in California, he's still basically the same shy, low-key Southerner who dislikes interviews ("a necessary evil") and avoids Hollywood scenemaking. He hasn't fallen victim to what he calls the "Elvis Presley disease." As we pull up to his favorite deli, he says, "If I came in here with ten guys and really started pointing the finger at myself and making a lot of noise, then I could be as miserable as I want. You could get away with that in the past, but now it's like cancer, it can be diagnosed and treated. I refuse to live my life that way."
He orders scrambled eggs, fried potatoes and coffee, then considers whether he'd like to be as popular as Springsteen. "It's too famous," he says, lighting a cigarette. "I'd be very nervous to be on the tabloid level. You can get to the point with that where the joke's on you. I wouldn't be comfortable being the hero of a nation. It would make me want to do something really bad." He grins. "They'd catch me with three sixteen-year-old girls right away."
His seven p.m. breakfast arrives. "My family acknowledges I'm sort of a Martian," he says. "It still cracks Adria up that I'm just waking up when she's coming home from school."
He picks up a salt shaker with his left hand -- the hand that he broke during a fit of temper while making Southern Accents -- and sprinkles salt on his food. He puts down the shaker, then wiggles all the fingers. "It works pretty good," he says. "It's never going to be normal. It still hurts if I play for too long. It gets me out of a lot of work. I can always fall back on 'Well, I can't lift this.'"
As he finishes breakfast, the conversation returns to Dylan, with whom he will be rehearsing in just a few hours. Petty was only fourteen the night he turned on the radio and heard "Like a Rolling Stone." Now he's playing with a legend. "It's not that weird, really," says Petty. "You have to get by [Dylan's legend] as best you can. And you do tend to get by that. We get along pretty well. It's funny, I've met a lot of famous people, but I've never met anybody that everybody's always asking me about."
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers | Pack Up The Plantation -- Live! (MCA)
Review by Jimmy Guterman
Rolling Stone #465 -- January 16, 1986
On Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' best albums, Damn the Torpedoes and Hard Promises, they mined rich sources, most often the Byrds and the Rolling Stones, and made those sounds their own. Petty's recent work has been less consistent, but on this live double album he still sounds impassioned and impressive when he lays into his early songs (such as "I Need to Know" or "American Girl," both included here) or a well-chosen cover (the Searchers' "Needles and Pins" and John Sebastian's "Stories We Could Tell.")
Petty's salvation when his songs fail him is an undeniably great band. His recent material has its drawbacks, but he has the Heartbreakers to play it up, and Pack Up the Plantation gives them room to stretch out.
Guitarist Mike Campbell and keyboard player Benmont Tench gain the most from the space, recapturing the intensity they lent to recent LPs by Lone Justice and Don Henley yet was somehow missing from much of Southern Accents. The bruising jangles with which Campbell slams shut these live versions of "Refugee" and "Rebels" are his best recorded work. The three-piece horn section fills out the mix without cluterring it; a pair of unobtrusive backup singers don't add as much. The song selection is neither overly safe nor particularly risky; this doesn't contain "Don't Do Me Like That," but there's nothing like the wild cover of Chuck Berry's "Bye Bye Johnny" that illuminated Farm Aid either.
The three tracks from Southern Accents reprised here are far better than their studio versions, but that LP's conceptual confusion threatens to sidetrack the band. Pack Up The Plantation is both a summation and a question mark -- here's hoping Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers use this as a platform for further growth.