1980s
The Petty Archives

Anxious Moments
By Marilyn Beck
The Palm Beach Post - February 20, 1985

The cast and pins were removed from Tom Petty's left hand and he is playing the guitar again for the first time since slamming his fist into a wall last October. But it will still be a few weeks before he knows whether he'll regain full use of that band. In the interim, he's meeting with Jeff Stein (who won scads of awards for his directing of the Car's You Might Think music video) about helming a video for "Southern Accents," the album Tom was completing at the time of his accident -- and his first LP in nearly three years.

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The Palm Beach Post - March 8, 1985

Tom Petty's in therapy -- the physical kind -- three times a week, and making progress. The cast is off the hand he smashed during a temper tantrum, and he started to play guitar again.

The first single from the "Southern Accents" LP is Petty's duet with Eurythmic Dave Stewart, called "Don't Come Around Here No More." Petty might be hitting (not literally) the road in late April.

Petty stumbles with new disc
By James Muretich
The Calgary Herald - Saturday, March 23, 1985

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Southern Accents (MCA). Following a three-year hiatus between records, one would expect Tom Petty to explode out of the gate with his new release.

Petty, however, is content to truck out the same old tambourine and jingle-jangle guitar sounds as well as his (to paraphrase a famous saying about war) life-is-hell lyrics.

In fact, the best thing about his new work is David A. Stewart. The scruffy maestro of the Eurythmics briefly abandons Annie Lennox for Petty (why?) and manages to push him into progressive territory on the three tunes they co-wrote.

A New Album by Petty and the Heartbreakers
By Robert Palmer
The New York Times - March 25, 1985

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers have been keeping a low profile for a band whose two most recent albums sold several million copies each. Mr. Petty, thin as a rail, with a haystack of blond hair and a slurred Southern drawl, hasn't been heard from since the end of the Heartbreakers' last tour, two and a half years ago. Reports that the group is on the verge of breaking up have been widely circulated.

According to Mr. Petty, the reports were unfounded. In a recent interview, he said he is rehearsing with the Heartbreakers for a national tour that is scheduled to begin in June. And later this week, MCA is releasing "Southern Accents," the first new album by Mr. Petty and the Heartbreakers since 1981. It is the most adventurous and musically accomplished album of the band's career - and potentially just as commercial as its predecessors.

Gainesville Sun - March 29, 1985

Notes on "Southern Accents," the new Tom Petty album, which arrived in stores this week (and is already selling well, according to our "Top Ten" chart): There are no less than five producers listed on the album, including David Stewart and Robbie Robertson; ex-Heartbreaker Ron Blair is credited for bass on "The Best of Everything;" the album is not on Backstreet Records, but its parent company, MCA -- the subsidiary (which could claim only Petty as a successful artist) was liquidated two years ago, right after Petty's last album; and, finally, the entire LP is barely 30 minutes long, a Petty trademark. It's a very good record, though, and although it's stylistically different from the artist's previous works, it's definitely worth the few listens it takes to follow the groove.

Tom Petty Tries His Hand At Southern Rock
By Robert Hilburn
The Los Angeles Times -- March 31, 1985

Most Southern rock just sounds like heavy metal with a Dixie accent.

The musical strains may be different, but both styles revolve around themes that celebrate the "live fast, love hard and die young" mentality. One difference is most heavy-metal fans outgrow the nonsense once they pass their teens, while many Southern rock fans remain good ol' boys forever.

That's what gives Tom Petty's new "Southern Accents" its character. The just-released LP is not a concept album ("We've already had enough 'Gone With the Winds,' " wisecracked Petty), but its key songs look with rare compassion and insight at some of the tensions and frustrations that contribute to the good ol' boy life style.

Petty? Southern rock?

Record Roundup: Petty still honest but album flawed
Review by John Griffin
The Montreal Gazette - Thursday, April 4, 1985

Tom Petty punched his hand through a wall during a recording session last year. His new LP Southern Accents (MCA) sounds like the accident must have hurt a lot.

This album has been years in the making, since 1982's Long After Dark, in fact, and it sounds fussed over, like Petty spent so long with the project he just couldn't hear it any more. As a result, what could have been a brilliant album is less than that. Instead, it's deeply flawed, very pained, and sad. Sort of like the America Petty knows so well.

The record is, of course, well worth hearing because Tom Petty -- even a confused Tom Petty -- is still one of the few authentic chroniclers of American life in the rock 'n' roll mainstream, and also because The Heartbreakers, Petty's boys, are a great rock 'n' roll band.

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Southern accents don't change Petty's downtown rock
By Evelyn Erskine
Ottawa Citizen - April 4, 1985

Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers | Southern Accents (MCA-5486)
On the jacket of Southern Accents, Tom Petty is pictured sitting on a bale of hay in the barn. But the album is not the turn from earthy downtown rock to southern boogie that the image implies.

The influence of the deep South is more thematic than it is musical. Rebels is a rock lament about the descendants of Dixie and It Ain't Nothin' To Me, goes into the heart of the bible belt via television where Jerry Falwell is preaching.

But Petty is an observer in all of this rather than a participant. The song's chorus, "It might mean somethin' to you/It ain't nothin' to me" seems to say more than Petty intends it too. The South Petty knows is Florida where he grew up.

Call and response vocals on some tracks lend a hint of gospel, but more dominant is the East Coast dance beat. It brings the music much closer to The Rolling Stones than to the Allman Brothers. In general, the southern music influence is vague.

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Tom Petty delivers new songs with a southern accent
By Bill DeYoung
Gainesville Sun - Friday, April 5, 1985

You can take the boy out of the South, but apparently you can't take the South out of the boy. "Southern Accents," the sixth album from long-gone Gainesvillian Tom Petty and his rocking Heartbreakers, tackles a wide range of subjects -- alienation, loneliness, and the human condition the foremost -- and gives almost every one a southern angle; indeed, its own southern accent, the way Petty accents everything best. It enters the Billboard chart this week at 36 with a bullet.

The LP's opening cut, "Rebels," follows roughly the same pattern as Petty's earlier "A One Story Town": the narrator has left his southern digs in the dust for a more exciting life (as in the previous lyric, perhaps a veiled look back at Gainesville). Petty sings

"I was born a rebel, down in Dixie
On a Sunday morning
With one foot in the grave
And one foot on the pedal,
I was born a rebel"

as if he's trying to explain why he turned out the way he did. It may be significant that "Rebels" was the only new song Petty chose to sing at The Islands last year during his brief, impromptu acoustic set.